I have never met Cameron Diaz, or Johnny Knoxville.
I have rubbed shoulders with them however, quite literally, and most accidentally.
"So what?" I hear you say. "Who gives a crap about who you know or don't know?" And to you, I say "exactly". Exactly, because, if this world was anything remotely close to resembling the way it should be, no-one would care, least of all me. And let me be clear about this- I don't care either. But there are a lot of people who do, and in the last week, I have experienced quite a few of them.
Last night I came out of a movie at the new Hoyts complex in Melbourne Central, to find I didn't have a snowballs chance in Hell of getting out of the building, as every exit and escalator was blocked by 65-bazillion fans of who I did not yet know. Then I got shoved out of the way by a highly trained crack team of security gorillas, and there's Cameron Diaz all of a sudden, standing right in front of me. I wish someone had told me, I would have caught a different session. Last week at onesixone I was quite rudely stampeded aside as Mr Johnny Knoxville entered the room, by a herd of apparently post-pubescent and excrutiatingly excitable young fillies. And by fillies, clearly I mean girls. This was amazing in two ways.
1. How can people have so little shame, and so much adoration for someone they know nothing about, to actually shriek and stampede toward the nearest movie star? I was standing next to Toni Collette on an escalator in Prahran a while back. I like her in interviews, and I like her work. She comes off as a no shit kind of person, and I dig that. But I didn't say hi because she has idiotic strangers saying hi to her all day, and I figured she could use a break. To be honest, if you don't have your head up your ass, you will see movie stars and rock stars all the time. It's a city, they go shopping. Before you think I'm trying to be cooler-then-thou, allow me to hit you with this- I get excited by seeing movie stars too. It's weird and fun to see someone who has made you feel so many strange and complex emotions in the past, right there in front of you like that. I saw Kerry Armstrong taking her kids to see a movie a couple of weeks ago, and my first instinct was to rush over and profess my eternal and undying love for her (character in Lantana). My god she's beautiful. Luckily I seldom act on first emotions. When I was working at the Logie awards last year, I had a great time (not) drinking and flirting with every hot girl I have ever seen on Australian tv. But come on, have some pride in yourself. Don't shit your pants, just enjoy it for what it is.
2. The Knoxville incident was interesting also, in that I was standing right next to my man Buck Wild when it happened. Don't you ignorant bitches know he's a star? Your loss I guess.
Maybe I 'm lucky, in that I have met so many of my idols. Maybe that's why I see other peoples reactions as so embarassing, while they are too busy being euphoric to ever notice. Maybe if I grew up in the Western suburbs of Melbourne and had never met anyone, and then I ran into whoever is hot right now, I would have acted like more of a tard. Maybe I'm the one with the problem, being too uptight to feel and express myself naturally. I definitely think too much about insignificant things. Things like how I equate this star worship with anthropomorphism, how we have to look up to something/someone at all times, how we have to have something higher to focus on, something better than us. But I think if you asked Cameron Diaz if she thinks she's better than the rest of us, she'd tell you in no uncertain terms you're talking utter shit. I wonder if she goes funny at the knees and idolizes the hell out of someone else? Somehow i doubt it, she seems way too grounded for that. Having said that, like i said before, i don't know her. Star worship, and organised religion and overt materialism are all flipsides to the same coin. People just don't seem able to confront the fact that everything has to die, and will rust, rot, fade, evaporate, congeal, or fall to pieces. And that that's ok. Why does everything have to be permanent? And I don't mean in the 'having evolved from hunter-gatherers and settled into fixed communities' thing. It's like our collective ego is hardwired into a pattern of dealing only in absolutes, like forever or never. Buddhism came so close, in that they know life is never permanent, and that all things must pass. But they still deal in a higher consciousness to attain, and a Godhead to guide you there. Hinduism knows all about birth/death/rebirth. But there's the thing- rebirth. That's where it loses me. There's nothing wrong with death and decay. It just is, like a banana. There's nothing romantic about it either, it just is, like a glass of water. So why do we hide from the knowledge like we do? I don't make a habit of hiding from bananas and glasses of water. Brussels sprouts maybe, but that's different. Clearly they're of Satan.
What about a religion that has no higher consciousness higher than us ourselves, and where death is the absolute end of all consciousness and use?
