Having a ton of time to burn and a near endless library of movies gave me the ability to attend to one of my secret vices, shitty movies.  I love them, sometimes even more than great movies.  There is something about seeing something that sucks and ripping it apart.  It is like that “friend” everyone has who is the butt of all the group’s jokes (wait… you don’t have a friend like that in your group?  You wouldn’t treat any of your friends that way, right?  I hate to break it to you in blog form, but YOU are that “friend”).  Shitty movies are a great way to laugh at someone’s hard work and wonder why they ever wasted their time and creative energy on a monumental peice of shit.

The steaming pile of directorial feces that I subjected myself to as I was confined to my couch was “Wickerman” starring Nicolas Cage (definitely a Type 4 on the Bristol Stool Chart) .  Sweet Jesus, this movie was so randomly shitawesome (new word, I kind of like it.)  He punches women, accosts bicyclists with handguns, chases people in a bear suit and gets bees poured on his head (not kidding).  The dialog is meandering and inartful, the narrative is plodding and at no point should this movie have been released as a serious endeavor.  In a word, it was GLORIOUS.  I cannot recommend this movie enough, it needs to be seen to completion to really soak up the crappiness but here is a little taste:

 ”Not the bees, not the bees… aaaaaauuuggghhhhhhh!”  Fuck me, that is awesome…

They happened to be in Sydney this weekend playing at the Metro and they didn’t disappoint.  Their sound is precise and the concert was more like an opera than a rock concert.  It is definitely not for everyone but take a listen and let me know what you think.  Here they are… enjoy.

That is really the beauty of the Internet, a person can positively impact someone’s life that they never met, and not even know about it.  Everyone is constantly beaming things into the ether that 10′s, or 100′s or 1,000,000′s of eyes can see.  Everyone takes it for granted but it is truly amazing.  Now, due to these people I never met and never will meet, when I hear this song I think of Tokyo, Sushi and Japanese women in french maid outfits trying to get me to play arcade games.  That’s fucking powerful.

The book is obviously well written and Oscar Wilde must have been an interesting cat because some of the lines form the book are so insightful even to someone living in 2011.  Most of the interesting dialog is spoken by Lord Henry, one of Dorian’s older admirers, who is the devil on Dorian’s shoulder, equipping him with the rhetoric that allows him to act out in the way that he does with self-moralizing impunity.  Throughout the novel Lord Henry delivers some spectacular one-liners like:

Men marry because they are tired: women marry because they are curious, both are disappointed.

or

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Fucking brilliant, and he keeps them coming throughout the novel.  A lot of what Lord Henry said and what Dorian does was probably considered deviant and horrible based on the public standards of 1800′s England.  Many of the book reviews of the time refer to “The Picture of Dorian Gray” as “poisonous” and that it contained “moral and spiritual putrification”.  The critics could not see past the aberrant behaviours of the characters to see the larger themes that the book contains.  This well crafted, thoughtful novel was simply tossed aside by many due to the content that could potentially be seen as off-putting or amoral.

This brings me back to the point that I brought up at the outset of the post of coincidentally seeing recurring themes in other forms of media.  As I was reading this novel I stumbled across “Irreversible” on my Netflix cue and decided to check it out.  This movie has a reputation for being pretty rough (rough, as-in a couple hundred people walked out of its screening at Cannes).  It is a French film shot “Memento-style” (the movie starts at the end and moves backwards in segments).

 Ho-ly-shit, it certainly lives up to its billing.  The first few minutes contain a vomit inducing camera spin and a certain sound frequency that is known to make people nauseous (I read about this after I watched the movie).  The director, Gaspar Noe, literally is attempting to make the viewer physically sick.  It is for good reason though as the characters are in a world of shit.  The first 20 minute segment of the movie (the end of the movie chronologically) is set in a hardcore gay club and climaxes with one of the main characters bashing another guy’s head in with a fire extinguisher.  “Irreversible” slowly pulls itself out of the terrifying abyss of its “ending” to reveal the characters motivations as well as some interesting perspectives on relationships, sex and life choices in general is it works backwards.

