“SORRY, SORRY, SORRY (SINCERE REGRETS)”

Now we’re a country with a heart of gold,
Or at least that’s what we’re taught and told,
The kinda place that’s the envy of the world.

 But there’s some things that ain’t too thrillin’
Like “The X Factor” or seam gas drillin’,
That when I hear about, do make my toes fair curl.

We’re very sorry for Pauline Hanson,
She can’t wash a car and she’s shit at dancin’,
She ain’t much superior to anyone.

Sorry for whinin’ and fallin’ to our knees-
Whoops! Here’s a boat from Indonese!
Run for the hills and don’t forget the guns!

(CHORUS)
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sincere regrets,
Sorry for all the things we’ve done, and the things we ain’t done yet.
We’re so sorry it makes us cry,
Sorry that our planes don’t fuckin’ fly,
Sorry for the floods and the levy and the flies and the sharks and the pests.

Alan Jones is sorry for his choice of language,
I wish he were the meat in a gay leper sandwich,
Alan Joyce is sorry he’s brung The Troubles.

We’re sorry ‘bout the price of bananas,
And Coles and Woolies fuckin’ over the farmers,
But I still shop there, ‘cause the other places cost me double! (Sorry)

We’re sorry about Andrew Bolt’s pity,
The sook could be heard from city to city,
But old Andy, he ain’t sorry ‘bout much at all.

“My freedom of speech is under threat!”,
And, “Ordinary folk can’t place a bet!”,
“These Muslims and ni**ers gonna rape and kill us all!”

(CHORUS)
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sincere regrets,
Sorry for all the things we’ve done, and the things we ain’t done yet.
We’re so sorry it makes us cry,
Sorry that our planes don’t fuckin’ fly,
Sorry for the floods and the levy and the flies and the sharks and the pests.

We’re sorry for climate change,
No doubt these scientists are all insane!
You can predict the climate from the entrails of a chicken!

And we’re sorry for Katter and Barnaby Joyce,
Add Angry Anderson and you’re spoilt for choice
For candidates with the brainpower of a kitten!

And we’re bloody sorry for Julia Gillard,
And for Kevin Rudd, whom she doth spill’ed,
Poor dear went off his Iced Vo-Vo’s for a month.

But we’re mortified by Tony Abbott,
In his budgie smugglers with his budgie’s scabbard,
I’m sorry, but I’m about to lose my lunch!

(CHORUS)
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sincere regrets,
Sorry for all the things we’ve done, and the things we ain’t done yet.
We’re so sorry it makes us cry,
Sorry that our planes don’t fuckin’ fly,
Sorry for the floods and the levy and the flies and the sharks and the pests.

We of the Australian pharmaceutical industry and its related interests and concerns are alarmed at the Federal government’s recently announced policy intentions seeking to introduce mandatory dosage recommendations on prescription and non-prescription medicines and medicinal products.

It is our firm belief that introducing such restrictions on products that are legally and freely available to any Australian within current age regulations will seriously impact on the ability of the Australian pharmaceutical industry and its related interests and concerns to continue operating on the level of profitability necessary to viably invest in much-needed further research into the medical, scientific and pharmaceutical fields that are vital to the continuing health, well-being and welfare of not only all Australians, but people throughout the world.

Our independently conducted research has concluded that the introduction of such mandatory dosage restrictions and recommendations may potentially cost the industry upwards of $13 billion in lost research and development investments per annum, which carries with it dire implications for the average Australian citizen’s health and their ability to treat their health issues and concerns responsibly and independently of government interference. By restricting such current freedoms, the government also fails to grasp the enormous cost and pressure such a policy of restrictions will place upon the national health care system as more and more people, unable to responsibly self-medicate will, potentially, consume the time and attentions of health professionals on relatively trivial matters that would be best served on those far more serious.

The Federal government’s current policy intentions signify not only an interference in an individual’s right to choose their own treatment regime as their needs may dictate, but a breach of confidentiality between the recommendations of health professionals and their patients. Therefore, it is our most sincere intention to continue to aggressively protest the introduction of such a policy by the current government as we believe it represents not only a highly unfair and discriminatory imposition on our industry and its related interests and concerns, but a violation of every Australian citizen’s right to live and make decisions about the course of their lives unhindered by government intervention and restrictions.

It is down paths such as these that the seeds of totalitarianism are sown.

Sincerely,
The Australian Pharmaceutical Industry and its Related Interests and Concerns

Lordy, lordy, won’t you help me please, for I was about 41 or 42 when this conversation about refugees became the Australia’s Cup of political footballs, and I am almost 53 today, and this conversation continues, and it surely does exhaust my tired ol’ mind sumfin’ awful and wearies my chalky ol’ bones to the marrow, yes’m, indeed it do, amen to that and praise this day.

For I have worn out my last pair of rubber underpants and peed my last panicked puddle of despair over the dire straits of it all, I can pee and squeal no more, I’m plum all peed and squealed out, looks like they’re here and they’re here to stay and they’re coming, more of them, every day, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of whacked-out dingbats in bomb-laden dinghies to blow us all to that great brick shithouse in the sky, fuck our sheep and fill our pies with felafel.

By God in the almighty heavens above our tender heads, it is a sad truth today that the fabric of our society is indeed a torn and ragged rag of a thing now.

Yes, Sweet Jesus, it is but a pair of ol’, piss-streaked y-fronts on the spindly and spotted frame of an 80 year old digger with its arse all hangin’ out to buggery, and the people of this fair land ain’t havin’ none of it no mo’, they’s a souffle of social unrest a-risin’ in the heartland, all angry cheese and righteous dustings of outraged flour over the changing state of this nation and these seemingly endless series of vile upheavals that have seen our shores swarm with murderin’ beards and their murderin’ ways, smokin’ hookahs and bakin’ flatbreads and those little jelly sweets that are dusted with sugary shit, I quite like those and I don’t really have much of a sweet tooth.

…

…

Sorry, where was I?

Oh.

