If there were shadows in the ether, if the slathering hounds were circling just out of fire light, he was not going to pay any attention. Here in the Heart of Darkness. Here in Sihanoukville; which is remarkably similar to Goa in India 20 years ago. Much is filthy. Bars line the beach. Young drunken backpackers get blasted on a nightly; sometimes daily; basis. All is sick. Nothing is well. His stomach refuses to behave. Crippled with the stigmata of a thousand generations, he was not going to lie down now. He needed to evolve to survive. He could become another person. He could become anything he wanted to be.
And yet here it was, this crummy beach in the over bright sun; where nothing could be achieved. Old men lamented they could no longer drink; that they had woken up at the end of their lives, more dedicated to living out of it than in it, as yet another amiable English outcast described it; and you couldn't even have a Scotch. Gary is sleeping after a restless night, the disco music pumping out. The guards let him know the hotel was owned by a senior member of the police, just in case there was any trouble. "This f...ing country," his friend had declared in the middle of the night. "Ï am not going to pay." That was unlikely. You always paid.
Sullen, the locals stared at you like you were about to rape their children. Which considering some of the behaviour of the western tourists, was possible. They stared at you with a numb, ignorant loathing he was born to endure. The tragedy of it all was just beneath the surface. What could have been. What would have been. The creatures that came, the creatures that went. As if all sound, all light, all flight was something that could be taken in; as if the whisps of sand and heat and a dog shitting on the beach, the bobbing fishing boats and the wreaking air of neglect could never compensate; and yet there were moments, as the pink mauves of the sunrise and the sunset transformed the scene, when he could almost have been happy.
There was nothing else to do and there were bars everywhere. He was surmounted by evil and conditioned by lust; yet nothing worked. They were away from meetings yet they were not drinking. All was gone quiet. They were thinking of fleeing the country. All was quiet. There were no girly bars. Banana pancakes and English breakfasts sold along the beach. Coffee was readily available. The tourists came and went; most of them 30 years younger than himself. He couldn't believe he had gone out of his way, had wasted money, to come here. All was quiet and yet the supernatural was all around, as if the fabric of things was nothing but a paper cloth over a deeper place.
A lace from which he had almost managed to depart himself. A place where he could never be happy. Where the sanctuary he sought was unavailable. It didn't matter now. He just wandered. The filthy conditions meant he was under assault, like other westerners, from every bug imaginable. It was awkward. He just wanted to get pissed and dance off on his own, a corner, a subject of interest or derision but beyond caring; dancing jerkily through to the sunset when other wasteoids joined him on the beach, grinning stupidly as the partook in their poisons, holding still the large alcohol containers as they used straws to suck the liquid into their already inebriated bodies.
It looked such fun but he could not partake. And so it was that the whispers of the sea took him everywhere and nowhere; and lights circled and pain was brief. There would be no cure. Not for this. Not now, not ever.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://goldderby.latimes.com/awards_goldderby/2010/03/oscars-academy-awards-news-the-hurt-locker-371682594-story.html
How did 'The Hurt Locker' defy the odds at the Oscars?
March 8, 2010 | 5:07 pm
It's amazing that "The Hurt Locker" won best picture at the Oscars despite having three strikes against it. "The Hurt Locker" didn't feature A-list stars. It wasn't successful at the box office. And maybe, worst of all: it was about the Mideast war, a topic usually cursed at the Academy Awards.
So how did it pull off this Oscar miracle?
For starters, "The Hurt Locker" had some high-caliber oomph behind it. It was distributed by Summit, a studio with bold leaders who had deep pockets and something to prove. Flush with money from the "Twilight" movies, Summit wanted to be taken seriously as an artistic player in Hollywood.
The Hurt Locker Oscars Academy Awards news
Early on, Summit hired Cynthia Swartz and her Oscar soldiers at 42West to head up its academy campaign. Swartz had been a key player in the past blitzkriegs behind "Chicago" (and other Miramax flicks when she was still a commander in Harvey Weinstein's army), "Crash" and "No Country for Old Men" and other successful award champs.
Swartz likes to take on daredevil challenges. A few years ago, for example, she adopted a gritty, hip-hop film called "Hustle & Flow" just to see if she could ram it past the academy's fuddy-duddy bias. Bingo. She ended up nabbing a best-actor nomination for Terence Howard and reaped a win for best song ("It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp").
The initial groundswell of support for "The Hurt Locker" came from a pure, heroic source: the film critics. It hadn't fared well on the awards front at first. It competed last year at the Indie Spirits, for example, and only reaped nominations for actors Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie. Nothing for picture, director or screenplay.
But when "The Hurt Locker" entered this year's derby, things were different. It gathered momentum quickly, launching a bandwagon that was hard to stop. The Indie Spirits' rival award, the Gotham, named it best picture. It swept the film critics' trifecta: Los Angeles, New York and National Society. Those are critics' groups comprised of mostly print-based, cynical, gritty journalists who are renowned for picking quirky stuff like "Mulholland Drive" that doesn't break through into the Oscars. Then "The Hurt Locker" won best picture from the Critics' Choice Awards. That was odd because it's a prize bestowed by members of the Broadcast Film Critics Assn. They're largely part of the junket press just like Golden Globe voters. Both groups tend to be similar in taste to Oscar voters.
The Golden Globes picked "Avatar," but that wasn't too strange: they've been out of sync with Oscar voters four out of the past five years. Then something extraordinary occurred. "The Hurt Locker" won laurels from the directors' and producers' guilds, which usually predict what wins best picture at the Oscars. Think about it: the producers — people in charge of generating profit — endorsed a financially unsuccessful movie. That meant that "The Hurt Locker" had not only crossed over from the film critics to the film industry, but that it landed with nuclear force.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/09/2840558.htm
Abbott still 'threatened' by homosexuality
Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is standing by his comments that homosexuality makes him feel "threatened".
Mr Abbott said he would "probably feel a bit threatened ... as most people do" when asked how he felt about homosexuality during a 60 Minutes interview which aired on Sunday night.
Last night he told Lateline's Leigh Sales that the comment was a "spontaneous answer".
"The truth is I try to take people as I find them," Mr Abbott said.
"I've always tried to be that way and I hope as I get older I become better at it."
When asked to clarify what he meant by "threatened", Mr Abbott would not say if he felt threatened that men might be attracted to him, or if he felt that traditional families were threatened.
"There is no doubt that it challenges, if you like, orthodox notions of the right order of things," he said.
"But as I also said on [60 Minutes], it happens, it's a fact of life and we have to treat people as we find them."
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