Well, here’s the hair:

The colour kind of matches my mood of general blue compounded by Bangkok-itis. I’m going back to Australia for a couple of months to soak up some rural peace.

I’ve been wondering what I’d look like with blue streaks in my greying brown hair. I had a box of gouache open on the table, and inspiration hit. Dark blue, light blue, brush. Into the bathroom. Paint, paint, paint. Light blue shows up better than dark. It was fun. But the colour didn’t look that good. Blue might look ok with the right haircut and some other colours in the mix, but the cold colour with nothing else interesting happening only made drab locks look drabber. Nevertheless, painting hair = a good time. Washing it out was also fun. I might try it with another colour.

Starting second childhood early. Beating the rush.

What was that I wrote about a skeezy, diseas-ey tropical city? I think if I wrote that book again I’d have everyone in Ashamoil permanently sick with annoying viruses.

I’m lassitudinal. Have some Gloom (Anton Semenov, DA gallery here), and some Martin Wittfooth, and a charming piece of street art in Rio.

Oh, and I’m now the happy wearer of a pair of flip-flops decorated with plastic jewels, which, when I saw them, I realised I had always subconsciously wanted. I think I shall keep them all my life and be buried in them.

Last night I watched The Good, The Bad, The Weird, a (the?) 2008 South Korean spaghetti western by Kim Ji-woon (Korean title Joheunnom Nabbeunnom Isanghannom … aka “Nom Nom Nom”). Set in 1930s Japanese-occupied Manchuria, it’s a tale of gangsters, killers, bandits, and a treasure map. Inspired by Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, GBW takes the same trio of a bad guy, a kooky bad guy, and a “good” bad guy, adds a cast of other assorted colourful bad guys, plus the Japanese army, and sets them all at each other (with weapons ranging from a morning star to a machine gun — one of the things I enjoyed about the film was its milieu of cultural and technological worlds in collision). I have to agree with the reviewer who called it “a cartoon of a cartoon” — and some of the cartoon lines are faint, notably in the characterisation department. And as you might expect in a cartoon of a spaghetti western, there are no female characters to speak of, except for a few decorative girls and a granny, who was cool in an old silent granny way but didn’t have much screen time.  But I still thought it was a lot of fun. (Not to mention that Byung-hun Lee as “the Bad” Park Chang-yi is my kinda man in black.) Here’s the trailer.

My other recent discovery in the spag-western field is the Spaghetti Western Orchestra. An Aussie group, formerly the Ennio Morricone Experience, they do what their name suggests: play spaghetti western theme music, with great playing, amusing theatrics, and fine scream-yodelling. This is their version of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

It’s here! Innit classy? The design is by Andrew J. McKiernan.

I will always remember how writing my story for this anthology was like chewing my own leg off. And I will also remember Gillian Polack’s editorial patience, conscientiousness, and hand-holding.

Not really related to cultural baggage, but Australian anyway: I’m feeling left out. For the past five years my fellow Melburnians, in their boho-bogan way, have been wearing spray-on jeans and calf-high boots (ugg, biker, musketeer, cavalry, take your pick) in the winter. It seems to have become a sort of municipal costume. And I don’t have any spray-on jeans, and while I do have boots, they’re go-go boots that don’t really go over jeans. Do I take the plunge? I’m feeling more and more old hat, even mumsy, in my bootleg jeans over mid-heel shoes. I don’t think I’m even going to have time to go shopping for costumes this visit, but maybe next year, if the tides of fashion haven’t turned…

Apparently it’s quite common to dream of losing teeth, but this was my first time. I dreamed that one tooth fell out, then the others followed. The first one seemed to leave a gap, but when the others went it was only the enamel that fell off, laving a quite anatomically incorrect flap of tooth-shaped gum behind. Pretty soon my whole mouth was full of these flaps of gum, which seemed to be much more numerous than my teeth (had been), with just a couple of frail, soon-to-be-lost molars remaining. Talking was extremely difficult. It wasn’t until someone else in the dream said they had a sore mouth, and I felt I had to warn them, that I made a very determined effort to speak, and in doing so woke up. In the dream I had already considered that I was dreaming, but evidently decided I wasn’t.

There was a distinct sense of being stifled by the proliferating tags of floppy gum. I’m wondering if there’s a writing connection to the dream, since I’m up to the point in the new story where I have to start drying wet concrete: I’ve written several drafts, it’s 10,000 words long minus the ending, and still in a rather rough state with plenty of small things undecided. I have to decide them, decide what to explain or at least have characters talk about and what to leave wide open, and set the general tone of the story (how comedic or serious, how strange, how much full-throttle fantasy pastiche lingo to allow, etc.), which is proving difficult; I’ve been doing lots of scrabbling and spluttering — so my subconscious might be telling me to get decisive and “bite”.

