Stairway to the Gods.

Hari Ke Podi at Haridwar.

Beware of motorbiking in India!

The Bridge at Uttarkashi Swept Away by Flood.

 Gangotri.


Like the dream I’ve had more than 21 times, I flew thru the infinite darkness, across oceans and continents, under heavens into netherworlds, over landmarks and signposts pointing the way to heaven and hell, where a million gods confuse and bemuse. And I land in Delhi, city of djiins, to get lost amidst fabulous structures like Humayan’s Tomb, Quatar Minaret and the labyrinth of Main Bazaar finding old friends to welcome me home with real affection. But beware, one can be fleeced while sleep-walking, by djiins who smile seductively, spirits of fire, fickle, mischievous and cruel. But I'm a survivor, a hardened vagabond, I can find my way out of any dark alley.

I’d promised a Tibetan mate a night out on the town and for me, a movie addict, that meant indulging my hobby of discovering new cinemas, so we caught a took-took out to the edge of Delhi to a 21st century ubiquitous shopping extravaganza called “Ambience Mall” where I was promised bliss at the “Director’s Cut” cinema. We got lost in far-flung suburbia but finally, there out of the darkness, shone a colossal concrete cube with an oval glass-dome on top, the facade covered in fairy lights to disguise its functional rough-concrete ugliness, with a flight of Cinderella steps leading up to the golden doorway into an ambience of spending frenzy. In front was a marble fountain, gardens and palm trees also covered in fairy lights and spaced all around like lit-up mushrooms were sheet-metal phalluses, as if the mall was a site of ultimate fecundity. My poor old rickshaw driver looked quite flummoxed as he dropped us off across the road from the monstrosity, expensive cars zooming around and designer-dressed babus making a hullaballoo while we peasants cringed for daring to enter the Maharaja’s palace.

Inside was four floors of designer hell and as we went up the escalator to the food court at the top I had an out of the body experience, the urge to fling myself onto the tawdry gold-tinsel sculptures hanging from the roof and go crashing down upon a giant gold papier-mache idol of Ganesha, piercing myself upon the many spears he held, performance-art to stop the happy shoppers in their tracks and make their jaws drop.
We marched about the hideous kitsch tiers of shops, the usual Hugo Boss, Diesal, Levis, KFC, McDonalds where I pissed of the staff by helping myself to the juice-fridge and not buying a hamburger. And the usual muzak and cheerful wall-paper art, all to lull the shoppers into a daze of amenability, the new opium of the masses, stoned in the Temple of Consumerism.

 We had a “gourmet” pizza with no anchovies (!), perused the 7 customers in the three ultra-expensive restaurants and then cruised into the funky “Directors’ Cut”, photos and Bios of many of my favorite directors on the walls, the décor post-modern art-deco, very cool, easily the best room in the building. Even the toilet was like a chi-chi nouveau-riche disco, black and gold marble, bottles of scented hand-lotion, woolen towels and a sign saying there was a CCTV camera watching EVERYTHING in case you tried to steal something. I couldn’t resist lavishing the hand-cream upon myself as I danced about to the piped techno music, knowing the Security Guards would get a laugh when they watched the videos.

It turned out to be a “Gold Class” Cinema, classic red-lit edges, couches with blanket and bottle of fruit juice, and a hot movie, “Cloud Atlas” by the Watchowski siblings. I read the book last year, pared down in the movie and chopped to bits, losing much of its sense, the through-line of the human spirit always attempting to overcome oppression vaguely evident, to my rebel's delight. Still it went for three dam hours, we got out at 2am and found ourselves in the middle of nowhere, luckily always there’s a mob of rickshaw drivers waiting patiently deep into the night, hoping someone will stagger from the Maharaja’s monolith with whom they can earn a buck. I got driven home way across the vast city for $5 and my friend Raxsin thanked me for a fun night for we had taken the piss mercilessly of the whole scene: the theatre of robopathic consumerism that we’re all conned into playing a part of these days, like a new global religion.

