Somewhere over the Rainbow… Dildo.

Last week a friend sent me a picture of yet another ‘novelty’ butt plug, this time with a political theme (posted here: Butt wait, there’s more) which I take as fair and just retribution for spamming everyone with the My Little Pony Fleshlights and the story of the Door Stop Butt Plug lately… but seriously?  Am I to become everyone’s Go To Gal for every weird sex toys and erotic paraphernalia from now on?  Because honestly, I am not searching for this stuff, I’m not stumbling on this stuff… you lot are sending me this stuff now!

I’m starting to feel some sort of perverted consumer product reviewer who gets sent random sex toys in their (e)mail so they can ‘Try it and share it with your friends!’.

Here is the latest offering – a 3D printed DIY Rainbow dildo/vibrator complete with flashing lights and brown-chicken-brown-cow soundtrack:

Actually, I think it’s kinda pretty… anyone got a friend with a 3D printer?

It’s his first day on Wall Street. Give him time.

Fuckin’ BOO-YA!

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Went to see Wolf of Wall Street last night and was blown away.  I love Scorsese, he takes these anti-hero biographical tales and weaves them into amazing and confronting, in-your-face, films full of capitalism, organized crime, greed, violence, drugs, sex, excess and inevitable downfall – places where the lines of good and evil, legal and illegal, moral and amoral are either so blurred for, or so far behind the protagonist, that the audience is both appalled and enthralled.  The Wolf of Wall Street is no exception, in fact it damn well epitomizes these things as it follows the meteoric and unquestionably illegal rise to enormous wealth of Jordan Belfort (played by a very energetic, bordering on manic, Leonardo di Caprio) and his merry band of con men.

I haven’t read the book, but as I expect it to be in an extremely narcissistic first person narrative, I think I might have to dig up a copy for shits and giggles.  The film depicts Jordan Belfort’s humble, and seemingly naive, beginnings where his mentor Mark Hanna (a very laid back, chest beating, throat singing, and totally drug fucked, Matthew McConaughey) shows him the ropes of this Wall Street gig, and explains that the stock brokers primary function is not necessarily to make money for their clients, but rather, ‘the name of the game (is) moving the money from the client’s pocket to your pocket’.  In an untimely twist of fate, this savvy and formative piece of Wall Street wisdom arrives right before the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash, which suddenly leaves Belfort newly registered and ready to trade, but also – somewhat unemployed.

But never fear, Belfort obviously learned his lessons well.  Perhaps a little too well, and he sets about creating a company of his own to do just that.  Belfort finds a partner of equally flexible morals in the oddly frumpy Donnie Azoff, (Jonah Hill from, well, everything), and then surrounds himself with a small band of ‘salesmen’, mostly small time drug dealers, and turns them into an army of dodgy stockbrokers, whose sole aim is to use his masterful sales script to rip off investors with a brutally self interested ‘wolf pack/frat boy’ mentality… and by all accounts they get very, very good at doing exactly that.  It’s the 90s and yuppie greed is so not dead, man!

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Little known fact: the Wolf of Wall Street has the distinction of having the largest number of ‘fucks’ recorded in a non-documentary film … there are 506 ‘fucks’ in total, from a whopping 2.81 ‘fucks’ per minute!  😀

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The money piles up.  They revel in their success, and their excesses appear only limited by imagination – enormous mansions, luxury yachts, unlimited drugs (oh my god, so many drugs), designer suits, cheap hookers, expensive meals, fast cars, high class escorts, dwarf tossing, half naked marching bands… you can tell these guys are in a downward spiral and Scorsese celebrates it with a dark humour.  Belfort not surprisingly ends up coming across like some sort of modern day Gatsby on crack – literally, so much coke! – and you know he’s going to come all unstuck, as the SEC and the FBI start sniffing around.  But true to form, he seems completely unrepentant over his ill gained wealth and seemingly convinced (deluded?) he can con his way out of trouble’s way.

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Belfort does appear to ‘suffer’ a momentarily appearance of actually being human upon finding out his trophy wife, Naomi aka Duchess (the stunningly gorgeous Aussie, Margot Robbie) is going to leave him and take the kids, and has one other slight moment of human concern (for himself, of course) about going to jail for his misdeeds.  However, even this is depicted as being rapidly overcome as he remembers that even jail time isn’t so bad… for people with money.

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Overall, Scorsese depicts Belfort as a deplorable and unapologetically flawed creature riding a tsunami of economic greed, at the expense of a cast of thousands we never meet; whose wave inevitably comes crashing down onto the rock and a hard place, that is otherwise known as the FBI; only to eventually come up for air on the other side of jail, smiling and peddling his one true ‘talent’ – grifting – as a motivational speaker to unsuspecting wannabe Kiwi salesmen in Auckland.  Go figure.

Love or hate Jordan Belfort, it really doesn’t matter here – I thought this film was brilliant and Scorsese is at the top of his game.  Go see it.  Twice.

Australia Day – things we can not change.

