Your Dreams Don't Look This Good

Before all thoughts of Australia are dashed to the polluted winds of East Coast port cities, I feel this must be properly documented. First, I have to ask: do you believe in portal discovery? Astral projection? Parallel universes? It is, I'm afraid, the only way to encapsulate what you find in a little place called Yorkeys Knob, up in the town of Cairns, North Queensland. Now don't go there or anything, otherwise I will have spoiled the delicious secret. You should probably just stick to the backpacker-friendly city of Cairns, spending your days in the beergarten of Shenanigan's and picking up twenty-something American college students who are throwing caution to the wind while on parents' travel money, unless...

You know the answers to the following:

1) Cairns was discovered and settled by the English explorer named blank.

2) The main cash crop in Cairns is blank.

3) The surrounding area is most like America's blank in terms of education and opportunity.

4) You can throw your used syringes blank.

One of the first sights when you arrive in Cairns is the giant cartoonish monument to Cap'n James Cook's legacy. There he stands, proud in breeches, sharing this momentous discovery with you, but you're too busy consulting the map in your ridiculously painted mystery machine that some idiot either thought would be TOO cute to decorate the six-pack-toting backpackers passing through town, or a cruel joke to alert locals to the trust fund babies on board.

Driving down the single access road to Yorkeys at dawn is one of those smells you can't forget. They're cutting the stalks of sugar cane to add to all those products that in the US are injected with enough high fructose corn syrup to make your grandkids diabetic, and the salty sea spray air spreads it around the valley.

As with many little preserved secret paradises, the area is home to skilled tradespeople and rednecks who have a great connection to the land they tried (and succeeded) not to share with the natives.

Although I can't imagine it has very much more heroin being pumped through its wayward youth than, say, Eugene, OR, Australia definitely takes a more responsive approach to the problem by providing public bathrooms with easy syringe disposal here, there, around the corner, pick up new ones at the free clinic. Enlightened! Proactive! And yet exactly the kind of thing would send up a million furious mothers at preemptively introducing their impressionable youngsters to the evil facts of the world. Sex can wait--masturbate.

I could give a flying yorkeys knob who settled the place, but I'm most intrigued by this last bit comparison between Uzzie and Auzzie. Maybe because of pressure we feel to attract tourists and locals alike, lure them into a false sense of security by pretending that the drug problems of some of its citizens need not interfere with anyone else's daily life. A sign placed on the inside of a bathroom stall door could, hypothetically, interfere with someone's God-given right to drop the kids off at the pool without having to think about larger community issues. Can we at least get those sacrosanct five minutes, please? In our hustle and bustle of fulfilling ambition (a term not nearly as household in OZ), we need to consider the children. (Won't someone pleeeease?!) Where else will they get the brilliant idea to give themselves a booster shot of pure

sweetsugarheavenJesusridingamechanicalbullTijuananineteenseventyfourwasahelluvayear than these, quote, proactive signs? We might as well be handing out fliers at all the bus stops, for His sake! (Statistics of applicable ratios, prevalence of signs to later junky-hood still in progress).

But we mustn't fool ourselves that our empire expatriate cousins down under are more enlightened in all respects than us poor fallen Puritans. After all, we got like fifty years on them in terms of integration, and I'm sure there's been a lot of back-patting for this one at least. 2008 was the first formal governmental apology to the aboriginal and islander peoples of Australia, but the resentment still sticks like peanut butter in the mouths of many bushies who,

not unlike the natural-born workers of Arizona are having a tough time getting on with the new kids from the other side of the fence.

In my month stay, I didn't hear of a single violent crime not linked to an aboriginal or islander man, and the paper proclaimed growing support for anti-petrol-sniffing efforts in a town north of Alice Springs. On Thursday Island where I stayed for four days, in amidst the continental crumbs from some prehistoric Pangea in between Australia and Papua-New Guinea, memories of the Lost Generation, the children who were yoinked from their families by the missionaries to learn proper cosmic philosophy still smart. Families who raised chickens to support their families were stripped of both chickens and children, then told to buy the one back at a government-installed grocer, and leave the other in the hands of Christians. (Ooh, but we love their artwork!) With a past like this, maybe inhaling petrol would feel better.

