Realities for a caveman

I have been scouting around for interesting events and news, looking for inspiration to write a script for a documentary project required for my class. I somehow stumbled upon a familiar story of a particular individual, a rather eccentric one if I may say so, who lived on the cliffs of the hilly walkway leading up to Bondi beach.  I remember seeing him a year ago and even two years ago when I used to take the occasional stroll from Coogee to Bondi. He lived in a makeshift tent stretched about 2 meters or so along the rocky cliffs. He was known as the Bondi Caveman, but preferred the name Jimmy ‘Two Hats’. I guess he was, as society would term it, a homeless man, or a ‘hobo’ or maybe even a ‘hippie’. His reputation spoke of his love for poetry, for nature and of course for the best possible view that lay right on the door step of what he calls ‘home’. It is interesting how reality as prescribed by the environment or conventions we live in can be contrasted so greatly by subjective reality. Jimmy’s reality opposed mine and almost everyone else’s perhaps because, I think, he lived in a world where those two mentioned realities dared to be more similar more explicitly intermingled than the ones we experience. He lived that hidden desire that some of us have, one that if we practiced it would take us away from civilization and lead us to the depths of the networks within our own individual selves. Jimmy was sent to prison last year after authorities who’d been wanting to take down his ‘home’ for years convicted him of rape. So of course a whole host of conspiracy theories and protests emerged on the internet. Looking at all those comments and fan sites on line, I wondered if he ever knew, being so detached from the world and all its extensive networks, that he was such a sensation.  I thought of changing the facts a little for the documentary, I thought I’d say he died in prison, probably out of sheer depression or just inability to accept the kind of world we live in. I’d create a virtual reality, one convincing enough to actually let whoever watches it to believe that he really couldn’t take the imprisonment of his subjective reality, and in the reality dictated by our laws and conventions, he could not live anymore. I’ll set up my documentary to be one that merges all subjective, environmental and virtual realities.

 

Script Archive 1 – My Poor Will

Script for theater.

A playwright who cant decide on how to end his play, is in two minds about what the fate of his main character, Will should be. Inspired by Sartre’s No Exit and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead, this is a story that, hopefully, explores ideas relating to fate, existentialism and free will.

 

Please see link for script:

My Poor Will (for theater), (all rights reserved, ©)

 

Media ecology – The New World

Media ecology, as I understand it, is living, viewing and experiencing media as the world itself. I remember finding myself in a rather difficult situation when attempting to explain to my mother who the famous TV personality Sascha Baron Cohen is, and why or how exactly is he a famous TV personality. Mr. Cohen seems to apply, to great extent, not just that privilege of living in two or three separate worlds but also that ability to have distinct identities in each of those worlds. Of course we all, in one way or another, share those privileges with the opportunities that the internet provides us with. Many of us re-create ourselves in that virtual domain or that ‘hyperreal ecological system’ (if I may call it so). The multiple duplications of ourselves that roam or that are paraded throughout that virtual system are prescribed with forms and identities that tend to vary, albeit to different degrees, from our actual selves. The creation of the alphabets, books and pens and the digital age of now, have magnified the importance of an interactive, interpersonal society. And the same interactivity that exists in our ‘real’ society, is also ever attendant in the society of the ‘hyperreal’. With the availability and accessibility that those creations have afforded us, and the existence of that all important interactivity, we’ve transformed ourselves into writers, comedians, filmmakers, song-writers and bloggers, that roam and parade ourselves throughout these two environments – that is one of the real and the other of the ‘hyperreal’. We are not too different from Mr. Cohen I think. The media has worked to become some sort of an alternate universe, an alternate reality for us that holds all the attributes and pre-requisites of a ‘real’ society. So much so that we’ve dared to define the age that we live in today as ‘digital’. A result of which is the legitimizing of the idea that media is, in many ways, viewed and experienced as the world itself.

 

 

Smokes, Screens and the Photographic Reality

It’s funny that the one word ‘advertising’, spotted somewhere within the 28 or so pages in this week’s reading, should bring to mind an image of Don Draper smoking his cigarette in a meeting room with tobacco producers. I feel somewhat guilty or even sad that my thoughts should be allowed to redirect themselves so quickly to such an image – a man (or an actor if we choose to call him so) from the present disguised as a 1950’s ‘ad-man’ to play his part in a ‘re-enactment’ of past events. If there’d been the words 1950s anywhere along that same line that carried the word ‘advertising’, who knows how many episodes and images of Madmen my memory would have dug up for play in my mind.

