It's true, I admit it, I'm nothing but a cry baby, always whinging about some perceived slight, as if the universe were centered around me, when in fact the world is burning and I don't amount to a pile of cat-shit. One foolishness I have to redress is my umbrage towards the Sydney City Council; I've had a few blues with the Lady Mayoress because one of my paintings got rejected or my arse got kicked on the Town Hall steps. I guess it's because I'm paranoid, too long crushed at the bottom of an unjust world, and I indulge in too much pot smoking, I'm like a ragged alley-cat hissing at monsters imagined in the moon's shadow projected between flying storm clouds.
Anyway, I hallucinated THEY had bricked into the wall, like Poe's black cat, my Northcott painting as too horrible. I am never to be seen by the public, as if I were Dorian Gray. THEY only bought it because a friend took up a petition as to it's historical/folkloric importance, "the travails of life in high-rise social housing" and as I feel I'm persona non grata I figured it would never actually be shown. Now, after some investigation, I'm told THEY exhibited it at Customs House down at Circular Quay earlier this year, and in September it will be displayed in the Lower Town Hall in some extravaganza called "175 Years of the Council's Service to Sydney." And so this mangy poofy cat is quite chuffed, and mollified, for a few brief days till some other trespass catches my ire.
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| 21Years Under Northcott - 2012 - acrylic on canvas. |
I'm kind of embarrassed about all the bullshit I write about getting stepped on in the race to the top of the heap, though I hope to make the travail of the working class artist one of my major subtexts; it must also be obvious I use Blogging not just to tell wild stories but to get entangled hairs out of my cake-hole, otherwise I choke on them, stupidities though they are. I do tell my truth, creating my own cinema verite via urban folklore, as nobodies don't ever get to tell their side of the story in the mainstream, and thus I can give reality checks to my phantom listeners. I'd like my carping to come across as funny satire rather than vitriolic insults. I'm going to delete most of these Blogs soon as they will be republished in books, only a few whines left, nobody gives a damn, life is more fucked for many more people than me, I'm happy I got to express myself at all.
Life's not too bad for me, I'm neither in the absolute gutter, filthy and mad, nor am I feted by high society, with money pouring out of my ears. I walk the middle path, my art occasionally surfaces and gets an overwhelming laudatory response, not bad for a guy who got rejected from art school, never enters any of the classy competitions or gets invited anywhere.
I'm a happy recluse in my social housing dungeon. Northcott has been a space where I am mostly free to create without any stand-over merchants, conducive to my democratic freedom of speech, with many highs and sometimes lashings of pain. Mostly it has settled down here. ICE addicts still run amok at night but we oldies don't venture out when the zombies are at large. I've got Cursula next door under control, every day she dumps piles of garbage from the dumpster by my front door and every day I cart it back to the bins. She has her eighteen year old son living with her nowadays which has grounded her a bit, and he has turned out the opposite of her, upright, sensible, polite, hardworking, determined to avoid her wastrel lifestyle.
Birdbrain upstairs still plays the same bad music over and over but he has it turned down, only when he's in a super manic mood does the American national anthem or corny Christmas carols get blasted through a thousand brains on edge, and we just grate our teeth till he calms down. Lately it's been Justin Bieber's "Sorry" played a thousand times over till we're spewing in existential depression but that's how life is, full of sorrow.
I lost the spirit to paint for the last three years as the "art world" is corrupt, ignorant, empty, hostage to money, fame and elitism. But a show for the '78ers is coming up in 2018 for the 40th anniversary of the Sydney LGBQTI Mardi Gras and I'm one of those original protesters from 1978 who got punched up in the riot way back then. So I've decided to contribute a new work which I'm working on now and it will be fun to splash the paint about upon one of my feisty drawings, ugly pigs, sweet poofs and beautiful dykes in a whirling heap of fists and boots and angry faces.
Then it's back to tweaking the second volume in my trilogy, "The 7 Lives of the Punk Poofy Cat" and then self-publishing it. I'm heading towards 70 and about to realize my life's goals and for a poor boy from the Olympic Village, West Heidelberg, Melbourne, strung out in the lower echelons of alien Sydney, that's pretty fucking cool.
"Deadbeat Realism in the Queer Underworld"
www.amazon.com/author/tobyzoates
If you like my stories please consider buying my book. I have given my writing away for free for 10 years, with no advertising, but starved in my garret while I did so, and now I'm asking for support.