Then I cruised up into the Himalayan foothills in a private taxi, doing it easy for once in my life, no chasing 7 modes of conveyance dragging 7 pieces of luggage stuck in traffic jams for 7 hours squeezed into a tight seat with 7 families and their entire household goods. A few times we had close calls swerving around a tumultuous humanity but we made it up that long highway to Haridwar on the Ganges River and past another major landmark, signpost site of the Collective  Unconscious, Hari Ke Podi, Stairway to the Gods. Rama, representative of Vishnu the Preserver, came this way with his wife Sita and brother Laxman when they were at the end of their lives and done with this earthly existence, the celestial staircase up to Heaven somewhere high in the Himalayan mountains in the vicinity of Badrinath. I tried to find that stairway when I was a young vagabond and I seek it still, in my decrepitude.

I made it to Shangri-la for Diwali, Festival of the Lights; it was the night Rama came back from 14 years penance in the dark jungle and as a benign, enlightened king he’d been sorely missed and now his people’s lives were lit up again, the kingdom was happy and the land fruitful, like King Arthur healing the wounds of his kingdom with the Holy Grail. And so I did pujah to Rama with a Hindu family I have long loved, put a light on their doorway and watched the fireworks above Shangri-la, bursting like a million new stars in interstellar-dust clouds, only it was cracker-night smog. Exhausted I had to walk up a mountain to get to my room and a man on a scooter came to my rescue and gave me a lift, his name happened to be Rama, a hotel wallah trying to get my custom, and yet…

Shangri-la, paradise from a dream of the Orient, temples, mountains and sky reflected in the flowing green-silver of the Ganges River, another God(dess.) But the river is a wild thing of nature, not a toy for our amusement, the placid burnished mirror of its surface belying what lies beneath, the Underworld, oblivion, opposite to the reality we live in. On the first day of my idyll I went up river and sat peacefully upon a rock in the jungle above the raging torrent of white-water rapids. I contemplated the beauty of the scene, delighting in my good fortune to be aware of the 7th heaven that I found myself in. Many inflated rafts drifted by full of squealing schoolgirls and their river guides or Delhi business associates out on a team-building exercise, all with helmets and life-jackets paddling furiously every which way and being swept by the turbulence into the rock upon which I sat. I’ve done this rafting many times and well know the thrill of hitting a whirlpool and being flung dangerously towards the seething water and so watched amused as they all swept safely onwards, yelling in joy, hundreds of them.

Then came a raft with only three guys in it, all river-guides by the look of them, they were fooling about with a video camera, maybe making a promotion to post on the Internet, and they’d taken their life-jackets off, why the fuck is a good question. They hit the whirlpool and one guy fell overboard, clutching at his jacket but it was torn from his grasp and floated away; his mates reached out a paddle for him to grasp but the raft was swept onwards and he just missed grabbing it; instead of continuing to swim after the raft as I would’ve done he panicked and swam away, into the turbulence, trying for the sheer rock-face from where I watched above with anxious eyes. He scrabbled at the sheer wet rock but couldn’t clutch the slippery surface and went under, he came up and I held out a vague hope for him but could do nothing to help, no rope to throw and I’d drown if I jumped in to attempt a rescue, for there is an undertow there and it sucked him under again from which he never resurfaced.

Before he went under for the last time he looked up and saw me above, on the rock, in safety, in another world, and he looked deep into my eyes, one last look of sheer terror and behind it the knowledge that he’d blown it, was a fool, his one life, so short, so young, and it was gone, and then he was gone. I stared down into the maelstrom hoping he would resurface, other people along the river had noticed the incident and come running from all directions, a veritable crowd formed within 3 minutes and stared down into the water as if they could will him back, but he was gone, gone, gone. I walked back thru the jungle and cried in shock and sadness.

I’ve seen quite a few people die in my life, from accidents and in my job as a nurse and am very aware of the fine misty curtain between life and death that sometimes gets lifted and shows one the truth of existence in this universe, that it ENDS one day. A miracle of consciousness in this world above, an unknowable oblivion below, a fine skein of quantum film separating the two, easy to break through; life’s a balancing act, to be alert and intuit where you’re going, that’s the rub. It’s an intense elation to be alive, the adventure of climbing the celestial stairway to the gods, but never quite reaching the top.

P.S. I very nearly did get to the top of that Stairway to the Gods and topple over into oblivion later in my sojourn when I went motorbiking up in the Himalayas close to the Tibetan border. We hit a mud-slick and the bike fish-tailed, we crashed to the ground and slid down the road, the heavy bike on top of me, techno-music thumping in my ears from my MP3, and for a few seconds I thought, "Here it is, the END!" I'd felt a thwack on my left knee but on jumping out from underneath the bike thought I was OK.
A few hours later the knee stiffened from the cold and swelled up, I'd bruised it badly, yet lucky I didn't break it as we were in the middle of nowhere, glaciers all around, no villages for many miles. There was a hot-springs tank and hotel a hundred klms back down the mountain and when we made it back there I sat in the tank for 3 days till the swelling went down. My Kismet is to keep climbing that Celestial Staircase and never meet the Gods, because I don't fucking believe in them, just Guardian Angels!

