At a loss to say anything more about that which has already been talked about enough -- in both useful ways and not -- I am still unable to prevent myself from writing about it.

Last night I think I finally experienced an emotional reaction to the WTC crisis. S-boy and me got home from quiet dinner and an interesting play and both burst into tears within minutes of each other. Mega-hugs followed. We may even have gone to sleep hugging (not a terribly common occurrence), and I was surprised to find myself still hugging him when the alarm went off this morning.

I’ve had a reasonably good day today, but I’m still fucking sad -- and now that I’m sad, it’s not just about the WTC or America but the way power works in the world. The knowledge of act upon act of ruthless murder in so many locations throughout the world and the way that murder is more or less important, tragic or terrifying -- depending on who commits it and who is its victim. Maybe the weight of having counted off disasters on my fingers so many times this last week finally got to me.

Anyway. Voiceworks went to print today. It wasn’t as stressful this time, overshadowed by the obvious crisis, but I still felt the tension lift this afternoon when Lach and I finally uploaded it all onto a zipdisk and packed it off to the printers. I got myself a haircut afterwards. Was forced to listen to this ditzy punk hairdresser named Mike rabbit on about sending, like, a sound system and some ecstasy to Afghanistan instead of nuclear weapons -- let’s all just peace out, man -- while he chopped hanks of my hair off. He nearly gave me a mullet, but I made him chop off the back bits too. Thank god.

Feel kinda callous and ditzy myself, getting a haircut, or thinking about going out this weekend, but I have an excuse. I’m turning 26 on Monday. (I also have an excuse for something else, which feels both slightly callous, given the world situation, and consumer-sheep-like. But rest assured, I'm taking the damn thing down after Monday.) The year has gone incredibly fast. I have changed in innumerable ways. The words ‘growing up’ might even be appropriate, involving references to nearly-sound capability with rent and bills, motivation to get up early, less partying then last year. But there are other things as well. My friends aren’t all kinky queer perverts any more and my lifestyle has changed accordingly, at least in public: no more fetish club adventures, telling porn stories to drag kings and boidykes in smoky lounge venues with red velvet touches. Hardly any more cruising of said boidykes, and no dinner parties like the one more than two years ago, when my best friend walked in on me kneeling to, well, someone, in the living-room and laughed at us.

Instead, more meetings. Funding applications. Hanging out with huge numbers of bio-boys in every aspect of my life: colleagues, fuckbuddies, collaborators, friends. Reading as work rather than play. Work as play. Everything, even this, as work.

So, yeah, I’m growing old and leaving things behind. Various friends and associates. K. and I., who I still think about often and with sadness. Tom and Urszula and Dash and the crowd of crazy bois who I never really got talking to properly, it seems, for friendships to cement. Leonard St, home for two years. My dad. A future (for now) of going back to study, and constant re-jigging of honours thesis plans. Being officially classed by the UN as ‘youth’.

Goodbye to all that. Hello to uncertain futures, threats, advantages, tactics. Hello to light and summer, soon. Hello to this one, me here now. And goodbye.

posted by Rosa Luxembourg at 3:45 AM

Someone on Barbelith reminds me that it's easy to be flippant and intellectualise when you're not close to what's happening. It is. I'm sorry. But I am not intellectualising: I feel what I think in my gut.
posted by Rosa Luxembourg at 9:03 PM

collapse

The only thing that's made me laugh all morning is this quasi-joke, from Barbelith:

'In Star Wars: how would the Empire's media have reported the destruction of the Death Star?'

'the Death Star was a secret weapon... only the rebels knew about it...'

It's a year this morning since a policeman kicked me in the head for blockading the World Economic Forum in Melbourne. The memory of feeling confused and angry and scared gives me some idea of how people in New York are feeling now -- that panic -- even while my brain marvels at the sheer elegance of such a lo-fi attack on the USA: suicide bomber + domestic plane hijack = x. To be honest, the first reaction I had when my housemate got me out of bed to watch the television last night was weirdly enthralled. America finally gets what it's been asking for. The Pentagon 'breached', home of everything I call terror. And then I started ticking over the numbers of dead people, watched buildings collapse live, imagined being there (as all the media coverage was encouraging us to do), imagined climbing down fifty flights of stairs and being on the second-last flights when the tower fell.

But so far away, over here with everything going on normally in Melbourne, I am already trying to make sense of the politics of this. The talk is of 'innocent civilians' being targeted. Reporters compare the event to Pearl Harbour, saying that 'nothing like this has ever happened in America'. Well, der. But what about the rest of the world? Apart from natural disasters, which regularly kill hundreds of thousands of people in places where the media coverage isn't so great and well, the populations are so large and faceless that none of 'us' 'here' really care, what about the numerous acts of war supported or perpetrated by the United States? What about the invasion of Panama? El Salvador? Columbia, still? Iraq? Vietnam? Rwanda? Burma? Palestine? Lebanon? The civilans killed there, did they ever want to be involved in conflict? Was it somehow less terrible because those civilians were already in states of war before the killing started in earnest? Or do the white news-makers consider the civilians in countries decimated by American imperialism, paranoia and military control to be somehow sub-human? Because of course 'they' are not like 'us', 'they' don't speak English, 'their' skin is not white.