As the movie progressed the viewer starts to understand what is driving the characters and eventually has a happy “ending” (the beginning chronologically).  There are parts of the movie that are literally difficult to sit through (yes, there is a scene more disturbing that the start of the movie – I won’t spoil it though, in case you want to check it out, which I highly recommend if you are not squeamish).  I finished it, and I was glad I did, because I really witnessed a piece of art.  Even after the movie was over I thought about it and came back to one of the movie’s opening lines, spoken by a broken, half-naked, old French man: “Time destroys all things.”  Irreversible has a similar theme to “The Picture of Dorian Gray” as well as a disguted response from the critics.

I went on rotten tomatoes and saw the reviews much of which were positive, and anyone that had a negative review talks about the brutal content and fails to mention the artistry of the director or the compelling storyline.  I find it very unfortunate that many things in our society get dismissed out of hand for being different or challenging prevailing viewpoints.  “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “Irreversible” are just two examples of this occurring, but it happens all the time.  The critics of the time failed to recognize a great piece of art when Oscar Wilde published his novel in 1891 and many people today miss amazing contributions to literature, music and film solely from the idea that art can be “poisonous”.  Art itself is nothing but a vehicle to elicit a response from its audience, I think that some of the readers and viewers are unhappy with their own response so they castigate the art itself, rather than turning the mirror on themselves and understanding why they are reacting the way that they do.

A great shot from "Irreversible"... what happens directly after this shot may not be suitable for all viewers...

Unfortunately, we left and went to the other party.  I knew we were making a bad decision, but I took off with the rest of the crew hoping for the best.  On the way to the party it was revealed that we were going to a 70′s party… GAME OVER.  At that point I knew we were on a death mission.  We stayed at the 70′s party for 15 minutes before we bailed and went to the bar down the road all still wondering why we left the shindig at the warehouse.  Moral of the story: Stay where the free booze, good music and lovely ladies are… no exceptions.

Anyways, in honor of good party music and staying with an “8″ I present to you “Girl Talk” which will get even the shittiest party started… enjoy.

This week’s entry is “Municipality” from Real Estate’s new album Days.  It has been rising in the “Number of plays” rank on my Itunes playlist since I downloaded it last month.  The entire album is amazing but in particular I have loved this song.  Take a listen for yourself, and let me know what you think.

Real Estate – “Municipality”

In addition to the freedom from management that success at work entails it also means more money.  Many people equate money with things, but to me money is freedom.  More money means I can do what I want when I want.  There is a delicate balancing act though.  It is a inverse relationship: the more responsibility and pressure that is realized at work the less that the income translates into freedom.  I feel bad for people who make a shitload of money doing something that they are not emotionally invested in that takes all of their time and stress.  They are incredibly rich and incredibly depressed.  Money is no longer freedom if you can’t do what you want with it.

I don’t really care too much about things, the pleasure I get from buying something comes and goes very quickly.  The mindset that I can do what I want when I want is far more powerful to me than anything that I can buy.  I think that is why I don’t buy too many things and I really find a lot of pleasure in saving money.  When I have a ton of money in the bank I can feel comfortable that I could bail on my job at any point and still be OK.  It also allows me to go out to dinner where I want, travel when I want to travel, and help my friends without stressing about how much those activities are going to cost me.

So, in my mind, I have a good work/life balance.  I work a reasonable amount to make a reasonable amount of money.  So how should I use the freedom that I have built my life around?  I recently received an email from KS and a line from that email struck me:

Hope the rest of your weekend was a success – booze, ladies and sleep? That’s what I assume you do with your time down there.

That IS what I do in Australia, without an ounce of sarcasm, she has me pegged.  I work all week, occasionally go out for dinner or casual drinks then Friday night hits and I get a bit rowdy, wake up the next morning play some basketball, bum around with friends during the day then go out again on Saturday to conclude my weekend activities by nursing a hangover/relaxing on Sunday.  Then every month or two I take a holiday and travel somewhere to get out of the city.  Rinse.  Repeat. (“white people problems”, I know… bear with me, I am not complaining just making a point). 

I sometimes think about what I want to be doing in 5 or 10 years time.  Where will I be living?  Where will I be working?  What will life look like?  I find the things that I am doing now amusing but ultimately boring.  I would not consider myself an extraordinarily passionate person but I am hoping that I find at least something I can be passionate about as I head into the second half of life (unless I get hit by a bus on Pacific Highway on my walk to the train after work today, then in that case – “Peace out bitches!”).  It is amazing that I have not found anything so far in my 32 years that I could not live without, but here I am.  I think being focused and passionate about something positive is one of the keys to finding fulfillment in life.  Whenever you talk to someone who really is deeply invested in cars, their wife, rock climbing, trading stock, engineering, painting, or any other random activity that people are in love with they seem like the most balanced happy people.