I’m not exactly the poster child for acceptance and resignation.  The idea of accepting things we can’t change is somewhat alien to someone like myself, who has spent their life pushing shit uphill with a shovel to try and achieve the things I desperately want to achieve.  So I kinda get the whole ‘just can’t let go’ thing.  For once though, I am not sitting here writing about infertility or chronic pain or arsehole uni supervisors.  What I was thinking about is Australia Day and the socio-political nightmare that it has become.

I don’t really remember Australia Day figuring largely in my childhood.  In fact, I can’t really remember celebrating it in any special way at all.  This could be because we were often off camping at Stradbroke (or similar) at this time of year, or more likely that Australia Day barbecues with friends and family have all melded together with the other general myriad of reasons why we would get together and indulge in the same things – barbecues, beer, swimming, sun, sand and all the rest of it.  I don’t recall wearing or waving little Australian flags in my youth… in fact, I think you would have been hard pressed to find Aussie Day paraphernalia when I was a kid.

I’m not sure who first decided that non-Indigenous Australians needed to feel bad about celebrating the fact that we love living in Australia, by re-labelling Australia Day as ‘Invasion Day’, but I don’t honestly think it has done anyone any favours.  Contention and divisiveness of this nature will never help bring communities together.  On the one hand, you have indigenous Australians dwelling on the various horrors early European settlers committed upon first coming to this land over 200 years ago – and subsequently fostering a discontent and animosity in their communities and, very sadly, in their youth.  Much of this history is being read between the lines as indigenous Australians did not have a tradition of written history prior to the arrival of the Europeans.  And I sometimes wonder how much of that ‘reading the unwritten’ is potentially selective, designed to push various political agendas… Yes, there were many, many truly heinous mistakes made… but can Bruce from down the street do anything to really fix it?  Nope.  Not a damn thing.

And on the other hand, you have the Australians of European descent feeling confused and variously affronted at being made to feel guilty over something that 1) we did not actually do personally, and 2) we literally had, and still have, absolutely no control over.  Yes, there are many elements of our shared history that are remnants of a less enlightened time, which I am sure every one of us would change if we were given an opportunity to do so – but no matter how much reconciliation and public acknowledgement of the tragedies of our collective past, there are just so many things that we, the modern citizens of Australia, can not change.

None of us can change our history… it’s simply not possible.  No one is denying that unimaginably horrid things that occurred in the past that are completely acceptable to us now.  We acknowledge and accept that these things happened to real people – but we are all at a complete loss as to how to rectify the situation.  All that can be done now, is to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite that shared history to shift focus onto the dreadful atrocities committed by these long dead white men.  But this seems a futile or even an empty gesture; attempting to appease people who are somehow stuck or trapped living with this past, unable to forgive or forget it.  It seems too, that people wilfully hanging onto the crimes against their fore bearers also strangely want the rest of us to be continually confronted and even defined by it as well.  The figure of our shared history looms too large for indigenous Australians to forget it, while at the same time white Australians are completely impotent to adequately alter it.

Being Australian and wanting to celebrate Australia Day does not mean we are not mindful of the mixed emotions some people have towards this shared history, nor does it mean we have forgotten it.   Sure, there is always going to be that yobbo who thinks that ‘Straya Day (Fuck, I hate hearing that term – to me, it’s a huge flashing neon sign saying we are not investing enough in education) is about boozing up, and fat slabs of steak, and getting sunburnt playing backyard cricket, who puts little to no thought into the politically delicate minefield that Australia Day has become, and who thinks that Indigenous Australians ‘have just gotta get over it, mate’.  And, you know, sometimes I despair that that yobbo is in the majority, largely due to over representation in the media – the same media which appears to be working it’s best to make us feel bad about being proud to be Australian on Australia Day.  We are not all that yobbo, but you gotta wonder if he has a point.

There is currently a vocal movement lobbying to move Australia’s national day of celebration from it’s current position on the calendar to a different date.  January 26th… the date chosen to celebrate the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Cove in 1788.  January 26th is not exactly the ‘Invasion Day’ date these lobbyists make it out to be.  It is not the date Australia was first ‘discovered’ by Europeans.  It is not the date of any of the documented horrific massacres of indigenous Australians.  Nor is it even the actual arrival date of the First Fleet – the First Fleet fleet turned up in Botany Bay somewhere between the 18-20th of January and if memory serves, weather prevented all ships from landing safely in the Cove until the 26th, though some were thereon the 24th or thereabouts.  So it was an arbitrarily chosen date to celebrate an anniversary on from the get-go.  And while I applaud the ideology behind attempting to make all Australians happier about our shared history and heritage, I wonder – would choosing another arbitrary date to celebrate being Australian make any real and/or tangible difference to those who currently feel disenfranchised by celebrating on January 26th?  At the end of the day, I don’t think so.

Because I keep coming back to this one inalienable fact:  We could change the date – but we can’t change the history.  We can not undo the wrongs that have been done in the past – no matter how much we might wish to, or how many dates we arbitrarily move around on the calendar.  It’s becoming glaringly obvious that token gestures, apologies and official speeches of reconciliation are not sufficient to alleviate the damage that has been done to the collective imagination of Australia’s indigenous people…  So we can change as many dates as may be, but somehow I strongly doubt it would make a lick of difference in the hearts of the people who find offence where none was intended.

