Priest and Orphan: Our Pilgrimage to the Vatican.

My Dad is a football monomaniac. There is the cold silence when quiz nights force him to miss a match, the demented teenage hysterics whenever his beloved team wins, the dogged deployment of football metaphors at the most unhelpful of times. Hey, you know the guy who inducts balloons and streamers and inter-club football tension into the otherwise productive workplace (nevermind that he is the honcho)? That's Dad. There used to be an age where I shared a ticket to every Eagles home game with Pops; Father and Son, side by side, gelling over a healthy dose of uber sport. But things went awry the moment his mutterings spilled into screaming, profanities launched at the umpires, gum-scented spittle showering everyone in arm's length. I was never offended, just shocked, that same feeling evoked when the new teacher asked me what indigenous tribe I was from, such was the tan. Let Mum go along this year, I told dad, faux goodwill steeping my vowels -- It's Mum's turn to lap up the fun, she's been deprived of the oval for too long! Right then I disavowed football.

And then -- hallelujah! -- I discover out I am flying out to Melbourne tomorrow for the much-vaunted A.F.L. Grand Final. Dad booked the plane tickets months ago, apparently prophesising something big. Awesome, I had told him back then, with the emotion of an autistic. I didn't know he'd booked a ticket for me, too. And I certainly didn't expect West Coast to make it all the fickle way to the Grand Final, the weekend of weekends, the furious orgasm of Australian's most iconic sport. We leave at 12:00pm.

Only an angle will exalt the trip into something incendiary, methinks. Something more-than-nice. Religious. So I have hastily compiled sheathes of notes. Packed a case of biros lest the insights outlast the ink. Re-batteried my dictophone and researched football museums and cults and supporter-warfare in Melbourne. I hope to write an article, cute or sprawling or bunk, on A.F.L. as a cock-eyed religion. We are pilgrimaging to the Vatican. Whether or not I'll be a heathen once it's all over, I wonder?


[ Some holy texts for the interim:

(1) Didion hands Cheney his arse on a platter of facts.

(2) Safran Foer makes blank pages sound profound, as he tends to do.

(3) Vollmann talks Norwegian, Eddic, woop for Comparative Literature.]

The kind of shit I am paying uni to make me write.

April of ’92. I am 8. A friend’s mum beckons me to the phone, eyes
shimmery with happytears. Immediately I know; been awaiting this
for 9  long months. Mum?, I speak into the headset. It is her, at the
hospital, newborn wailing loudly. What's its name? She replies:
Benjamin Paul Seman, your brother. So I snap the phone cord and
curse. Which gives way to crying, bawling, for 3 excruciating days. I’d
been lobbying to name that pesky foetus Mario since day one. He’d grow
stout and hirsute and look splendid in overalls. He’d eat trippy flowers.

It ain’t strange for kids to idolise, romanticise, or fetishise
Mario and his cronies. These are legendary 2-d characters synergising
with the 2-d wiring of a child’s brain. Real emotions stir and throb, but
they are indiscriminate, puerile. Soon I matured, though only a jot, finding
myself in the same boat as Jenkins: screaming through levels, ‘totally
invincible … release[d] from normal constraints’. By this stage it was
less about Mario and more about the rush. I grew some more and suddenly
things were different; gone was the brotherly love for Mario; gone was the
Paleolithic reverence for D. Kong. The only feeling left for them was
nostalgia. Perhaps best explained, I think, by the simple expansion of
my mind, its 3-d-ification into an entity that could identify Mario as
essentially vacuous. It didn’t make sense to care about him anymore.
This alone would matter less if I was still captivated by the game --
stomping on goombas, pulverising brick-blocks, ingesting mad starpower
-- but I’m not. Unfortunately my head works in a different way nowadays.

Maybe I’m myopic, but I cannot see an adult user developing a real
emotional rapport with the characters of a contemporary computer game.
Movie characters sear themselves into our hearts because they are the
Other: they act on a scriptwriter’s volition, not ours. But once we
enter simulation, characters become vessels for our own wills and urges,
someone to be rather than someone to interact with. Then what of the
moment when artificial intelligence passes that apocalyptic threshold
between dependence and independence? Emotions will spout liberally.
But it won’t be a game anymore;  it will be life populated with androids.
This is the grand paradox ... but lo, on the flipside, what’s to say we as
humans shouldn’t just calibrate our own cognition to that of a computer
game? Probably because that’ll take some hardcore evolving, and anyway,
I quietly suspect (fear!) that computers will evolve into us beforehand.

So while Jenkins and co. implore engineers to innovate, I sit here and
bite nails. The quantum leap required to make emotion of computer
games pushes things way outside my ken of understanding. I am incapable
of crying over Mario ever again. I have devolved into some kind of Luddite.
Here's my ode to you, Mario; a confidante, a hero, a mere computer character.

Art for life and life for art, a synecdoche.

Pretty picture, yes? Think of the footprint as the good, foetal news below. I'd advise digesting this doozy before moving onto said, foetal news below:

syn‧ec‧do‧che [si-nek-duh-kee]:
A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, the special for the general or the general for the special, as in ten sail for ten ships or a Croesus for a rich man.

So. Three degrees left of the Hollywood pomposity lives a waif of a gentleman with Medusian hair, and ideas. Call him Charlie Kaufman. Till now we've known him as reclusive wordsmith, or genius-freak, but as of summer (their hemisphere!) '07, know him as a director, too. Two endless years since ye ol' Eternal Sunshine, years rife with curious rumours -- the genre-smashing horror project w/ Spike Jonze, the vogue-smashing novel in the cut of Stephen Dixon, the ball-smashing sex-change thing which I just made up -- we can repose with the news that there is something true and new: Synecdoche, New York. Though shrouded in secrecy, what I do know I am compelled to share, lest I remain the only one birthing puppies over this. Understand that right now I am birthing puppies en masse...

The vaguest but most evangelical script review ever:

"If this film gets made in any way that resembles what's on the page — and with the writer himself directing, it will likely gain even more color and potency in the translation — it will be some kind of miracle. "Synecdoche" will make "Adaptation" and "Eternal Sunshine" look like instructional industrial films. No one has ever written a screenplay like this. It's questionable whether cinema is even capable of handling the thematic, tonal and narrative weight of a story this ambitious. [...] moviegoers will surely be gorging on the power and depth of this film for a long time."

Similar info. except worded by an industry stringer:

"Another fellow intern mentioned the script to me a week ago, though he said it was called "Synecdoche NY" rather than just "Synecdoche," which is what other sites are listing it as. And his very nebulous plot description matches what I've seen on these websites. It's definitely a thematic cousin to Being John Malkovich, in that the actors in the writer's play begin to inhabit the traits of his characters, the distinguishing line between "actor" and "character" become almost indecipherable, and some of the other details I vaguely remember show another self-reflexive work related to art imitating life and life imitating art. The part representing the whole and the whole representing the part. Hence, the title. I think I remember hearing something about the playwright being suicidal as well."

I can tell you that my heart is fluttering like it did that time at band camp. I can tell you I somereason fear I will be in Kazakhstan when it is finally released, released everywhere but in Kazakhstan. I can tell you that I think cinema currently needs Kaufman's shtick n sensibilities. I can also tell you alot about the mysterious disappearance of Harold Holt in '67 off Cheviot Beach, for their is a script I find myself writing centred on such myth. I can tell you Perth has cracks and that homeless people fall through them, that Phil the God-fearer promises to chaperone me through the slum-circuit next week for an impending doco. I can tell you my posture at forty will resemble an ogre's. I can also tell you that I intend not to look into a mirror, nor any reflective surface, for a week starting NOW.