It's not soft porn, it's a historical reference.

Kate giving it everything in Babushka.

The title of this post is paraphrasically linked in my mind to the scene in Back to the Future III, when they hijack the train.
Marty and the professor jump onto the running plate of the steam loco, with bandannas over their faces and point their guns at the driver.
The driver stares at them saucer-eyed and says, "Is this a hold up?"
To which Marty and the prof reply in unison, "No, it's a science experiment!"
Well likewise this trailing-smoke-and-flames-hot picture of Kate Bush is a pageview experiment.
Occasionally I talk with my work colleague Scott about increasing pageviews, which is needed to eventually try to make some money out of my writing.
Scott's suggestion has always been to put porn on the site.
Now to be fair to Scott, he is being ironic, he has two daughters and he, like another friend Sandy, has some very pungent thoughts about pornography and its effects on society, and particularly the women involved.
So we're not doing porn on the website.
But as it happened, the subject of Kate Bush bubbled to the top of the melting pot of my consciousness, and I was kind able to meet in the middle ground.
The picture shows Kate in her video clip for her single Babushka, which came out in 1980, when I was 15, in the midst of my pubertic-rush.
I remember back to that time, looking at this videoclip and a stampede of confusing thoughts came rampaging into my hormone-riddled adolescent mind.
I stared transfixed at it, thinking a lot of thoughts, but mostly, "I HAVE GOT TO BUY THIS SONG, IT'S THE GREATEST EVER!".
First chance I got, I went out and bought the single at our local music store, Stop 'n' Rock, and I wasn't alone, I can tell you.
Babushka was the twentieth most popular single of that year in Australia.
Looking back I feel that Kate's single was the first overtly sexual video clip - the first video clip that used a paltry excuse to have a near naked, scantily clad woman on the screen to sell units.
I say paltry in the case of Babushka for this reason.
My work colleague Susannah is Czech, and I asked her if they have the same word, and they have a close analogue, Babichka, which also means 'grandmother', which is the meaning of 'Babushka' in Russian.
The song is about a woman, recently married, who decides to test her husband's fidelity.
So she writes to the husband and asks him to have an affair with her.

"It's a science experiment!"

He signifies his acceptance, and so she dresses, (and I guess, undressed in the dark) in disguise, meets him and has sex with him.
Then he spends the rest of his married life confused as to why his wife suddenly freezes on him.
Okay, so that's the scenario, but why the song was called Babushka is less than clear, it refers to the nom de plume the wife adopts to write to the husband.
But that doesn't make much sense either, maybe it's just me, but if I got a letter from someone saying "it's granny here, how about a shag?", I'd be thinking twice I can tell you.
In the end, as I further discussed with Susannnah, when we were both 'sposed to be working I might add, it seems that in the eighties the record companies suddenly twigged to tapping the market of adolescent boys by putting near naked women on the screen to sell singles.
The Babushka song and clip was followed the next year by Duran Duran's Girls on Film.
This was an even more axis-rocking romp for teenage boys.
[BTW: Duran Duran are so called for a character in the sci-fi vamp movie, 'Barbarella'. In case you were wondering.]
Anyway Girls on Film, as you can see in the pic, went another nine-yards toward being soft core pornography.
What's more, this marked another shift in the music business.
Babushka, as discussed, seemingly had no connection with Kate dressed like a female B&D prostitute, but Girls On Film was actually written so they could make a film clip with naked women in it.
And I might add, when reading up on this, I discovered that there were a few version of this clip for Girls on Film, and the one I saw on Countdown at 7pm on a Sunday night was heavily censored apparently.
Since the censored clip sent a multitude of teenage boys immediately to the shower where they stayed for 45 minutes, I couldn't imagine what the uncensored version was like.
And thus the flood gates opened.
Now when I go to the gym, every single bloody film clip is soft-core porn.
However, this has had a curious reversing effect - on me at least.
Which is: if I see a clip come on without naked women in it, my logic is that the record company realized that the song is good enough to attract attention without the porn, so I tend to stop and pay some attention.
Then again, if a song comes on that does have porn, I tend to stop and examine that so I am adequately briefed to be able to complain about it here.
You can watch the actual film clip of Babushka down at the end of this post and relive the throbbing sexual magnetism that so affected me in that winter of 1980.
Anyway, so what brought on all this talk of Kate Bush, and thus the paltry excuse to have a near naked woman on the blog?
Well recently I have had a few hits to my writer's self-esteem.
I entered the blog awards and wasn't short-listed, not even long-listed.
Out of 1100 entries I sank to obscurity down the bottom of the list.
But what would those F%^&-ing ARSEHOLES know about good writing, HUH???!!!
Obviously a load a small-dicked, bullied at school wannabes were judging the damn things, and so didn't feel I was worth a mention.
Then over the last six months I have had my first book, and first novel rejected by four different publishing houses.
Likewise those god-damned bucking lame excuses for talent scouts at Allen&Unwin and all the rest failed to see an incipient James Joyce when it was served up to them in electronic form.
ARSEHOLES!!!!!
Anyway, Kate Bush's most famous song was Wuthering Heights, in which she dealt musically with the most inconically tempestuous relationship in English literature.
At one point she sings, "Ooohhhh, it gets dark, it gets lonely, on the other side from you."
That resonated with me, as I feel at this time, and almost certainly forever, I am on the other side of the publishing door.
It's dark and lonely I can tell you.
However, I have this blog, and knew that even in rejection you can't just give up.
To be a writer, or perhaps more accurately, a published writer, you have to show persistence.
The most famous case was Frederick Forsyth, who had to hawk the manuscript for Day of the Jackal around fifty different publishers before he got a nibble.
Today he has sold many millions of books.
Also, U2, perhaps the world's biggest band, were saying in 1984 that they wrote the song, I Fall Down, describing when things weren't good for the band.
And we know where that story went.
So all I can do is persist, keep writing in the lonely dark, and one day I may convince someone somewhere that this is more than electronic whingeing on the web.
So it continues dark and lonely on the other side of the publishing door, but at least it's given me the opportunity to relive that spazonklifying time when Kate Bush was romping around on the television, bringing a breath of the exotic to my rustic home town in rural Australia in the (as usual) freezing winter of 1980.

