The Legend of Toby Zoates (?!)

A few of the artworks I did in the '70s and '80s.

Get ready for another of my ongoing vitriolic raves about getting fucked over by the dogs' arsts-holes I met in my long travail surviving bitchy Sydney. I don't give a fuck if you think I'm a whinging fuckwit, it's fun to spit chips on the low-talent middle-class robots after they stood on me: imagining the look on their pallid faces is worth the bad reputation. They expect guttersnipes like me to just take it quietly, disappear and die; thank nogod for the Internet, it's a democratic space where I can get the right of reply, at least for the near future, until the likes of Murdoch figure out how to own and censor it.

In the last year I've been amazed and stoked to meet various people at events or on the streets who have lauded my non-career as an artist, telling me I'm a legend. For someone who has been totally broke, at times starving in the proverbial garret and always ignominious, it is quite bemusing to be told I'm a legend in inner-city Sydney. I don't quite believe it as mostly I've been fucked over, beaten, given up, fatigued and relegated to the dust-bin. But a legend is exactly what I had worked tirelessly for 35 years to achieve, like an underground guerrilla artist slashing Z for Zorro, Zapata, Zippie the Pinhead on all the walls of Sydney when I pasted up my posters, a phantom character with no one knowing who I really am.

I've eschewed entering the big snooty art contests here in Auz like the Archibald, Suleiman or Wynn prizes, (it being a 'class' thing and my inferiority complex telling me I'm not that good.) (And all of it apolitical and meaningless which suits the ruling class nicely but for me is a waste of time bothering with.) I rarely give interviews and try zealously not to have my photo taken so I don't become public property and a fame whore. My manifesto is about not climbing the shit-heap of a society which tortures and murders the poor and indigenous for profit: I work very hard at not selling out, thus I starve. In my jaundiced eye this rebellious attitude is the only viable way of producing cool art in an irrational, cruel world = the artist has a responsibility to depict/discuss real issues = the fact that the world is being destroyed in the name of profit, over-population and tribal differences. (And I don't mean vacuous modern art where snooty wannabes intellectualize volumes of bullshit about a few straight lines ruled across a canvas and try to con us that it's about some "social justice" issue when it is in fact avoiding really depicting and informing on the horrors of war-mongering, planet destroying capitalism.)

Last weekend I participated in a show in Woolloomooloo entitled "The Future is Known", inspired by a Russian expression, "the future is known, it's the past that's always changing". It was to be "an opportunity to re-remember the past anew, to bring together some of those fragments into a temporary present that will again feed and change the past... to remember a city and state of mind... Darlinghurst, Woolloomoolloo and Sydney in the 1980s." My rave here is in furtherance of that idea, my side of the story, for the record.

The organizer of the show, Madelaine Preston, was kind enough to exhibit my "Darling It Hurtz" poster and my Super 8 film of the same name, she even used a photo of the wall mural that both artworks were based on as the front cover for her exhibition catalog/brochure. And when I attended I was chuffed to have a woman approach me and tell me yet again I am a legend. Then I read the catalog and was somewhat pissed off. Talk about retelling the past, every fuckwit non-talent has his/her own ego to trumpet, desperate for fame, and thus revise history.

Some guy named Rob Miller wrote a poetic paeon for the brochure titled 'Darlinghurst Daze' in which he gives a long list of people, venues and events from the times, every deadbeat including the right-wing Prime Minister of the time, John Howard, gets a mention, but it studiously avoids my name, though I put on a hundred gigs as attested to by the artworks above. This I accept as par for the course as Sydney is a gladiator's arena when it comes to arty-farty competition and I only ever got kicked in the teeth by the wannabe trendoids.

What really got my goat was the clanger in his list of happening artists, "Super 8 film was synonymous with the person of Gary Warner" as that arsehole was mostly synonymous with elbowing his way into the Super 8 film group, taking it over and only promoting his own type of obtuse, meaningless abstract crap. I'd been showing my cinema verite/vox populi Super 8 at gigs for years before he invaded from Brisbane, and years after he fled back to Brisbane, (few of these Queenslanders could cut the mustard in rough and tumble Sydney.) I was especially involved with the Sydney Super 8 film festival but once he took over I was excluded. Then he crawled into the Aust Film Commission and got the job of handing out the grant money to Super 8 film-makers and when I applied for money to finish and make a print of "Darling It Hurtz" he coldly knocked me back, basically telling me to fuck off and die.

