hot soup girl

Voodoo.

2005-08-28T02:22:00.000+10:00

hot soup girl: I watch some crap on television. Last night I watched Pretty Woman, The Director's Cut and read the original screenplay at the same time. I conducted this experiment for the benefit of science, but did science thank me? No.

Signalstation: There was a director's cut? I hope it involved the director getting cut.
Signalstation: Tiny little cuts on the arms and legs that will get infected.
Signalstation: wait... I just realized you said you had the screenplay. Why?

hot soup girl: The director's cut addendum was the only reason I watched it. I was hoping for a gritty, unhappy ending.
hot soup girl: I'm joking.

Signalstation: Ah. Thank goodness.

hot soup girl: Well, sort of. Apparently the original screenplay was quite different to the one they ended up filming. In the original, Julia Roberts' character is a hypersexual drug addict, and ends up being rejected by Richard Gere. It ends badly.
hot soup girl: Mary Gaitskill says that when the director of The Secretary first approached her about adapting her short story, he promised her that he wouldn't 'do a pretty woman' to the original text.

Signalstation: The craziest I've done is watched the film while dressed all trampy and humming "Some Day My Prince Will Come" the whole time. I figured it might work like a magical love spell, luring a rich man to find me, see the movie and clothes, get the hint and whisk me away from all this.

hot soup girl: That sounds like voodoo.
hot soup girl: Did a rich man find you?

Signalstation: Not yet.

hot soup girl: Well, one can hope.

Signalstation: And this make-up is getting kinda crumbly.... it's been years.

I'm Not Alive.

2005-04-21T16:22:00.000+10:00

Hey baby. What've you, uhm, been up to?

Right, right. Yeah, me too. Real busy, y'know how it is. Well, first I had to go on tour with the Billy Corgan Poetry Roadshow, giving him enunciation training and packing his mouth with dry ice between readings. Then I fell off a ladder while polishing the smoke alarm, plus the phone got disconnected so I had to communicate with the outside world using only my pheromones. Which was pretty exhausting, and frankly I don't think my glands have had a workout like that for ages.

So yeah. Nice to see you.

In other news, my housemate, K, stuck his head out of a first floor window yesterday and when he looked down, he saw Nicholas Cage and crew filming 'Ghost Rider' in a Melbourne alleyway. Highlights apparently included watching Nicholas ostentatiously 'prepare' for his role between scenes: chanting 'I'm NOT ALIVE! I'm NOT ALIVE! I'm NOT ALIVE!' (the titular character of 'Ghost Rider', for those who don't know, isn't alive) and loudly singing the intro to 'Surf Safari' by the Beach Boys between takes. K shared a clandestine eye-rolling moment with a member of the crew before leaving Mr Cage to it (where 'it' equals getting your wig fluffed by an assistant). Wish I'd been there. Lucky bastard.

Girlfriend in a Coma.

2004-11-22T20:22:00.000+10:00

hot soup girl: Here's my idea: you pay a corporation to put you in an induced coma for a month or two, while they run your life for you. You wake up and everything's been dealt with - ex-partners broken up with gracefully, all messy loose ends tied up - and you just pick up where they've left off. Robots may be involved.

signalstation: maybe a robot duplicate of yourself?

hot soup girl: Sure, why not?

signalstation: I'm glad it was that easy to convince you. I was ready to weep hot tears of frustration if you weren't willing to concede.

hot soup girl: I'm all for the robot. I'm thinking it would look like a rough fascimile of you, with a plate printed on its chest letting people know that they're interacting with a proxy.

signalstation: A proxy that thinks nothing of extending a middle digit and telling someone on your behalf to "sit on it and spin, shit-eyes" while breaking up with them.

hot soup girl: Maybe. Personally, I'd like my facsimile to deal with the situation with grace, self-respect and compassion. It's just that I'd rather sleep through the accompanying suffering, while the robot glides through with emotional imperviousness.

signalstation: Ah. See, I want a two-fisted duplicate. One with a reputation so fearsome that people will plead with me not to enter that coma.

hot soup girl: That works.
hot soup girl: This idea reminds me of the induced comas that opera singers opted for in the 70s as a effortless weight-loss solution.
hot soup girl: That didn't work out too well. Probably because the appropriate robot technology hadn't evolved yet.