I hear Mimi has just posted something similar on her site; I'm sure she makes the point better. And of course you could check out Shane's thoughts, which are similarly considered and fluent. But I want something constructive to come of out this; I want people to talk about it as more than just a 'tragedy' or 'an act of war against America'. I have spent months swinging back and forth on the issue of whether non-violence is necessary for a just 'revolution', or political action. I still don't know what I think. I know that I will be talking about it with everyone I know in the coming days, watching for retaliation, watching for the murderous paranoid American military-animal to rise from its nightmare slumber and hit out. Hit 'back'. Meanwhile, argue with me if you want.
posted by Rosa Luxembourg at 8:56 PM

'transatlantic servitude'

...which is what a cute-sounding grrlboy offered me today in return for a copy of the zine I did last year. Amongst which happy events today also numbered the purchase of new skate shoes. Yay. Nothing like shoving the old gaffer-taped ones in the bin.

Doing three things at once in the realm of virtuality, printed text on the desk beside me blurring with the text scrolling out from beneath me. M.... 'ulti-tasking,' my partner in crime informs me before I can get the word out, from the other side of the world.

No links today. Just a happy face. And a Paul Virilio quote:

'The more that time intervals are abollshed, the more the image of space dilates.'
posted by Rosa Luxembourg at 4:26 AM

Since everyone else is writing about it, I though I'd have a go...

What dangerous days these are,’ writes Andrew Bolt of the Melbourne Herald-Sun (23/8), ‘when so many Leftist activists, politicians, churchmen, and commentators treat facts as their enemy… Who cares about the facts now? Anyone will tell you: it’s the emotions, stupid.’

It’s beyond me to give a proper critique of the article here, which (among other things) slandered Lowitja O’Donohue yet again, and implicitly accused Shayan Badrie’s father of child abuse. But his diatribe about the importance of ‘facts’ has entered a corporate media space bristling with questions about Australian responsibility for a boatload of Afghani ‘illegal immigrants’ (asylum-seekers) rescued by the Tampa off Christmas Island a couple of weeks ago. After directing the Tampa to where the asylum-seekers’ boat was sinking, Australian authorities not only refused to allow the Tampa to dock at Christmas Island, but used the crisis to incite public paranoia about ‘our borders’ being penetrated.

The debate has been raging in the newspapers and on radio talkback and on telelvision (and in loungerooms, bedrooms, offices and pubs) for weeks now. It’s a hard thing to make sense of. It brings together such an arsenal of ‘touchy’ issues in Australian public consciousness that incoherent anger sometimes seems like the only available response. But let’s have a go. Let’s think about facts and feelings.

Given the highly charged level of public debate, it’s not surprising that ‘emotions’ are being used in various different ways for all sort of contradictory political purposes. One strategy is for the government and their right-wing supporters to present themselves as ‘hard-headed’ or ‘rational’ in opposition to a mythic ‘emotional’ bloc of left-wing refugee ‘sympathisers’—and of course asylum-seekers themselves. Minister Philip Ruddock has repeatedly ‘refused to be moved’ by the asylum-seekers’ pleas, even when the media reported that people were considering jumping overboard if not given asylum. Ruddock’s implicit accusation of ‘personal’ emotional blackmail paints Ruddock as the sensible party even as it erases asylum-seekers’ attempts at political agency.

While Howard and Ruddock are quite obviously devoid of any ‘compassion’, it’s interesting that critics of the government all focus on this lack as the driving argument for their removal from government. Because let’s face it, this is not about the refugees on the Tampa, really. As a public debate, it’s about an upcoming election and the government’s last-ditch attempt to scare enough people into voting them back in. And compassion is really important: particularly when it seems the only way to defuse such scare tactics is to connect up the asylum-seekers as valuable individuals with ‘us’. To impress upon ourselves that these are real people with real needs.

This is not helped by news reporting of the Tampa ‘crisis’, which complies with right-wing ‘factual rhetoric’ by being extremely selective about the nature of ‘facts’ reported. ‘Facts’, in the media spectacle around asylum-seekers, are almost always numeric: the number of ‘queue-jumpers’ expected; the numbers of people on each boatload (obsessively reported with daily adjustments by a statistic-hungry media); the percentage of the Australian population who are anti-refugee; the number of people in detention already. Numbers have a particular power to dehumanise individuals, but also attempt to persuade ‘us’ that caring is impossible. Caring will leave ‘us’ vulnerable to being over-run with masses of people. Strangely enough, facts like ‘there is no other way to come to Australia other than getting on a boat, sometimes’ or ‘embassies in places like Afghanistan actively discourage people from filling out requests for asylum’ don’t even make the opinion pages.

