My Hyperreality

I’m a bit of a night owl. I love to stay up late into the silent hours of the night, when the city goes to sleep and I feel like I might be the only person awake. Now, I know that this isn’t the case - there’s always somebody else awake. Usually that somebody is my terrifyingly old neighbour who likes to pee in his back yard while groaning loudly and staring over the fance at me while I take the trash out.

Luckily I don’t have to worry about my crazy neighbour for a good long while because I’m house sitting for some friends of friends in Subiaco. This house is so nice that there’s no way that two school teachers can afford it - they must be drug dealers. It’d be easy to find clients in their classrooms, I’m sure. Not only is the house huge and location fantastic, the place is decorated with beautiful works of art. My favorite furnishing is the spa bath. During my three months here I plan on drinking champagne in the bath at least once - possibly while munching on chocolate covered strawberries and caviar. I must admit that I’ve already had a bit of an accident with the bath though - let’s just say that there were bubbles everywhere, including the ceiling.

For once, though, I’m not finding it particularly calming to be the only one awake late into the night. Here, in this strange large house I find it a bit intimidating. There are strange clicking noises that echo through the house. I don’t know where any of the light switches are. The sheets don’t smell right. I know that all of this anxiety merely stems from the fact that the house is a new place, but I can’t shake the eery feeling like there’s a serial killer waiting to lurch at me from the walk in closet.

I think the biggest issue I’m having is that I’m just not used to being completely alone anymore. I’ve lived in a shared house too long. Even when my housemates aren’t around, and aren’t coming back for the night, their presence is still throughout the house. There’s the knowledge that they will be coming back, some time in the future. Here, though, there is simply me. And this is an awfully big house for one person to rattle around inside of. I feel a bit like a pea inside a barn.

I really didn’t think that I would be missing company so early on into my stay here. Hopefully this will pass, and I’ll quickly grow comfortable being largely on my own again. I am loving the freedom to blast music, walk around naked, and leave my shoes in the middle of the hallway where just anybody can trip over them.

I’m afraid I don’t really have anything particularly interesting or riveting to say here today. I had plans on writing about how watching The Bucket List tonight set me off, and how obviously I’m still having trouble dealing with my father’s impending cancer related death, maybe rant a bit about hopeless university students who want me to fail our group assignment, perhaps mention my inability to cook without making a huge mess to clean up, but to be honest I just can’t be bothered. I’m emotionaly drained and all alone in a huge house, so I’m just going to mindlessly watch some South Park, go to bed, and wake up to a better day.

Really, I got the title wrong. It’s so early that it’s late.

So I’ve recently become part of a very elite group of society: The Watchers of Stand Up Comedy. We of the WoSUC sit around, observing and judging while other, braver, people get up on stage and perform shticks in an effort to get a few laughs, or maybe just some love. But not the dirty, sticky kind of love where afterwards even soaking in bleach doesn’t make you feel clean. How does the saying go? If you can’t do, teach. If you’re not interested in teaching (or banned due to a court order over incident with a Santa Claus costume and a blowtorch that got blown completely out of proportion), critique! Or in this case, criticise. Which is a lot like critiquing, but much more spiteful. Well, it is in my case, anyways.

Yes indeedy, I’m slowly dipping my feet into Perth’s Comedy scene. The water’s lukewarm, and I’m not too worried about leeches. Who knows, soon I might be swimming in it! Laughing it up every night of the week!

For the last few weeks I’ve been heading over to Lazy Susan’s on Tuesday’s (upstairs at The Brisbane) to watch new stand up material. It’s safe to say that a lot of this stuff is very obviously new material - unpolished and often unfunny. A few acts have had me drifting off to think about what laundry I can get away with leaving for another few days, and what needs to be done urgently. But through the mire of poo, race and work related jokes (seriously, how is “I’m the guy who stands up at every office meeting and says ‘Let’s reinvent the wheel!’” supposed to be funny?) shine some real gems of hilarity. There are even some comedians who are consistently hilarious while constantly providing new material!

One example of this is Michael Workman, who, for the three sessions that I have seen him, has always had plenty of new stuff that tickles my funny bone.