Darlinghurst Squat Mural 1981

I had to write a letter to the Film Commissioners informing them Mr. Warner was a know-nothing twerp and that "Darling It Hurtz" would long outlive his pathetic bureaucratic career. They invited me in and gave me a check under the table, over his dead body. The film has been shown countless times ever since, used as a resource for several documentaries, (the latest being on Paul Kelly's life) and was indeed a telling part of "The Future is Known" exhibition representing the times of inner-city Sydney in the '80s, the people, buildings, bands and venues as no other documentary has quite done. But if it was up to Mr. Warner (Bros.) it would never have seen the light of day, I can only imagine it was because of his overweening ambition and sheer jealousy that I was out there doing it. (His crappy films are totally forgotten.)

Rob Miller mentions that a lot of this remarkable art of the '80s was post-punk rebellious, but anything truly anti-authoritarian gets wiped, the status quo can't handle it, and he himself has seen fit to write me out of history as have many another desperate fame-whore in tall-poppy-cutting Sydney. For example, when someone submitted an entry about my efforts to Wikipedia, that all-wise tome's agent in Sydney could find no proof of my existence on the Net! (The twit didn't look very hard.) (The dude submitting my "history" was trying to get up my bum and secondary stalking a girlfriend of mine, I don't give a shit about all this clamoring to get into Wkikipedia, I'd get a hernia if I did!)

When the "famous" Tin Sheds crew got their catalog printed up for the National Gallery Canberra show "Walls Sometimes Speak - Poster Art in Australia", the innumerable works I did within their hallowed precinct weren't included though they've got 17 of them buried in the Gallery's dungeon somewhere. (Again, the jealous cunts who organized it are instantly forgotten, and they just couldn't handle that, without any connections or money, my work got around the world.)

My mural from the Woolloomooloo Mural project has disappeared though Marilyn Fairskye's many ugly photograph-traced murals, faded to arse-wipe blotches, are still in-situ because, after all, they're safe and she's a professor who gets to judge the Archibald prize. (My mural depicted our great Prime Minister of yesteryear, Bob Hawke, selling Uranium as he's getting fucked in the arse by Ronnie Reagan. I bet he asked for it to be taken down, a bit late as it was up for 21 years. His latest contribution to Auz is to suggest our outback become a dump for the world's nuclear waste = what a great legacy to leave behind, he's got one foot in the grave and the other on some slippery reactor sludge.)

And my hard-won technique of roto-scoping and dissolves between animation and live-action film, with the design of a head eating crap, stuff flying out the ears and circling like thoughts above, got stolen from my studio while I was in mid-production by a plagiarist named Hobart Spews for a video clip for that boring band "Mad as Cut Snakes", he based his academic career and arty non-fame on it and I got relegated to an also ran, (He was a vampire and I was stupid enough to let him in the door so it was my fault.) To reiterate, fame and fortune, as the "grand artist", has most desperadoes willing to sell their grandmothers to the glue-factory, and they'll quickly trample a nobody like me, no worries.

The winners always revise history and let's face it, the conservative capitalist neo-fascists have been winning since the 2nd world war ended, forget the post-punks of the '80s.  THEY run and profit from wars, steal from the workers and the poor, kill off the indigenous owners and destroy the environment. And have nice blank-faced artists to white-wash and apologize for them. I'm not worried about posterity, or even fame and fortune, I get by, I travel the world, dance by the Arabian Sea, really live instead of climbing a bureaucracy to make sure me and my friends get the kudos/money.

Hiss, spit, scratch, yoooowwwwllll from the punk alley cat!

Yet it seems I did indeed create "the legend of Toby Zoates", (not even my real name) for that's what many people tell me, and my tag is all over the Internet. I actually put my soul where my mouth was and got arrested many times for my political beliefs and I bet the plethora of artsy anarcho-pretenders hate me for this as well. Fuck 'em all. I want to live NOW, and I sure got myself a life and not chasing a career with a brief-case and mobile phone ever stuck to my ear, sucking up to the grey-faced milk-sop bureaucrats who hand out the money and cushy jobs.

