The View from Elsewhere

amongst cockroaches

I'm now at a cafe on the northside of Alice where there is power...the owner has kindly let me use a powerboard in front of the 'stage' where there is unfortunately live lunchtime music (most live music is fairly unfortunate in Alice, not least because you've already heard the performer several times).  I told her I had good powers of concentration, tho I probably can't do much more than blog, under the conditions.  I have an hour left on my other, older laptop with the bigger screen and more sophisticated scriptwriting software, which I was using yesterday...I'm hoping to charge up another three hours on this one.  

A 43 yo man has been found dead in the Todd...apparently, he'd been drinking then was swept away in the current while trying to ford the river.  He's been named as 'Kwementyaye', so clearly he's Aboriginal, and quite possibly homeless or itinerant if he was by the Todd.  We're being urged on the radio to 'stay indoors at home' -- not an option for everyone -- because monsoonal waters are passing over the centre to the north-east of town...which doesn't mean that they won't flow to the south where I live.

It doesn't take much to make you realise how dependent you are on a couple of infrastructure elements to maintain your pretentious lifestyle.  Once my plans for the day were so rudely thrown out by a power outage, I decided to embark on another decluttering campaign, this time the plastics cupboard in the kitchen.  There has been a major pest infestation in Alice, thanks to this inclement weather, and some cockroaches have taken up residence in my plastics.  (This is at its most abject when you find roach dirt in the ice cube trays.) 

I reckoned I could chuck out at least half my plastics, anyway: you can't take it with you and all that.  None of this perfectionistic dithering about whether you might need a certain container again, faintly veiled by internalised ecological guilting.  Things can be 'chucked' in the Salvoes' bin, because there'll always be someone in need, especially in Alice.

this floating life

Yesterday, the cats and I packed into a life-raft fashioned from plastic tubes filled with lentils, almonds and raisins, and set forth on the ever-burgeoning Todd for Adelaide.  In case you fear for our collective welfare, we were all wearing flotational vests crocheted from ininti seeds, although one feline certainly didn't need it; indeed, the tortoiseshell blimp has proved useful as a buoy on occasion.  

We floated past the Brewers Industrial Estate just after midnight; we hope to make the Marla Roadhouse by noon, then negotiate the currents eddying from potholes at Coober Pedy before arriving in the River Torrens for the opening of the Adelaide Arts Festival.

The Todd, before we left (actually, on my last bike ride, snatched before the floods on Friday afternoon):

Emily Gap (somewhat unfocussed iphone photo: it was raining):

  

Seriously, the rain has poured down fairly constantly over the past few days.  It's a pleasant novelty to fall asleep listening to the rain, tho I do wince when it starts teeming, as I live in the flood zone.  Still holding out here, hoping the puddles won't up to the door, though it's pretty swampy outside my back gate.

Otherwise, drinks at Crowne on Friday night, then a weekend of de-cluttering, writing and DVD-watching, tho it might just be de-cluttering today, as the power has been off for a couple of hours.  It once went off for a couple of days after some stormy weather (the solution is to boot-up the laptop in a cafe with power).

Last night, as I went into Blockbuster, some Aboriginal men drinking in a car outside called out, 'Hello gorgeous!'  Only weeks, maybe even days left of these interesting cross-cultural experiences.  The Blockbuster car park isn't a usual drinking spot (in fact, I'm surprised they could get away with it).  I suspect they're out-of-towners, here for the NAB match between the Pies and the Crows, which I missed as I was drinking on the other side of town myself.  Apparently the match was pretty swampy; I've seen it so many times now not to be disappointed by missing this annual Alice event.  Anyway, I may soon have the opportunity for more interesting cross-cultural footy experiences.

In the new releases section of the DVD store, I saw some copies of In Tranzit, which as I understand it is an indie film about German POWs in a Soviet transit camp after WWII.  It features John Malkovich and Vera Parmigiana or whatever her name is, who was so good in Up in the Air...but more excitingly for me, I know one/have been taught by of the writers. True, I know/have been taught by some writers of Australian films, but it was a first for me to be able to say that about an international film. Needless to say, I didn't borrow it, I was brought up on a staple diet of WWII stories and have to steel myself to read/watch any more and I was In Search of Something Light, as one invariably is in Alice. But it's made it to Alice, so perhaps another time...

sleeping with bears

On Sunday morning, I caught up with the not-so-speedies (a ka: the ‘slowpokes’).  For those not in the know, this is a consortium of peoples who prefer to ride at an average speed of 23 kmh.  This coalition of the unwilling was started by my dear friend L, who was disquieted by the constant 30 + kmh speeds of the bike club’s Sunday Social Ride, as opposed to the advertised average of 27 kmh.

