The simple problem with Valentine’s Day is that, even though it doesn’t mean to be, it’s naturally exclusionary. It’s like having a High Income Earners Day or an Able-Bodied People’s Day. All would be focusing on a genuine, universally-accepted positive – having a partner, making good money, being able to physically enjoy life – but in doing so they also blatantly discriminate, dividing people into haves and have-nots. Coz let’s face it – poor people would not be raising an admiring smile for the suits popping champagne corks on High Income Earners Day. People in wheelchairs would not cheer and eagerly offer bottles of water as people jog past them on the Able-Bodied People’s Day Fun Run. It’s pretty understandable that they’d feel left out, and the day would merely remind them how they’re trapped in an existence – financially, physically – that they’re not happy with and isn’t particularly fair.

And yes. Single people feel much the same way on Valentine’s Day.

I’ll say straightaway that this isn’t about dragging everyone down to the same level. It’s not a matter of jealousy – “I can’t enjoy it so neither can you.” That’s never been my attitude to anything, and I know a few lovely couples – two of which are getting married soon – whose right to express their love for each other I whole-heartedly support. It’s nice to see nice people showing affection for one another, on Valentine’s Day and outside of it. If I were in a relationship, I know I’d do exactly the same.

But that’s the thing. Like it or not, as a single person Valentine’s Day serves as a reminder – an inevitably recurring, more or less unignorable reminder – that I HAVEN’T got a partner, that I’ve failed again to sort out a very important, perhaps THE most important, part of my life. For some people of course, it’s not that much of an issue and they’re not fussed. And while I’m busy enough and independent enough to handle – at times even be thankful for – being single, at the end of the day I’ve always felt a partner would deeply enrich my life and make me happier. Like a hungry dog peering into a butcher’s window, I’ve visualized myself sitting in a candlelit restaurant opposite a beautiful girl, and seen the big smile I’d have on my face. While a lot of my friends would say I’m too fussy in the opposite-sex department, they’d also be the first to admit I’m a hopeless idealist and romantic. And it sucks not to be able to indulge that part of my nature, yearning to be given an outlet and share its magic with someone special.

So every year, when I see Valentine’s Day hearts and flowers, partly what I see is a big red ‘FAIL’ stamp. Bam-bow. You’re still single and don’t get to join in the fun. Go do some shopping by yourself, cook a dinner-for-one then go to bed alone, single boy. To you, the gates to the Valentine’s Day club are CLOSED.

Yep, it’s all pretty stupid in a way – these rants and bitter posts  that take over your Facebook Feed by those whose relationship status is stuck on ‘Single’. I might not be a part of the V-Day club, but I don’t want to be a card-carrying member of the boo-hoo emo club either. Once I’ve written this and clicked ‘Publish’, I will not be putting N Sync’s ‘Bye Bye’ on repeat and drowning my sorrows in bourbon. All of us single people will wake up the next day and it’ll all be over for another year – business as usual, back to stiff upper lips and acting like adults, and why all the angst and carrying-on the day before? Hell, at the end of the day it’s all just marketing hype anyway – a way for florists and Hallmark and Lindt to spike their sales for a day. Right? Isn’t it? Well, my head says yeah, sure, whatevs. But deep down, my heart still wants to be a part of it.

Oh well. One day.

So it’s January 2009 and The Prodigy, my all-time favourite band, are headlining Big Day Out. I’ve never seen Prodge live or even gone to a major music festival, but someone I know – let’s call her Tanya – convinced me to go along with her and some dudes she knew. So I did.

We agreed to kick off at Tanya’s house, have some late-morning predrinks in the backyard to chill out and get in the mood. I rock up with a 4-pack of Smirnoff somethings, having not eaten any breakfast if my memory serves correctly, which isn’t a problem since in the kitchen near the back door is a massive tray of cookies to which people are periodically helping themselves. Except these are hash cookies. So full of hash they’re fucking green.

