The power of ...

One. After. Another.

They are the minute breathes of personified or objectified real creative thought ... the pulses and impulses littering the soundscape. They are pollution, clarity, obscurity and mystery – as much as they are confounding, confronting, instructionist and obligatory. They are history, present and future. They are gifts and they are returns. They are the wrong size and the wrong colour. They are inappropriate, hateful, racist, sexist and politically opportunistic.

They are doors or windows slamming shut and shattering glass. And silence. Or both.

They are wind, rain, fire and dancing. They are laughter and tears, resolve and dispute, common and uncommon ... they are the sun, the moon, the planets and they are the way we know how to get there – and what it looks like and feels like when we do.

They are coming home. And leaving again.

They are a look. A sound. A scent.

They are fear, apprehension, joy and derision.

They are life and they are death.

They are what it looks like and feels like.

They are what it tastes like. What it's made of. What colour it is ... how long it takes ... where it happens, why it happens, how it happens, who knows it's happening, happened, about to happen.

They are where they are and with whom. They are why. When. How.

They are what if, what was, what might be, what could be, should be and they are what can never be.

Maybe. Maybe not.

They are characterful and characterless. They are charming and abusive, seductive and repulsive. They find themselves aligned in long-winded paragraphs of exposition and they also find themselves ejaculated into being within short sharp rounds of gun fire or argument. They argue and forgive. They expect and they resist creating expectations. They are barren and furtile. They hate and they love, cloud and clear, close and near, rain, sleet, snow and desert.

They eat and regurgitate, skate, ski and turn keys – opening locked doors, chests, firing engines of cars, motorbikes and triggering deadlocks. And guns.

They are safe and unsafe. They arouse and ignore, they save and they fail. They shoot to kill and they run for their lives. They explore and explode. They walk, ride and ramble.

They fly ... and they hurtle toward the ground. Crashing and burning. They start fires and cheat death by seconds. Or not.

They burn buildings, capsize ocean liners and pluck rotten fruit from the desiccated earth. They exercise and exorcise. They have faith, a little or none. They believe in everything, something or nothing.

They are more than the sounds that come out of Actors' mouths. They are everything we see, hear, feel, experience, understand, misunderstand, loathe, love, admire and detest about the world of sound and vision on screen. Any screen. Any poster. Any trailer. Anywhere.

I, for one, won't miss The Golden Globe Awards this year. The worth of one is the value of many.

Waves of distraction

After a brief but intense conversation with myself yesterday, I've decided that the essential purpose of my blog is to be A Journal. 'What', 'Who', 'Where' and 'When' as opposed to 'Why'. At least some of the time. I'm a little fatigued by the obsession. It's like the beginning of every love-affair, when you disappear into bed for days ... weeks ... 'making' love, kissing, holding, believing again - unquestionably - in the power of intimacy. The whisper of breath on your neck ... and the blissful ignorance of the rest of the world and all the people you knew and loved in it. Quick showers and endless embraces. The stomach is empty ... but the soul is full. And the soundtrack is Mahler. Eating, drinking, and any and every thing else become ad breaks in the 'end-of-season cliffhanger' of So, This Is Love.

Until one day, you realise you've lost the remote and you're stuck 'on' Ten. Seriously. The days of hungry embellishment become minutes of interminable obligation. The breath on your neck stinks. You run out of toothpaste. The voice cracks concrete and comes not only in another language but also from another room. The smile is toothless. The conversation is secondhand. The silence is preferable. The intimacy is acidic and the simplicity is complicated. The soundtrack is Trance. You're on SBS.

My parents called me yesterday ... our annual Easter catch-up. It goes like this: my Father tells me that the Uniting Church has decided to defend itself from the 'pressure of the gay and lesbian lobby'. "Well it's about time Daddy", I say ... without a hint of sarcasm. I am the archetypal son of a Preacher Man. It's the reason I over-react - the fatal flaw in my otherwise hopeful persona. I engage with the sentiment for two reasons: 1) I agree with, and encourage, him completely; and 2) he'll eventually put my Mother on. He and I politely ignore the fact that the chicken's a bit pink. She and I share dessert.