We’re married. We had a simple ceremony in his apartment at night. It was beautiful. Although I was a bit disappointed with his vows - they sounded an awful lot like snores. And the priest! Talk about sensitive. Some people pay to be knocked out and tied up. I can’t wait for our babies. They will be hilarious. I will know when I am pregnant because I will suddenly begin laughing at my stomach.

And now that the creepy stalker portion of this post is over with, let me tell you a bit about the other comedy night that I’ve been to. Lauren and I went two weeks ago to the second ever Chuckle’s Comedy Night at the Elephant and the Wheelbarrow. The location matches everything that my heart says a comedy club should be - a small stage in front of several tables, and while there weren’t fun little candles for atmosphere, there were drinks and bar food.

The concept driving Chuckle’s is interesting - a competition between the stand-ups is judged by audience members who hold up a placard for as long as they are entertained. When all placards are down, the comedian is chased off stage with fire and pitchforks and tar and feathers. Or maybe are just courteously asked to leave. If the comedian can make it to five minutes, they go into the running for a fabulous prize! $100 worth of candied ginger! Or was it just $100?

While nobody at Chuckles even came close to the extreme terribleness of some of the acts at Shapiro’s, nobody really matched the possible fantastic-ness, either. In fact, I found myself merely “chuckling” at most of the acts, instead of guffawing. And that kids, is what we call a bad pun. But I suppose leeway must be given - after all, this was only the second time this night has run, and the comedians were obviously unused to, and therefore nervous about, performing while being judged by tipsy audience members holding elephant-shaped placards.

I’m heading back tonight for another go. Partly because the night’s organiser has a really nice smile, but also partly because I would hate for this night to be cancelled in its infancy because not enough people showed support. Perth needs more events like this desperately, and I encourage anyone reading this (and also the bazillions who aren’t) to get their asses over to Chuckle’s either tonight or in two weeks time with their laughing faces on.

Which is a bit of a record, even for me. Although I suppose I can plead extenuating circumstances. My last post on this fantastic blog of awesomeness was September 3rd. That same night, my parents called from India to tell me that an MRI had revealed a tumor in my father’s brain. On September 5th, they arrived in Perth and raced over to the neurosurgeons office. He comfirmed the presence of a tumor (although when it’s the size of a baseball it’s a pretty certain thing), and told Dad he’d be dead by Christmas if they didn’t operate. On the very auspicious date of September 11th, they cut him open.

These past five months have been a whirlwind of events, and emotions. The things that have happened could rival the content of the most melodramatic of soap opera’s. One day, when things are a little bit more distant, I plan on trying to write about the experience. But for now, everything is still a bit too raw.

Last week we went to see the chemotherapist with a new MRI. The results were better than we had dared to hope - thanks to surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy the tumor is being beaten into submission. Walking out of the building, tears in my eyes, I looked up at the clear sky and felt the hot sun beating down, and thought to myself, Oh, that’s right. This is what hope feels like.

As life returns back to some semblance of normality, I find myself a bit at loose ends. One way I plan to deal with this is by returning to my poor, neglected blog and showing it some tender loving care. After all, it’s a terrible thing that I’ve done, wasting the generosity of friends who helped me set this up in the first place.

So expect at least one post a week from now on. I give no promises as to length or content, but trust me when I say that it will be awesome.

Welcome to the future: My Hyperreality 2.0

The internet is littered with my failed attempts at keeping a blog. Over the years I’ve had accounts with angelfire, geocities, livejounal, insanejournal, xanga, and blogspot, just to name a few. I’ve tried writing on everything from short stories to writing inspirations to recipe’s to random daily happenings. Hell, I’ve even tried to create a vlog (granted, it was a joint vlog, but a vlog nonetheless). But for some reason I seem to lose steam pretty quickly (Although I did manage to keep my livejournal going off-and-on for over two years. And on a funny aside in order to get that detail I had to hop over to good ol’ lj.com and accidentally typed in “liverjournal.com”; it was highly amusing).