But I wasn't there for political reasons, or I really can't claim to have left D.C. at all. I went for the rainbows, the geckos, the salty sea air that poodled my hair, and the sun that turned it golden-white and my skin brown. And in this regard there were no disappointments. It's a forty-five degree slope up to where my sister lives on a cliff overlooking the dry tropics, beach and tablelands. The building is circular, and her balcony overlooks this grotesquely gorgeous scene. The windows and doors stay open even though it's wintertime because it's the dry season, and besides it's only about seventy-five degrees Farenheit. And should anyone get a little chilly out there, you can just climb on in and make for one very strange bedfellow:

And yet Octavio wasn't so dangerous as some of the other friends I made at the zoo where my sister works.

Even though he could rip me apart faster than any full-grown adult male, I am ultimately more likely to trust a fellow like this one:

Revert to Childhood

After a couple hours discovering I cannot sample and mix music like I want to on Garage Band, nor can I make fun cool spliced and reanimated movie clips on iMovie, I got to researching four of my all-time favorite songs from my childhood, and knew they had to appear on one post all together, like my fantasy dance party (David Byrne, may I have this dance?)

It started with one song that above all others I remember was my favorite song when I was about seven years old. My oldest sister had the album and would indulge me in playing it over and over until finally lending me the tape and her Walkman to listen to during her high school graduation. It's by a little band called Voice of the Beehive, and the song is from that album Honey Lingers where the sisters are all dressed up in big pink fluffy gowns:

The second is one I remember falling in love with at the beach, and wishing that David Byrne would be singing about meeee! This video employs the cut-and-paste technique, a popular style of the times. But since the embedding has been disabled, you get to click the link. (LINK)

Next, we have a more predictable favorite, but one that appeared on every single one of my many many radio mix tapes throughout middle school. Again, I remember hearing it blasting out of my sisters' bedrooms and would ask to enter and listen. Look for the turban hat. That is my favorite part. And for proprietorial reasons again, you get to clink the lick: (LICK)

And finally, the video I've been dying to find for ages, a relic of wobegone forgotten bygone times past when I was too young to read the episode titles and my other sister would have to read them to me, a timeless classic. Tiny Toons presents They Might Be Giants' Istanbul.

My favorite part is the fiddle interlude.

Sweet T-Shirts from MOFO

When I finally dragged myself away from the beach last Thursday, I ended up at a launch party for a new line of shirts at MOFO (Merchants Of Fine Objects) in Cairns. They have a fun little shop on McLeod St., complete with blinking skulls and an array of some locally-designed, in-housescreen-printed shirts. I bought three, and it'll be a fun guessing game as to which ones...

Yes, correct: the Love Bomb shirt, the piano chick shirt, and an older print involving happy dancing monsters on bright yellow T. And yes, they *do* deliver to the States! No more "Broke is the New Black" or that ironic barcode shirt you still think is oh-so ironical...these shirts are metaphysically endowed, on a scholarship from the School of Transcendental Nonthink and awarded grant money from phyllosoftsicle higher-ups. Don't go looking for better. You won't find it. And everyone will be jealous.

Even cooler is the fact that the owner, Sam Tupou is good friends with my sister, whose good friend, and his partner, Ania Ganowicz is responsible for many of these awesome designs, including the piano chick, who happens to be her best friend from Poland. Lovely people + lovely T-shirts = legend.

I also got to hear a bitchin' OZ band called Beware Wolf (be wear word play). Their self-disparaging attitude came off charming and their chops came off badass, especially considering they're still green around the edges. I was pleased to hear some keys alongside screamopop, and it was no surprise that they'd been playing together a while 'cause the drummer was actually watching the axes. They even brought their own fans, including a redhead in Mini Mouse ears. And to date they're the only people who think being from DC is kind of awesome, given our history. For which I wasn't alive. But am aware, very aware, yes indeed. Long live The Cicada Killers!!!

Pause for Vindictiveness

It's like I say about the whole Twilight thing: if there's eye-candy to be had, throw it up on screen and get out of the way, but I'm not so tempted to sit through the reading of a so-called "guilty pleasure" paperback with teenpop hype and zero contribution to adult literary cannon when there is SO much other time-tested classics I haven't even touched (Brothers Karamozov, Beyond Good and Evil, War and Peace, and anything by Henry Miller). I'm sure I would gobble down the thing, cherry and all (no pun intended), but I'd feel emptier after doing so.