Do you like the internet?

2004-09-21T23:38:00.000+10:00

Oh, I know, everyone says they do.

Three things:

1. Check out the amazing art of Ray Caesar, reminiscent of work by Mark Ryden (and Loretta Lux too, actually). I'm particularly in love with cat girl, supergirl, the girl with the eyeball and the girl with the unwieldy cranial protrusion and fibrous arms. Deliciously wrong.

2. I stumbled across a new word today: 'callipygian'. It is my gift to you, and to your perfectly formed buttocks.

3. And lastly, look, I am not kidding about this: clicking on the next link will take you directly to Batman and Robin porn. (I concede: this isn't going to work out for everyone, but I think it's neat, in an 'Oh dear' sort of way.)

Briefing.

2004-09-16T01:57:00.000+10:00

Okay, thanks for coming in. We're running a little late, so let's jump to it and get the briefing underway.

Firstly: the goddamnest most funniest dinosaurs I ever did saw.

Secondly: Charlie White and Joshua.

Thirdly: blueprints of sitcom houses (and a map of Gilligan's Island) by Mark Bennett.

Fourthly: masks. Masks and masks and masks and masks and masks.

That's it. Please take your dossiers with you and follow Frank to the armoury, where you will be equipped with matching engagement rings that release an odourless knockout gas. Have fun, kids!

Feathers.

2004-06-06T01:18:00.000+10:00

I did some calculations, and in the end, decided on a pelican. My first choice, a swan, appealed for romantic reasons, but lacked stamina. Geese, though stout, resilient and certainly capable of flying across whole oceans at a time - as I myself would need to - were too trapped by flock mentality. I mean honestly - who can be bothered with fixed migratory routes and V-formations? Pfft. It's a culture I have no time for, and frankly, that's why I dropped out of highschool in the first place. And so, a pelican: clumsy, sincere, beautiful in flight; ugly, so they say, in repose. Good at fishing. Longest beak in the world. I'd hoped you might like that.

Next thing you know, there I am, stumbling out of the library with an armful of books on feather chemistry and wind dynamics and maps of tiny un-named mid-Pacific atolls (just rocks really, but somewhere to rest along the way). With a scalpel, I cut out pictures and made a collage: a caricature, sure, but good enough for creative visualisation. Then I stole a bunch of graph paper from the art shop and spread it out on the carpet at home. For diagrams. I turned the laundry into the Coral Sea; the hallway runner into the Equator. Micronesia sprinkled across the kitchen floor like crumbs.

Abraham Ortelius drew the first map of the Pacific ocean in 1589, and these days they take photographs from satellites. But there's never been a map like mine: a bird's eye view, for reals. I've sent it to you in the mail, fifty sheets rolled up inside a gym bag. It'll get there before I do.

When I arrive, I'll come to you as you leave the office. I don't know what day, or even, really, what month, but I'll get there and I'll wait for you in the carpark at closing time, pectinated claws folded neatly beneath my soiled plumage. Perhaps I'll sit on the bonnet of your burnt umber Ford Escort and rest my wrinkled, scrotal neck pouch against your windscreen. I will preen, I will oil myself, I will run my tattered bill through my down, because I want to look my best, for you. But there will be broken feathers, injuries, a bleeding tongue. Lice, too, no doubt. I could almost fall asleep there on the hot metal, dreaming of the many times I considered drowning. I could have happily dropped straight into the sea - plummeted, pinions tucked to my sides - were it not for the memory of your soft seafoam skin, the white sandbar of your forehead, the coastal sweep of your receding hairline.

I will tuk-tuk my lower mandible in exhaustion, and wait. I'll be patient. I'll shut my eyelids and picture a nest: three plain, bluish eggs. I'll be patient, and wait for you to finish work and find me. What a surprise it will be. I'll be patient. I know how your boss likes to keep you late on Fridays. I can wait.