It also led me, somehow, to think of old photographs, those old grey-scaled or black and white ones, which I always find particularly interesting. Simply because they’re real, or at least there are the closest something to the real thing. Its difficult to imagine what living in those times, as seen in the photographs, would be like. Every time I tried I ended up picturing myself in a really grey… no DULL and grey place. That is only until I reminded myself that the dullness and greyness, were only the photographs, imprints of real events taken by some technology that very sadly was unable to capture the colours of the time. Yes, it is rather sad that we are never able to see that world in colour. And I think I speak for at least the rest of my generation when I say that all that re’stagings, re-enactments of those times, the period films and television programs like Madmen, are the ‘simulated’ realities that we are forced to settle for, just so we’d be able to remind ourselves that the world of our past was not an oddly dull, grey, black and white one.

The word ‘advertising’ pops up in the writer’s explanation of Beaudrillard’s ideas. This is the clip that popped up in my head.

 

 

 

The Untold Tale of A Greatest Man

 

 

He lay there.

Just there,

Staring at the morning sky.

The sun hidden from his face,

The air breathing across his nose,

The whispers from a busy street kissing his open lips.

His eyes, closed.

 

 

He lay there,

With his back to the earth,

His face hidden from the world,

The stench of the busy streets teasing his nostrils,

The noisy footsteps trampling over his lips.

His eyes, still, closed.

 

 

He was a ‘lonesome’ man,

They would think,

A ‘thinker’, they would guess.

“A mysterious man” he must have been,

“With his long hair and thick grey beard”.

But no,

No one looked,

No one would.

The blind whisperings of their thoughts,

Confined to only roam these streets,

Could not find their way to him.

He must have been that suspicious type,

Not to be told of, and not spoken with…

Hiding behind his thick beard and long grey hair.

 

 

“No, a ‘people’s man’ he once said,

A ‘speaker’ he once thought”  –

A mysterious other could say of him.

But no,

No one spoke,

No one would.

Their noisy footsteps so deafening,

Were left to only roam these streets,

To only trample, so harsh and so cruel.

While the mysterious other,

Now with quite possibly short hair and a clean shave,

Lay quiet in hiding.

 

 

He was one who knew too much perhaps?

But no shots were heard, no one would hear.

A government agent, killed on duty.

But no stabs on his back? No one would see.

A cast-away, A polymath, A millionaire, A sociopath –

Who would know?

No, who could know?

Behind that thick beard and long hair,

He quite possibly was an astronaut,

Intoxicated by the stench in the air.

Or perhaps a revolutionary,

Not to be told of, and not spoken with.

But no, quite possibly not –

His lips are open.

 

 

He lied there last night,

To stare at the night sky,

And the stars looked down on his face.

The garbage lined up,

Oblivious of his presence,

And waited for their morning pick-up.

While the quiet streets listened…

Listened, as they only then could,

Till his final breath.

The one that whispered softly,

and kindly,

To a comfortably deserted world.

He could have been the greatest man,

His lips left an open smile.

If only they listened,

If only they’d look.

Then perhaps yes,

He would look quite possibly like the greatest man.

 

 

Now, there he lay,

Under the morning sky.

The sun hiding from his face,

The garbage still in wait…

Its noise harsh,

and cruel.

The busy streets, still ignorant of his existence,

Looked to be the greatest  man –

A secret agent, a millionaire, an intellectual, an astronaut…

Its stench intoxicating.

They never listened, they never cared.

And now his lips are a quiet smile.

They never looked, they could never have.

And now,

His eyes are closed.

pic. : Shadow-lines (from prophecyblur.com)

 

 