Yes …

5.30 on Channel 9′s “Today” show this morning opens with the headline story, “They’re here! More boats headed for our shores carrying potentially hundreds of asylum seekers and they could be here as soon as today!”, it’s Groundhog Day, I punch the mute button on the remote and wait for it to go away.

Lordy, lordy, won’t you help me please, for I was about 41 or 42 when this conversation about refugees became the Australia’s Cup of political footballs, and I am almost 53 today, and this conversation continues, and it surely does exhaust my tired ol’ mind sumfin’ awful and wearies my chalky ol’ bones to the marrow, yes’m, indeed it do, amen to that and praise this day …

The justification for his actions, or so he would present them, are largely cultural and political and ideological, and he would like us to realise, he insists that we realise, that his actions have some underlying meaning, that we must understand what he is telling us, and that his actions, drastic as they may have been, were the only way, or one way at least, to compel us to listen.

Yes.

Yes, of course, I will stop what I am doing, I shall cease believing in what I believe, I shall discard my political and ideological and sociological convictions, all of which lean distinctively to the “left”, and I will do so simply because you have demanded that my attention, and the attention of the world, be paid you, and you will squeal like a child if it is not.

Or, perhaps, you will blow us all up.

No one wants to be blown up.

Therefore, I guess, you win.

No.

It really isn’t that easy.

It is curious that commentators are now commenting upon this individual and his actions as if they represent a thing, a movement, beliefs, a system of some sort, and that this thing is a bigger thing than it is, and indicative of some wider malaise threatening to riot throughout the modern world, and that the thing itself is to blame, the individuals merely misguided messengers, and so it must mean this, and so it must mean that, and so it must mean something other than what it is, for it cannot be simply what it is, for what it is is far too banal an excuse or reason for such outrageous carnage.

Listen … A serial killer is not a hyper-intelligent mastermind of infinitely novel and murderous invention, as innumerable Hollywood cinematic fantasias would represent to us.

A serial killer needs to cut someone’s throat because it’s the only way they can get their dicks hard, that’s all.

There’s not much more to it than that, really.

And a “spree” killer, such as the individual who is currently haunting the headlines throughout the known world, is just another dickhead with a gun.

This dickhead, like every other dickhead with a gun before him, and like every other dickhead with a gun that comes after him, has wrapped his emotional infantilism, his intellectual inadequacies and immaturity in a flag he thinks is a clubhouse, given his “clubhouse of one” a stupid name, and gone shootin’ to teach the world a lesson.

Because.

Because we weren’t paying him the attention he felt he deserved.

Because we weren’t reading what he wrote.

Because when he spoke, we all moved to the next table.

Because those girls didn’t want to fuck him, they thought he was creepy.

Because no one ever asked him out for coffee.

Because no one gave a fuck about his weekend.

Because he couldn’t get a “friend” on Facebook.

Because and because and because.

And so on.

But.

This dickhead, like every other dickhead with a gun before him, and like every other dickhead with a gun that comes after him, represents NO wide political ideology, no religion, no creed, no colour or culture.

Hell, this dickhead doesn’t even represent the multitudes of other dickheads out there, most of whom can safely be let alone to sit in a puddle of their own urine somewhere, picking insects from their pubic hair and shouting conspiracies at the radio.

No, this dickhead was just another dickhead who thought it was all about him, and that it should be all about him, but nobody agreed with dickhead, so dickhead got mighty pissed about that and got himself a gun and went shootin’.

Like dickheads so often do.

And that’s all he’ll ever be.

Just another dickhead with a shotgun.

Some random dive of a venue, bands during the week, disco-shit on the weekend; dark, dank RSL carpet so sodden through to the underfelt each step threatens to suck your boots into the floorboards, tattered red flock wallpaper, tarnished silver trim fittings and mirrored columns, a semi-permanent haze of stale cigarette smoke and polyester sweat, I barrel into the room, all eyeliner and attitude and start straight to the bar for the first gin and tonic of the night. There’s about thirty people, the support act’s already well into their set and nobody’s paying them any attention at all, they’re just a momentary inconvenience to be endured for another fifteen, twenty minutes is all and I clock a couple of scowling disco dickheads in too-tight sateen shirts with collars the size of albatross wings and tight white flares buttoned at the navel and think, “The fuck are they are here for, they lose a mirror ball?”

I grab a drink, and after a few minutes my attention is drawn to the sound of what seems to be an argument over the other side of the room, specifically the words, “WELL, FUCK OFF THEN! GO ON! FUCK OFF!”, spoken by a girl in a Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt, leather mini and fishnets, the object of her ire some nondescript doofus in a duffle coat, about forty badges pinned to the lapels, who spreads his arms out at his sides, palms up, in a “What the fuck have I done?” gesture, after which both engage in a dumb-show of all manner of furious gestures for several more minutes until doofus trails off out the room dejectedly, leaving Siouxsie looking daggers at his shoulder blades, her head shaking in what appears to be exhausted exasperation.

Then the bass-player and his girlfriend and the singer in the band I’m there to see front up at the bar, the singer waves, shouts, “ROSS!”, and I say, “HEY!” and shove an envelope of a half dozen eight-by-tens I’d taken a couple weeks before at him, saying “THERE’S A COUPLE THERE I THINK ARE PRETTY GOOD!” and he takes a look, saying, “GREAT!”, and then he comes to the shot of his head and torso leaning into the microphone and bathed in fluorescent green light and says, “I LOOK LIKE A BIG SICK GREEN PENIS!” and we both crack up laughing.

“TAKE THEM!”, I say, because I don’t want to be dragging the things around with me the rest of the night, so he does, saying “SEE YOU AFTER!”, and the bass-player and his girlfriend and the singer all trail off to whatever passes for a dressing-room in this shithole, probably a toilet the size of a pencil case with walls covered in scribbly Texta scrawls of hairy testicles and vaginas and random phone numbers of random girls that not even the roadie for a drummer would ever consider ringing.