It’s sort of like how every Christmas my mother gives me a journal, and gives herself a journal, and we both swear blue that we’ll at least write something down every day, but end up forgetting about the whole thing around mid-February. I think it has something to do with habit - ie; how easy it is for me to fall out of the habit of doing things. Or perhaps it would be better to say that I fail at being obsessive - I have many interests but am so easily entranced by new-shiny-awesomeness that they’re all a bit surface. I think it takes a lot more single-minded determination than I possess to successfully maintain a blog.

Of course there’s also the fact that I am so very aware of the things that I do. When I try to write something I always find myself asking “does this sound too contrived? too cheesy? will anybody even care about this?” On the flipside I am a mild egotist, and don’t really see the point in keeping a blog going if I’m not attracting millions of readers - hence why I always failed at written diary keeping. While I’m sure that someday people will be gagging to read my memoirs, autobiography and fictobiography, watch the documentary, the Lifetime afternoon movie and the Hollywood blockbuster reimagining, buy the memorabilia and bake the dedicated dish, these long term rewards are not nearly satisfying enough for my Gen Y “need-it-now” mentality.

It is, of course, highly ironic that I’m currently blogging about my inability to blog. Blame my tossing and turning for that one, folks. I eventually decided that it would be slightly more productive for me to sit on my laptop and write this than lay awake, staring at the ceiling (which is surprisingly hard to see without my glasses on), thinking about all the university work that I could be, should be, doing. Besides, dribbling via the keyboard ultimately stops me from dribbling all over my pillow - and right now I’m trying to be particularly hygienic, what with the broken washing machine and all. Nothing grosser than a drool covered pillow and no easy way to wash it.

If you’re feeling a bit bored or looking for a fun method of procrastination, I challenge you to go forth and see if you can follow my breadcrumbs over the internet. If you find any of my old haunts (that you didn’t previously know about, of course), I will bake you delicious cookies, or maybe even cake! And if there’s one thing that people should know about me, it’s that I make delicious cookies and cake. The second thing is that I’m incredibly modest.

So … After all the drama of moving to a new location (both online and in real life) and then finally sorting out why I couldn’t actually log on as an administrator to actually write anything … I’M BACK!

Try to contain your enthusiasm, please. No no, really, put down the indoor fireworks, there’s no need to go all out just for little me. Oh, why yes! I will accept that check for 9 million dollars!

Watch this space, people - big things are coming. BIG THINGS!!!

So today Josh, Andy and I decided to be brave and watch the Pain Olympics video. Of course, us being the narcissistic freaks that we are, we videoed ourselves watching the video. How very postmodern and self reflexive! And now, you can experience our experiences by pressing “Play” below. Don’t worry, it’s not the ACTUAL video - I wouldn’t force that upon anybody. Well, except my house mates. Who have already been forced.

Now, I must admit I wasn’t expecting the clip to be that disturbing - as you probably guessed from my calling Andy a “wimp” right at the start. But oh my god - surprisingly the sight of somebody castrating themselves was pretty damned disgusting - even though I don’t have a penis of my own to shield protectively, I was still grossed out beyond belief. I think it may have had something to do with the .. erm .. “things” that came out when the testes were forcibly removed from the body.

Then, in yet another stab at procrastination, I got Josh to watch the “2 Girls 1Cup” video, which I’ve heard all about but never actually seen. I only managed to get through this one by telling myself over and over again “It’s okay Serena, it’s just chocolate ice-cream”. But then the vomit thing happened and all my illusions were lost.

You’ve got to ask yourself though, what sort of person DOES these sorts of things? I just can’t fathom the motivation - I can sort of understand the Jackass-type stunts, but when things go to this extreme .. What’s in it for them? I know I personally wouldn’t chop off my penis (okay, don’t have one, but still) or eat another girl’s bodily secretions just for cash. And I can’t imagine that the internet fame that one would get from this sort thing is the sort of internet fame that starts you on the trail to your dream profession …

Now, I suppose the most important thing out of all of this is: Should I be worried about my dear and darling boyfriend Josh’s lack of reaction to this? Or is he just so darned manly that watching another man chop his own balls off doesn’t really faze him that much? Or perhaps he went and cried in the shower afterwards - cupping himself as he hysterically mumbled “Oh god, not the family jewels!”

