Sombre mood in Melbourne Diaries

The Paris terrorist attacks are still dominating the news coverage in Australia. I’m brooding over this more than I usually do the weekly terrorist explosions, not least because I am actually out tonight to see the Brian Jonestown Massacre play at the Melbourne Town Hall. It would be impossible not to draw connections to the Paris Eagles of Death Metal slaughter - similar type of band, similar venue, similar type of crowd, similar crowd size, and so on. The ‘massacre’ in the band name is especially unfortunate (did the terrorists in Paris think EoDM were satanists based on their name?). It would be stupid to cancel and not go out, but I think it will be a much more somber mood than anticipated. The more realistic threat will probably be the tens of thousands of subhuman cage fighting fans gathered for the Ronda Rousey bout in Melbourne tonight.

There’s been some fairly idiotic entries on PB over the last 24 hours from people exercising their borderline sociopathic and garbage logic mindsets - global politics as pontificated from self-declared anarchists living with their parents. Do you know there was a bomb in Lebanon this week? That thousands of people are being killed in Syria? That black people are killed by cops everyday? That thousands of people die every day and they never appear on the news? All statistically true; all entirely meaningless. What conclusions do such writers want us to reach? That people attending a rock concert deserve to be killed? That there should be some tallied up slaughter until enough people in the developed world are killed to account for those killed in the third world? Of course people have stronger emotional reactions to events closer to their own lives. I’ve never been part of the ground forces in a Middle Eastern civil war, nor have I lived in Lebanon or an African village. It’s as false a logic as a Parisian expecting a Zimbabwean dissident to start shaking with grief at Friday’s events. The experience of those culturally and socially distant from me is not scrubbed out from my consciousness but it is obviously easier to relate to people going out on a Friday night in a cosmopolitan, generally peaceful city. When I was 18-20 I probably went to see a band every weekend, and not with the thought that I might be shot by some young, glassy-eyed terrorist an hour into the performance.

My parents are distressed because their resource industry share portfolios sunk dramatically on Friday. It’s an overreaction, but a symptom of their naivety. As dividend dwellers around 70, they have lived for the last decade with the belief that, just like the 60s to the 80s, things would generally get more prosperous and everybody can buy a house if they try and superannuation will be crucial when you’re older and all the other fairy-tales that support the elderly. I think most people my generation see things in a more balanced way - that the great narrative of liberal progress (that the shitholes of the world would generally improve and everyone would get more profitable) is looking shaky and that by and large the next few decades are going to be tough. Recently, I watched a Russian film ‘Hard to be a God’. Now on DVD, it has become something of a meme among film fans - the most intense and prescient movie of the millennium (one viewer described it as finding Necronomicon in the basement and being subjected to something you were never meant to see). The plot of the film is that scientists are living incognito in a planet like ours, but currently in the dark ages, steeped in mud, disease, shit and executions. They are waiting for the renaissance, but as the film goes on and as one army slaughters another army and as people continue to squeal in their own film, it is clear that the planet is one a loop of its own degradation and the renaissance that happened on Earth will never happen here. This is the sort of ‘narrative doubt’ - that the world is not going to be like we hoped it would - that I’m seeing more and more of, and which the Paris attacks have most recently brought to the surface.

So god damn I am going to make sure that I enjoy the Brian fucking Jonestown Massacre tonight.

One of my budgies has the most remarkable habit of singing in her sleep when she dozes off mid-afternoon. With her beak tucked under her wings, she rocks to and fro while trilling softly to herself. Apparently this is a common thing for budgies to do - I wish humans did it.

Last updated January 15, 2017