I get another drink, prop myself against a wall and wait for the band; every suburb, every pub, music almost every night, no fucking pokies, and the only television, if there was one, a dodgy black and white 15 inch with shitty reception on brackets up high on a nicotine flavoured wall, the public bar full of bandy-legged, sunken-chested old farts hunched over an infinite beer, rheumy eyes glaring redly and resentfully at the steady influx of all these pretty things, these dandy young faggots in black jeans and ripped shirts and stupid hair coming into their pub with all this faggot music, their slutty girls, and they’d punch them all to oblivion if they had a functioning muscle left in their sagging, sandpaper-skin arms and were only a few years younger, but they just go back to their beer, brains so soaked they can’t hold a coherent thought for more than a few minutes these days, back to dreaming of a fantasy blowjob from Good Old Cheryl, 48 years old, 30 of them spent behind the bar, they wish she could bang them about their hairy ears forever with her tits, even though her breasts have turned the size and shape of drained and dried zucchinis , yet all she ever dreams about is getting the fuck home to her cat and a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner, maybe there’s a late movie to lull her off to a decent night’s sleep, she needs a thirty minute shower every night to scrape the grime of the day off.

Support band’s finished, Sammy the light and sound guy has shoved some music on – LOUD! – Ultravox before Midge Ure turned them all into a flock of poncing romantics, some Magazine maybe.

I grab another drink, drain it, and then another, then the girl in the Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt, all spiky black hair and Chrissie Hynde pout walks over to me, a little unsteady on her feet and she shoves her face in my ear and shouts over the din of the music, “I’VE SEEN YOU BEFORE! WHAT’S YOUR NAME?!”, and I tell her, and she shouts at me, “YOU’RE COMING HOME WITH ME!”, and she prods me in the chest with her finger.

“WHAT?!”, I shout back, “WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?”

“I’M LUCY!!”, she yells at me, “YOU’RE COMING HOME WITH ME!”, and she pokes me again, a poke with each word.

“WHY?!” I yell back, genuinely befuddled on account of I went to an all boy’s school and don’t have sisters and I’d only lost my virginity two years before, so whenever a woman spoke to me about pretty much anything back then, befuddlement was the most natural response I could muster.

“BECAUSE I’M PISSED AND I’M HORNY AND I WANNNAFUCKYOUTILLYOURHEADFALLSOFF!”, she shouts back, running all her words together, and poking me again with her drink.

“OKAY!”, I shout back with a shrug, because I don’t really know what else to do and I’m not looking for any trouble.

And then I hear the bass-players’ girlfriend shout “ROSS!”, and she ambles on over and shoves her face in my ear and shouts, “DO YOU WANT A COUPLE OF THESE?!”, and she pulls a blister-pack of pills out of her purse and shoves them at me, they’re diet pills, speed.

“OKAY!”, I shout back, and take a couple, and then Lucy shouts at the bass-players’ girlfriend, “CAN I HAVE A COUPLE?!”, and the bass-players’ girlfriend shouts “SURE!”, and shoves the blister pack at her, and asks her who she is, and she tells her.

“I’M GONNA FUCK HIM TILL HIS HEAD FALLS OFF!”, gesturing at me and I shrug, and then the bass-players’ girlfriend shouts back, “GOOD IDEA!” and then she shouts at me, “ROSS! CAN WE GET A LIFT BACK AFTER THE GIG?!”, and I shout back, “OKAY!”, and then I start to the bar and Lucy shouts, “WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU GOING?!” and I say, “I’M GETTING A FUCKING DRINK!”, and she says, “I WANT A BACARDI AND COKE!” and I say “OKAY!” and I buy her one and bring it back, and then Sammy the sound and light guy comes over to say hello and do I want to take a look at the eight hundred dollar tape deck he’s just bought and I do so we both go up to the sound desk for a gander and he tells me all about it and I say, “I WANT ONE!” and then he asks me, ‘WHO’S THE GIRL?” and I say “HER NAME’S LUCY! I THINK SHE’S CRAZY!”

“GREAT!”, he says, “FRIDAY! YOU COMING?”

“OKAY!”, I say, and then I start to the bar for another drink before the band begins and go back up the front of the room and Lucy dogs me, asking “WHERE’S MINE?” and I say, “I JUST GOT YOU ONE!” and she says, “WHERE’S YOURS?” and I say, “I FUCKING DRANK IT!” and she says, “SO DID I! I’M FUCKINGTHIRSTY!” and I say, “OKAY!” and I wander back to the bar muttering “Fuck me dead!” under my breath and I get her another drink and bring it back and then the band starts, the buzz has kicked in from the pills, and about a dozen of us break out bustin’ moves on the floor so carefully studied in furiously uncoordinated finger jabs, jumps and head pops it makes Peter Garrett’s dance stylings look like classically choreographed balletic grace on mandrax.

Seventy, eighty minutes later, exhausted, exhilarated, soaked through with sweat and stone cold sober, the band’s done and I’m heading back to the bar for a drink when Lucy grabs me on the arm, spins me around and says, “I WANT A BACARDI AND COKE!” and I say, “OKAY!” and I go get her one, and then we have another and then the band come out, the singer comes over, says to me, “ROSS! CAN I GET A LIFT BACK WITH YOU GUYS?” and I say “OKAY!”; the guitarist and the drummer are going with the van, I get the other three and Crazy Lucy.

Down and out of this place and into the car, the roads are damp from a light drizzle of rain, I punch a tape in the player, turn it up and we go, back to the city, civilisation, fuck these suburbs, they all suck donkey dick, we’re young and we’re cool and we’ll all live forever and if our heads were stuck any further up our own arses our navels would flap each time we drew breath.

Bugger all traffic, I’m under the speed limit taking it easy, everyone’s talking, winding down, and the singer and the bass-player ask me what the fuck is it on the tape, it’s good, what is it, and I say, “Suspiria! The soundtrack, you know the Argento movie? They’re called Goblin, they did “Dawn of the Dead” too, it’s fucking fantastic this music, I’ll make you a tape!”