Man, these guys are fantastic!

Elsewhere the above reference to staring wild-eyed, hormone-throbbingly at the screen and saying "I've got to buy this song", reminded me of one of my favourite shows, and so I'll mention it here.
The show was Police Squad, it was where Lesley Nielsen, most famous is the doctor in Flying High (Airplane for my north American readers), came to prominence.
Police Squad was a send up of the cop shows of the seventies and eighties.
Oh, it was a different world then, the criminal was always caught and there wasn't a corrupt cop in sight.
And it was the genesis for the "only-one-maverick-cop-who-breaks-all-the-rules" can solve it genre that Cannon, Kojak, Columbo, Lou Grant, The Streets of San Francisco, and so many others followed.
Anyway, Police Squad was a brilliant spoof of these rubbish shows.
One of the things that the Zucker brothers, who produced and directed Police Squad and then Flying High, did so well was have things going on in the background.
That's why you could watch their shows, both movies and TV, over and over again and always see something you hadn't noticed before.
If you look at the picture you will see the character in the background trying to use a phone with no cord.
This character, Pete, was a  running gag and appeared in each episode doing something in the background.
The episode I'm thinking of was about heroin.
Lesley Nielsen's character, Frank Drebbyn, and his boss Ed, nab some ne'er-do-well with a bag of heroin.
Frank opens the bag, sticks his finger in it and has a microscopic taste.
Then he spits it out and says in a hard voice, "Yes, that's heroin all right."
Then he hands the bag to Pete and says, "What do you make of this Pete?"
Pete has a little taste and agrees with Drebbyn.
Then the episode moves on, but Pete is in the background of every shot.
He is carrying the bag and every scene he is taking another taste.
By the end of the episode he is off his fucking Nana on the gear and the final shot shows him staring bug-eyed at a radio playing some lame arse song, and Pete opens up his eyes even wider and says, "MAN, THESE GUYS ARE FANTASTIC!!!!"
Well it was the same for me watching Kate prance around in her skimpy outfit, that was for sure.

Australian politics and the budget.