The Forsaken Tale of An Unnameable Kid

I shall begin, like all stories do, with a static shot, one that establishes our setting, our place in this world. And by that, it should be one that bears weight, a certain kind of heaviness or lightness, of significance from which the plot of the story that is about to be told can be derived from. And with the success of that, what could ultimately be achieved is a sense of suspense, one that could drive both the reader and writer, or the viewer and actor to continue reading or viewing, to go on… and on, and on and on. So this is that shot, one of a baby goat – or a ‘kid’ if you like – left to wander astray, far away from where it had come to be what it is now, or rather in this point of the telling of this story. Let’s say it has had no food, not any for quite some time, and more sadly it has no prospect of attaining anymore than what it had, say, almost seven hours ago. It stands on its four little legs in the middle of the street. Could it possibly know, somehow, at this tender age, that standing here in the middle of this vast country, on this stretch of gravel we humans call ‘road’, is probably its best chance of finding its next meal. How could it know that its chance positioning at this setting or its one deliberate choice of place could be the only possible strategic one in this world, and therefore one that could possibly be only better than any other. A bird descends in front of it, to alight on the burning gravel. There are seven seconds of awkward silence between the two before the bird takes flight and leaves the lost soul confined to envy.  Now let’s just say this kid, or little goat if you like, is seven months old. It would be an interesting coincidence, which could quite possibly lead to an interesting story, if say, this seven month old kid, starved for seven hours, is standing on a street, THIS street, or THIS stretch of gravel that we humans have, for some statistical reasons and significance, named ‘Route No. 7’. Then there could very possibly be a bus, full of people travelling on this very route. Of course statistics cannot be starved of reasoning or of what we humans like to call logic. Therefore, if this is to be a street or a ‘road’ that is used, if it be a stretch of gravel significant enough to be accounted for where statistics are concerned, then there should be more passersby than a lone No. 7 bus. As coincidence have dictated or repeated the one number most commonly used throughout this story so far, it should hence be only appropriate if it were to do the same here and now.  So let’s just say there were seven vehicles that passed this seven-month old kid, starved for seven hours and left alone on this Route No. 7… before the bus approached. It was carrying three housewives, who were at first committed to small talk for the sake of ridding any awkward silences, but had soon grown tired of it and were now staring out the window thinking about… thinking about perhaps their sons or daughters; a group of five construction workers… going home after a tiring days work, thinking about… thinking about their beds at home… a nice warm shower and their beds, at home; A brother and sister after school, one talking to a group of friends at the back of the bus, the other with another group of friends in the middle of the bus. Talking… perhaps talking about chocolates and sweets, big cars and rich people; And two big men, no not big, just one bigger than the other… or perhaps just older than the other, sitting and talking, talking about… about god and creation, about the wonders of the world; about Zeus… and Callisto, about the jealous Hera who turned Callisto into a bear; about Callisto’s kid who could not recognize his mother… about the two then banished by Zeus, left stranded together amidst the vast heavens, to become the seven stars of the Big Dipper; The driver in the front, who has been driving his dear old bus for seven years now had just finished two energy bars and was down to the last gulps of his coke, all of which would have cost him around about seven dollars. He was about seven hundred meters away from the goat, when he dropped his drink on the ground. He was driving at about seventy kilometres per hour and, statistically speaking, he would not have enough time to bend down and look for his drink, pick it up, regain his awareness of the bus’ position on the road and of the supposedly strategic positioning of the seven month young kid in the middle of the road, to jam his foot on the breaks, while hoping to the ‘God’ he prays to that his dear old bus would not skid off Route No. 7 and harm any of the seventeen people on it.  But defying statistical reasoning, logic and the little goat’s hopes of a chance meeting – ie. A pleasant coincidence, the driver, let’s just say his name is Fahreed (Yes, spelt here with a ‘h’ and two ‘e’s’ for the sake of a nice fit for this story), bent down to pick up his drink. Seven hundred meters away, at that precise moment, the little goat, still lost and confined, cried out. Could it have known of coincidence, statistics and logic? Could it possibly have known that fate had taken over the plot of this story, and the one ascribed for it was no longer in its own four limbs but in someone else’s?

****

I stopped at that, and sat up just as Salman came into the room. I saw his lips move about his face – left right, left right, up down, open close, up down, open close… But no words, at least not any one that resounded over the little goat’s cry that lingered for just a while in my head. The use of that word we call ‘fate’ has become, at least for me, some sort of a cliché. And like all clichés do, it repeated itself over and over again in my head, in sync and perhaps intertwined with what I imagined a seven-month old kid’s cry would sound like. Salman climbed up the ladder attached to our bunk bed. The metal mesh stretched across the four borders of his part of the bed morphed into the shape of a bowl. Salman was not a big guy; he was just older than me, but nowhere near to what I would imagine a ‘big guy’ would look like. He was an ‘ideas man’ as some would call a man with ideas. And like most of them ‘ideas men’, his heaviness and lightness in weight seemed very much susceptible to his thoughts, and thus so too was the size of the metal bowl above me. Salman was obsessed about finding her, as much as he was obsessed with his favourite number. Tomorrow shall be the seventh day of the seventh month. He seems much lighter tonight; I guess we will be leaving this place tomorrow then, ‘off to somewherebetter’ he would say. Yes, he must have made his decision. That would explain his lips’ dancing to the little goat’s cry. I wonder how MY metal bowl looks like now, how my weight should shape it … If only I could see the suspense. I leaned over and placed my pen on the ground. And then the story of the goat. And to make sure I don’t accidentally step on it when I wake up in the morning, I pushed it under my bed. I stared at the metal suspension above me and I thought of the little goat. Perhaps I should think of a name for it… I will be leaving here tomorrow… Maybe tomorrow… it would be easier to think in the fresh-lightness of tomorrow’s day. I turned around and closed my eyes. I began counting to ten like I so often do when trying to sleep. But, the little kid faded away at seven.