Sorry for the long hiatus, but we were all very drunk, apathetic, and otherwise distracted to care much for anything not labelled 'work stuff n' life things'. But we're back, with less time away, promise! Anyways, we've all been busy: Danny's almost finished his painting, Zianne's one chapter away from finishing his book and I bought a car! Also poetry.
But first, to atone for our sins, allow us to present Zianne trolling some conservatives:
For those of you still blind in your love of humanity, the One Million Moms movement is a group of somewhat-less-than-one-million women who long ago sacrificed their frontal lobes to Jebus so that they could become Stepford Morons...or something. I don't know what it is they want, so deep in raging liberal atheist lesbian territory as I am. Needless to say, if a 'media' group dares to advocate anybody who isn't white, straight or Christian, these creatures from the Id will petition and harass executives until they either capitulate or tone down their progressive advertising. Normally it doesn't work, but occasionally it does. Casper angry, Casper smash, etc.
Having discovered that they do not provide any open email which I might send gay-lesbian-black-muslim-athiest-evolution spam through, I decided to recruit Zianne to write a Trojan Fuck You to post through their 'report media trash' option. In his spare time, he composed this lovely piece:
First off, let me just say, thank God for you. I hope you can help me. I discovered this gathering on the internet a few days ago (see address below!); it's absolutely disgusting what people will try to force on our children in the name of some twisted morality.
As a writer of wholesome family novels, I personally find the approach of these backwards, amoral, anti-religious proselytisers near moronic in scale. It bewilders me just how far this great country has fallen, and how far it has to go, in this war against immorality. Sorry, rant aside: you'll find this particular 'social' grouping pushing their agenda through children-targeted ads, forcing their 'lifestyle' (I cannot bring myself to say it, but you know!) on an impressionable generation. They're trying to make something 'okay' when the Bible (1 Peter 2:1-25) says otherwise! Aside from these ridiculous ads, they've got an entire forum set up towards 'teaching' (indoctrinating!) teens into their practices. Please, please, please, bring your members to bear!
Thank you again, and God Bless! The website is below:
http://onemillionmoms.com
Love, a liberal. Boo.
All (sic) by the way. His aim was to keep the tone neutral and moronic until the reader scrolled down to the evil website address, which happens to be theirs. Hopefully the short text delay will only serve to fuel their ire. He left an email address for their response. If they don't try to rage/sue us, we still have the satisfaction of imagining their cute religious faces turning purple and hopefully exploding like that one thing I saw in a movie once. You know, the thing...don't look at me like that. It happened, damn it!
The Australian High Court has just struck down the same-sex marriage ruling by the ACT. Unsurprising, when you consider our Prime Minister. But I'm reminded why I avoid most Australian news sites now, and that is a terrible thing.
I promise I won't make a habit of this, but I feel like everyone should be able to see what happens when you segregate morons from the population at least once. Social psychology in action. How special. Unsurprisingly the most cogent sentences belong to the least conservative individuals among them.
'The opening monologue of a script, about the life of the infamous Charles Zidler. I think I may have posted this once before, in the mythical time when I didn't know how to work social media. In any case, enjoy. More samples shall follow!'
Zidler- By Zianne Napier
(The setting is simple: he is dressed untidily, with a battered crucifix around his neck and reeks of alcohol strongly enough that the audience can smell it. The stage has a chair draped with a long coat, and a satchel overflows with tasteless books)
I want forty-five hundred francs.
///
Oh, forgive me. I want forty-five hundred francs, now.
///
*sighs*
Oh great and righteous semi-nobility of this la maison de fous, I, Hal Zidler, son of Chloe Zidler the prophetess of syphilitic discourse, do humbly beseech you to pluck forth the surely petty amount of forty-five hundred francs so that my whores can get new sequins in this the great sequin shortage of our era. Et cetera, et cetera, et nunc et semper ad nauseum.
I make no apologies; that was cruel of me. Performance does the artists tongue a moistened brush of primal discourse make- publication pending.