Now, I’d never had a hash cookie before. Like any teenager, I’d ripped a bong and puffed a joint – in fact I’m being pretty misleading in making those experiences sound singular. But generally I don’t do weed if for no other reason than 9 times out of 10 it does very little for me. Only two exceptions come to mind – the first, a predominantly Christian house party during which a few of us strategically retreated to a car, turned it into a Bill & Ted’s-style gas chamber and I lost all feeling in my feet – so that I tripped over while stepping out of the car, since I could no longer feel the ground, and spent the next couple of hours walking around like an astronaut, trying to convince the Christians that I’d just played soccer a bit too vigorously that morning. To the point that it made my eyes turn pink, yes.

The other time was… well, I can’t even remember where I puffed the stuff but we ended up at Southland Macca’s, as you do, and I got the giggles so bad I couldn’t look at anyone in a McDonald’s uniform and not see a clown. Since I’d been bitten by the munchy bug though, I lined up in the queue and kept my eyes fixed on the impossibly perfect burgers on the overhead menus, hoping the giggles will have dissipated by the time it’s my turn to order. When I got to the front though, and saw a chick forced to wear a stupid brown hat and a stupid brown shirt with a stupid little name tag pointlessly telling the world her name – well, I just couldn’t handle it. I literally burst out laughing – a genuine LMAO – and ran straight for the door and out into the carpark where I let it all out til my sides hurt, like a fucking lunatic. Eventually I got my breath back, calmed myself down and re-joined the queue. A few faces I’d previously lined up with were now seated with their fries and Coke, eyeing me warily as again, I stared as if hypnotized at the impeccable photogenic burgers above the counter, trying hard to Think Serious. Finally it was my turn to step up and interact with another girl in a ridiculous uniform she had to wear just to confirm whether some deadshit wanted fries with that – and again, my brain just couldn’t process the surreality of it. Unable to even form my first sentence, which I’d been mentally rehearsing for at least five minutes, I bolted out the door and ROCLed (Rolled On The Carpark Laughing). I didn’t dare go back a third time in case someone called the cops or a padded white van.

But like I said: these were exceptions. I didn’t get high and stupid off weed as a general rule, and don’t like smoking full stop. As I’ve said to friends before, I’m the opposite of your everyday smoker. Most smokers seem to hate themselves for being “smokers” with all of its social stigma – helpless modern-day lepers forced to bear the cold and wind and hostile glances from menstrual asthmatics  just to get their hourly puff of death stick – but they love the reassuring warm tingle of smoke as it pours down their throat, fills their lungs and enters their bloodstream. Me, I’d love to be a smoker – standing outside like James Dean, wrapped in a thick black coat with the collar up like some Nordic detective from a film noir movie – but I hate the taste it leaves in your mouth, hate the smell it leaves on your clothes, and hate the abrasiveness as it scrapes down your protesting, moist pink respiratory cavity like the hot fine dust out of a vacuum cleaner bag. I digress, but I think my point is made. I don’t smoke and, as a result – since it’s usually ingested that way – I’ve rarely consumed weed.

So I’m sitting in Tanya’s backyard, twist the cap off my first Smirnoff and have a hash cookie with it. Not bad. I don’t need to inhale it, and it tastes exactly like you’d expect: the sweetness of cookie cut through by the herbal tang of hash – a little odd, but it makes a nice contrast to my lemony overly-sweet beverage. I have another bottle, and another cookie. After maybe an hour and a half, I’m done and I’m bored – there’s just Tanya and 3 or 4 stoner dudes sitting around on plastic chairs, talking in their stoner voices about stoner stuff that doesn’t interest me or, for that matter, even make any sense. It’s only about 11am at this point so I decide to quickly head back home, seeing as its on the way to Flemington, and tell Tanya I’ll meet her & the bongheads at the Showgrounds. No worries.

I get in my car and drive back to my flat. It’s once I’m back in the cool, curtain-darkened ambience of my abode that I realize I’m starting to feel a bit under the weather – tired, but not in your regular sleepy way – in a bit of a sick way, weak and dizzy, unsure of yourself. I put it down to having alcopops in the sun less than an hour after waking up, and climb into bed to doze for maybe half an hour.

