"Some of us have created a lot of awful messes through the years. We've committed some big juicy sins that fill us with remorse and regret. Others of us have stayed out of trouble and kept our noses clean. Our records aren't full of black spots, but then they're not very full of anything. We haven't done much because we haven't done much. Which of us is better off? There's no virtue or joy in being a spectator to the game of life. Better to risk a wrong turn than to sit out our lives."
Larsen & Hegarty
Saw American Gangster last night. Great movie.
What was there to prove? That happiness had always remained out of reach? That he wished he had enjoyed his life more? That the funks, the binges, the slow settling decay of the spirit, the thickening of the waist, that all of it should have been different? Days of crawling embarrassment, no laugh, no cry, the wispy phantasms, always just out of reach, disappearing into the corner of murkish, green auditoriums; that the truth, the single cohesive whole, was there to be grasped. But nothing was to be grasped. He had been born defective. Hope was for other people. Happiness was something that happened in the suburbs. Cosy family units, which he had been so briefly happy to belong to, all that disintegrated as soon as it appeared; and he didn't know anymore why he did what he did.
American gangster keeps playing in my head. We could be cruel but mostly we just held back. Sunshine gripped faces full of secrets only hinted at. The trains coming down across Thailand from the mountains with a police guard. The politics of heroin in south east Asia, by Alfred McCoy. The chaos on the streets of Harlem; and even here. The American military planes which flew the stuff into the US. That startled look; 100% pure. What an amazing movie. Cutting across our own lives. The Bangkok bars; now really just sex bars. The only thing that had ever made him feel normal, coherent, a single person. Otherwise, it was all scattered to the four winds. The pale faces of the drug lords. The moments of history we tried to make our own and were instead littered with the dead. I was crying for those motherless children, for all of us who danced the dance; and we ended here in a foreign country, the future.
And the bars, what stories he could tell, were just normal bars; and everything that was possible, the depravity of our past lives; the groups which had been so tight and then dissolved; after we had thought: every man's cafe is the centre of the universe; thank you Sartre; but it was only his micro universe. He had tried to climb out of the hole he had fallen into; only to realise there wasn't much use calling for help. The old friends who might drop by didn't even live in Sydney anymore. His ever evolving circle of acquaintances didn't share any of the same history, didn't know any of the same faces. And when a blast from the past did arrive; they were almost invariably dying, their disease and the limited number of their days making them even more eccentric than when they had been young. He didn't want to admit defeat; but defeat had claimed that old self a long time ago.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/whale-watch/protesters-turn-on-each-other-in-sea-hunt-for-whalers/2008/01/19/1200620274594.html
TWO anti-whaling groups harassing Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean turned on each other yesterday.
Sea Shepherd chief Paul Watson slammed Greenpeace for refusing to tell him where the Japanese whaling fleet is, even though the Greenpeace ship Esperanza is right on the tail of the whalers' mother ship.
The row blew up as the crew of the Sea Shepherd ship, the Steve Irwin, threw 10 butyric acid bottles at the Yushin Maru No. 2. The acid is harmless but smells like rancid butter.
Captain Watson said his ship then lost track of the Japanese whaler when it was forced on a 75-nautical-mile detour to collect two crew members who had been handed over by the whalers to the Australian customs ship Oceanic Viking.
"We were only a few miles away when they transferred the two crewmen, but the Oceanic Viking insisted we rendezvous 75 miles away," Captain Watson said.
"That allowed the Japanese whaler to get away. Now we don't know where the hunters are and Greenpeace refuses to give us the co-ordinates of the mother ship they are trailing.
"If whales begin to die within the next few days, I will hold Greenpeace and the Australian Government responsible. I understand Greenpeace needs kill footage and images of heroic eco-warriors buzzing about in inflatables, but that does not stop the harpoons."
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