“Great!”, they say, and I say “Okay!”, and I come to a curve in the road, hell, it’s not a curve, it’s a gentle lean to the left, a nudge to the steering wheel, it’s barely even noticeable, and I come to it and nudge the wheel just so, and then …

Steering wheel locks.

Freezes.

What?

Hello?

What?

The fuck?

Oh.

My car begins to spin, it spins on the spot, it spins and spins, right there, in the middle of the road, it just spins, and this ain’t ever happened before, this is most definitely a new thing, and as open as I may have been back then to new things, I’m not sure that this is a good new thing – NO – it most definitely does not seem that.

And my car is a carousel and we are the horses, ‘round and around, up and down and around, it’s a night at the fair and the streetlights are firecrackers, fairy dust, fairy dust, who’s got the fairy floss, where is the lever, pull the lever, the lever, and if this is a movie, then where’s the director?

Someone yells.

And someone says, “FUCK!”

Then, “OH, SHIT!”

And, “HANG ON!”

Backwards now, across three or four lanes, up and over the divider, another three or four lanes, on the kerb now, the footpath, and into a fence.

Made of bricks.

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

“I GOTTA GET OUT!”, someone says.

“FUCK ME DEAD!”, someone else.

“SHIT!”, from another.

“MY FUCKING CAR!”, from me.

Everyone gets out.

I go around to the back, to the boot, it’s where the engine is, it’s a Volkswagen, there’s a dent is all, just a dent, but the brick fence is a pile of rubble, for this was when cars were made of COLD-HARD-STEEL, not the pussy-sucking tin foil they’re made of today, so that’s all okay then, and the singer and the bass-player and his girlfriend and Crazy Lucy are still trying to figure what the fuck just happened, and if it had happened only a couple hours earlier when the roads were crowded, we’d all be deader than Steve Fielding’s brain, but it’s one a.m. in the morning on a weeknight in the 1980’s and we’re alive.

“Mate,” asks the singer, “can I have a cigarette?”

“I didn’t know you smoked”, I say and give him one.

“Just for now,” he says, and everyone mills around aimlessly for a few minutes, quietly ejaculating various muttered expletives of wonderment and shock and surprise and awe and trying to pull our shit together, fireflies for stars, the road a greasy rainbow of damp, but we really gotta get out of this place, we gotta get out of this place now, before someone in the block of flats whose fence we just killed wakes up and calls a cop, so we all pile back into the car, what else can we do, I turn the key in the ignition and when it starts, the singer says, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” and I say, “It’s a Volkswagen! I LOVE this car! You couldn’t kill this thing with a wrecking ball the size of Mars!”, and I tell him how the mechanic at the garage who did the last service on it asked me what the hell had I done to it and I’d told him, “Nothing! I bought it for fourteen hundred bucks at Flemington Markets in 1976, one owner!”, and he offered me two thousand for it and I just laughed and said, “No way, mate!”, and then I pull it back onto Parramatta Road and head to Bondi, back to the bass players’ flat to have a relax and a calm down with a bottle of gin between us all and a reefer or three.

(Yes, I know what you’re all thinking, and you can shove it.)

A bottle of gin and a reefer or three later and a spin of The Residents “Eskimo” album – limited edition white vinyl, gatefold sleeve, TAP YOUR FEET TO WIND!, it’s about four a.m. in the morning and Lucy says, “Let’s go, it’s late!” and I say, “Okay!”, and we take our leave and go out to the car, my killer of fences, and I ask her where I have to go and she says, “North Bondi, down here to Campbell Parade, I’ll tell you what to do!”

“Okay!”, I say.

And she did.

I’m very pleased to be able to report that while my head didn’t exactly fall off, it most definitely got a rattle on.

Just lucky, I guess.

A gerbilist is an erstwhile journalist whose prime modus operandi is to load each and every “article” they write with links to other journalists with whom they agree on pretty much everything and who, in turn, agree with them. Gerbilists do not generally quote from, or link to, those journalists who pose a contrary point of view to their own.

Gerbilists produce “gerbilism”, a style of abstract typing that, when recognised, immediately puts the reader in mind of brown noses, small furry animals wrapped in duct tape, ferris wheels and speech impediments.

Example No.1–

The gerbilist praises itself for finding another gerbilist in agreement, and says as much …

There was no real Julia

Janet Albrechtsen agrees:

Gillard has become the casebook study of how to shrink in the job as PM…

Example No.2 –

This is when a gerbilist disappears up their own arsehole by linking to other gerbilists who say warm and runny things about them …

Lose some, win some

I wish I could persuade Joel Silver to read my columns, but luckily I’ve still got my TV show.

Gerbilists are like the Human Centipedes of news media, forever defecating in each other’s cakeholes and then chewing with their mouths open in public.

The film was refused classification to be distributed in any form in the U.K. citing the following reasons (take a deep breath now) –

“This new work, The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence), tells the story of a man who becomes sexually obsessed with a DVD recording of the first film and who imagines putting the ‘centipede’ idea into practice. Unlike the first film, the sequel presents graphic images of sexual violence, forced defecation, and mutilation, and the viewer is invited to witness events from the perspective of the protagonist. Whereas in the first film the ‘centipede’ idea is presented as a revolting medical experiment, with the focus on whether the victims will be able to escape, this sequel presents the ‘centipede’ idea as the object of the protagonist’s depraved sexual fantasy.

The principal focus of The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) is the sexual arousal of the central character at both the idea and the spectacle of the total degradation, humiliation, mutilation, torture, and murder of his naked victims. Examples of this include a scene early in the film in which he masturbates whilst he watches a DVD of the original Human Centipede film, with sandpaper wrapped around his penis, and a sequence later in the film in which he becomes aroused at the sight of the members of the ‘centipede’ being forced to defecate into one another’s mouths, culminating in sight of the man wrapping barbed wire around his penis and raping the woman at the rear of the ‘centipede’. There is little attempt to portray any of the victims in the film as anything other than objects to be brutalised, degraded and mutilated for the amusement and arousal of the central character, as well as for the pleasure of the audience. There is a strong focus throughout on the link between sexual arousal and sexual violence and a clear association between pain, perversity and sexual pleasure. It is the Board’s conclusion that the explicit presentation of the central character’s obsessive sexually violent fantasies is in breach of its Classification Guidelines and poses a real, as opposed to a fanciful, risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers.”