Blink blonk blunk.

2004-02-28T00:47:00.000+10:00

'Driver', the latest issue of Cordite is up. It's sexxxy.

Also, toy piano music.

Fonda.

2004-02-07T21:49:00.000+10:00

HSG: Have you ever heard Jane Fonda's Workout tape?

K: No.

HSG: I heard it once when I was fifteen, and all I remember is Jane Fonda screaming 'Make it BURN!' over and over.

K: Sounds terrifying. Why is she telling people to set fire to things? That doesn't sound like effective exercise.

HGS: Exactly. It's more like Jane Fonda's Arson tape.

Organ Grinding.

2004-02-07T21:27:00.000+10:00

Has it been a while since you saw some monkey automata?

Thought so.

I can see it in your eyes: dull, haunted, monkey-less.

Honeybunny, put down the saucepan. Come to papa.

Tiara.

2004-01-26T01:26:00.000+10:00

Call it a sabattical: I spent some time wearing a tiara at the beach. Those who know me in real life know this is not a fabrication.

So, a brand new year, and lots of things are different already. Mister Pants has returned. Spalding Gray has gone missing. Angels are falling out of the sky like broken satellites.

Also, a friend of mine, Simmone Howell, now has a story up at the Barcelona Review. Fancy.

I've got two pieces up too, a pdf of an old poem at Going Down Swinging , and a search poem called A Prank Call To John Howard in the latest issue of Cordite.

A search poem, by the way, is what you get when you type a 'title' into, say, Google, and then fashion the results into something that looks like a poem. Mine are not the best example of the form; I suggest checking out some of the others on the site.

Haiku Mania.

2003-11-20T00:31:00.000+10:00

Davey Dreamnation, the hand inside the puppet head at Cordite and ludicrously successful musical 'artist' (who acknowledges the following as influences: 'Drugs, opinions, music, media, beauty, penguins, vanilla slice, national anthems, sports modelling') has just returned from the World Haiku Conference in Japan. Here's a sample of what he had to offer.

Sick.

2003-11-20T00:24:00.000+10:00

Trust me, even if I'd been around this week, you wouldn't have liked it. I've had stomach flu since Friday night and have been crawling around the bathroom floor throwing up and fainting and stuff. I am up to Day Number Five in bed. I am seriously hardcore. I rock it to the tip top. I am so hip it hurts, gastro-intestinally.

Meanwhile, I heard you were looking for these:

* Your pen
* Your photo album
* Your vinyl collection
* Your pay cheque
* Your mother

Funny how they're always in the last place you look.

Furry Pop.

2003-11-04T12:31:00.000+10:00

Been listening to Olivia Newton John singing 'Physical' tonight. Especially the bit at the end where she gets all raunchy and primal:

Let's get animal, animal
I wanna get animal
Let's get into animal...

I cannot resist singing along, but add the word 'suits' to the end of each line, as Our Livvy herself ought have to begin with.

Cheese House.

2003-10-17T01:54:00.000+10:00

First, you get a house. You get a house, and then you get some cheese, and then you cover the house with the cheese. That's the recipe.

Then, you get a jacket, and a bedroom, and a couch, and a desk, and a bathroom, and you do the exact same thing.

Then, you set a piano on fire, and you serve the fruit platter.

Let's Put an End to This.

2003-10-15T12:38:00.000+10:00

It's becoming a bit disgraceful, isn't it? It's becoming a pattern. Whenever I actually bother to show up, it's the same old thing: no sooner have I strolled in the back door, whistling like I'd just nipped out for a packet of cigarettes a half hour instead of a month ago, than I'm talking about myself again. Telling you how great I look in a poncho or showing you my brand new water-skiing trophy. And you stand there, tears of fury collecting in the corner of your eye, as I do a little dance - a foxtrot even - on the kitchen linoleum, kiss you on the mouth and ask what's for dinner.

So, what's for dinner?

