~ helmets, butterflies and broken hearts

My old friend Anne Harding just told me a beautiful little anecdote concerning an erotically charged friend of ours. She has made a career from her steamy novels and I’ve mentioned her before, but I won’t say her name out of respect, though I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if I did.

She was sunbathing naked, on her back, in what I took to be a wheat field in the South of France. It was hot and sweat was beading on her body. A butterfly fluttered in the air above and, sensing the moisture, alighted on one of her nipples. It began to drink from the droplets that had formed on her aureole. The tickling sensation of its tiny legs, mouthparts and wings were pleasant, they stimulated her, caused her nipple to harden. But it did not end there. A connection was made across species and, in time, the touch of the butterfly brought our friend to orgasm. She can now stake claim to having had sex with an insect and, in her pulsating lubricious psyche, this is an achievement of note.

I also used to have a female friend who would suddenly announce things in her sleep. My favourite was ‘Unicorns wander through the valley of broken hearts.’ That was how she was. Half in our world, half through the mirror into Narnia. Or Banana Land. I couldn’t be certain which.

*

As a massive fan of The Wire I was looking forward to seeing David Simon and Ed Burns’ next project Generation Kill, a war drama set during the Iraq invasion. Of course it’s great, similar in style to The Wire, but it really exposes a problem I commonly experience with combat dramas. (And I do enjoy the good ones.)

I first identified the issue during Saving Private Ryan. When characters wear helmets [and uniforms] I find it hard to tell them apart. Thinking back, I think I had the difficulty with Platoon. I couldn’t discriminate between the good and bad sergeants until well into the movie, but by then it was too late to properly appreciate their titanic moral struggle. I recall a similar frustration with Full Metal Jacket as well.

It was only during my third viewing of Saving Private Ryan that I could actually separate out the characters (excluding, of course, Tom Hanks). In Generation Kill, like The Wire, there are a lot of characters and they all wear helmets nearly all the time. I’ve watched half the series of six episodes and I still haven’t sorted out exactly who’s who, and I remain confused over the chain of command.

I am generally somewhat poor at recognising faces, a deficiency that at times has seen me accused of arrogance and rudeness, particularly in my early life. My poor eyesight is at least partially to blame, but not when it comes to war dramas.

I believe that a director who intends to make a war drama, or any drama with a preponderance of helmets, should take especial care with character identification. He should give helmeted characters distinctive insignia, idiosyncratic voices and punctuate the script with helmet-free scenes …

But I wonder if they already take this element into account? If they do, then on Generation Kill they’ve yet to find a working formula. At least for me. But don’t get me wrong. I do like helmets and I do like to see characters wearing them, It’s a male thing, of course. I like Spitfires too, and Messerschmitt 109s and 262s and 163s. But this helmet thing … it’s a problem that needs solving. Wouldn’t you agree?

*

In The Age this morning, we had a mention in the EG’s Sticky Carpet column; the Ears gig plus related events at the Melbourne Film Festival. Officially, we’re not supposed to speak about the festival until their launch on 6 July, but this doesn’t seem to have bothered The Age …

~ what football can do for a man

My father, Vilis Sejavka, arrived in Australia around 1952. He was a refugee from the Second World War, a displaced person who had spent at least six post-war years in internment camps around Germany.

Latvia, his home country, had fallen under Soviet rule. To return there meant probable incarceration in the Gulags. As he had been a (19yo) conscript for the Latvian division of the Waffen SS, this would more than likely have lead to his death.

His kidneys had been ruined after a night spent playing dead in the snow as a Red Army column passed close by. His German lieutenant, with whom he had deserted, lay beside him but his was no act; the pair had been fired upon earlier by the Russians. It was standard practice for the Communists to bayonet the dead, so Vilis did not so much as twitch. Imagine that. He claimed to have never been quite the same.

As truckload load after truckload of refugees departed Germany, bound for new lands in which to settle, Vilis watched and waited, praying that eventually his turn would come - which, ultimately, it did.

It is not difficult to understand the gratitude he felt towards Australia - though, as a willful, contrary child, I did my best. Once here, he worked in logging camps in order to fulfill his contract with the Government. While doing so, he contracted rheumatic fever and then tuberculosis. Down the track, it was the rheumatic fever that doomed him.

In a TB sanatorium, close to death, he fell in love with a nurse, my mother, and so on and so forth. But that’s not the story for today.

What I want to communicate is his unconditional love for Australia and all things Australian. He threw his heart and soul into this country. He had little contact with the local Latvian community - to my later chagrin - largely because of the Soviet spies who were thought to have infiltrated. He was fervently anti-communist, almost to the point of paranoia - Australia, his country, and the new family it had given him were all that he trusted now.