///
Heaven forbid that I should be forced to stand before you now, but the irony is not lost upon me. Many of you who now preside as my jury will one day be knock kneed as I am, begging a moment from those who know you not, requesting recompense for fines you’ve yet to earn, and applause you’ve yet to receive. You, panel, have seen this all before I suspect. Your veins are etched in jade from watching the endless parade of performers, of which my accusatory speech may be one of perhaps seven like it. To this end you will not enjoy me, but you’ve no better choice. So too, the veterans stand in judgement, the old man in the crowd who’s done the same dance time and again; oh yes, I know you, and prepare to see yet another impossible candidate pass you by. Or, perhaps, the youngest one, the sweet young lady with so much talent, so filled with desire to clutch at that lifelong ovation that she may surrender the very promise of dignity that she bound at the start. The differences are minor, but the result is the same. You shall all lose, and when you lose you shall look for escape, and when you escape, you shall come to me.
But why? What, you ask, in all the pontificating and blasé insults of this cubby fellow could possibly inspire one to give him money, or time, or sexual favour? Simple. Because this is all scripted. This. What I have said, am saying, and will shortly say. It wasn’t conjured up five minutes ago, nor plucked from twixt the sweaty bosoms of this moment. And it certainly wasn’t improvised. It, you, are simple elements of public profiling that last Saturday night I conceived as a script in a fit of misanthropic passion. Each of you is nothing more than a character of the theatre. The old man, the hopeful young child, the jaded panel. Utterly beautiful, and all my idea. Ladies and gentlemen, that makes the point of this: I know people. I know the very moment they gaze up at my sign what element will drive them into vice, and their riches into my grasp, right down to threading their favourite colour into my atrium rug. That is a fact, the only kind of fact from whence you can take the assurance that your investment will be returned tenfold. I guarantee it.
///
Plaudite, amici, la comedia finita est.
///
Or don’t.
///
Either way, I’ll settle for fourty-five hundred francs.
Pen doodle I did in the bus when on Anti-isthaminics from my remicade injection. omfg why do I draw good when on that but have difficulties walking straight. Brain logic.
I’m not sure I’m actually properly ashamed of any ships per say. Like, even Merlin - a show that I now hold some levels of resentment for as a whole - gave me such lovely ships (AND YOU AND ME JUST CAME UP WITH EVEN MORE BB, GEORGE X BRONWEN FOR LYFE) that I can’t really be too annoyed?
You were wrong when you said that I’d get bored of you. I never did tire of the way you’d look at me or your stupid sense of humor and lack of knowledge about literature. I never once got bored with how we fucked because it was like we were playing the roles we spent our entire lives rehearsing...
I love writing to death, but I don’t think I personally will ever find anything that brings me as close to experiencing childbirth as putting a fictional existence on to paper. I’m just about to finish a novel, but I usually write these little tidbits on the side when I need a break from the plot. This is an experimental piece I wrote while I was practicing introductions a little while ago.
Six degrees below the horizon, six hundred kilometres leeway either side and getting thinner, we followed the twilight band that had wrapped itself about our halted planet. We wandered, watching as the worlds on either side began to change. The west became Dayside, the east became Nightside. South was a matter of debate. We set out from home seven days after the sunset. We went north.
We walked as the crow flew, right out from Devil-Devil, not waiting for anyone else. Seven days, and we were gone. A ragged band of semi-intellectuals fleeing the oppression of day like folklore horrors, leaving behind everything that once mattered. I can still recall our house at the moment we left. There was a hasty pile of dishes, spattered with the remains of all the perishable breakfasts we’d never be able to keep, stacked high in the sink beside the line of pillaged cupboards like we were going to attend to them when we got back later. Beds ransacked for sheets, scattering abandoned blankets across torn-out drawers and cupboards leaking clothes not fit for survival wear, near frames emptied of precious pictures and electronics pushed out of vogue and into the bin because the power kept cutting out. The hallways already gathering dust, the bathroom growing mould in the waterless pipes, the garden floating quietly in the ever-shifting breeze, letting the brown grass shrink by the koi pond Katie thought she was putting in.