Elsewhere a little contest has started among me and my friends, trying to workout who is the biggest arsehole in the Australian government.
So for my north American readers, things become distinctly antipodean from here on, so you may wish to go elsewhere, as there is no topic of less interest on the world stage than Australia.
[This is true. I first noticed this when I went overseas, the only references to Australia were bushfires or when some tourist was brought undone by some of our ferocious wildlife, sharks or crocs mainly]
[Also, the lack of interest and knowledge of Australia's politics and the epicentre of this, Canberra, was best demonstrated as uninteresting when the US 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire' asked the first up question, "What is the capital of Australia?"
The contestant answered 'Sydney' and was off the show.
Apparently this is the only time that anyone has ever got the first, perennially easy, question wrong.]
Anyway, this all started with a phone call with my friend Darren (Daz) in London.
Daz was opining that from what he could see the biggest nob currently lacing up the political boots in Canberra was Scott Morrison, the Federal Minister for Killing Anyone Who Arrives in a Boat.
I nodded my head judiciously and agreed that he had many claims to the Top Arsehole Position.
I then countered with, "Yeah, Daz, but what about that fat loathsome toad, George Brandis, the Attorney general?"
Brandis is the guy who said, in parliament no less, "that people have a right to be bigots".
[NB: George please note, no they fucking don't. We as a race have spent thousands of years getting people to not be bigots.]
Daz, then likewise nodded his head in agreement and that then led to the discussion that I am now inviting you to take part in.
Another friend, Stokesy over the phone,  then weighed in and nominated Christopher Pyne.
Stokesy then making a very valid case for Pyne being allowed to enter four times in the Arsehole list, due to four things he had done that deserved mention.
My friend Michael also leaned toward Pyne, saying, "That guy is really a worry".
Michael's dad, Eric, couldn't nail it down, and favoured all of the current government being entered.
I would also add, the Minister for Destroying the Environment, Greg Hunt, is another very worthy entrant.
He is the Planet-Neptune-sized mongrel who wishes to dump three million tonnes of dredge spoil in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.
So the list seems inclusive rather than the opposite, so then it behooved me to try to find someone in the Federal Government who isn't a total and utter excreta releasing sphincter.
The best I can offer is Peter Dutton.
Who?
Yes, exactly.
Dutton is the health minister and is so nondescript that he was once present at a cabinet meeting for twenty minutes before anyone noticed he was there.
However if in the end the only person I can offer who is not an Arsehole is offered because no one has ever heard of him, then that does kind of show us the sheer size of the problem.

A very telling picture, Credlin leading, the Prime Minister following.

But then I'm sure most of you are already planning to stab down a comment and say, "Lachlan, surely the answer is Tony Abbott, the leader of this pack of gluteus maximally located faeces dispensers?"
Well that is a valid claim, but even here it's not clear, and here's why.
Australia is not actually run by Tony Abbott, but by this woman, Peta Credlin.
She is listed as his press secretary, but she is far more than that. [An Incredible-Hulk-sized bitch mostly.]
The word I have from my various sources round the traps is that she tells Tony Abbott what to say.
This is evidenced by how slow he speaks these days.
When he was head of the opposition, railing against Julia Gillard, he was reasonably articulate, but now he speaks as slow as the tide rising on the timbers of a pier.
What is going on is that when asked a question by a journalist he has to stop and think 'what did Peta tell me to say?'
And this is what leads to him giving it the 'uh..., uh...., uh,   yes, Madame speaker" sort of speech.
Now I didn't see Peta Credlin's name on the ballot paper, so think it's pretty rich that she is now running the country of which I am a voter.
So in the end, she gets onto the ballot paper of the vote I am running, Biggest Arsehole.
You can vote for her any time you like.