I told L I might come if I woke up in time. (Actually, there are a lot of ‘L’-friends in my life, and their names often do start with ‘L’ – ha!).  The biggest hitch was the meeting time of 6 am, but there were some good reasons to join them.  It’s hotter earlier at this time of year, and the last time I joined the Sunday Social Ride, they wore me out, as I’m not ‘bike fit’ enough to deal with the speeding.

Much to the not-so-speedies’ surprise, I did wake in time (it’s also very bright early in the day this year) and joined them.  We rode about 40 km at 25 kmh, amid protests that I had raised their overall average speed.  However, they did get to use me as a windbreak. 

Out riding, I was reminded by how seductive the embrace of the Centralian landscape can be early in the morning: the quietude, the gentle light picking out pastel tones.  Holed up in my air-conditioned bunker over summer, I had begun to forget what the place could be like.

   There were only three of us slowpokes on the ride, though many others passed us on the way, evidently with the same idea of catching the cool of the day.  Afterwards, we – L, the Gavster and I — had coffee in the Mall while the marketers were still setting up their stalls.  It was almost impossible for me to imagine I was up so early, as indeed it was for my companions (mind you, I felt like falling asleep for the rest of the day).  

Gav, in particular, couldn’t get over the fact that I was actually there, given my aversion to earliness and my peripatetic lifestyle.  At one point, L related a travel tale about a friend who had been ‘sleeping with bears’ while camping in the States.

‘Can you imagine that?’ she said.  ‘I can’t imagine camping with bears.  Would you camp near bears?’

‘No,’ said Gav, ‘But I can imagine texting El and finding that she was sleeping with bears.  I’m always getting messages: “Sorry, can’t ride with you, I’m in Timbuktu” or “I’m in Alaska”.  Next thing you know, she'll be texting to say that she's "sleeping with bears".’

Well, more like penguins in Tasmania or Mormons in Utah… We also talked about Alice, what a good but difficult place it was to live, and where we might go next.  ‘Alice’ is such a common topic of conversation amongst those who live here, it’s hard to know why (apart from the obvious ‘resonances’), but maybe it’s because everything is so far away.  So many residents are expats too and there’s such a great sense of transience that the place naturally becomes a point of discussion and comparison itself.

 L had always wanted to live in the centre, and had cast an anchor over the side here after travelling round the country with her ex.  Gav, it seemed, was gradually travelling north from Tasmania, and planned to head further north, to the Kimberley perhaps, in hope of better fishing prospects.

L asked Gav if he’d seen any of the film festival or if he intended seeing anything.  She handed him a flyer, and he scanned it and said, ‘No, and the only film I’d want to see has already been on.’

‘Oh, The Fox and the Child!’ I said.

‘That’s the one!’ Gav turned to L.  ‘You see, El knows me so well she knows which film I’d pick.  It’s because it's about the innocence of childhood, and my childhood was disturbed, so I like to see things like that.’

And not only that, but hence the long journey north, further and further from Tasmania.

winging it

 The other day, I went to the physio.  I hadn’t been in ages, because generally I can’t afford these things so often these days, and I try and deal with my various aches and pains with yoga and exercise.  Most of my issues are concentrated round my neck and shoulders from all the computer work I do: I don’t have problems with my lower back or knees.  

 

As soon as I took off my top, the physio said: ‘Oh, your left first rib’s sticking up.  I’ll just pop it back in.’

I said: ‘Hold it right there.’

And I explained to her about the whole subclavian vein/thoracic outlet episode (the theory is that this shoulder vein gets compressed between the first rib and clavicle, leading to thromboses and other issues).

She looked nervous, but I told her to go ahead with the manipulation because there wasn’t any clot (as far as I knew).

 That done, she examined my back and said that my left scapula was ‘winging’: i.e. my shoulder blade isn’t sitting flat against my back. She suggested that it was the cause of my neck problems, and gave me exercises to strengthen the muscle.

 

 I was given exercises for scapula winging on both sides by a physio several years ago.  Evidently I need to keep them up.  It’s raised an interesting chicken-egg scenario for me: did the poor scapula strength contribute to problems in the thoracic outlet, or did the scapula problems result from the clot experience?  I hardly used my left arm for two years afterwards, which definitely led to another set of problems.

 Anyway, I suspect that both structural factors are interrelated.  Given that I spend more time at the computer than anything else (tho sleeping with cats might be a close second), it would make sense that poor posture was a major contributor and that what I had was possibly an e-thrombosis (getting more special all the time — Ed.)