What stood out even in that dereliction were all those newspapers in dirty piles by books of coursework gathered around the broken TV, listing the latest theory on why the world had stopped turning.
They ran thick on the first few days. Amidst promises of governmental enquiries and the latest think-tank to promise a solution, people flung stories of everything from acts of science to acts of God. The Terrorists had put a bomb into the earth’s core. Actually it was the Chinese, and they’d built a drill to harvest minerals from the mantle and accidentally hit the gravity switch. No human force had done it- it was a burst of radiation from the sun that had knocked the earth out of its rotational axis, and the collapse or evolution of nearby star that was dragging us into something called a ‘wolf-rayet’. Or possibly Generic Science Explanation Number 5. To hell with science, it was the Almighty X arising from Y coming to enact Z upon the unbelievers. Some were even saying that the world hadn’t stopped turning, that it had simply slowed to a crawl, like that made it all better. Squire believed it, so perhaps…I didn’t pay attention after a while; it was a wonder to me that they were still printing papers at all.
The certainty that remained was that we all had to leave, and soon. By the end of a week we’d disproven all the theories that it would be over by Christmas and come to the conclusion that we would head towards the equator, where the band was thin and refugees would be less with any luck. Fourteen of us stacked into two Jeeps and crammed whatever we could get our hands on into the breathing space left over. We drove those for two days straight until they ran out of petrol, and then walked with everything we could carry. Squire and Katie pilfered a shopping trolley and pushed it all the way, with Gabe singing a cover of the Proclaimers over and over again as he rode on top of the pile to keep everything pinned down. Graham and Marie couldn’t carry much, not with age, so they hung at the back with Sandre and his family. I walked at the front with Lorenzo pretending we were ‘covering point’, while Rudi and James brought up the rear.
‘Civil Twilight’ was the name of our ragged line of non-fiction, though there was nothing civil about it; when the wind blew easterly we would throw layers on everything, because it would bring snow straight from the Nightside. If it blew in from the west we’d be looking to the Dayside for smoke, and spend all day hanging around bodies of water in case a bushfire came roaring in on the wind. All the time we wore holes into our clothing, passing ragged bands of refugees following ‘expert advice’ to flee south towards Antarctica, which would apparently transform into paradise given a month or so. We’d go through towns partly-barricaded by the vast majority who chose to stay in their comfortable corner of twilight, whose inhabitants looked to us with the jaded gaze of a xenophobe; we’d become transients for leaving, and this was our chief fault. We augmented our own rations with what we could buy from them, those who still found a value in money, and used our single rifle to shoot at any game that came across our path and – Rudi hoped – threaten any criminal stupid enough to approach a cohort of disparate university staff. We were content, though it wasn’t easy. We etched out a barely passable existence as nomads.
Then, at last, we found our home. We found the Gallery.
It came to us at the perfect time, just as we began to wonder whether going to the thin side of twilight was a goal worth pursuing at all, when our fears from the west were realized. Coming in on the breath of doubt came the firestorm. Squire knew it was coming. He’d always had a way of knowing where it concerned natural disaster: as the most paranoid man in any room he’d suddenly become a god when the worst happened. Something in the ripple of heat like a slowly spreading wave sent a thrill through him, and he demanded we flee towards Nightside. He was right. We all made it because of him, tumbling wildly over that field towards a great lake, stumbling across the stony beach where tiny flecks of sand worked their way into our clothing and mixed with the freezing waters just as the smoke appeared on the horizon. Gabe couldn’t swim, didn’t even want to go near the water, but I grabbed him up and submerged us both until he clung to me, frail and tiny like a skinned rabbit, near to perching on top of my head to keep himself in the heat of the day.
“Don’t let go Hallow. Don’t let go Hallow”, he said. Harry Aloe makes ‘Hallow’. I’d had that nickname since I was his size.
“Buck up. I’ll try and turn you from a bug to a shrimp” I replied. He was needed. He had me, I had him and the rest of them had his Lady Gaga impressions that had us all in fits after a long day. I couldn’t let my brother down even if I wanted to. He was at worst the source of all sanity.