I did try to avoid it but since it's germane to this particular strand of discourse, I'll bring it up: the budget.
Now if I ever wanted to get my pageviews going down, if I wanted to have readers turn away in droves, then this is a topic I could use.
But this time, it has had quite the reverse effect.
This budget has been so universally unpopular, so unthought through, that it has done more for the Labor party and Bill Shorten, the leader of same, than bringing Gough Whitlam out of retirement.
So where do I start?
Well it's a classic conservative budget.
The rich get looked after and the poor get labelled "dole bludger" and get kicked radically in the teeth.
Probably the most mystifying thing of all is the $7 co-payment to see a doctor.
No one, not even it seems Joe Hockey, the Federal treasurer, (feel free to nominate him, by all means) seems to understand how this will work.
My friend Mick, a family man, with two children and a full time job was telling me that each time he sees the doctor what he pays seems to change with no readily apparent reason surfacing for this.
The doctor sends him back to the desk and sometimes he pays 'X' and gets 'Y' back on Medicare.
Other times he pays 'Z' and gets nothing back from Medicare.
Will the seven dollars be taken out at the Medicare stage?
Will you have to search through your wallet and find some gold coins to pay it over the counter?
Will your local GP have to install a till and eftpos machine on the counter by the receptionist?
No one seems to know.
This truly disturbing picture from GetUp! highlights the horrendous nature of this sick, both literal and metaphoric, tax.
Will we see the appalling day when a parent gets their child to the GP, but realizes they have left their wallet at home, and then have to race back home with a sick and vomiting child to get the $7?
God help us all if that days ever dawns.
Also, here are just two of the hypocritical, let's-hack-the-poor-'cos-we-don't-like-them things in this budget.
Prevailing thought has it that those poorest who need medical attention, will go to Accident and Emergency at their local hospital, instead of the GP.
This must be blowing the exasperated-minds of those medical staff who work at A&E.
The reason being that these staff have spent a long period, a decade maybe, training people to not got to A&E for trivial things, but to see their GP instead.
One example I read was a patient who showed to A&E and wanted someone there to put their eyedrops in.
Another was someone who was too scared to pull a bandage off because of the pain, so wanted the A&E staff to inject a local anaesthetic before removing the bandage.
With this $7 co-payment, suddenly all that hard work will be reversed and the hordes will restampede to the A&E departments across the country.
Then there's Aboriginal health, and the 'Closing-the-Gap' plans.
This was brought in by the Howard government to bring Aboriginal standards of living up to equivalency with white Australians.
Well the representative of the Aboriginal Medical Service I heard on the radio this morning was saying that Aboriginal patients, already living in third world poverty, will never be able to raise $7 for a doctor's visit, and so all that 'Closing-the-gap' talk will be as nothing, and the standard of health for Aboriginal people in Australia will go back downhill.
However before we all get too down and start planning to march on Canberra and burn the Liberal Party offices down, this truly lunatic budget has shown the populace the true face of the Abbott government.
The polls out this week show that Tony Abbott (AKA: Peta Credlin's mouthpiece) is now as popular is a dose of syphilis.
Bill Shorten has moved into the lead as preferred Prime Minister.
Seventy five per cent of Australians who responded to the Neilsen poll said they felt they would be worse off because of this budget.
The Labor party has moved ahead in the poll as preferred government and if an election was held today, the Abbott Government would lose.
In the end, as one commentator said on Outsiders on Radio National on Sunday, "This budget was just what the Labor Party doctor ordered."
What's more, Tony Abbott still continues to believe that people love him.
He threatened an election if the budget measures were not passed by the other parties in the senate.
To which I can truly say with uttermost vehemence: "Bring it the fuck on Tony. BRING IT ON".

The men we once were.

I normally close with some nice shots of the sunset over Byron Bay, but since this week's blog has dealt with things too frightening to name, AKA the budget and the members of the Abbott government, I thought I'd throw in some photos too scary to be seen.
The one on the top is me, taken after I had been pitched into the mud of Queensland Uni's soccer fields, our team having just won the uni championship, and me being the non-playing manager.
I couldn't play due to a torn knee ligament, and in retrospect, like Charlie Brown, that was probably why we won.
Gruesome as this tash is, it pales into insignificance compared with the photo below.
I even jumped when the photo downloaded onto my screen.
This is me with my soccer team in 1990, aged 25, old enough to know better, one would have thought, but clearly not.
And finally, the photo below that, of this handsome guy is my friend from Vancouver, Darren Sears.
Darren you may recall was the man with whom I first drank pints in Canada, followed by some shots of vodka, and then some overproof Bundy Rum back at his flat.
I described that dark day in this post, Whale song Rings out in triumph.
Anyway, Darren happened to notice his name somewhere on the web and saw with astonishment my blog relating the events of that oh-so-drunken night all those years ago.
He then contacted me through the email link and it's been great to catch up with him.
On the soccer field Darren was an immensely hard man, famous for tackling people like he wanted to remove them from the historical record.
When I asked him for a pic, and he sent that one, I was immediately struck by the hard-man nature of his visage.
So that part hasn't changed, and what's more Darren didn't need to grow a moustache to look tough.
A lesson I could have well done with learning all those years ago, and saved the world from having to look at mine.












 

The film clip that sent millions of teenage boys to the shower for 45 minutes.