 

I also habitually hold my head to the right: childhood photos show me doing this, so I may have shortened the neck muscles on the right side over time. If I turn my head totally to the right, I close the vein, which was the position in which I was sleeping when I got the clot and which I try to avoid.

A sports doctor once told me that I’m hypermobile (i.e. overly flexible), a common problem for tall women with long ligaments (TPS: take heed).  Apparently, it means that it’s difficult for you to maintain stability in different postures, unlike a short, compact, nuggety person, so you tend to overcompensate and your muscles become tense and rigid in response.  I do find it hard to remain comfortable, sitting for long periods of time, and my neck often tenses into positions that I can’t undo without professional help (however much stretching and exercising I try).

So...so...am now sitting with shoulders permanently pinned back in 'must-improve-my-bust' position evocative of characters in Mad Men, the second season of which I am now watching.

travelling on

As I was cabbing towards Darwin airport, I thought, please let there be no one I know at the airport, especially not someone who’ll want to talk about some dull aspect of local social policy for ages and sit beside me on the plane.  The problem (one of them) with the NT is that it’s like a huge country town, and you’re never quite sure when you’ll run into someone you know — hope of a moment’s silence (lonely amongst a crowd and all that) or time to write a blogpost can so quickly be shattered.  I’ve even been hailed down in the loos at Darwin airport by a local politician. 

I saw Up in the Air the other night, probably the best film I’ve seen so far this year.  It captured so much of the world of constant air travel for me, as well as the ambivalence about the single versus encoupled life I was trying to express a couple of blogposts ago.  I realise I’m quite possibly the last person in all the world to have seen this film, living in Alice.  But if you haven’t seen Up in the Air, the basic story concerns a Ryan Bingham consultant who’s hired to fly around the States firing people.  He’s on a quest to accumulate 10 million frequent flyer points, and when he hears the company wants to carry out its operations online, he offers to take the 23 yo mastermind business consultant behind this plan around with him to prove why it’s better done in the flesh.  The real reason why he doesn’t want to give up his peripatetic lifestyle is that if he became more sedentary, he might have to build deeper connections with other people.  He comes unstuck when he falls for another woman who seems to share the same lifestyle and outlook.  I won’t tell you the twist, but thankfully the film’s makers don’t give it a sappy rom-com ending in which everyone lives happily ever after, having learnt their lessons.  Instead, they just learn their sour old lessons (oops – tmi).

I admired the Bingham character greatly because of his ability to finetune both the packing and check-in processes, and combine it all with clocking up the loyalty points. (I wonder if there’s any reason for him being called Bingham — after the Salt Lake visionary and traveller?) In my glory days, when I had to travel a lot for work, I had it all whittled down to a small wheelie cabin luggage bag and a routine where I could virtually run onto the plane having arrived thirty minutes before the flight.  Those were the days when Qantas would let you do that.  Sigh.  (I only almost missed a connection once in Brisbane, when my first plane ran late.) I travelled so much I automatically became a gold frequent flyer without paying the member fees, a status I’ve never regained.  Another sigh. 

There is something about constant air travel for work, as opposed to holiday travel, that’s quite addictive and hard to explain.  Both involve having to adapt quickly to new people and places, to re-make yourself continually, in a certain sense.  But with work, there’s an added pressure to perform, to make the appropriate contacts, to be in certain places at certain times, and to communicate information (in my case).  There’s also a sense of going into the zone, of the normal partitions and distractions of the work day disappearing.  For some reason, I’ve often found it easier to develop longer arcs of thought or to write short pieces or edit docs while on a plane, although you wouldn’t have thought that three hours on a plane would be better for this than three hours at home.

As for the intimacy-versus-solitude-Stephanie-Dowrick stuff … so much of what Bingham says about relationships I would say myself, but he’s clearly the loser for it (I don’t travel quite as much, she says quickly).  But constant air travel – the possibility of always rolling on, meeting more people but never setting down roots — versus being staying at home — trapped in the same place with the same people — great metaphor for that tension.

Note to self inspired by Kevin Rudd: This was what I was doing when I was meant to be incubating -- running on and off planes with small wheelie bags for government (i.e. my country). I never gave a thought to my eggs: we didn't in those days, we frivolous and career-minded Xers.  Note also that Rudd never mentions men in same age group's reluctance to commit to breeding, and their sometimes misogynist discourse on this subject.

no to the bubble

In Darwin I noticed the prevalence of the ‘bubble’ fashion, something I daresay may eventually come to Alice, but then again not, if we’re lucky (I’m sure we miss many fashions altogether).  If I remember rightly, the bubble skirt had a flutter a couple of years ago (indeed, twenty years ago) but seems to have come back in force, in multiple forms: bubble dresses, bubble shorts, bubble pants, etc.  I think this trend can only be described as unfortunate: does a bubble suit anyone, outside of a bath?