I think it goes back to the freedom thing in the end.  Not being able to live without something is the end of freedom.  Weather it is drugs, money, sports, music or a woman the thing that one cannot live without is a prison.  A person is bound to it and can’t let it go, without that person, activity or thing then nothing is the same.  Eventually I think I can be happy in a prison as long as my “cellmate” was some thing or someone that I would be happy to lose my freedom over.

I have designed my life up to this point to be as simple as possible however I think that complication is what makes life interesting.  The ultimate question though is what complication is worth all of those complications?

Politicians should have to wear stickers or buttons denoting their largest campaign contributors.  I would prefer to have lobbying completely abolished, but I am not naive enough to think that would ever happen.  Having a politician covered in logos as if he were a NASCAR driver would at least help people cut through the bullshit far more easily.  When a senator is at a press conference talking about how we need to ease environmental regulations and he has a big Exxon logo on his chest it makes things a bit clearer for the average voter to see where that politician’s allegiances lie.

Media

I watched a football game live (4:30AM Sydney time) and it was the first time I had really seen American commercials in a long time.  After not seeing advertisements in so long I noticed that every other commercial was either about 1 – How wives are annoying shrews to be lied to and avoided at all times 2 – Husbands are lecherous scumbags who could care less about their wives, are assholes to their friends and secretly hate their children. 3 – Children are either ultra-cute, bastions of love and grace or prickly little consumerist bastards depending on the product being sold.  Every single commercial that is constantly being rammed down everyon’e throats is in direct opposition to the family values that America prides itself on. 

It really speaks to the dualism of American life that has really been made evident to me since I have moved here.  There is a huge gulf in America between what is said and what is really meant that is much less so in Australia.  The announced and inferred messages of media, politicians, and sports are much more homogeneous in Australia.  Companies, politicians and athletes will say one thing and intend another in the US and the public seems to be able to process both realities even if they are in opposition.  People priding themselves on strong family values on one hand and identifying with the scumbag husbands and jaded mothers is really more unique to American culture than I ever thought.

Gays

I was invited to play basketball with a friend from work who happens to be gay.  I have had a friend in town from New York for most of the past few weeks and haven’t been able to play for a while so I took him up on the offer.  He called to tell me he was downstairs and as I was leaving my apartment I mentioned to my friend that I hoped this wasn’t an overtly gay basketball game then went downstairs and hopped into his car… which was a red Miata convertible pumping techno music.  In my opinion the only gayer vehicle is a gay pride float.  At this point I had a second thought or two about playing in his tournament.  That second thought turned into a 3rd and 4th thought when I arrived in the parking lot to see a few trannies milling about the entrance.

I shrugged it off and went in and met the guys we were playing with, who were all really nice.  We played and it was fine, they were not very talented but it was good to run around for a bit.  It was pretty much just like any other pick-up game I have played except for one thing.  We were playing half-court and on the other side of the gym there was wrestling competition set up.  **Sidenote** I was telling one of my friends about this and I was explaining to her that they were playing the “gayest possible sport: on the other end of the gym.  I had her guess to what I was referring.  Her guesses: Badminton (huh?  More Asian than gay), gymnastics (good guess), and “that floor routine where they twirl around that ribbon” (I stand corrected, that may be the gayest sport) **End Sidenote**

Something about it was just really creepy to me, it was some tall white dude and a little Pilipino guy rolling around in pastel uni-tards.  It definitely made me feel awkward but thinking back there really isn’t much difference between 2 gays wrestling in a gym and a guy grinding up against a chick in a club.  After playing a few games I was definitely recruited to join a gay basketball team for which I politely declined.  I don’t think I would ever play with those guys again, not because I am a homophobe but more for the fact that it is false advertising.  I am not gay and I am sure that these dudes go to this to meet other hookups.  It is understandable though, if I you told me that I could go wrestle or play basketball with some cute chicks in bikinis I would definitely be down.  Besides the crappy car selection, the gays really have their shit together.