This is not to say that reportage of asylum-seekers is without ‘emotional’ content. Obviously, it’s not: the photographs of Shayan Badrie and the horrific accounts of asylum-seekers in detention sewing their lips together attest to highly emotional reportage. And yet these accounts, like the blurry, indistinct photograph of the asylum-seekers on the Tampa, seem often only to incite a kind of empty ‘horror’, which is as numbing and closed over as the endless repetition of statistics.

So, you ask, what might make people connect the dots? When every ‘citizen’ of Australia except indigenous people are descended from immigrants, it seems logical to try to hear the asylum-seekers speaking. But this is refused: even when a letter from the asylum-seekers on the Tampa was tabled in court, it didn’t make as much airtime as Howard’s ‘plan’ to ship the public embarrassment off to Nauru, our new penal colony in the South Pacific.

Alternatively, we could try to speak ‘with’ them. But media reportage on refugees, boat people, asylum seekers and people crossing the borders is dominated by a particular mode of address: ‘we want...’; ‘we must...’; ‘our borders’. ‘We’ variously means a whole lot of things, depending on who is addressed and who is speaking. Overwhelmingly, ‘we’ in this context means white Australians whose human rights are not at risk. ‘Our’ borders are not just about the physical space of the nation-state as much as boundaries separating the privileged from the dispossessed, ‘real people’ from television spectacles; ‘us’ from ‘them’. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

Writing this is frustrating. I don’t know how to write without somehow violating the humanity of individuals who have already escaped torture, oppression and fear of death in their home. I already objectify ‘real people’ by talking about them as if they (you) are not reading this. Well, if you are reading, I support your right to cross the border. I am thinking of you. Escaped refugees are welcome here.
posted by Rosa Luxembourg at 12:49 AM

First quiet moment of a long day (yesterday was longer). I've been writing porn and funding applications and articles on refugee angst. Talked to my mother last night for the first time in three weeks and we realised, half-way through the conversation, that we'd been assuming we understood each other, but really hadn't. This was somehow progress. I'm back in the family drama space after having pushed it away for a while. Seems like fragmentation and misunderstandings are the only way to communicate, the only way we can really talk. I'm glad it's not like this with everyone.
posted by Rosa Luxembourg at 12:44 AM

Subject to change.

posted by Rosa Luxembourg at 12:18 AM

This morning we noticed that the lip-ring had actually begun to rust. The ball had strange brown markings on it. He tried to get it out, and then I tried, with little success. I'm hoping it comes out soon. Quite apart from the health hazard, we haven't been able to snog for five days. But of course you'll want to know how it all began, and be utterly blown away by some sparkling, complex, spiralling genius of a tale.

Shane's gone and got hisself a blog.

posted by Rosa Luxembourg at 8:29 AM

Supposedly, today I was going to write something in the morning, go to a rally for asylum-seekers, speed into work and write a report, have a meeting, have another meeting, and then go home. Instead I went on a new music spree and bought the Moves album, a split 7" by Ninety Nine and the Vivian Girls, and new headphones for my Walkman. Got bothered by a slightly cool-looking boy who randomly smiled at me on the street and asked, 'Are you a student or an artist?' 'Neither,' I said. It was almost a lovely exchange. Then he produced the Hare Krishna manual, and I fled.

This was followed by a nice moment in the Degraves St cafe, poring over the CD liner notes and watching my coffee curdle. Why don't they learn how to make proper soy coffee? Please? Jeff Buckley sang 'Hallelujah' and I wrote some unrelated stuff. 'Are there any pineapples in the usual spot?' someone asked. 'No.'

Now I am procrastinating. Having decided that I must write this thing I was sposed to write this morning tonight, and that I'm not leaving until I finish a draft, I'm merrily wasting time posting more unintelligible nit-pickery to this thread and writing a long blog post.

I've been thinking about intertextuality lately. A friend of mine in Sydney does a zine called Laughter and the Sound of Teacups, which began as a single sheet of paper with a description of what she did on the 23rd day of each month. She used to give it away. Now it's an eight- or ten-page zine, covered in words the size of half a small ant; must be about 5000 words all up. I don't think she's actually missed a month for four years now. I wonder if she plans the day at all; if she gets anxious about whethe her activities are exciting enough to write about. I wonder if she edits the day's events at all, and what she edits out. I also wonder how much time it takes her, and what significance the number '23' has. Was she just being smart, or did she pick it at random?

I wonder the same thing about myself: am I subtly restructuring my life so that this blog makes me look cool and interesting? Would I really be thinking political ranty thoughts if I didn't have an immediate outlet for them? Would I even bother writing a blog if I didn't already think I had interesting thoughts to share? Am I cool? Am I really cool? Do you care?
posted by Rosa Luxembourg at 6:00 AM