Here's the thing. I'm giving a talk later this month at the Victorian Writers Centre, as part of a seminar called 'Writers & the Web: An insight into the possibilities for writers online'. Also on the panel: Michele Sabto, Michael Farrell and Dr David Reiter. As you can see, they're all much more famous than me. More info down the bottom of this page.

Oh, and another thing I forgot to tell you: I had something published a while back over at Cornerfold. It's in flash - click on the picture of the doll to launch, and turn your speakers on.

Anyhow.

Later, after I've mopped the gravy up with a torn piece of vienna loaf, sung a few bars of push it in your ear, and then made your eyelids flutter with four hours of breathtaking, super-human, 'Hey, I'm home now baby and I ain't never gonna leave you again until the next time' sex, it's time for you to go downstairs. I'm fast asleep, and my snoring's rattling your collection of carnival glass. There's a shovel in the laundry and a vegetable patch beneath the jacaranda tree the size of a grown man, if that man was lying down. You know what you have to do, and I can't say as I blame you. You know I meant everything I promised, but you've just got to make sure.

Sweetpea, I ain't never gonna leave you.

How the Trouble Starts.

2003-10-11T20:36:00.000+10:00

Here's something I overheard today:

BOY: So, if I see an object, I can use that object to end the world. That's how it works.

HIS GRANDMOTHER: Dear? I'm really not interested.

No Offal.

2003-09-09T02:51:00.000+10:00

Okay, so I'm gonna be all 'Hey dude, look at me!' for a moment here. The marvellous Signalstation has conducted a Q & A with me via email (and to be honest, I took an embarrassingly long time to A the Qs, so I'm chuffed to see they still wanted to use 'em). Hurrah! Click here to find out what kind of robot I'd like to have and under what circumstances I may be coerced into eating offal.

Handkerchiefs.

2003-09-09T00:42:00.000+10:00

In one dream, it was handkerchiefs, the coloured silk ones that magicians use. He felt his lips itch, and putting his fingers to his mouth, found a corner of fabric poking out. He pulled and out popped a string of scarves, one after another, tied at the corners. At first it seemed wondrous: like kissing, like finding money. Imagine the looks on their faces! he thought. At last, a real talent! He liked the handkerchiefs, and some had tiny, silver, hand-painted stars that made him feel lucky. Also, there were economic benefits: no longer would he be forced to purchase handkerchiefs like ordinary men. He couldn't wait for the weekend. He couldn't wait to show his ex-girlfriend.

But after the eighteenth handkerchief—a blue one with white dolphins swimming along the edge—he started to get frightened. Each handkerchief ended with another knot, another handkerchief. On it went. It began to hurt his oesophagus. They were scratching him. His gag reflex made a comeback. His eyes watered. It seemed as though it would never, ever end. And it didn't.

Another time it was tongues. His tongue came out and then he grew another and that came out too. He grew another but the third tongue was deformed. A broad, triangular stump of flesh: a cane toad's tongue. He didn't know how to speak with it. He knew that even if he managed to learn how, his voice would be different than before and this made him unhappy. He looked in the mirror and manipulated the strange, vestigial amphibian tongue with his fingers, tried to stretch it. It struck him that he was now ugly. No one will ever be able to love me with this tongue, he thought. I will be alone forever. And he was right.

For a week, he awoke with a lump in his throat and foam on the pillow. He dreamt that cocktail umbrellas pierced the hollow of his cheek. He dreamt of spitting tennis rackets and mice; a surge of blue electricity like vomit. He dreamt that bullets poured from his mouth into a glass slipper. In the mornings he would drive to work, thinking: This means something. Perhaps I should go to the dentist; maybe I should stop telling lies. This is a sign of some kind. This is a sign, a sign. But it wasn't.

---------------------------------
[This story appears on the Visible Ink 'Soundtrack' CD.]

Zombie Poems.