What about that? So we can use the one life I believe we all have (I believe in it because I'm living it right now, or so I think), to do some good, to learn some lessons once and for all, not just for us but for our children, and their children? Not just so we can build a strong house to hide in, and to make our bodies look like something we were not born as. So we as a species can undergo a second major evolution, where this time we climb up out of the oceans of our collective ignorance, and stop endlessly and unnecesarily repeating the same pointless exercises in futility. You know what I'm talking about. The first evolution we crawled out of primordial ooze, and onto dry land. This second one we should shake ourselves free of the funk of post-industrial-post-post-modernist-slightly pre-apocalyptic modern living, and climb onto the pure shores of living in the here and now with all the relevant information. The majority of us don't need to be unhappy, but the majority of us don't stand much of a chance of escaping our unhappiness, because it's kinda foisted upon us. And because some of us chase after it a lot of the time. We don't understand that people were never meant to live like a lot of us do, crammed into cities, chasing after careers that have no meaning, because they are directly connected to nonexistent entities like 'the economy', and now even 'the internet'. Things that don't really exist, even though we feel them rudely pressing up against us in the elevator every now and then, or crushing us in some cases. A lot of people will be reading this thinking I'm speaking metaphorically/allegorically, and they're totally lost. Not lost to death, but rather to a life without life. Careers are meaningless, unless they bring something meaningful into life. And while I'm not trying to diss you or say you're dumb/stupid because you are a financial analyst for Sportsgirl, surely you must see that any deeper meaning (other then the satisfaction of seeing a task through and doing a good job at it) simply does not exist. So what's wrong with that? Well, nothing really. Jobs/careers don't need to be meaningful in and of themselves to be worthwhile. Except that in order to be a financial analyst for Sportsgirl, you're going to spend all of your time driving to/from work, being at work, or drinking yourself stupid after work to convince yourself that you have a social life, crammed in there amongst all that work and driving. And there's your life, right there. Having some meaning would be great, don't you think? We could learn a lot from Kerouac, and go for a trip up the Matterhorn, even if we don't make it all the way. He knew enough to know that it was the journey that mattered, the wisdom attained, the self knowledge. Not standing on the top and conquering it. Conquering is for Spaniards, Dutch, and British. Oh, and Mongolians.
"So what do you want me to do, doctor knoweverything?"
Good question, wish I knew. I'm good at seeing problems, but I'm not so good at unravelling those problems, namely because I can't for the life of me see how we as a species let ourselves get so tangled up in the first place. The majority of people in this world are unconscious. I know it because I used to be as well. It's not evil or anything. But it's a waste. It's a waste when there is so much more that it could be, and that getting there is free and available to most people (in the west anyway). It starts in your mind, and it radiates outward. And it attracts like minds, into loose social groups that have the capabilty to grow so big they actually stand half a chance of making quantifiable difference in culture as we know it. Make a nice dent in your Coke commercial. It starts, believe it or not, with a tv set. It starts with looking at it. But instead of anaesthetising yourself with it, you have to turn it on, you have to sit in front of it, and...
...YOU HAVE TO FIGHT IT.
You have to watch the news, and Today Tonight, and A Current Affair, and every ad you can, and you have to battle them. You have to debunk them, you have to tell Naomi Robson that she's lying to your face, and that you know she is. (She knows she is too. She does it because it's her job, and she justifies it to herself by getting paid a lot, and by telling herself anyone with half a brain will see through it for themselves.) You have to translate ads and look for the fine print. You have to find the catch. You have to look past all the cute animals in the Optus commercials, and see the massive Ving Rhames looking motherfucker in the leather behind them, waiting to fuck your asshole right off your body, by conning you into a binding plan that offers you 5% of what they could easily offer you for the price you're paying, effectively nailing your feet to the floor, while telling you you're so lucky to be in on this limited offer, because you get this rad free iPod with the battery that will run out a week after your warranty expires, and will make Apple computers a nice profit when you and every other sucker that got in on the deal has to send them back to the States for a replacement battery, and pay for the priveledge, when consumers in the USA get it all for free thanks to a massive class action lawsuit that showed Apple what they were doing was wrong. But it's ok to con Australian consumers with the same deal, because our laws haven't caught up yet. You have to tell Hugh Jackman to fuck off with his offer for Foxtel, becauyse as much as it is paying for his sons education, it isn't doing anything for the rest of us.
Take a breath... We're surrounded by this mess, it's easier to opt out and join the mass populace, than to have to (heaven forbid) think, right?