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Jimmy Carr – Gagging Order

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Went to see Jimmy Carr last night and can’t tell you how terrified I was that our tickets turned out to be in the very front row!  As many will know, Jimmy Carr spends about a third of his act either talking with members of the audience, taking the piss out of members of the audience, or outright bitch slapping members of the audience into next week!  And I for one, seriously didn’t want to end up being one of those in the latter group.

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Anyway, I needn’t have worried – of course there was a semi-inebriated yobbo of questionable mental capacity, prepared to go early and go hard, effectively drawing fire away from the rest of us for the entire duration of the show.  I mean, seriously… if you’re going to heckle someone like Jimmy Carr, you better have something better up your sleeve than, ‘Your Mum’ or ‘Your girlfriend’ for a retort.  For the entire gig, the wanker, (Jordan, as we discovered later), was at the pointy end of every single joke that in anyway referenced persons of limited intellectual abilities or questionable moral behaviour…  In fact, poor Jordan got picked on during any opportune moment when Jimmy Carr wanted to sleight the not so quick, or allow a moment to let a joke settle in a bit for the peanut gallery.

Couple of things that stood out this show… slightly less pedophile jokes, slightly more geriatric jokes… slightly less bestiality jokes, slightly more tax man jokes :)… still roughly the same amount of jokes about sexuality, religion and/or racism (usually all mixed into the same gag for greater shock and horror effect).  And holy shit, can he think on his feet!  I’ve seen most of his stand up shows before and some of his material was a bit familiar as he threw well practiced lines at members of the audience who had the audacity/stupidity? to yell out an opinion, but you don’t really appreciate how quickly he snaps out those barbed retorts until you’re seeing him responding to his audience in real life.  All round he was pretty awesome.  I maintain that, he is crude, coarse, common, vulgar and fucking hilarious.  I laughed so much my sides ached and my cheeks hurt.

Of the three hundred odd jokes that he claims to tell in a show, only one stuck in my head, which he claims he, ‘heard it from a bunch of Aussies blokes, so you know right away, it’s going to be a bit brutal, yeah?’…

Q:   “How do you get a gay guy to screw a chick?”
A:   “Shove her cunt full of shit.”

Yeah.  Bit hard to forget, that. I was both repulsed and involuntarily amused.

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During one particular ‘bit’, he threw open to the audience, asking the women there present, what sort of unsavoury sexual practices men had asked them to perform.  His general premise seemed sound – anything turns men on, so you never know what sort of weird stuff they will have asked their partners to do.  Sooo many couples gone dead silent at this point and laughing nervously… I could feel the guy behind me sitting bolt upright in what I assume was abject terror as he wondered if his girlfriend was going to shout out something he’d rather not have made public!

One woman turned it up by saying that one guy wanted to ‘fuck her with his foot…’  OMG.  Which of course prompted a few questions from Jimmy, and a response that came something like ‘Well, he liked the feel of it.  Apparently he had a dog that used to lick his feet…’  Yup.  Dig up, sweetie.  Not making this sound any better.  The next woman to volunteer information said a guy wanted to ‘give her a Strawberry Shortcake*’.  I have to admit, I was nonplussed having never heard this term before… there was however a rather noticeable collective groan from the crowd behind us – they obviously knew what it was.  Jimmy Carr too, had never heard of it and wanted to know what it was.  The woman who had offered this information said it was ‘giving a guy head, and then he punches you’.  Which made little sense, but gave the comedian plenty to work with.

*You know I totally had to Urban Dictionary that shit when I got home, and it was so much worse than what she said!  Ewww…

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While fairly confident that most think they have heard it all before, there were SOOOO many things going through my mind that I, personally, could have yelled out in response to this particular question…
Things that would have made men cover their nether regions!
Things that would have made women cover their eyes at the mental image!
Things that might have even make people throw up in their mouths a little!
… but they say discretion is the better part of valour, so I chose to remain silent.

Made me think though – if there were so many nasty, nasty things that I could have yelled out that would have mightily embarrassed long distant men in my past (fortunately I don’t think I know them anymore, and there’s a reason for that!), whose proclivities do not bear thinking about… it made me wonder what sort of kinky shit were the other women in the audience keeping to themselves?   O_o

Gorgeous altogether.

Damn.  I could have totally tortured my kid by posing him for hours in cute little poses from medieval paintings… don’t know why I didn’t think of it at the time.  Now, of course, he’s getting too old and too cool for school to let me take portraits of him for hours in costumes.  C’est la vie… opportunity missed 🙂

I’ve just stumbled on the work of Australian photographer, Bill Gekas who has an obvious fondness for the works of the Great Master painters of the Renaissance, in particular the Northern Masters, such as Vermeer, Van Eyck and Rembrandt.  The results of his very photographic model/daughter are stunning.  Beautiful sets, beautiful use of light, beautiful attention to detail and absolutely beautiful results.  Almost makes me want to buy some lights and set up a studio again… almost.

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