Apparently my last post wasn’t as funny to other people as it was to me - so perhaps I need to explain myself? Let’s just say that it was a hilarious pseudo discussion of Judith Butler’s hatred of the nickname “Judy” in public spaces because she feels that it separates her, the individual, from her scholarly work. In other words it makes her identity less important, more controllable, more child-like, if you would. Some of the reasons that these associations are made when one uses the name “Judy” instead of “Judith” are A) because “Judy” is a nickname, familiar, while “Judith” is more formal and demands more respect and B) because thanks to actresses like Judy Garland the name “Judy” is alludes to a nostalgic representation of traditional femininity. Hence the hilarity of the statement “One Judy alludes to all Judy’s” and the inclusion of the photo of Judy Garland herself.

Just trust me, okay? It was funny.

In other news the three weeks ahead look like they will be stress filled, after all, The End Of The Universe Is Nigh. Or rather, University. And then it’s time for fun fun fun! By which, of course, I mean “time to find a full time job for the break in order to earn lots of monneys”.

It’s moments like these when I think of that “Retirement” song by the Kaiser Chiefs:

There are many things that I would be proud of
If I’d only invented them such as the wheel
The washing machine and the tumble dryer
On these inventions surely I could retire

I want to retire
No longer required
I want to get by without the man on my back
A tear in my eye
With a heart full of pride
I must go out on a high
And tell nobody why

There are many things that I know I could do
If I’d only have wanted to, such as create
The perfect soulmate everyone would admire
On this creation surely I could retire

If you’re interested, you can find the rest of this song’s lyrics here.

I, too, “want to retire,” preferably before I finish my degree and actually have to work. I just wish that I could invent something so spectacular and useful that I could retire off of it. Of course, I think that this is a common dream for our society (after all, it’s such a popular dream that songs are being written about it). Maybe it’s a reaction to seeing previous generations slaving away at hated jobs for years and years and years and only being able to actually enjoy their lives upon retirement. Let me be a bit clearer in terms of my desire to retire: it’s not that I don’t want to work at all, it’s that I want to work at doing something I love, and get paid enough that I get to do other things I love during my free time and still be able to pay rent/ a mortgage/ bills/ food costs. And unfortunately there are a lot of examples in recent history of this not being the status quo.

Anyways, I’m sort of distracted and flakey this evening, so I might just call it a night and go to bed, wake up early tomorrow morning and try and get a head start on the day/ my life. How lovely it will be to wake up at 5 in the morning to do assignments!

I’m still getting a handle on the intricacies of setting up my very own wordpress website. Tim has been a fantastic help, giving me various tips that I’ll try to put in to practice in the next few days. I must say, though, that I am somewhat annoyed by little niggly things that don’t work out how I think they should - for instance, though I have a “tag cloud” set up on my page (check it out - it’s over to the right of this post, and currently has the oh-so-clever name of “Signifiers“), it doesn’t look like the tags with which I have been tagging my entries (I use the plural form of this word, even though I’ve only written one other entry, because I am highly pretentious) aren’t showing up as part of the actual “tags” section at the bottom of these aforemention entries.

Speaking of convoluted sentences which run on forever, imagine my horror when I learned that my beloved Judith Butler was named winner of the “Bad Writing Contest” in 1998. Granted, the sentence is a bit on the long side:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

But should a theorist so fantastic and so controversial be subjected to the expectations of clear and comprehensible writing that the rest of us mere plebes must adhere to? I think not! After all, convoluted and dense writing means that readers must try harder to understand what she’s writing about! Butler is so amazing that not only does her theory force us to rethink conventions of gender representation, but the way she writes about her theory forces us to confront and reevaluate dominant ideologies about the construction of a sentence! Lead on, Judy, lead on!