Maternal guidance is a quiet thing. Dads are the song and dance. Mums are the phrasing.

"Hello Geoffrey. Have you been behaving yourself?"

"Yes I have actually ... perfectly."

"Oh, what a shame. Why?"

Phwoomp. Harpooned. Again. She's famous for it ... and it's one of the things I love about her the most. Like the time she put "Cunt" on the Scrabble board and, in response to my seizure, my sister's plain-faced horror and my father's hotpot of shock, adoration and laughter, she brightly - if not somewhat rhetorically - asked: "Well, that's a word, isn't it?"

It was time to play hard. Sydney hard. It's the only way to begin to defy Mother's rather all too-clearly articulated disappointment.


The destination: Tamarama Surf Life Saving Club. The occasion: The world premiere screening of The Inaugural Surf Life Saving Association 2007 Sydney Gay + Lesbian Mardi Gras Float DVD. The relevance: I had participated (and was duly credited) by helping to dispose of 1,000 beachballs into the crowd along the parade route. The reason: Surely it's obvious.

I need to get 'off the grid' more often.

And I will write more about this wonderful evening when I stop catching sight of huge black fourteen legged spiders crawling from all directions toward my keyboard.

In the meantime ...

Questionable Distraction: Part One

Scene: Night-time. Three men - let's call them Brad, Greg and Geoffrey - are perched on stools in a busy inner-city pub drinking beer. Brad and Geoffrey used to work together ... and they love to laugh and share a beer or ten - which, sadly, they do less and less these days. They haven't seen each other for a long time and are engaged in lively, nicotine-fuelled gossip. Greg (who knows Brad well but has only just met Geoffrey) is clearly enjoying their waspish repartee ... and of course Brad and Geoffrey are showing off shamelessly - like tipsy peacocks. In the midst of a veritable torrent of snide put-downs and caustic character assassinations, they pause for breath. Greg, taking the opportunity to participate, leans bravely into the conversation. "So, what do you do Geoffrey - if you don't mind me asking?"

It's an interesting question: "What do you do?" ... and one I find increasingly difficult to answer. Frankly, it's a real conversation stopper. My problem, you see, is that I don't really 'do' anything - at least not by the generally recognisable standards of polite social order and interaction. More for the sake of expediency than anything else, I told Greg* I was a "Fee Slut". I have come to really love and respect the term "Fee Slut". I first heard the term when, perhaps ironically now that I think about it, I had asked a gorgeously interesting woman I had just met at a party what she 'did'. A Fee Slut, as I expect you have already figured out, is someone who does anything for a fee. Fee Sluts are also people who can't be bothered going into what we perceive to be superfluous (not to mention difficult to summarise and justify in a minute or two) details about our lives with someone we've just met ... and are unlikely to ever see again.

One of the problems I have with the whole 'what I do defines who I am' concept, is that it can lead to somewhat premature conclusions about what we're worth ... what we offer to the world, or - at the very least - the conversation. It's as though the mundane, lung-cancer inducing thing(s) I 'do' to keep the roof over my head, the nicotine coursing through my veins and the caffeine coursing through whatever part of my anatomy caffeine courses through, somehow collectively offer a key to a greater understanding of who I am. I 'do' graphic design because my clients pay me to. I 'do' the odd little publicity or public relations gig because my clients pay me to. I write the very occasional Brand Management Discussion Paper because my clients pay me to. I typeset, I write copy, I mess around in Photoshop and Illustrator, I design display advertisements, brochures, catalogues, business cards, websites, letterheads, CD slicks and presentation folders because my clients pay me to. It reveals no more about who I really am than it does about who you really are.