We watched the fires rage along the shoreline, eucalyptus burning in the air and sending a thick pall of smoke across the water to hang just above us like the creeping fingers of a noonday ghost, tendrils touching upon the waves and raising their acrid scent in each fevered breath. We watched as the fire twisted and turned on the sands, seemingly fanned into a rage by being so close to the things it wanted to consume, but could not quite seize up. We watched it for hours, until at last a wind from Nightside blew it back the other way, and we could crawl back to land to where the land had been so scorched that here and there were scattered pieces of blackened glass.
We looked forward, and saw the fire-stained earth, where our path was now ash, our food and water was now dust, and knew there would be no future there. When at last we were tired of hoping for a change in the horizon we looked back, across the lake, and saw the Gallery. It had planted itself firmly between two barren hills, a squat two-storied creation of glass and concrete, with a polished wooden roof that wedged itself into the earthworks so that it hovered above the whole complex. With its largest window looking out across the lake towards us, catching the ever-waning light, it seemed a glimmering sign to us. ‘Come here’ it sang, ‘Or go far enough away’.
The doors were stainless steel, punctuated here and there with tiny shard-like windows of stained glass. It was unlocked, ajar, and a faint draught escaped through the hairline crack as a breath of fresh air to us in the still outside. Rudi entered first with the rifle, the only item to have survived with us. He disappeared into the dim, leaving us outside in awe of the place. In a short time, we heard his voice again.
His summons came as a hollow boom, an echo that seemed to stir the earth beneath my feet. Into the thin corridor from the entrance, up a flight of lonely stairs, we found him, our eyes immediately drawn to the same sight that had transfixed his attention.
Our scene was an atrium in the shape of a wide hexagon, whose blank walls rose straight up towards the glass ceiling. A thin grey line descended from the heavens through the untarnished glass, formed of the twilight band to cut straight down through the middle of the atrium. As I walked about the edge I could see both hills in turn. One was held in shadow, a crown of frost glowing amidst the wind-scoured stones. The other shone gold in a harsh light. They met here, in the heart of the building, divided only by the twilight. Dayside and Nightside held an equal measure of this place. Still, it was not this impossible spectacle that held us. The atrium was not empty. There was an angel, there. It fell from the ceiling, a skeleton twice the size of a man, whose giant wings stretched out to arrest his fall even as they dissolved in mid-plummet. Feathers, hundreds of them, torn free from these appendages danced in the air about it with scraps of cloth that tore from the burning robes. Upon it’s dying features a silver mask was worn, which barely hid the fleshless jaw, parted only slightly as if in its last moments the angel was telling of a great thing, now unknown forever. The angel was never to land, of course. Its fall was arrested by thousands of nearly invisible threads knotted into the wooden beams that criss-crossed the ceiling. It was held just out of reach of a monstrous steel gauntlet, comprised of countless machine parts, that rose glittering from the marble floor, clawed fingers outstretched to close about the angel, to crush it, or claim it. The victor and his prize held mockingly from each other for eternity. Only when at last I looked down to the thin security wire that encircled the battle did I see the plaque: ‘Wyatt Plath- ‘Our Progress’’.
All too soon, the sight of our faces in the dim drew us back to ourselves. As our eyes painfully adjusted to the first true shade we’d known in ages, we saw what mark the twilight band had made upon us. From left to centre, our faces had been burnt a solemn dusk, leaving all our features to the right as pale as the moon. For us, it was a harsh call to the truth. Until that point none of us had tempted the idea of what we were going to do when we reached the equator. Of whether or not it would seem any better or worse, and what we were to do there. Here in the quiet and the cool, where we were not so ravaged by the harshness of life, where clean water was nearby and survivable food was soon discovered nestled in the back of the Gallery’s café, we tempted upon the notion of stopping.
