I <3 op-shops

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Some people go to op shops to dig out the treasure hidden amongst the piles and piles of junk. I go for the junk.

Cookbooks for out-of-fashion cuisines, magazines and manuals for obscure hobbies and crafts, DVDs and videos of films nobody has ever heard of, apparently useless kitchen utensils. To me this cultural detritus is endlessly fascinating.

Gough Whitlam

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Guy Rundle writes:

Whatever Tony Abbott brings himself to say in the coming hours and days, one truth above all will remain: that the sort of Australia he and his ilk wanted preserved, deferential, limited and grounded in conservative fantasy was forever put beyond possibility by the Whitlam revolution. That did not happen everywhere else, not nearly. If what we thrill to in the memory is the bearing, the audacity, the wit, what we should also remember is the root-and-branch reconstruction of our institutions, the battle to open up opportunity, to go to war against received notions of what a white imperial outpost, a two-century improvisation, could and should be. To write this from a motel in Colorado, where the waitress at the truck stop next door earns $2.50 an hour plus tips, and the battle is to stop an amendment that would criminalise all abortion, is to remember that progress can be measured by the battles that no longer need to be fought, and to remind ourselves that audacious change has happened on our shores, and can do so again. What is owed to the memory of Gough, and all who made the era that goes under his name, the myth and the reality, is to find no shame in defeat, only in caution, to crash through or crash.

I'm getting all teary-eyed. I think it's too early in the morning to be reading eulogies.

Coast

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I gave myself the end of the year off from working a job job. Instead I am up on the northern coast of NSW, hanging out, crocheting, visiting beaches and generally being warm and happy.

Every town on the northern NSW coast looks like a holiday park. It's as though a bunch of middle aged and elderly people went on holiday and then decided never to go home again. I can't remember seeing anything like it in Victoria. But I suppose our beaches aren't as mild and pleasant.

We've been visiting a lot of different beaches. I like sand. Sand is the end. Nothing can grow in it. It contains no nutrients. It is the mashed up bones of mountains and molluscs. When you have nothing left to offer the earth, you become sand.

What do you have to offer?

in

Transcript of an excerpt of a speech by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman:

So you are here and I am here, spending our time as we must.

I am trying not to spend this time as I spend most of my time: trying to get you to like me. Trying to control your thoughts, to use my voodoo, at the speed of light, the speed of sound, at the speed of thought. It is an ancient pattern of time usage for me, and I'm trying to move deeper, hoping to be helpful.

This pattern of usage paints over an ancient wound. It paints it with bright colours, it's a slight of hand, a distraction, so in an attempt to change the pattern, let me expose the wound.

I do know that it is old. I do know that it is a hole in my being. I do know that it is tender. I do believe that it is unknowable, or at least inarticulable. I do believe you have a wound too. I do believe that it is both specific to you, and common to everyone. I do believe that it is the thing about you that must be hidden and protected. It is the thing that is tap-danced over, five shows a day. It is the thing that won't be interesting to other people if revealed. It is the thing that makes you weak and pathetic. It is the thing that truly, truly, truly makes loving you impossible. It is your secret, even from yourself, but it is the thing that wants to live. It is the thing from which your art, your painting, your dance, your composition, your philosophical treatise, your screenplay, is born.

People all over the world spend countless hours of their lives every week being fed entertainment, in the forms of movies, TV shows, newspapers, YouTube videos, the internet, and it's ludicrous to believe that this stuff doesn't alter our brains, and it's also equally ludicrous to believe that at the very least, this mass distraction and manipulation is not convenient for the people who are in charge.

People are starving. They may not know it because they're being fed mass-produced garbage. The packaging is colourful and it's loud, but it's being produced in the same factories that make pop tarts and iPads, by people sitting around thinking 'what can we do to get people to buy more of these?' and they're very good at their jobs, but that's what it is you're getting, because that's what they're making.

They're selling you something, and the world is built on this now. Politics and government are built on this. Corporations are built on this. Your personal relationships are built on this, and we're starving, all of us, and we're killing each other, and we're hating each other, and we're calling each other liars and evil because it's all become marketing and we want to win, because we're lonely and empty and scared, and we're led to believe winning will change all that.

The world is very scary now. It always has been, but something grotesque and specific to our time is blanketing us. We need to see that it is not reality. It is a choice that we are making or allowing other people to make for us.

Don't allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are, is the way the world must work. What I'd like to express is the notion that by being honest, thoughtful and aware of the existence of other living beings, a change can begin to happen in how we think of ourselves and the world, and ourselves in the world.

We are not the passive audience for this big messed up power play. We don't have to be. We can say who we are. We can assert our right to existence. We can say to the bullies and con men, the people who try to shame us, embarrass us, flatter us, to the people who have no compunction about lying to us to get our money and our allegiance, that we are thinking, really thinking, about who we are, and we will express ourselves, and with this, other people won't feel so alone.

I want to tell you that I have a hope, that there's another way to be in this world, and that I believe with courage and vulnerability and honesty, that the stuff we put into the world can serve a better purpose.

What I have to offer is me.

What you have to offer is you.