On top of the nightmare of being poor, everyone's afraid of death and dying as a nobody, not leaving even a ripple on the pond, being meaningless in this vast VOID. Why give a shit? Is fame worth selling your soul to vacuous consumer capitalism for, or trampling on others? Many seem to think so but they don't end up happy and fulfilled anyway. To LIVE, fully in the moment, and be COOL, that's the rub, fuck posterity!

(Yeah yeah, I'm a legend in my own toilet-break and a walking contradiction, all this blather is blowing my own trumpet, as if I'm a sucker for the cult of celebrity along with every other dickhead. But I've never sought power to hand out the money and jobs, never plagiarized or pushed anyone out of the way to get ahead, never hassled to get my face in the Daily Terror news. I've hung in the underground, with only the Internet as my right of reply. Great art is a joke, half the masterpieces in the world's collections are forgeries, the other half will go up in smoke when the bombs rain down.)

I've got a show coming up in September 2012 at Damian Minton's Annex in Redfern, (if the Machiavellian artsholes don't interfere and stop it), wherein I will show 35 years of my work, posters and paintings, absolute proof that I did indeed LIVE IT to the MAX. Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean They're not gonna fuck me over!

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." - Hunter S. Thompson.
(Thanks to Gaz for the quote, it applies to the Arts in general!)

W'loo Mural 1985 to 2006.

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If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

On the Road In India.

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1) Mad Main Bazaar in New Delhi where one can immediately get lost in the crowd.
2) The bastard money changer who on day one ripped me of $100. I gave him ten one hundred dollar notes and he cleverly palmed one and told me I only gave him 9 notes.
3) The Ganges River at Rishikesh, my Shangri-la.
4) There's no Medicare or disability pension for cripples in India, they become beggars and/or saddhus and are at the mercy of us passer-bys.
5) The cable bridge at the magic town of Uttarkashi, half-way to Gangotri, source of the Ganges. I love this town, really relax and chill out there.
6) My non-friend Balu on a good day, when Dr. Jeckyl over-rides Mr. Hyde. Here he is helping a peasant woman take her grass-cuttings back to town.
7) The hot-springs of Gangonani, just before Gangotri, where you can relax in a hot tank, out-flow from Siva's pituitary supposedly, still it got me high.
8) My favourite temple in all the world, dedicated to the Nature Spirit, cool for an atheist like me. I walked around it 7 times and hoped for a good year in 2012.
9) The anthropomorphised image of the Nature Spirit. I thank my lucky stars I make it here, difficult to get to all the way from Auz, from sheer willpower I made it.
10) The endless man-made lake formed from the damming of the Ganges River at Tehri. For years I cruised alongside the river but the old roads and villages are now under water and one now travels far above it.
11) Sunset deep in the foothills of the Himalayas where I was invited for a traditional Hindu wedding at the bride's family village.
12) Me and the village women watching the Hindu wedding ceremony.
13) The blessing of the cow at the wedding, essential for future prosperity and fertility.
14) My favourite chai-shop on the beach at Goa.
15) Sunset over the Arabian Sea in Goa, a place I found it hard to tear myself away from.
16) Night lights in Mumbai, a city still in the doldrums from the terrorist attacks.
17) The Gokul, the best pub in all of India and just about the only lively spot for non-Bollywood stars in all Mumbai.
18) The Lodhi Gardens in New Delhi, 14th century tombs and palaces where I relaxed many days for free with no pedlars, beggars, hustlers to hassle me.
19) Every day somewhere in India is a religious parade, this time Sikhs in medieval garb taking over the Main Bazaar in New Delhi.
20) Humayun's Tomb at New Delhi, one of the most magnificent monuments in the world where I sat in awe and read the Moghul Emperor's life story in the gardens.
21) One of my spirit guide animals, the Indian Rhino, at the Delhi Zoo. They came over to pose for me as if they knew they were special to me. Saying goodbye to them, I said goodbye to India, this time round.

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If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

Manu of the Mountains.

I left Mughal Delhi behind me with some relief, saddened to hear 14 Eunuchs had died in a fire at a community hall. Because their families had disowned them, only their fellow Hijra, (trannies), came to claim their bodies. Many of them were old and couldn't outrun the flames and it was their young chelas, (acolytes), to whom they belonged. I was surprised to note that many of them were previously Muslims.