Director Tom Six responded to the BBFC’s move, stating –

“Thank you BBFC for putting spoilers of my movie on your website and thank you for banning my film in this exceptional way. Apparently I made an horrific horror-film, but shouldn’t a good horror film be horrific? My dear people it is a fucking MOVIE. It is all fictional. Not real. It is all make-belief. It is art. Give people their own choice to watch it or not. If people can’t handle or like my movies they just don’t watch them. If people like my movies they have to be able to see it any time, anywhere also in the UK.”

I have not seen the first film and have no desire to, and this is simply because, as someone who regularly watches horror films, I want a horror film to scare the living shit out of me (so to speak), not make me reach for a fucking bucket or spend 90 minutes of my life going, “Ewwwwwww!”.

And I say this as someone who loves such fare as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, “Dawn of The Dead”, “The Walking Dead” and other such offerings, but the horror movie has most certainly come a long way since the relatively innocent days of “The Exorcist”, or “Rosemary’s Baby”, or “Carrie” or John Carpenter’s “The Thing”, and I find myself wondering whether the journey was worth it, considering the penchant of so many directors of horror films today to confuse “horror” with “gross-out” …

Natalie Haynes from The Independent …

“Perversely, the harder these films try to shock, the less the suspense: it just becomes a catalogue of ick. And that makes it difficult to stay emotionally engaged enough to be afraid. Human Centipede plays on a previously little-considered fear of compulsory coprophilia, which is disgusting, sure, but not frightening. The plot of Human Centipede II apparently centres on a sexual sadist who becomes obsessed with a DVD copy of the first movie. Chance would be a fine thing – I was being paid to watch it, and I still dozed off in the middle. It’s a movie that climaxes long before it ends, and you can’t even go and get popcorn to cheer yourself up, as your pervading response isn’t crippling terror, but vague nausea. And no one ever heard a creak on the stairs in the middle of the night and was paralysed by the fear of feeling a bit queasy. It’s surely time horror became horrifying again, and not just gross.”

It’s obvious that Six intended his film to be viewed by a general audience, either in cinemas or direct to DVD, and so I question the BBFC’s assumption that any commercially released film (or at least, those intended for commercial release) could, or would, pose a threat to the mental health of its audience – it’s not as if anyone is going to be forcibly dragged from the streets into the cinema by a pack of feral ushers and tied to a chair, their eyelids propped open by matchsticks. And for those who freely choose to watch it who may be appalled or repulsed at what they’re viewing, they have a choice of (a) getting up and leaving, or (b) hurling their cookies into their bucket of popcorn and then leaving. Or just not turning up in the first place.

But I would also question, not Six’s point (no film or book or piece of music needs a point to justify its existence or creation), but his intent.

And if the intent is simply to present a graphic visual catalogue of the variety of ghastly horrors one human being may inflict upon another or others for no particular reason other than that, then what we have here is little more than an example of fatally flawed storytelling, flawed in that there is simply no “story” to be told.

Hence we wind up with a lazy screenwriter and a lazy screenplay, one that comprises nothing more than one concept, or one thought, that starts with just that and goes no further.

By denying the characters development as characters beyond merely victim and torturer, we, as audience members, are also denied any opportunity to empathise with them, to form any relationship whatsoever, to involve ourselves, to care. And it would also seem, going by the BBFC’s summation above, that are we also being denied any sense of conflict within the characters themselves, that the obstacles that should typically prevent these characters from reaching their desired goals (however unpleasant they may be to us), and the ways and means by which they must overcome these obstacles, we have also been denied drama itself (for the drama arises from said conflicts and obstacles), and if there is no drama, what is it that is supposed to hold our attention for the duration?

Six defends his film as “art”, and yet if it is to be regarded as “art”, the absence of such vital ingredients necessary for a cohesive dramatic narrative would appear to relegate it to the realms of  video installation exhibit in a gallery somewhere, around the corner from Tracy Emin’s “My Bed”, or Serrano’s “Piss Christ” or Mike Parr’s documentations of self-mutilation.

As for the whine about “spoilers”, finding out that a character wraps barbed wire around his prick in order to rape a woman is not exactly a plot revelation up there with the concluding moments of “The Usual Suspects” or “Psycho”, and given the nature of the behaviour that this character has (apparently) exhibited thus far, probably wouldn’t raise so much as an eyebrow at this stage in proceedings.

Many reviews of Six’s first film (both from critics and viewers) dismissed it as “dull”, that most heinous of cinematic sins, and if it is so, then there can only be one culprit and one only – the script.

Writing a script is hellishly difficult at the best of times. That tantalising brain fart that popped one’s frontal lobes in the dead of night, that seemed so fresh, so original, so promising, will, more often than not, turn out to be little more than an unsustainable and insubstantial few pages of sound and fury, signifying nothing and with nowhere to go and fuck all to offer, a squealing flatline of stillborn celluloid. Ideas are easy. It’s doing something with them that’s hard work.

(I understand that all of the above is nothing more but mere assumption on my part, and rather arrogant assumption at that, given that I’ve seen neither film and probably won’t, so this is offered not as “criticism” as such, as it is food for thought or a beginning point for further discussion.)

Banning a film in this digital day and age is a rather futile and impotent act of bureaucratic interference anyway, given that anyone in the United Kingdom who may want to watch the film could, armed with the right knowledge and tools, very simply download the thing (as I understand it, it has already been classified for straight to DVD release in Australia), so this makes the BBFC’s decision more than a little baffling, to say the least …

Adam Sherwin from The Independent …

“Examiners do sometimes admit to feeling shellshocked at the weekly gathering. “It’s not the hardcore pornography and violence,” said the insider. “It’s children’s DVDs – having to watch five hours of Ivor The Engine.””