2003-09-03T23:09:00.000+10:00

Now, I ain't gonna get all sombre and apologetic. And I ain't gonna throw my arms around you and start blubbering about how sorry I am not to have spoken to you for weeks and weeks and how I've been carrying a photo of you around in my wallet (the one where you look like crazy old Boris Yeltsin even more than usual) and how I take it out and look at it when I'm sitting in the toilet cubicle at work. Okay? I just ain't. Picture me slapping you on the back, that'll do, and handing you a twenty so you can go get us both a beer or something. I've missed you. What? No, I didn't say anything, it must have been that guy. That guy over there. That's the guy.

Anyway. There's a whole buncha things I've neglected to tell you about, as you can imagine. I don't have time to spill them all now but one thing you have to do is go visit Cordite. I know, I know, you don't usually read online poetry magazines because they're jam packed with rhyming couplets about endangered marsupials. Understood. But this issue is all about - get this - zombies.

Yes, zombies.

Also, Buffy the vampire slayer and Sarah Connor, and the removal of Phar Lap's heart.

There's a review of Undead (the new Australian zombie extravaganza) written by my esteemed housemate Dr Mangan, as well as an interview with the film's directors, conducted by my friend, international pop superstar Davey Dreamnation.

And while you're there, check out the blog: I've made an urgent plea for zombie equality, and need a few more signatures on the petition.

Micallef.

2003-07-23T01:22:00.000+10:00

So last night I was in the studio audience of Micallef Tonight. I won't say too much about it - lest I gush - but I did have a chat with M Signalstation about the experience today; he's posted an extract from the transcript here.

Incandescent vs Fluorescent.

2003-06-30T00:25:00.000+10:00

You know what's interesting? People who look as though they're lit from within are very attractive - whereas people who are actually, literally, lit from within are much less so.

True fact.

Island.

2003-06-24T19:36:00.000+10:00

We've been on this island so long I barely remember what life was like before. If I sit and concentrate really hard, with the hat pulled over my eyes, I see a room with model aeroplanes and a broken ship-in-a-bottle. There's a girl in pink cashmere, who smells like vanilla coke. Sometimes there's a voice - announcing the weather or reminding me that Winchesters Peanut Butter is the crunchiest peanut butter there is - but that's pretty much it. The sea air has a way of wiping you clean, and I never was much of a brainy type person anyhow.

Some of the others remember more, but then, they left more behind than me. Maybe if I'd had an audition to go to, or an invention to build, or a stockholders meeting to chair, I'd be unhappier about being stuck here. But I don't mind it. I like our cosy, thatched huts, and I like coconut cream pie. I never have to worry about numbers or money or the alphabet, plus there are two pretty girls here who mend my clothes and don't slap me and call me stupid like the others used to.

We've built rafts. A dozen, at least. Something always seems to go wrong with them. The professor keeps coming up with blueprints and I keep spilling soup on them or accidentally using them to start the campfire. I'm so clumsy. I guess I've always been that way.

Actually, there are a few other things I remember from before. A sound: something whipping through the air. And a dark room, stinking of camphor and cider apples. Sometimes I wake up at night and my fingers ache like I've been holding onto something awful tight, but I try not to think about it.

There's a breeze that sweeps through the palm trees. Late at night, I crawl out of my hammock and go listen to it. It's like silk rustling, or hands rubbing together. In the moonlight, sea spray shaped like a genie rises from the lagoon, wearing harem pants and holding a scimitar above its head. It whispers that one day there will be another storm like the one that brought us here. It says one day a plane will fly overhead and see a smoke plume or the wreck on the beach. I stare at the genie in silence until I'm too tired to stand up. Open sesame, it says, and tune in next week.

Not long ago, the professor repaired the radio transmitter with seaweed and oyster shells. Powered by bamboo bicycle, it filled the air with scratches of noise; static; fragmented voices. Howls. An army of ghosts. When I first heard it, a stream of pee ran down my leg and puddled in my sneaker.

Anyhow, silly old me, I confused it with the desalination machine the professor had built the week before and when he came back from lunch I'd already poured half a bucket of seawater inside. His eyes popped like crazy and the skipper chased me around the camp, bellowing and slapping me with his hat. He hit me so hard my shoulder turned blue.