I imagine it’s the kind of bandwagon some might leap onto, hoping for greater concealment, though it’s more likely to create the impression of greater bulk.  You could end up looking like you’ve got two baobabs for legs or as if you flunked the parachuting course and made yourself some duds from the silk for revenge.  (But wouldn’t you be dead? Ed.)

I tried on a couple of the bubble fashions at Casuarina Mall, that great northern homage to hyperreal shopping.  Being tall, I reckoned I could get away with the bubble pants thing, but would I want to?  I tried a size smaller than what I’d usually take (still plenty of room), and I immediately looked like I should be fitted with a crop and a small horn, so I could ride out with the hounds.  But you wouldn’t want to be short and stumpy; that would be stretching the whole bubble pant thing (actually, the exact opposite). Lulu's so rotund, she looks like she's wearing furry bubble pants anyway.  As for the bubble dress with its high gathered waist and faux gold trimmings: I looked like an escapee from a toga party or perhaps from a 1930s girls boarding-school book production of a Greek tragedy.

 So that’s my verdict: no to the bubble thing, along with its distant relative, happy pants: both should be banished.

N/T: the finale

I'm sitting in Cafe Roma at the top of Cavenagh St, my current air-conditioned escape in Darwin.  It's so highly humid that previously dry clothes I've left out to 'air' during the night have become limp with moisture by morning.  The motel where I'm staying smells entirely of mold, which I put unfairly down to poor housekeeping when I arrived.  I made a polite complaint about my room (always a good bet in a tourist down season), and got moved to a larger, sunnier room upstairs, but it still smells of mold. If nothing else, Darwin's not a place where you need much moisturiser (tho there's a surprising amount of haggard and world-weary-looking people around -- hard-living, hard drinking?).

In my luggage, I bought with me the fifth season of Nip/Tuck.  I wasn't sure what the boys' move to Hollywood would bring, and ironically it did seem to result in the loss of a certain hyperreal glow.  Since N/T has always been filmed in Hollywood, maybe they put more effort into creating the Miami feel, but the LA season seemed to have lost some of the big blocky colour, unreal set look.  It also featured a somewhat clunky, 'show within the show' parody, where Dr Sean ends up playing himself in a soap opera about plastic surgeons.  It depicts Hollywood as full of people with control issues who find outlets through bizarre fetishistic behaviour…not an altogether surprising or original portrayal.

I hadn't watched N/T for at least a year, so I was struggling for a couple of episodes to remember who had slept with whom (if in doubt, presume everyone else). N/T is fascinated with pushing the incest taboo (tho perhaps this is common to all soaps and I don’t watch enough of them), and features all manner of relationship convolutions, and breaches of personal and professional boundaries, from which the main characters seem to bounce back remarkably well (i.e. within one or two episodes), along with finding corpses in their closets, being stabbed by stalkers in their surgeries, etc.  There's been some simply inspired couplings, like when the unicorn-like Joely Richardson falls for the nanny, who's also a dwarf.  The characters are never given the hubris of a full-length Shakespearean soliloquy, either; just a couple of dead-pan lines at the end of a pile up of corpses and alienated family members: 'Gee, I wasn't really thinking at the time, but it seems my pride has led to this.  I guess I'd better quit the show.'

Some of my friends eschew my patronage of this show, but I still claim it's fabulous television (and it involves so much less concentration than The Wire).  It slides between the long-running soap and the quality mini-series, but at a higher level than a show like Desperate Housewives, but never quite makes it to Dexter or True Blood.  I'm little disappointed that the show's makers didn't try and do for plastic surgeons what 6FU did for funeral directors: N/T is Waugh-ian in its excesses but still a semi-tone off satire or black comedy.  But being about plastic surgery, it has to be trashy.

teh wasteland

My Sydney friend is excited at the prospect that I might go ‘on sabbatical’ to another city, as I put it.  I’ve been contemplating a move to southern climes for a while, tho there hasn’t been much action in that direction yet. For my friend, it might mean the possibility of shared Easters once again, and maybe reciprocated accommodation in a place where she used to live. 