 Sadhus choofing down at the end of the trail

 

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The Vagabond's Karma.

 OK, I had my long immersion in the graphic arts, now it’s back to writing for a good spell, my second most favorite thing to do, (dancing in abandonment my first.) I got my long schemed for art show completed, a good crowd came, I got lots of plaudits from strangers, old friends showed up from the distant past to cheer my heart, I sold enough work to cover my costs plus some, nowhere near enough to make a living but what the hell, it was fun doing it. I even got in Sydney’s major arts newspaper twice, as if somebody up there likes me, (I don’t think so.)

Young and old perused my art and I was thrilled many of them were turned on, telling me they were inspired to find meaning as well as beauty in the color and folkloric narratives, a challenging dialogue with the audience instead of the empty and inane shit pushed as cutting art and hanging from many gallery walls like bloodless husks. I can never get on top of the fact that here in Auz you’ve got to be State-sanctioned to make a living in art, willing to make inoffensive, colorful wall paper. Maybe They are still afraid artists will start a revolution, I thought hot art was supposed to stir things up. I gallery-sat the show every day and got to talk to lots of people, the art students’ and musicians’ ebullience was most satisfying.

Not all were pleased, there was that one old blond woman in a business suit who clacked the full circle of 35 works on her high-heels barely giving any one piece a glance, (she did linger to look at my Gay Lib poster from 1982, a crowd of homos and lesbians painting graffiti upon the Art gallery of New South Wales), but she seemed to have her mind made up before she entered, it was all trash, she grimly thanked me and ran for the door. After all, while so happy to get a mention in the papers, the newsworthy hook was that I was “an old gay bum from Northcott Housing ghetto who gets in trouble with the cops and paints …”

My performance of “My SOB Story” went over well, about 70 punters showed up on a Saturday afternoon when there was stiff competition from the Sydney Fringe Festival and the opening of the “Arts and About Festival” with a free band in Martin Plaza. I wasn’t nervous about my monologue, in fact I was hungry to get an audience eating out of my hand, to finally tell my story in a legitimate forum, that should have some kind of ripple effect, especially as a top video-artist recorded it. I caught a wave, surfed it smoothly, adlibbed adroitly, played the fool, sobbed into a huge hanky while my mate Peter played sad violin and I had them laughing and gasping with my tales of childhood “oppositional defiant disorder”, working-class gay travails, teenage psychedelic soul-grab by a mad-messiah cult, jungle-book Indian adventures, the battles for Sydney squats and chasing across Auz the rock maestros, the Divinyls, Chrissie Amphlet sending me into a divine ecstasy.

For an artist it’s cool to stand amidst one’s art and explain oneself, like fleshing it out, full expressionism, the artist telling it from the heart. I didn’t sell any of my latest elaborate paintings on canvas though, just all of my early posters, which bemuses me, all those nasty punk activist graphix which I thought would be the last things to sell, gripping signs of their times I guess, things have homogenized since then. We can’t all stay radical forever, some of us slow down, get beat, get old, get wise, I was a headstrong, idealistic, rebellious youth and now I want peace, contemplation, summation. And to paint the visions I’m compelled to, not what I think others will want to buy. I’m too lazy, uptight, with a huge chip on my shoulder, to enter all those snooty art competitions, climbing the social ladder, I’m from the hoi polloi, a vagabond, I love wandering, and studying and dreaming.

Once when I was a young vagrant lost in the high Himalayas I was asked to make a wish over a magic stone by a powerful Baba and I thought I’d be too clever by half by wishing for nothing, to be able to wish for nothing, which secretly meant, to have everything I wanted. Yet I ended up with nothing, no money, no expensive toys, no career, no fame, little respect, few prospects. I have nothing yet I’ve got everything I need to make me happy, I’m very poor yet I live like a prince, knowledge and entertainment at my fingertips, an apartment in central Sydney, and I fly through the air like Lord Rama in his silver chariot. In my room I can be a time-machine, library and space-ship rolled in one and go to the furthest reaches of the Mind to fully live this fleeting life. I’m quite aware of how things stand in this Universe and am thus rich beyond measure. But I’m a flawed human and that brings me back to nothing again.