Not really, no.
You see, these big companies rely on your money to remain viable. They need you. Sure, they act like they don't by making you wait 50 minutes when you call them to dispute the bill they sent you, that overcharges you by 25%. They act like they don't in all sorts of nifty ways. But they're only acting. Used to be a time when customer service was the best way to run a business. But business woke up one day, and realised that if you treat your customers like utter shit, they would feel small and powerless, and then you could take better advantage of them. You could bully them, and they would fold. And you could use the law to send them into a spiral of debt whenever you wanted, even if they didn't owe you anything. You could blacklist their credit rating.
So they did all that, and so much more, and eventually people took on the same mentality they took on with the Government 2 party system. If we don't sign with Telstra, we'll have to sign with Optus. Or AATP, or whoever. They are all the same.
Well, they are all the same, but you as a consumer don't need to sign with any of them. Do you want free calls, local and international? Get broadband, and use an application called Skype. "But you need a phone line to have broadband." No you don't. Wireless broadband is freely available all over the place right now, and even better- soon you won't even need that. You can get it down your power lines. If everyone did this, Telstra would be crippled, and they wouldn't be so cavalier and "fuck you, public!" about everything, would they? And once tech companies get a whiff of the public demand, we will have wireless internet protocols retrofitted to mobile phones, so all calls will be made over the internet, wirelessly, from a pda instead of a cellphone. Then Telstra will be dead.
Sounds great, right? Shame it will never happen.
Because all of the somnambulist hoi polloi out there in Australia will keep Telstra up and running, buying the latest mobiles with features they don't need (seriously people- a 1.5 mega pixel camera in your phone is just a cheap gimmick. Can't you see that?) on the latest plans, so they can take throwaway pictures of all their shitfaced friends at work drinks on Friday night. They'll do it in the same way they consume alcohol in such needless and destructive volumes, driving V8's and SUV's, smoking, and buying Kelly Clarkson and Tamara Jaber records. It's fun partying, isn't it? The ship's been sinking for 100 years, but it's ok- the radio is still on.
And that is why I say- "Go fuck yourselves Australia."
Actually, Frank Zappa kinda said it first, but you know what i mean. So forgive me if I don't play along and go apeshit when I see Johnny Knoxville, who is nothing more than a paid model with dialogue, in protracted product placement spots we call motion pictures. He's getting paid to sell you
If you're in Melbourne, go to Gertrude Street before 5, and check out the Artholes gallery, then go a few doors down to the Intruder gallery. Seriously, go look at some art. Some really fresh shit, today, before it turns up in a commercial for sneakers (and it so will). And listen to PBS or any other radio station that might introduce you to a band like The Shags, or Diamanda Galas, or The Drones, or Dr Dooom for fucks sake. Have you heard of Dead Frenchmen yet? Why not? The Melbourne Fringe Festival is on, you can't avoid theatre right now, but 95% of this city will cunningly find a way. Go to Russel Street in the city and buy some transexual porn DVD's for $10 each without the covers. Do anything, but make it different from usual. If you've got the balls to do it, and break out of your comfy little mold, you will never stop thanking me. You'll laugh more, you'll cry more, you'll confront yourself in ways you never knew existed, because real art is like that.
Get down with the bones in the meat, I dare you. Be your own star. There's a hot catchphrase for you. Drop $20 on the street and walk away. Spend a night in jail for punching Kyle Sandilands in the face, or better still, get his girlfriend utterly shitfaced and fuck her in his car. Then ring up the Salvation Army and see if there's any way you can help them out one Saturday a month, feeding people who are starving or something. Think about your own body rotting and full of maggots, and then think about if you still really love your job. Walk somewhere. Push a 12 gauge needle right through the head of your penis. No, seriously...do it. It's just meat, it's gonna rot off one day anyway. Besides, if you clean it, in a week you'll never know you did it in the first place. And if you jerk off the same day you did it, you will come harder than you ever imagined possible. That's the power of contrast people, it's what happens when you take the road less travelled, stop being such a pussy, and give your body/mind/whatever something to marinate in. It's what happens when you're alive, and you're not so concerned with controlling everything. You have to struggle to be happy, did you even know that? Yin and yang, the jedi vs.sith, contrast contrast contrast.
Stop lining up to see movie stars and go make a movie. Because I would sincerely love to see it, and so would Cameron Diaz.
-this is knifey, from 'the internet'.
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