Why do we do it? Why is it that with almost monotonous regularity, people - myself included - always ask this question within minutes of meeting someone ... and in just about any given circumstance? Is it that we expect the answer might put whoever it is we're asking it of in some kind of, I don't know, illuminating context? Does the answer ever really tell us more about the person than if we'd asked, say, "So, tea or coffee - what's your preference?" ... or "So, toilet paper - folder or scruncher?"

I have to be honest. Apart from the fact that I 'do' so many different things (most of which I find too common, ordinary and inane to even bother mentioning), the biggest problem I have with being asked this question is that I always imagined that by this stage of my life, people wouldn't have to ask me what I 'do' ... because they'd already know. You've just been introduced to Al Pacino at a party. What are you going to say? "Hi Al, Geoffrey. So, what do you do?" Or Steven Spielberg ... "Hi Steve. Nice suit. So Steve, what do you do?" You see my problem? I am wracked with pain, guilt, fear and regret about having failed to live up to the expectations I set for myself.

I expected to be famous.

I actually was famous once, albeit in a very suburban fashion. I used to have a career as an actor in television - until a nasty amphetamine habit rendered my eyeballs and my powers of short-term memory entirely useless for the purposes of an actor's requisite proximity to a television camera ... not to mention the messy little details associated with character development and story narrative. I was stumbling through what turned out to be an almost embarrassingly brief contract on a television show called Carson's Law. I was so drug-fucked that I once managed to get from North Dandenong (where I lived in heterosexual bliss) to Collingwood (where we were filming) in eighteen minutes. In morning peak hour.

Perhaps most problematic where my acting for television was concerned, is that I could never remember what I had just 'done'. My vainglorious association with the show came to an abrupt end when, during a scene featuring Lorraine Bailey and some poor hapless guest in the witness stand, my character had apparently 'done' something interesting by way of a reaction to what was going on. Make-up was called ... and as Ms Bailey looked on with thinly veiled impatience, a light metre was held up next to my blood-shot eyes, tape measures assured the cameraman of an appropriate distance between me and the camera, a light - about three metres from me - was inched closer, the large and heavy front panelled section of the jury box was moved out of the way, and the confidence-erradicating beast which is The Television Camera was swung in my direction and floated toward me. "Do that again", said the director. "Rehearsal! ... and, standing by ... and ... action!" "What ... exactly" I asked. "What you just did ... when you looked from Lorraine to (whoever it was in the witness stand)." I gave it a go. A crew member shifted his considerable weight from one foot to the other ... and as anyone who has ever worked as an actor for television will confirm, once you have the crew offside you can quite literally count what remains of your career options in nano-seconds. "No, no," said the director, "do the look ... ". Poor Lorraine, bless her. I still recall her wan smile of encouragement ... her vain hope that I might rise to the occasion. I gave it another go ... and the director looked at me with an expression that, today, I would recognise as a mixture of disdain, disappointment, contempt and bewilderment. Without either further adieu or the shot, he turned his back on me. The light that had been inched closer to me was moved back, the large and heavy front panelled section of the jury box was put back, and the confidence-erradicating beast which is The Television Camera was swung away from me and floated back to where the real actors were.

Some weeks later, an episode of Carson's Law I had been in was on television and the following day, I went with my Mum to Safeway to help with the grocery shopping. I wore my baseball cap and sunglasses ... masquerading as some kind of Glen Waverley-based, lame excuse for television royalty. As we stood in the check-out queue, both Mum and I started to notice that people were looking at me. A woman asked my Mum if it was in fact her son who had been on Carson's Law last night ... and Mum, who has never been more proud, nodded and smiled. As a small audience of admirers began to form around us, we gathered our groceries and left the shopping centre ... my wonderful Mum and her famous son.

Today, I feel Universally blessed to have had so many wonderful opportunities throughout my life to have had a go at 'doing' all sorts of interesting things ... but to what extent they define who we are is a subject I am really looking forward to exploring. Bear with me. This could get interesting.

So, what don't you do?

*Greg, by the way, is an Architect, Photographer and Writer.