I was being interviewed by 2 SER radio in front of my painting “21 Years Under Northcott” and the radio-arts jock asked me, “Surely it can’t be as bad to live there as you paint it here, it’s quite dystopian?” And I laconically replied, “It’s like living in a Heironymous Bosch painting, strung out between paradise and purgatory, in the garden of earthly delights, I love the greenery, the birds; my next door neighbor, Dolly, is an angel; most of the time it’s silent there, very peaceful, but you never know when it’s going to explode, usually once a week you can count on some misadventure.”

And that very night, it had to happen, I was having a shower, unwinding from the art-show finally reaching its satisfactory end, when I noticed blue and red lights flashing through the opaque bathroom window and heard lots of yammering voices. Then there was a furious banging on my front-door that grew more loud and insistent as I cursed and spat chips, jumped into a towel and rushed for the door, all wet and bedraggled. I opened it to an army of cops, uniformed and plain-clothed, and a squad of firemen one of whom stepped forward and said, “Have you seen or heard anything suspicious in the last hour or so?” I spluttered, “What are you talking about? Suspicious like what?” (I’m thinking of Cursula next door and her nefarious deeds.) The fireman responded, “Like someone spraying a fire accelerant on your door!” I looked at my security grill in stupefaction, “No, I haven’t noticed a thing.”

Then I heard Cursula’s voice whine, “Toby, I saw a guy spraying something there before and I got a text message, "the witch’s house is burning!” so I called the fire brigade that we’re under attack…” I fell through my door semi-naked and wet and yelled, “It never ends with her, 24/7 she causes some drama, she’ll give me a heart attack one day!” My hysteria was about to boil over till the handsome fireman stepped forward and growled, “That’s enough from you, go back inside!” Stunned, I looked from him to the cops, “What is going on here?” A young cop said, “Go and finish your shower mate.” I gave them one last wise-guy smirk and shut the door on the lot of them, Cursula squawking about her democratic rights because the firemen were entering her fire-trap flat to see if there was any conflagration. Then I heard two female cops get a hold of Cursula and try to pull her arms off, all the while snarling about what a waste of time and space she was.

Lucky I’m a law-abiding citizen trying to live a quiet life, otherwise the zombies next door would get me caught in the apocalyptic maelstrom they stir up. 2012 has been a great year for me, my friends put on awesome concerts, Peter Urqhart’s grand piano and string quartet at Paddington, Paul Vassala on slide-guitar blues at the Red Rattler and Redbee with their grunge-metal rock up in Katoombah. I saw some hot sci-fi movies, (I dug “Loopers” and “Dredd”) and read some trippy sci-fi novels, (reading Neal Asher at the moment.) Simple things like this keep me happy. With my laptop as my flying carpet I will now escape into the netherworlds, to other times and sites, to write of my wanderings and my vagabond’s karma.

  Imagine we’re sitting around a raging camp-fire, the luminous white ice-caps of the high Himalayas glowing in the background under a star-filled black void and I’m telling you a story, a continuation of a long life’s confession told over many nights, the warm fire always reflected from the heart… Once upon a time, when I was young and lost, I thought my desires could be realized in the fabled land of Kashmir, with the music of Led Zepplin luring me on, to the houseboats, gardens, palaces and libidinous Greek-like demi-god men…

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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.

Cyberpunks United!

I just got back from my Friday night outing to the movies and a delicious dinner in bustling, festive Sydney Chinatown, a milieu reminiscent of the movie sets in  the remake of "Total Recall" we'd just seen. As far as I'm concerned, the snooty critics got it wrong, always hankering after talking-heads high art, they either don't like the variations on sci-fi narrative, don't appreciate sci-fi art or do not understand science-fiction's take on pop-culture; I felt there was a buzz at the end in the theatre, the punters seemed to enjoy the ride so fuck the crits moaning about bad remakes. I got off on the movie, almost as much as the first, fuck Arnie, the Republican overseer! It's like papier-mache tits versus stainless-steel teeth! (On the re-release of the Director's Cut way back in 1999 me and the infamous Nicorette dropped acid and really spun out on the trip to Mars so I didn't need a repeat.)