Racism

As I have said before, Australians are racist.  It is not a aggressive type of racism but a more curious almost endearing from of racism that I have never really seen before.  I was at the bar last weekend for the New Zealand vs. Australia rugby game and someone shouted “pass it to the coconut” referring to a member of the team who was from Fiji.  Harmless, stupid racism.  Many of the funniest conversations I have had with Australians have started out with “I don’t want to sound racist buuuuuuttttt….” then they go on to say something incredibly racist, not hateful, just racist.  Almost like a child saying something they didn’t know was really offensive.  This one guy started talking to me about NFL football and asked if the white and black players were actually friends and if they fought all the time.  How do you even answer a question like that?

I was so busy when I had first moved to Australia that I didn’t have time to write about my adventures of when I first arrived here (I know you are on the edge of your seat wondering what happened).  This is my attempt to right what once was wrong (kind of like a crappy version of  Quantum Leap) and fill you in on the details of my arrival and first few weeks in Sydney.  I am going to write about it a little differently though, it will be less bloggy and more like a personal narrative broken up into a few parts.  Then at the end I will combine the parts and put it into the short story section of the blog.  So without further ado:

I am a professional sleeper.  I can sleep anywhere at any time, just give me a 15 minute heads-up and I could pass out in the middle of a noisy bar or the night before an important meeting.  My mind can be cleared and my senses dulled at a moment’s notice to accommodate a long trip or the need to get away from life and just cease to exist in my brain for a while.

That is why after climbing aboard, taxiing, lifting off and flying for an hour I was perplexed.  I was awake.  I don’t think I have ever been awake at this point in a flight.  This was not just any flight for me though.  This was a flight to Australia for which I had no return ticket.  I was leaving Southern California and not planning to come back for a long time.  I sat there with my eyes closed trying to force myself to sleep thinking of the last few weeks before I left the country.  The goodbye drinks, the farewell dinners, the moving preparations and all of the friends and family that I was leaving on another continent.  My thoughts shifted from the things I was leaving behind to the new world that I was entering.  I was nervous and there was no chance I would ever get to sleep.  Why would I leave a place that I know so well and risk an easy, laid back lifestyle just to move to another country?  That was my last thought until I woke up 13 hours later for breakfast.  I may not be a professional sleeper but I am definitely a top seeded amateur.

Airline food during a 15 hour flight is a necessary evil.  I had a long day ahead of me and if I waited until I landed to eat I would most likely crumble in a heap in the customs line.  My choice was runny eggs or mealy pancakes.  Runny eggs won and I started to deconstruct the plastic tomb in which my food was encased.  Not only are these meals disgusting, they also have to be the most anti-environmental way to eat anything.  Each morsel of food is packaged in its own non-biodegradable home.  They should just go all the way and put every square of toilet paper in its own shrink-wrap or hand out water in little capsules that you pop open, drink and discard on the floor like futuristic peanut shells.

After the plastic carcass of my meal was hauled away by the stewardess I was left to stare at the virtual map which showed my plane moving impossibly slowly across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean to my final destination: Sydney, Australia.  That tiny little dot on the map held all of the things that I was stressing about.  North Sydney was the location of my new office and the Harborside Hotel was where my luggage and I would be living for the next few months until the crate with the rest of my belongings would arrive.  It was also home to the 1 person on the entire continent that I knew outside of work, and I met her a few months before randomly, on vacation in Hawaii.  It was where I had decided that I wanted to live just two months before.  All of that was within the little spot that the video plane was pivoting towards.

Landing is my least favorite part of flying. I am never outwardly nervous but a part of me always looks out the window and wonders how there are not more crashes.  The pilots take a gigantic hunk of metal moving at a few hundred miles an hour and drop it perfectly on a slim strip of concrete a few thousand times a day, every day, with no incident.  Every other task that someone does in the course of my day is fucked up constantly.  How has something that is so difficult been done to almost flawless perfection for so often for so long?   Everyone is nervous during the landing because at some level they know humans are not meant to do this.  A tenth of a percent of me is amazed every time I don’t touch down in a cartwheeling fireball of my own demise.  After we hit the tarmac in Sydney everyone took a deep breath, stopped thinking about their potential death and started wondering where they wedged their laptop case 14 ½ hours ago.