Maybe they were just having a bad day.

This revolting development has occurred because “home prices eased a further 0.3% in April, 1.2% over the April quarter, and 1.5% over the past year, seasonally adjusted”, whatever the fuck that means.

And I am moved to wonder.

In the small, bog-ordinary, late ‘80’s style (which means no style whatsoever) block of six flats I currently live in (renting), the flat across the hall from mine sold last year for half a million bucks.

If it were to go on the market now, I presume that this “easement” of home prices at 0.3% would mean that it would sell for a whopping $1500.00 less.

From $500,000.00 to $498,500.00.

My heart bleeds for the vendor.

It’s a 2 bedroom flat.

It’s the same size and layout as mine, 2 bathrooms, one of which is an ensuite, the other doubles as a laundry. It’s kitchen is a kitchenette, which means more than one person at a time, there’s a crowd. From the balcony, you get a view of the block of flats across the street and if you turn your head to the right you get a view of the block of flats next door. Turn your head to the left, and you’ll see me on the balcony smoking a cigarette and scowling at you.

On a clear day, if you turned your head to the right, you might get a view of someone in the block next door shaving their armpits in the shower, because you can see straight through their bathroom window.

I wonder if that counts as “water glimpses”?

For real water glimpses however, wander about four blocks down and have a gander at the storm water channel on steroids known as the Brisbane River.

On the way back, stop in at the local pub, a big barn of a place that’s been renovated in such a fashion that all traces of style, history and character have been eradicated from it, a style I refer to as “airport toilette”. You can pay five and a half bucks for a schooner of basic beer, and thirty bucks for a 250g steak and a small fistful of salad while you’re there.

After which, you can take a relaxed stroll through the delightfully eclectic, village-like atmosphere of the shopping centre medium-sized, arse-ugly concrete shopping mall, grab a five buck bottle of cleanskin chardonnay from Liquorland, go home, get drunk and then put a bullet in your head because you’ve just realised that forking out a half million bucks for a bloody flat makes you a fucking moron.

In 1983, when I was 24 and earning about 23 or 24 grand a year as a royalty clerk for a record company, I rented a one bedroom flat in Kirribilli for 68 bucks a week. It was a nice, tidy, older style place, close to everything, no views to speak of, but you only had to go outside the block and look down the street for those, and when the owner told me he had decided to sell up a couple years later, I asked what he thought he might get for the place.

He replied, “Oh, about 65 or 70 thousand, they tell me”.

I was only young and single and had no desire to hook myself into a home loan for several decades, but I could easily grasp the amount as a realistic one and potentially achievable in terms of what I was then earning, certainly a lot of money at the time to fork out, but not an impossible ask.

About 4 years worth of my then annual gross salary, compared to about 12 times now for the 2 bed ratbox across the hall.

I recently spied a “studio apartment” for sale in Kirribilli for 270 thousand.

A studio apartment is real estate speak for “bedsitting room”. Typically, they’re about the size of a linen cupboard and the kitchen comprises a portable two-plate gas-burner and a bucket hung off a tap for a sink. The main selling point for this particular place appeared to be the presence of a balcony which was only slightly larger than a shoebox.

You could grow a WHOLE POT OF PARSLEY on it!

What a bargain.

Listen to this …

“The number of new home sales recorded in April grew by just 0.2%, according to the latest figures from the Housing Industry Association.

The HIA’s figures found detached house sales increased by 0.4% with gains in New South Wales and Victoria, while sales fell in Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia. Multi-unit sales recorded a third consecutive decline by 2%.

HIA chief economist Harley Dale says the result is evidence of an industry suffering under red tape and supply constraints.”

I’d say it’s also evidence that a great many people, certainly those in their 20’s and 30’s, simply couldn’t be bothered anymore attempting to hitch the wagon of their lives to an impossible mortgage that would have them living off tomato sauce and crackers for thirty years and have just given up.

Now, typically at this point in any conversation about the price of real estate, some dreary cunt will pop their head from the murk to gibber at all and sundry about how “they’ve managed to buy a house, they’ve bought three, and that’s because they worked hard, they worked really, really hard, harder than anyone else and certainly much harder than you, and they saved their money, they saved it all, and they ate beans from a can for twelve years and wore the same pair of underpants every day for a decade, whereas these days, these young people, they spend all their fucking money on plasma televisions and iPods and having fucking beers with their friends on a Friday fucking night and then they go and waste more fucking money on a fucking kebab with the fucking lot the indulgent fucking cunts and yes you can fucking buy a fucking house I did it why can’t you fucking do it it’s because you’re a lazy fucking goose that’s why it’s because you’re a lazy fucking goose and it serves you right you fucking farting fucker.”

And typically at this point in the conversation, after belting said dickhead upside the head with a mallet about forty times, you point out to said dickhead that,” Yes, you did manage to buy three, but you bought the fucking things in 1988 or thereabouts, dickhead.”

After which, you belt dickhead upside the head with a mallet again.

Houses are grossly overvalued. About 56% overvalued.

By that measure, the two bedroom ratbox across the hall from me was actually worth about 220K when it sold, and that sounds about right for what it is, which is exactly the same as the one I’m renting, and the one I’m renting ain’t nothin’ special, believe me.

You pay 56% more for a thing than it’s worth, you are a fool.

And those real estate spruikers and advisors and investors who expect you to pay 56% more for a thing than it’s worth are little more than the Limehouse Chappies and Ocean-Liner Al’s of today in modern dress shilling a Big Con, a Sting of wondrous dimensions, and it’s about time to tell these Gondorff grifters and shysters to take their overpriced shoeboxes and over-dramatic gibberish about how everybody needs to buy a house and buy NOW! NOW! NOW! just to get into the market before it’s too late and you wind up a third-class citizen because you only rent to shove it all up their backsides and go take a flying fuck at the moon, because interpreting an “easement” of 0.3% as a “slump” of any sort and touting this as “news worthy” is complete and utter bullshit.