Yeah, I know, we've heard the story before, but it was a good revision of Phillip K Dick's dystopian paranoia and questioning of a consumers' paradise, the "reality" pushed upon us, the enslaved masses. I can't get enough of his work so any attempt will do, I'm starved of imaginative speculation, almost feverishly hungry for anything sci-fi. It had great action, awesome cyber-techno  mis en scene, the British sci-fi artists having done a hot job, and I loved their joke on Australia as a slave colony down the end of the tube. The look of the movie is a pastiche of many classics, the flying car scenes from "Star Wars", "Minority Report" and "The Fifth Element"; the robots from "I Robot"; the water-logged Asian street-scapes from "Blade Runner", ( a re-imagined drowned Sydney, the Colony, circa 2099); even "Journey to the Centre of the Earth"/ "The Core" type machine-jaunts: it was a wild ride.

I know there are cyberpunk Headz out there somewhere who like this kind of shit, Sydney must have a gang of them, we inadvertently meet at Events Cinemas on George Street on opening weekends of horror, action and sci-fi movies and get our rocks off together on the futuristic visions and surreal mind-scapes. I cum in my pants over Phillip K. Dick and William Gibson stories, I'm always hanging for the next hard sci-fi movie release; "Prometheus" only half did it for me. I can't wait till they decide to turn William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Steve Baxter, Neal Stephenson, Iain M Banks and Ian Watson books into movies, plus all those hundreds of other great sci-fi stories out there of which I've read many, I'm a total fan. I'm reading space-opera right now, "Leviathan Wakes" by James  S. A. Corey and it's a lot of fun, cyberpunk/horror/noir, really taking me out of myself, into outer/inner space, and escaping this dehumanising world I'm trapped in, keeping my brain sharp decoding the signifiers.

I need the escapism, my art show's coming up in two weeks and I've got to dredge up the energy to handle it. It's a gig, better than a void, actually exciting, and there's lots of science-fiction in my material. I was encouraged to do a newspaper interview and I'm nervous about that, I think I spouted a lot of nonsense, Zippy the Pinhead always takes over. As I feel I'm making my last stand before I turn to dust I'm taking the chance to tell my story, for what it's worth, maybe to fuck with all the naysayers. I even wrote a letter to the curator of prints at the Australian National Gallery in Canberra, telling him how much dishonor he'd done me by excluding me from their book, "Australian Posters: the Walls Also Speak" after I'd put thousands up on the streets of Sydney. They have sixteen of my works but they took them offline due to "Copyright". Thus I haven't had access to my own art, which I'd made while desperately poor and hungry back in the late '70s and early '80s. And I never got paid the fifty bucks each for half the posters they've got in their collection: as a punk I'm easy to rip off, it's the rich kids from private schools who get the money.

I asked them to put back online those sixteen posters of mine as I have the copyright, not them, and I want the public to view my work, not remain forever buried in the file-room. I got a phone call today telling me they'll do it, and send me copies of the works for my own archive, which soon I'll post here. Thank nogod I got brave, after 21 years of stewing in my juices over it. You get nothing by being a wimp, cyberpunks always have a fight on their hands, to stay alive, and achieve their art, critiquing the powerful, talking about the future, dystopian or utopian, and always rebelling against tyranny.

(They sent my art to me in PDF file format so I can't reproduce them here, always some fucking obstacle. Even when Technology is  used against us, this Blog is an example of low-tech fighting back, swamped by the Internet giants though it is, it gives my cyberpunk heart a tiny spitting, cursing voice. )

P.S. An example of hot cyberpunk writing that's got my brain in a swooning delirium is Neal Asher. I'm plowing through his voluminous output, now onto "The Departure", the 22nd century where there's overpopulation of 18 billion, the world run by a Central Committee of a Nazi-like bureaucratic elite who enslave and compost or incinerate the disposable zero-asset millions, and one lone cyber-augmented super-intelligent rebel who sets out to destroy this inhuman world-order. Asher reminds me that there are wealthy elites, partnered with bureaucrats, who don't mind betraying and destroying most of us so that they and their families may survive and live in comfort, and they always use catch-phrases like "for the good of greater society" as the excuse for enslavement, incarceration and mass murder. Cyber-punk is always about rebels fighting back, with whatever means, like punks, daring to do it in the belly of the Beast.

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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.