While I was being called a wog at school, he was calling himself a New Australian with absolute, unadulterated pride. He whole-heartedly embraced our traditions and culture. He acquired English at speed. Though he retained his accent, and was partial to borscht, pickled herring and sauerkraut - these things were all that remained of the Latvian Vilis.

My father grew up with the slow, exasperating species of football we call soccer, but once he hit these shores Australian Rules became his code. He was a New Australian and soccer was for ingrates. Because he lived with my mother in one of those little worker’s cottages on Acland St. up from Greasy Joe’s, St Kilda became his team. Not long after I was born, I was attending matches in my swaddling, first at Junction Oval, then, in actual clothes, at Moorabbin.

My father and I had precious little in common. He was an engineer and I was an artiste, but on football we saw eye to eye. It may seem sad, but it was our strongest link as father and son. The one certain thing we shared. For me the night of St Kilda’s 1966 Grand Final triumph is a volcanically joyous memory, perhaps the sweetest of my boyhood.

Now Vilis is long gone, but our team is not. Whenever I set foot in the stadium, whenever I bellow the team song, whenever St Kilda manages to win a game, the my father's ghost is there. That’s why I sometimes cry at matches, in case you were wondering.

We start another finals campaign this week, and already I feel him stirring. We’ve had a few chances over the years, but, since his death, no premierships. Still just the one ... Just the one ... This year Geelong stands in our way, but there is always hope.

From my father, with his harrowing, unforgiving life, ... from his thankless son ... for Robert Harvey and his twenty-one seasons of scintillating brilliance and old school tenacity … let me just say ... Carn The MIGHTY SAINTS!

At War with Abominations

With each passing year, the distinctions in my life become ever more blurred. I no longer know if I am sick or well, awake or asleep, rich or poor, intelligent or bog stupid. My days blend together. The substance of my existence eludes me.

The peaks and troughs of my emotional life are progressively levelling out. Music does not move me, though once the making of it was my principal joy. I enact my feelings as if long ago, at some forgotten time, I metamorphosed into an automaton. The source of my love for Jenny, my wife, is unclear, though the fact of it is certain. My daughter of four years, Polly Eileen, is vivid and scintillating - a font of miracles, beauty incarnate - but I know this more from deduction than from direct experience.

Perhaps uselessly, I struggle against these trends and the drear powers behind them. At the age of thirteen, I received an Olivetti Lettera typewriter for my birthday and subsequently writing has been my work and my love. But the act of creation has less significance in a life where the act of subsistence is paramount.

Steadfast endurance seems to be my most potent weapon, as I stage a staggered retreat before the inexorable advance of my enemies: The Quinquagesima, a constant and dessicating wind that finds its source beyond the atmosphere of the Earth; the Slammerkin, a tiny reptilian possum whose incursions leave toxic exudates and whose bad vibrations resonate destructively with my liver; and, finally, most dreadfully, the Spores... the black, deadly Spores, that insinuate themselves into every domain of my life - the physical, the emotional, the spiritual, the intellectual, the financial - and there engage in lethal infestation. It is against this vile and feculent adversary that I struggle most desperately, even this day on which I write...



Jenny, who is sitting her mother's house, arrived early to pick up our daughter. It was only ten and already she was rife with Spore activity, (the Spore abomination most commonly takes strength from the night time hours.) Black pinpricks danced on her too-pale skin, defocusing her physical presence. They clustered in her every word. They had taken root in her mind and were directing her thought. She spoke of abandoning a beach-head we had established - specifically, a medication - in order to engage in a risky long-term strategy that would give the enemy a short-term advantage. It made no sense. The Spores would use this advantage to lay us perilously low. The Spores were talking through her sweet and sensuous mouth. It was awful to observe the one I love so thoroughly enslaved. It was a struggle just to meet her eyes.

Smiling, she indicated the jeans she was wearing. Formerly, they had been tight and exceedingly flattering - now they were noticeably loose. A disquieting symptom, I thought, presented as a point of interest. Of no greater import than the odd striped spider she showed us in the toilet cubicle this morning. Sporecraft. Deadly Spores on a deadly mission.

In nature there is a parasitic fly which lays an egg upon a living snail. Once hatched, the grub burrows into the flesh of the host, makes its way to the brain and from there influences the snail's behaviour - ordering it to an inevitable and putrescent death. This modus operandi is analogous to one of the innumerable sleights employed by my most pitiless foe.