Someone did pay 500 grand for that unit across the hall from me.

The poor, silly bastards.

I wonder if they drink and own a gun?

This “report” informs me that “healthy choice” food options in fast food chains are moving slower than a eunuch’s dick in a whorehouse and that this is a shame.

And I am moved to wonder.

I feel that my mind is slowly being clusterfucked into a piss-streaked gloopy puddle of dead, gelatinous jism by a persistently noisy gaggle of gibbering dickheads, all of whom regularly feel that their mere existence in this world upon which I stagger entitles them to poke their fingers into the slowly diminishing spongy spillage that is my brain and waggle them about some before scooping it up in a tissue and flushing it into the sea.

I imagine this scenario …

“Dad! Dad!”, shouts the excitable little boy in the ever-so-gorgeous Superman costume, “Can we go to McDonalds for dinner tonight?!”

“Why, of course we can, son!”, replies Dad, all Brylcreem and respectable gray slacks belted at the nipples, he’s Fred MacMurray on steroids, he has a maid who cooks and cleans every day, she has folksy homilies on tap, you wouldn’t fuck her with a bag over your head via remote control even if you could.

“But only as a special treat, you mind! This is not a regular thing!”, says Dad, hitching his pants up to his neck and pulling the belt tight as it will go, a little spontaneous auto-erotic asphyxiation while junior’s washing his hands and poking about his earholes with a fluffy stick before a nice meal out never hurt anyone, whoopsy-daisy, there she blows!.

And then they arrive, and our excitable tyke rushes up to the counter and gazes longingly at the vast array of tempting comestibles on offer, all oozing, juicy meats and cheeses and buns and salt and sugar and stuff that bears no known relationship to any existing foodstuff but it’s served in fucking buckets TEN FEET HIGH! and our adorably innocent little boy-scout supreme looks back at his Dad who’s now wandered up to the counter and joined him.

“Take your pick, son!”, says Dad, gazing adorably at the pride of his now empty old gray testicles.

And our cute as a button little fella, why you could almost take him home with you and chain him to a chair in a locked room that’s covered all over with dinosaur wallpaper and throw bloody big boxes of Lego at him until he cracks and agrees to be your son and help you hand out pamphlets at the abortion clinic for the rest of his life, he looks up at Dad, a little tentative, a little anxious, and then he blurts out the one true desire of his sweet young heart on this oh-so-special of nights …

“CAN I HAVE THE APPLE IN A BAG?!?!?”

“Why, of course you can, son!”, says our Father of the Year, “But only as a special treat, you mind! This is not a regular thing!”.

And a fine night was had by all.

Listen …

A person wants a fucking apple, they go to a fucking grocer.

Let’s all try living in the world, yes?

You have a friend, your best friend, a bullet-headed, nuggetty little scrapper named Fitz. They leave you alone when he’s around, but when he’s not, you’re a red rag.

The worst of them, once he picked you up and threw you from one end of the classroom to the other when the teacher was out of the room for a few minutes one day. You hit the floor with a thud and mostly just slid across the floor to the wall. It hurt.

It was like that.

Years later, someone tells you that this same guy wound up getting pinched for stealing cars and spent time inside for it. You think, “I hope he got the living shit beat out of him while he was there”.

You’d forgotten his name, and you’ll forget it again in an instant. You certainly can’t remember it now.

You wonder whatever became of Fitz.

You used to tell him stories that you made up during lunchtime. He liked that.

…..

Tumbleweeds, an imitation of life, everything recedes, fits and starts and flitting shadows and distant murmurs and this world does not seem real anymore and your mind turns on itself and you are a Sebastiao Salgado pixel of shadow, indistinguishable from any other, and all the bad things keep coming back and night’s black agents caress you on the brightest of days with cruel cloaks of roughly hewn and battered cloth, on every day, and you are walking to work, your head down, every step a slow-motion trudge through molasses, there’s barely anything but body memory to keep you moving, and you think to yourself, “This is not normal behaviour”.

If you are always looking at the ground, how can you see where it is you are supposed to be going?

…..

High school.

They’re kicking your chair again from behind. Every day, something.

Twenty minutes of it, if you had a gun, you’d turn around in your chair and shoot them both point blank in the face, thinking of nothing, no consequence other than “it would be quiet”.

You stand up and leave the room.

Yes, there is the teacher. You don’t care. You need to go and you do, and she begins, “What … ?”, but you’re out before she can finish.

Your refuge is the school library. You run. It’s oh so quiet there.

Last time you picked a book, “Welcome to the Monkeyhouse” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an author you’d not read or even heard of before. You liked the title. It seemed apt.

This time, you pick a book, “Advertisements for Myself” by Norman Mailer, another thing that is new to you, and you lose yourself.

You will be in this place for another three years. One thousand and ninety five days.

You do not want to be in this place.

You want to die.

It would be quiet there.

…..

They dangled you over a second storey school balcony once, about three of them, holding you by the wrists.

You looked down. That fear of heights thing you’ve had all these years, you think?

Afterwards, you wished they had let you go.

There would be the fall. Yes.

But then there would be the peace.

…..

Wandering through a bookshop, shelf upon shelf of “self-help” books, “Conquer This”, “Unlock Something”, “Embrace this Blah!”, they make you grimace, these stinking, stupid things.

“Because it’s all about you, isn’t it?”, you think, “Everything revolves around you, you’re the centre of the fucking universe, everyone is the centre of the fucking universe now, aren’t they? A world of potential reality television stars. Me, me, me, mine, mine, mine, I, I, I, I … Just FUCK OFF!”

Anything but that. That it be about you.

You’re not here anymore.

You haven’t been here for years. That thing in the mirror is not you. Your eyes dart around the edge of your reflection, not long enough to see who or what it is you have become, just long enough to shave, to maintain the appearance of a person living in the world, to carry on with the charade.