Though I was happy to be on that
infinite dusty Indian highway, I got the heebie-jeebies as the bus trundled through Haridwar, Gateway to the Gods, where at the city's famous temple, Hari ki Padi, a week previously, their had been a stampede during evening Pujah prayers, and 20 women and children had been trampled to death. The prayer group had been trying to overcome rampant sexism and empower the women by letting them lead the prayers for once, and that's why most of the deaths were female.
With 1200 million people life and death are writ so large it tears one's eyeballs out at every step, and for all the immense wealth piling up in India many poor flock from miles around when free food is to be given away, they'll squat and wait patiently for hours, patience is an Indian necessity.






On the road to Gangotri, source of the Ganges River, we found an ashram belonging to a mystic named Pilot Baba, (yes, he was once an airline pilot); he has a huge Russian following who built this vision for him and he now lives in Russia.















































































At last we broke through civilization's gates and were flying up into the high Himalayas, those magnificent mountains of mystics who have meditated there for thousands of years. As we drove through the jungle I noticed forest rangers walking the road with rifles slung over their shoulders. A rogue elephant had killed 5 people in the last few months, only recently dragging one poor fellow off his scooter and crushing him. They were hoping to tranquilise the brute and then shift him to a far-off jungle where human encroachment will not infuriate him as much. He's getting some animal revenge on so much human predation I guess. I wished him well as we cruised on by.













(Manu and I at the magic Temple to Nature.)














Up, up we flew, towards the snow-capped crags on the back of a golden motorbike, round hairpin bends and into hurtling traffic, monstrous jeeps that jostled us aside, through streams and over rock-slides, places where no road existed at all, an extreme sojourn so exhilarating it was worth any danger. We passed marvelous temples, the architecture of folklore, and a line-up of gods so manifold there seemed one for every person alive. We rode above the Ganges River turned into an endless lake by the Tehri Dam and yet again I pondered upon my youth when I did wander the valley paths and medieval villages with my mentor Compassion and beloved friend Serenity way back in the '70s, a landscape now all drowned beneath the turquoise waters.

We crossed the cable bridge into grungy, romantic Uttarkashi, town of my dreams, where I cream in my jeans, who all year I yearn for and always return for a night by her streams. But Time cascades on making all an illusion and I have to let go, next day we zoomed to Gangonani, with its huge tank filled by a hot-spring, supposedly the fountain erupting from Siva’s head, a healing embrace for my sore bones no matter the mythology.

It was at this small village clinging to the mountains side that I first met Manu, maybe seven years ago. He was from a tiny village 7 kms down the road called Buki but he hung about Gangonani most days hoping to find work with the passing tourists, offering to guide them to Gormukh, a site at the foot of the Glacier that is the source of the Ganges. He stepped forward from the crowd of ignorant peasant boys speaking fluent English when nobody for 70 kms could speak a word of it. He was honest, sincere and sweet natured and we became friends instantly.

He could never find enough interesting work to occupy his inquiring spirit, he felt he had greater potential than just toiling in the fields as his forefathers had done, he was made for bigger things but he knew not what. He was bored and restless, he’d outgrown Buki Village and knew there was a greater world out there, below the mountains yet had no means to attain it. Every year he told me his mind grew more clouded, his spirit more depressed, he was losing hope that there could be any future for such a misfit as he. I tried to give him pep-talks, encourage him to go down to the plains and take on the world, no matter the hardships but it seemed beyond him. I suggested he could turn his family farm into a miracle of modernity and eco-friendliness, his despondency found it a banal idea.

I brought him books that talked of the history of the world and might open his horizons, he ended up throwing them in the river, they hurt his brain with their difficult words and mind-bending concepts. There is no Medicare in the mountains, no shrinks with their anti-depressants and no money to pay for it, just priests and shamans whom he eschewed as backwoods mumbo-jumbo. Last year when I left I asked him what he wanted me to bring him next time I came and he requested dark sun-glasses, a very simple gift.