And before anyone jumps on me and says “OMG YOU FOOL DON’T CALL JUDITH BUTLER JUDY SHE HATES THAT” I will preemptively respond with: I KNOW. I WAS BEING IRONIC. IT WAS HILARIOUS. I totally get that “It’s Judy in the living room, Judith in public.” Not that I know Judith in the living room .. If I did I probably wouldn’t call her Judy, though. I’d call her “J”. Or something. And while I myself never got a chance to read the fanzine Judy! (Which, incidentally, the big B herself was not a fan of), I totally wish it was still in publication. Check out what Richard Burt had to say about Judy! in his article “Getting off the Subject; Iconoclasm, Queer Sexuality, and the Celebrity Intellectual“:

“It is perhaps clear why Butler dislikes both being called Judy and the fanzine Judy!. For the fanzine is a form of imitation and gender insubordination that mimes and critically exposes Butler’s reliance on “the phallic regulatory norms of institutionalized criticism”: Judy! is a “speculative excess” that exposes the way Butler legitimates her performance of performativity through her own body, or more precisely, through the promise of access to it. Butler’s body matters, it’s “the body you want,” because it will make your body matter. Butler is the critic who will take you inside academia and out, “beyond the confines of the ivory tower” as the introduction to the Artforum interview puts it, if you purchase and mime Butler’s books in the appropriate way, if you submit, that is, to the authority of her lesbian phallus. This is precisely the serious point made comically in Judy!. On a page with the words lesbian phallus written in large Gothic script across it, we read this appreciation of Butler: “Judy is the number one dominator, and the only thing you or I can do is submit gladly. Take it with pride. Think of it like this: Kaja Silverman might be the Phallus masquerading as lack, and Teresa de Lauretis might be lack masquerading as the Phallus, but Judy is the Phallus masquerading as the Phallus.” Judy! isn’t simply a frivolous parody of Butler’s “serious” work, but seriously reveals the excessive, unwittingly self-parodying elements of that work. It puts “seriousness” in quotation marks, deconstructing the opposition between serious original and subversive parody.”

And now, for a little bit of color (of the gray scale sort), I give you a picture of Judy Garland, because one Judy alludes to all Judy’s.

I’ve created this blog (for a second time) in a bid to try and increase my thought coherency, and to have somewhere to record all those little bizarre musings I make (so that I don’t have to bother my long-suffering boyfriend or house mates with them). I’ve promised myself to write something on here once a week - regardless of how insane or stupid it may sound to me. Who knows, maybe something that I think sounds ridiculous may spark a religion, and soon the world would be covered with Ser-worshippers …

A brief note on the word “hyperreality” – a hunt through a dictionary might tell you that the term “hyperreality” refers to an inability to distinguish reality from fantasy, but this is a pretty simplistic definition. Of course, mine is not likely to be much better, because I did say that this was going to be brief. French theorist Jean Baudrillard, now sadly deceased (I wanted to have his babies), theorized that our world has become so saturated with images and symbols (thank you consumerism) that any sense of objective reality lying behind these images or symbols has been obliterated. It is a world overrun with simulacra (another delicious Baudrillardian term): Images are reproduced so many times that they become objects themselves, rather than representing or reflecting them, self referential and devoid of their original meanings. These images, which simulate what they are representing, begin to be viewed as what they are representing, if that makes any grammatical sense at all to somebody other than myself.

Frederic Jameson’s notion of the depthless pastiche links in quite nicely to simulacra and hyperreality, as he theorizes that in our current postmodern environment we have a habit of simply yanking symbols and signifiers out of the past, ignoring and destroying its history as we mash it together with something else. Think of the proliferation of t-shirts with that iconic image of Che Guevara – I’m sure that there are some people out there who brand themselves with an image of El Che because they agree with his leftist guerilla actions, but I’m also sure that there are many people who buy and wear these shirts because they look awesome, and they’ve seen other people wearing them, so they must be awesome. The image of Che Guevera becomes a fashion statement, not a political statement.

I seem to have gone off topic a bit here … But that’s pretty standard for me. This is the interwebs, after all. Also, because this is the interwebs, and because right now I’m feeling lazy (and getting a headache due to sitting in a dark room and staring at a screen) I’m not going to give you any references, nya nya nya. But for a more in depth look at these theories, I recommend checking out Baudrillard’s own work, particularly his book Simulacra and Simulation, or Jameson’s book Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Also, The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought is a must in the arsenal of any individual who professes him/herself to be a cultural theorist.