You turn your back on the mirror to brush your teeth.

“This is not normal behaviour”, you think.

But it’s all you have.

…..

Thirteen or fourteen years ago, in another galaxy far, far away, a young woman walks into my office and begins to tell me things.

She tells me about the way they speak to her. She tells me about the snide remarks, the comments, the subtle and not-so-subtle putdowns and slights. She tells me about the abuse, every day, something, the way she looks, the way she dresses, her life, her boyfriend, her taste in this thing and in that, it’s constant, it never lets up, and as she speaks, her face flushes and her lips tremble and her eyes dart about frantically, and then there is a sound, a hacking inhalation of a sob, and then it comes.

She crumples to the floor in a crouching position, tears pouring from her eyes, her arms hold herself and she cries out, “BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’VE DONE! WHAT HAVE I DONE?!”, and I sit, stunned into silence, not moving, not knowing what to do, clueless for what seems long, long minutes, but is surely only seconds.

She’s done nothing. I know that.

Another young woman passes the office. She’s had this, too. She comes in, puts her arm around the shoulder of this girl and says, “I know. I know. Shhh … Shhhhhhh … Come on, now”, and they both leave the office together, they leave the building, they go outside. Where there is quiet.

This other young woman, she has recently made the grievous misjudgement of telling one of her so-called “workmates” that she had been raped by her cousin some years back, a thing you would hope to tell a person in confidence, a thing that, were you to tell a person, you would think that they would listen and that they would care.

Not here.

They just laughed at her. Sniggers and whispers.

“I’ve really got to get out of this fucking place”, I think.

I do. Eventually. I had to wait about 18 months. I wanted the long service payout.

It wasn’t worth it.

…..

Let me tell you something …

These are not my words. I have paraphrased those of another man …

“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I HAVE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE APPROXIMATELY ONE HUNDRED TRILLION CELLS THAT COMPRISE MY BODY. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH SINGLE NUCLEUS OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF CELLS IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU.”

Was that what you wanted?

FUCK. YOU.

That’s all you get.

…..

YOU.

Bully.

This is for you.

You are an emotionally underdeveloped, intellectually lightweight lump of barely human filth who should’ve been scraped, bagged and flushed into the toilet the moment the sperm met the egg in the womb of whatever five buck cum-soaked whore spat you out and dragged you up.

May your first born never draw a breath.

I no more want to understand why you are the person you are or how you became that person than I would want to know why a child pornographer does what it does.

FUCK. YOU.

I want nothing from you.

But to see you dead in a

FUCKING

DITCH.

Was that what you wanted?

That’s all you get.

…..

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the toxicity of the environment you found yourself in begins to seep into your psyche, gradually disappearing strips of self-worth and regard, and your sense of self begins to shatter like a burst water balloon in slow-motion. “What the fuck have I done?”, you ask yourself and there is no answer to that. This is how it works here.

“Can’t you see what this job is doing to you?”, a friend asks you one night as, yet again, you’ve managed to fly into another incoherent, half-drunk rant about some thing or another, and you just sit on the floor staring at nothing and saying nothing because yes, you know what it’s doing, you know full well, but it’s not long away now, just another short year before you can grab what money is owed to you and run.

They keep dishing it out and you begin dishing it back, every word a bullet, lashing out at everything and everyone in such a manner that you shock yourself with the ferocity of your own bile and how base you can become when pushed to it, but to no end as they appear to enjoy this, that you have finally buckled under and begun to play this game, this stupid, stupid game and you begin to loathe yourself for it.

“I am not this person”, you think. “This is not me.”

It took years. The persistent, constant stream of verbal abuse, intimidation, veiled threats and derogatory slights, all of it designed to break you down and tear you apart and keep you in a place from which you would never be allowed to escape. You recall how, when you finally got your ten years and you told them to shove their miserable job and their miserable selves and their miserable industry up their collective miserable arses, you were finished with it all, that the General Manager wandered into your office half-tanked after a liquid lunch and plopped himself into the chair opposite yours and said to you, “So you think you’re fucking leaving do you? I’ll tell you one thing, you bald-headed cunt, if you go through with this, you’ll never work again, I’ll make fucking sure of that mate, I’ll make fucking sure life will be difficult for you, mark my fucking words”, and you flew off the deep end, the top of your voice, using language that would melt the head of a sailor.

The hundreds and hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime over all those years, the work you took on that was never supposed to be your work in the first place that one person who knew about such things told you would’ve been worth about one hundred and twenty thousand dollars and after all this and all this time, the best you get is a threat to fuck up the rest of your working life, and when you do get out, it’s with a long service payout and a two hundred and fifty dollar gift voucher.

You bought yourself a new clothes iron and a portable CD player.

One thing crowds in upon another, all of this and more, that thing you wanted so badly that slipped away, and that other thing you wanted so badly for so long and wound up getting, and then it all fell apart, and then you fell apart and then you simply stopped caring.

You lose yourself in drugs and alcohol.

Time passes.

And then the drugs and alcohol lose you.

And time passes.

You see your reflection in a mirror and it puzzles you, because this is not a person you recognise.

You’ve finally disappeared.

…..

You’re coughing, hacking and dry-retching into a towel on your lap because you drank yourself into a coma again and forgot to eat third night in a row. Sweat streams down your face, tears, you shake and sputter and sink back into the couch exhausted, bent so far out of shape you can barely lift a glass of water.

An hour passes. Two. There’ll be no work today.

You just sit, your mind a blank, struggling to find a thought to hang onto, and time just slips away.

“This is not normal behaviour,” you think.

You go to the bathroom to rinse your mouth and catch yourself in the mirror and think, “You worthless sack of stupid shit”, and you turn around and go back to the living room and another hour passes and you realise that this time must now come to an end.

You pick up your phone, select a number and press “call”.

“****** Medical Centre”, is the reply.

“Yes. My name is Ross Sharp. I need to sort some things. I need to make an appointment.”