He became unpopular at Gangonani hot-springs for cracking onto the foreign tourists and taking the custom away from the locals, they were jealous of his language skills and thought him too big for his boots. This year he had a fight with the fat, gronky hotel owner; he must have beat the old grouch up for the police were called and he was put in some mountain jail for two months to cool his heels. I’ve never known anyone to come out of an Indian jail the better for it, it destroys the little spirit and stamina they might have harbored going in. I had great fears for Manu’s health and said so to my motorbike companion as we arrived at the hot-springs. Usually Manu was waiting there at the chai-shops, ready to greet any arriving tourists but this time he was nowhere to be seen.

We put our bags in at the wooden-chalet hotel and then drove back to Buki to see if we could get word to him through the old men that sat hunched over their brazier in the chai-shop there. We mentioned his name and they said he was finished, gone, dead, having committed suicide by drinking poison only three days previously. I couldn’t believe it, three lousy days too late, if I’d left a week earlier I might have picked his spirits up, with more pep-talk and the dark sunglasses he so desired. I stared down at the ancient cable-bridge that led over the nascent Ganges to the path that wound up over the mountain to his primitive village, a column of smoke issued from the place and I sadly imagined it to be the left-over haze from his funereal pyre. The old men of Buki shook their heads and indicated that his mind had gone, there was nothing to be done about it.

The next day we cruised all the way to Gangotri, sacred pilgrimage town lying below a stupendous snow-capped peak named Siva Lingam from whence the Ganges River flowed. We paid our respects at the great temple but I wanted to avoid getting caught up in any rituals as I don’t believe in them, find them tedious and time consuming, night was setting in, we were freezing and I wanted to get back down the mountain to the hot-springs. But this old Baba roped us in, promising us hot chai as he led us across the river to the small mandir he was in charge of where he made a great show of lighting up a chillum and shouting up to the gods. Before I could say no he’d opened up his little temple and proceeded to bless us with red tilak on our foreheads, water on our heads and manna in our mouths. His particular god was Hanuman, the monkey cohort of Lord Rama and thus I got a blessing from what I take to be the spirit of my evolutionary forebears, we’ve all still got millions of years of ape-men in us, and only seven thousand years of civilization.

Hanuman symbolizes strength, courage, loyalty and cleverness, all attributes I would need on my Indian idyll, he is the guardian of bachelors and protector from ghosts, which suits a queer adventurer like me just fine. I don’t believe in the reality of any gods but positive vibes and meaningful metaphors can’t hurt any. We thankfully said our goodbyes and cruised off back down the crumbling mountain road, passing a small herd of wild Himalayan mountain goats on the way. Not far off is a town called Dirauli and there built into a pit is a primeval temple to Nature, my favourite temple in all the world and to which I give myself a challenge to visit every year, if I can make it there I can make it anywhere. No God, no Master, no Intelligent Designer, just an awesome natural phenomenon that is Life and consciousness emerging from the quantum flux of this expanding Universe.

I had visited this temple with Manu some years previously, it seemed to lift his spirits as it did mine, to walk seven times around it and pray to the Universe, of which we were a conscious part, that It would take us to Its heart in safety, love and ongoing hope. It was not to be for Manu but it continues to be so for me. I’ve reached the miraculous age of 62 after countless hardships, it’s not easy being a ignominious queer pauper libertarian pagan adventurer cyber-punk artist, I’ve contemplated suicide throughout my life’s long journey, grand Oblivion always looking over my left shoulder, the promise of it reassuring enough not to need it.

The world can be such a sad, destructive place, especially in India, the newspapers tell me Jihadi Mujahidine are massing in Pakistan and India and we foreign tourists are “sitting ducks” for their pathological hatred. Yet India counters death with a great verve for life and this energizes me and gets me surfing the wave of chaos ebulliently. After all, I'm a baby-boomer from Auz and as such am very privileged, far better off than maybe 7 billion other souls wrestling with their existence on this planet.

 I was so depressed when I arrived in India this time round I thought surely this would be my last adventure, somewhere amidst the snow-caps of the Himalayas I would do myself in, I feel so tired and dead-beat I just can’t go on. Sweet Manu did it for me, and I have to carry on for him, till the very end, wherever that may be. I can't say I won't finish my life tomorrow, chaos may take over and do me in, but for NOW I will persist, I am still Alive, miraculously Alive. This story is in Manu's memory, for few will know that he also once lived and was Alive.

www.amazon.com/author/tobyzoates

If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.