Amongst the empty tables in the quiet room we debated the proposition for hours. Sandre and Graham were completely against the idea. The chance of anyone else finding this place, they reasoned, was too high, and the beauty of the building with its glass facades made it too indefensible. I was for it. I wanted Gabe to be safe, and I lacked the faith of others when it came to the impossible utopia of the north. I was tired of wandering as most wanderers soon become. Tired of the uncertainty. The morality of my demand quickly drew Maria in on the matter. She was the former Dean, after all, the only leading member of any department to have heeded our warning. Though her powers counted for nothing, the lingering memory of it soon turned the others over to our cause. The matter, as it stood, would come down to exploration. If we could find a place in this building secure enough for any trouble, we could stay, if only long enough to recover.
Graham, Maria and Rudi stayed in the café to take account of our supplies. The rest of us split into three groups and wandered down the corridors splitting off from the atrium. I wandered into the Nightside half, towards the lower level of the gallery, where the lights gathered darkness and cast their marks over the great halls. Illuminated only by the frosted windows, set high into the walls, the paintings watched us from their vaunted positions; silent watchers laid to canvas by the hands of impressionists. Here a lonely beach, where a single ship floated softly on a dusk-marred sea. A cluster of poppy flowers whose colors were fading in, and living on, where the breath of many could not reach them. Gabe looked over at a portrait and saw a young boy in a red vest, who gazed back into his wide-eyed face with an expression nearing bathos. I could feel the echoes again as my footsteps touched upon a floor whose surface took in our image like water and sang at the touch of our heels with a curious certainty.
“It’s good to have some time alone” said Squire, drawing up behind me so quietly it made me jump to hear him speak, “Sorry, I just couldn’t take Sandre anymore”
“Yeah, well, there’s a line. And we’re not entirely alone” I replied, raising the hand I was holding. Gabe looked up at me with a petulant glare.
“Let me go then”
I laughed back at the wounded pride in his eyes, “Oh, no worries! All alone in this big, dark place, with who knows what lurking around the corner. You’re a big boy, off you go then” I loosened my grip, only for him to fix his tighter still. I looked at Squire knowingly, “I thought so”
“You’re always right” he said, brushing his fingers against my free hand, “I’m beginning to forget what you sound like when you aren’t in ‘Uni-mode”
“I know, just-“
“Is there really something else here?” interrupted Gabe, his voice tempting upon a tremble.
I squeezed his hand, “I was kidding, mate. Don’t fret. Squire is the scariest thing in here” For a moment longer I wondered at why everything did seem a little too clean and tidy to be a place long abandoned. The sound of footsteps behind me temporarily perished the thought.
“Christ, Katie!” I cried, as she dropped her hands on my shoulders.
“Sandre?” asked Squire.
“No, I was just bored. I hoped you three were throwing a party”
We were nearing the end of the hall, beyond which only one more remained, “A party couldn’t liven up this place” I said.
Beyond the low doorway, framed on all sides by paintings half-etched into the oblivion was the final hall. This contained art of a form I did not recognize. Giant brass cubes had been scattered across the floor. The parts of an old ute had been transposed upon a metal sheet nailed to wall. Here and there lay dulled fluorescent lights. The mess lay about without cause or reason, scattered everywhere. It was as if some force had transplanted the most mundane aspects of human society into this strange place.
It was Katie who found the throne first. While we walked lost among the ruins of these things that some man had called art, she followed the sound of sudden-stirred water to a pool cut into the floor. It was a great square that separated from the hall as an island, accessible only by stepping-stones that the unknown artist had made out of blood-red rocks. Upon the island sat a throne, an amalgam of broken canvas boards and shattered blocks, themselves apparently from the ruins of disgraced work. An iron crucifix rose out from the ground behind, and resting upon it was a glass crown. Katie hopped almost childishly across the stones and sat upon the structure, placing the glass crown upon her head.
“Katherine! Queen of Nightside!” she cried with a laugh.
'The Seedy Collective' is about three people and their zany adventures through the mile-a-minute, sexy-explosion-filled (heh), third-hyphenated-adjective dimension known as 'Art'. We're a happy little slice of unknown out of Australia and the UK. Every week/fortnight/whenever we can find a computer we'll be posting our work here until widespread public condemnation demands otherwise, because frankly, there is no such thing as bad attention.
Much love,
Casper the poet, Zianne the writer and Daniel the painter.