Anyway, it was quite the most disgusting dream I’ve ever had. If nothing else, I think I’ll be cleaning my teeth very carefully for at least a few days. (For all I know, it was my subconscious telling me to floss, and nothing to do with writing at all!)

Just a quick note to say that I wasn’t in any kind of danger during the trouble in Bangkok, and that I’m in Australia now and for the next few weeks. I don’t like writing about political goings on in Thailand, as it’s always complicated and I don’t feel particularly well informed by the English-language news sources. But our part of town is very safe from disruptions, as there isn’t anything there to interest political agitators.

Had quite a good flight, stopped in Singapore for an hour and visited the butterfly house at the airport. I didn’t have my camera with me, but will on the way back when I have a longer stopover. There were some particularly lovely swallowtail butterflies like this one, which looked like black lace with the light behind them.

Flying over Australia, I saw more green than I have for years. Who knows if the drought has really broken, but there has at least been a respite. My parents’ garden is looking great and they have a lawn for the first time I can remember — even if most of it is weeds!

Words are still heavy. Even thinking in words is heavy. It might not be just the smoke. It’s very hot, and a four-storey derelict building near me is being demolished in slow motion with what I call drilldozers — bulldozers with pneumatic drill heads, which make a juddering mechanical noise from 9-ish till 6-ish (with a break for lunch). There are no adjacent buildings and there’s a huge vacant lot next door, so you’d think they could use explosives to bring it down quickly, but maybe the Skytrain is too close, or maybe the drilldozers are just cheaper. I think I’ll be taking my computer into school next week and trying to work there. (And if the people who’ve been lobbing grenades around Bangkok recently want to come down and chuck a few into that building, it’s ok by me!)

Anyway, while words are heavy, images are light, so have a devil child:

I really need to stop drawing faces in half profile! And start drawing them showing some emotion. I’m pretty sure this picture was obscurely inspired by this, via Alankria. Girl. Tempting object. Never-to-be-developed person. It would be a shame not to take a bite out of her. Vessel for male ego. Mother is lurking inside. Girl will never be human. What the hell would she become if she was allowed to grow up naturally, on her own terms?

Bangkok’s air has been disgusting lately. It’s full of smoke from the seasonal burning off of rice fields, and possibly forest fires. Anyway, my eyes are sore and my sinuses are borked and I feel dopey. Words feel like heavy things to lift. On the positive side, while my brain’s been lost in the fog I’ve cleaned quite a lot of bugs and bug poo (white sticky stuff) off my indoor tree. Some people think this kind of bug poo was the original manna from heaven that the Israelites ate. And I could eat it too if I hadn’t sprayed the tree with pesticide. But I did eat the pollen from the giant spider lily, which flowers indoors, where it had melted against the window. It tasted like sugar syrup. I feel sorry for this plant, because it flowers profusely but has no other spider lillies to pollinate with. I feel like collecting some of its pollen and taking it down to the spider lillies across the street!

I recently got my author copies of the Traditional Chinese edition of The Etched City. Fab artist Wang-Tin (Andy) Lin has posted some info on his blog about how he created the awesome cover art. (Google Translate helps a bit if you want to read the text). The sphinx’s face looks rather like me, but Andy says he’s never seen my photo, so it’s (maybe!) just a coincidence. And the crocodile fetus and lotus man are on the back! The old parchment look on the cover is reproduced on the title page of the book, and the cover has a finish I’ve never seen before, matte but kind of grainy, almost like a sort of plastic, which looks good and feels as if it might be more durable than regular cardboard. I’m grateful to Andy for the artwork and to the publishers, Fullon, for doing such a lovely all-round job.

Speaking of art, the eye candy’s been piling up in my Firefox again.

Artists:

Stacey Rozich

Tiffany Bozic (found via Wurzeltod, major love for The Silent Dredge)

Anna Lukashevsky

Sam Wolfe Connelly (interior contents not as sweet as the front page pic!)

Zhou Fan (artist’s website here.)

Jon MacNair (I like the “fine art” section)

Kristen Ferrell

Jessica Albarn

Joel Peter Witkin

Nick Sheehy

Images I hadn’t seen before by one of my always favourites, Takato Yamamoto. Lots of other good stuff at Mondobizzarro.

Individual pics/vids:

The People Tree (video) by N.A.S.A. (North America South America), thanks to Penchaft for pointing it out to me!

Madam Satan by Adrian Greenberg

A weird etching by Tommaso Gorla