But in the end, no one was really that surprised. I can't help being me, after all, and in no time, Ginger was scolding the professor and clutching me to her bosom like an Emmy. The skipper called me 'Little Buddy' and we got to eat clam chowder for supper and play canasta, just like usual.

I still have the bruises, and Golly do they smart. But it was worth it.

Sign.

2003-06-22T23:57:00.000+10:00

So it's true. There was a Time Out. Yes there was. If you were here, or at least within fifty metres of here with an unobstructed view and a pair of binoculars, you would have admired the way I made the sign with my hands: the lazy horizontal hand resting atop the defiant verticality of the other. You would have said to yourself, 'That's a T that could never stand for Tailspin or Topsoil or Truffle Oil or Tap Dancing or Tantric Sex, no no.' And even though the light reflecting off the lens of the binoculars would have given you a headache like the bloody dickens, you would have known instantly what I meant, and that, my darling, is why I love you.

Because that's the kind of astute web-citizen you are. You've learnt not to panic. When you see a straw hat or torn jacket floating like jetsam on the surf, you don't scream for the lifeguard. You're an old hand at this standing-on-the-beach caper, and pal, this ain't nothing you ain't seen a hundred times before. Like last winter you found a stingray on the sand, lying upside down, gasping for breath. Its lips were like the lips of a human baby and the sounds it made, well, you've been trying to forget them. It had nostrils - wet slits in silver rubber - that opened and closed, opened and closed. You poked it with a stick and stared for a half-hour and wondered how to get it back in the water without touching it with your hands and it felt like your life would never be the same if you couldn't and then you heard the others shout your name and you walked back to the carpark and someone gave you a can of Bondi Cola and it tasted really good. Like ginseng and cinnamon. This is nothing like that, of course; it's quite different. But still.

I promise nothing: things get washed ashore all the time, we both know that. We're men of action, us. And sometimes, inaction.

And maybe the T did stand for 'Tailspin' after all.

You know, my love, I think it did.

Poodles and Biscuits, Sir.

2003-05-16T23:37:00.000+10:00

Right now, and for at least the next ten minutes, this is my favourite thing in the whole world.

Water.

2003-05-09T00:32:00.000+10:00

Sometimes, the hero is trapped in a room that begins suddenly to fill with water. For whatever reason - maybe a burst water pipe or smashed aquarium or malfunctioning sprinkler system or even, perhaps, because the room itself is underwater to begin with, like the control room of a submarine - a torrent of water rushes in.

The hero tries at first to escape. She kicks at the door and then, finding it won't budge, tries to pull the grate out of the ventilation shaft. She swims across the room, looking for tools - a letter opener, a crowbar - and although she sometimes finds these things, they are useless.

The room becomes separated into two layers, like a salad dressing. The bottom half, obviously, is water, above which the remaining air floats like oil. The submerged portion of the room is transformed. Papers, previously stacked neatly on the corner of the desk, become snarls of watercress.

The surface of the water - too turbulent to have formed a meniscus - is the dividing line between two worlds. Below, it is strangely calm. Above, there is foam and noise. If there are others in the room besides the hero, this thin slice of air, narrowing by the minute, is where they will shout, hatch plans and comfort each other. The hero ducks into the water again and again - swims with blocked ears through the slow-dancing shipwreck looking for a forgotten window pane or laundry chute - but returns always to the surface to breathe.

In time, the hero will run out of options and tread water with her forehead touching the light fitting. The others will tire and disappear one by one. As the level rises further, the hero will tilt her head back until at last only her nose and lips remain above the surface, pressed to the plaster, taking rapid little sips of air.

It's okay, though, because the hero knows that something always happens at the last minute. She will prevail. She will be rescued. The flow will abate to a trickle; a wall will give way. There will be a miracle.

The hero, in fact, is wrong. There's no plot twist. The water always fills the room completely. The room never contains an exit. The hero never escapes. But that space at the top - that twenty, fifteen, ten, five centimetres of air between the ceiling and the encroaching surface of the water - that space is enough. Until it isn't.

---------------------
[This story also appears in HEAT 7]