I always think that I am going to get busted when I go through customs.  I had no drugs up my ass, no Mexicans in my suitcase or any flora or fauna that could possibly hump a wallaby and completely destroy the Australian ecosystem yet I felt every customs agent’s eyes drilling into me.  I would usually be tentative about being in the customs line but the flight had dulled my senses and the people watching was too fantastic to miss.  It is like a slide show that kept repeating as I wound around the queue.  First there was stinky Indian business man, and then the nerdy couple in sleep pants holding stuffed animals, and then the chick with fake tits that looked like she showered and did her makeup on the plane somehow , and then the sweet looking old couple and then the confused Asian family who were looking at their own passports like they were in a different language.  Each pass gave me a new perspective to observe the weirdness of the humanity around me.  If airports are a hurricane of people watching activity then the customs line is the eye of the storm.  The quiet calm before the assorted foreigners are spat out upon the baggage claim.

To be continued…

So that brings me to the title of this post – I went to Costco (rrrrr) last weekend.  I received a text from one of my American buddies on Saturday: “Costco – you wanna go?”  I did not need anything from Costco nor do I have any place to put an 8 gallon drum of olive oil in my apartment but I wasn’t doing anything and I was curious about something so American transplanted to Sydney.  If they could not even say Costco correctly, how could they possibly run the store?  I needed to check it out, if only as a social observation activity (I love me some people watching).  Anyways, he and his girlfriend picked me up from my house and we took off.  A trip that should have taken 20 minutes turned into a 90 minute road trip in bumper to bumper traffic.  I had no idea that you could set a GPS system to route you through every congested piece of Australian roadway but apparently we did.  My lanky ass was in the back seat performing some sweet yoga contortions trying to get comfortable, to no avail.  At last I saw the shining beacon of the Costco sign and thought my backseat pain was over.  I was wrong.

Thus began the odyssey of finding parking in a woefully small lot filled with Asians behind the wheel and pushing around carts (deadly combination).  It was beyond brutal.  Inside our car there was complaining… and swearing… and racism… until we finally found a spot – 20 minutes later.  I was spent already and I knew that I would never come back to Costco.  Frankly, I didn’t even want to go in, then I saw a 350lb woman with her cart full of assorted artery clogging foods and a 90 pack of toilet paper and I knew that I needed to forge ahead.

On the ground floor, near the entrance from the parking garage was the customer service area which looked like a refugee camp, crammed with aggravated people waiting in line behind a makeshift chicken wire fence.  It reminded me of the gas lines that I have seen in documentaries from the 70′s.

We quickly passed that scene and went up a ramp to the store upstairs.  I finally walked into the main lobby area.  One word - clusterfuck.

So. many. people. consuming.

I have been to Costco before but never to one this crowded.  I felt like I could get agoraphobia and claustrophobia all in one place.  After walking around for a bit I realized everything was the same as the US.  There were the couples arguing about what ridiculously large quantity of this or that they should buy.  There was the tired, overweight, angry mom with her gaggle of kids buzzing around her like dimmed insect zapper.  It was all there, Costco had been able to export over-consumption to Australia.  I walked around and gathered the few things that I wanted (all American items that I haven’t been able to find in local stores – bagels, mayo, and shredded American cheese) and became a little depressed.  This was all of the worst stuff about America, and were the things that most Australians rip on me for yet here was a monument to capitalism and mass consumption in their own country.

I met back up with my friend and his cart  overflowing with $700 dollars worth of this and that to stand in the longest line I have ever been in outside of Six Flags Great America.  We finally exited and I realized that no matter where we were, some things never change.

We were starving and there was no question that we were going to eat ourselves retarded.  I was not disappointed, the standard hotdog and cheese pizza tasted EXACTLY the same as it does in the US.  I finished the last bit of my pizza, saw the sun setting amongst the rest of the outlet malls that dotted the road away from Costco and thought to myself that this kind of living can’t sustain itself.  Corporations have exported this lifestyle overseas to “enrich”  local populations across the world but unfortunately everyone in the world cannot binge, purge and waste as Americans.  We are coming to the end of an era of American domination and over-consumption in general.  The environment, lack of energy resources and overpopulation all prohibit this being a viable option for too much longer.

As the sun winked behind one of the golden arches of the McDonald’s sign down the road we grabbed our cart and headed to thec car.  I will never go back to that Costco and I wonder how long such things will exist?