She also has plans for me to hit the internet dating scene.  (‘Dating’ for want of a better word, given that we don’t quite have the same sense of this convention as Americans – in fact, we don’t have as many manners or conventions as Americans, period, unfortunately.) 

‘You will try and go out with straight men?’ she says.  As opposed to consorting with gay ones – one of life’s true small pleasures. 

For the last few years, I have tried to explain to her that apart from being Lesbos Central, all that Alice has to offer in terms of men tend to be mechanics, mechanics and more mechanics, prison screws and tour operators.  Call me choosy, but I’m probably one middle-class professional woman who really is too esoteric for The Farmer Wants A Wife/Mr Average Aussie Bloke as opposed to say, a fresh-faced ABC regional cub reporter, a bank manager who likes water sports or a heart-warming salsa-dancing secondary school teacher.  

Besides, any available men who land in Alice tend to go for women 10-15 years younger than themselves, simply because they can.  So unless I want to go for someone with early stage prostrate cancer, I’m out of luck, and even then, I’d have to get my skates on.  Recently, there was a bun rush in Alice reminiscent of the wedding bouquet skirmish scene in For Love Alone, where middle-aged women flocked to check out a 58 yo secondary teacher who’d just arrived.  Could anyone sound more unenticing?  I envisaged a strong dose of male babyboomer self-important pedantry about a dull and ultimately irrelevant area of knowledge, an untrimmed bushy grey beard and homeopathic sandals.  (Anyone but a Mr Collins, eh? –Ed.)

a mixed bag

There’s nothing decent on TV and Quickflix have sent me something I’ve already seen, so I feel a blogpost is upon me.

My evenings this weekend were taken up by watching Flickerfest, which used to look like this when it visited Alice, but now sadly, no more. 

It’s a shame, because the outdoor atmosphere with people kicking back on swags under the stars and Aboriginal people sneaking in round the edges was really very Alice.  There were fears of rain and valuable prints being wrecked it seemed, so the outdoor thing didn’t happen this year.  Numbers seemed down, quite possibly because of the loss of sense of idiosyncratic occasion. 

Flickerfest is always a bit of a mixed bag.  Over the last couple of years, I’ve felt it’s improved.  Often one or two nights will be good; the others less so and it’s hard to predict which one.  I think this is partly due to the nature of the beast: short films are difficult in the way that short stories are, of providing that pithy focus on an event or experience.  I tend to prefer the longer shorts (i.e. 20 mins) with more narrative, though a long short that’s badly done can be painful.

This year, surprisingly, the Australian film night was the best.  I say surprisingly because the Australian shorts have usually been amongst the worst over the past few years. There was a while there when pretty much every Australian short seemed to be a clumsy, over-obvious number about refugees, which was oh so tedious. (I’m someone who’s been overexposed to PC issues through work, but surely others secretly found this trying.  I remember watching a ‘refugee’ film with a bunch of dentists a couple of years ago, and one of them said to me, ‘People don’t speak like this, do they?’  You may be able to fool bureaucrats but you can’t fool the film-watching general public…they watch too many films.) 

So, anyway, thank God there were no refugee films and let’s just hope that the period of over-egged ideological earnestness is over in Australian film, what with the new Screen Australia and what seems like a focus on genre (tho that emphasis could also be about market second-guessing).  It could also be that with the Howard government gone, there are less obvious political issues to make dramas about, thank goodness.

I particularly liked Celestial Avenue, a film about a woman who unexpectedly finds love on a blind date in Chinatown and Franswa Sharl, about a twelve-year-old boy who wins a beauty pageant on a family holiday to Fiji.  And the Cat’s Piano cartoon, in which a giant piano hits nails into cats’ tails to make sounds.  All comedies: I want to be entertained.  There were some good Aboriginal films, especially local filmmaker Dena Curtis’s Jacob, which powerful in its portrayal of the impact of the birth of a fairer skinned child to Aboriginal parents.

So Flickerfest: bring back the swags, I say!

(And who supplies the slices?  Why are they always the same?  I’ve been every year to Flickerfest for six years, and they’ve always had the macadamia slice, the coconut caramel one and the chocolate one.  I’ve never seen them anywhere else on sale in Alice.)

In other news: I saw Bran Nue Dae with some friends the other night, and it was much fun.  Everyone was greatly relieved to have a non-bleak Aboriginal film.  I don't think everyone's in denial out here about how bad things are (tho it's possible to be numbed by too much exposure).  It's more that it was great to have a film that embraced the better side of human relations and showcased the rightly celebrated Aboriginal sense of humour.  Also great to see that exotic far-western port, Broome, up on the screen.