I feel similarly about country poprock semi-gods Kings of Leon who have that one song that's just...awful. And here I'm breaking my whole rule, aren't I? If it's tasty and potentially harmless it's not worth demonizing? Okay, but I can still laugh myself stupid at articles like this: KOL Cancel Tour For Unsanitary Conditions.

Favorite line from their twitter: "You may enjoy being shit on but we don’t.

Yeah, what gives? Why would you show up to a KOL concert if you didn't?

Not To Be Missed (Unless You're In Australia)

My extended sabbatical here in Cairns is beyond unreal and bordering on OBE, but I can't help but be dashed to bits that I'm missing a performance of great note back in the States. A very dear friend of mine, Ms. Sarah Rosner was my inspiration to join our high school dance company where I was exposed to modern, hip hop, a little jazz/ballet influence and Indian folk/Bollywood dance styles. Today she's absolutely kicking ass and taking names as the creator of the A.O. Movement Collective company in Brooklyn. And we're all proud as punch to see her name in lights in this issue of Gay City News:

In “90 ways to Wake from drowning,” a new work that will have its debut at Joyce SoHo on July 30 and 31, choreographer Sarah A.O. Rosner and her A.O. Movement Collective communicate a profound hopelessness but also a tenderness — and queerness — that embodies the new American generation.

Hot damn and good onya, Sarah!!

Anyone haunting the area on those dates should be compelled to take part in history.

Fuck You, Jack White.

Dear fucking Jack White,

First of all, why. Just, why. Don't play dumb with me. You know perfectly well what I mean. I mean, how dare you.

1) How dare you be so awesome as to have picked up music as an alternative to seminary school. How dare you be so fucking badass and maintain those altar boy looks? Do you know how bad a good case of the smits can feel?

2) How dare you make music the best of which is like the product of an orgy amongst Blind Willie, Booker T., Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, The Rolling Stones, and the Kinks? How dare you make up relevant, brain-tickling and sense-confounding poetry seemingly on the spot?

3) Where do you get off effortlessly living out the rock star dream of starting and rocking multiple bands with all-star casts of legendary and current musicians, and receive instant, real-time validation from the likes of Rolling Stone who would probably rather just suck you right off rather than waste all that drool on their rankings and articles?

4) How dare you be the wild and sexy brooding artist that crumbles my little heart? And why in God's name would you get married to a gorgeous British model while set afloat on the Amazon river by a freaking shaman after I pledged myself to you as a scrawny thirteen year-old??

5) The theremin. The freaking, theremin.

I am Jack's tortured girl soul.

The Dead Weather's new album Sea of Cowards. Seriously.

Mayyyyhem!

Who knows when you'll stumble across the greatest Norweigan black metal band the world has ever seen? Have your mace out when you do. Although they'd probably like that, sick fucks. I guess somehow I was bragging to someone about how I'd just watched the adultswim phenomenon "Metalocalypse" on a giant, 3D TV. One of the sushi rollers at Sticky Rice then informed me it was all an elaborate satire of this great black metal band from the nineties called Mayhem, and there was controversy because of how the one guy killed himself and his bandmate kind of enjoyed the remains. So naturally I had to do some research. I found the picture of the rearranged corpse that Euronymous took and made into partial brain stew (rumored). It then became an album cover for a bootleg album called Dawn of the Black Hearts. Yes, that is his brain. And yes, it is pretty brutal.

Of course, right before I posted this, VICE just had to beat me to the punch: http://www.viceland.com/int/v8n1/htdocs/blackmetal.php

F-ing awesome.

While we're in the great Nordic regions, we shift our attentions to a little blonde dance pop chick from the nineties making a great splash. Robyn (best known for "Show Me Love", a favorite of 6th grade Julie) just came out with a new album, Body Talk Part 1. High-profile collaborators include Royksopp:

and Diplo, on the track "Dance Hall Queen." Themes include boredom, self-destruction, and feminine fierceness. What's not to like?