Midday arrives and I know I have to make a move, but feel like I’ve gorged on a bowl of sleeping pills. I scull a Red Bull – there’s always a trusty titanium can of that shit somewhere in my fridge – then hop in my car and drive to Windsor station. It’s only about a 10-minute walk but I can’t be fucked walking in this state, which I still blame – for now – on alcohol and the sun. I’ll be right by the time we get there, I reason – the Red Bull will have cut through the vodka, I’ve put my sunnies on, and the gluggy aftermath of a 20-minute nap will have been thawed by the hustle & bustle of Chapel St. My head’s starting to spin though and by the time I park my car, step out and amble towards the platform, a realization dawns upon me. I’m fucked.

The problem was, this was the first stage of the day where I was out in public, rather than a private backyard or the confines of my car or flat. So I noticed – abruptly, as the effect of the green cookies escalated in a J-curve – that I was actually paranoid as hell. Standing on the platform with at least a dozen other people around me, I couldn’t contain myself after a few minutes and power-walked – trying to look natural, but probably looking like I’d just shat myself with explosive diarrohea – back to my car where I locked myself in. “Mateusz,” I told myself, “you’re being a freak. Snap out of it. The train’ll be here soon.” I psyched myself up to step out of the car again and walk back to the platform – this time with an exaggerated calmness and slowness, like I’d had something very large and uncomfortable inserted into my rectum. You’re just standing on a fucking train station like you have a million times before, I told myself. No-one’s even looking at you. Again though, the spooked-out ganja fairy on my shoulder convinced me to hurry back to the car. I knew from the announcement that the train was only a minute or two away now, and had no idea what I’d do if I missed it. Realizing it was now or never, I stepped out of my car and walked briskly down to the platform for the third time. Anyone paying attention to the CCTV cameras that day must’ve thought I was one of those insane public transport types – or on quality narcotics, I guess, in which case they’d be spot on. My one redeemer was that I had my sunnies on, and somehow those tinted eye-shields made me feel at least a little bit protected from the suddenly very hostile, unstable outside world. The train slid in and I stepped on. There was no going back. I was now locked into a fast-moving, cramped steel tube full of young people in loud clothes jabbering in loud voices. And I came upon a second realization: I’d made a very bad move.

In retrospect it was amazing I lasted as long I did. I got all the way to Melbourne Central, which was still short of my intended stop but about 5 stations (I think) from Windsor. When I got on board, the seats were all taken (not that I would’ve sat next to anyone probably) and so I found myself standing by the door opposite the worst possible person, someone who even dead sober would’ve made you look twice. He was wearing very tight jeans almost definitely not intended for men, some kind of ultra-shiny black boots, and a ridiculous little vest over his baby-smooth, otherwise naked chest. The whole time he stood there in a stupid pose that reminded of the box art on the original Sonic the Hedgehog, thumbing away at his phone like the security of the country over the next few hours depended on him getting these texts out. Again, even sober you’d be drawn to a character like that – with a head full of drugs, it was like being faced with a fucking gigantic walking banana or something. I had to get out.

I remember being extremely thirsty by this point – unsurprising considering it was hot and I was no doubt dehydrated from my alcohol + hash cookie happy meal – so having escaped the train at Melbourne Central, I wandered into Coles to get a bottle of springwater. By the time I was in its shiny, numbered bowels though, the drug suddenly peaked like a massive wave, crashing over and submerging the last vestiges of my mind that hadn’t yet succumbed to its powerful reality distortion filter. I literally forgot where I was or what the fuck I was even doing here.

So picture this: you find yourself, all of a sudden, in what appears to be a humongous space lit by oppressively bright white lights like you’re under interrogation from God. Along the two walls either side of you, stretching as far as the eye can see, are cans and bottles and packets and jars and tins of food – hundreds of them, for no discernable reason at all. Why all this food? What’s with all these fucking baked beans? Who needs all this powdered milk, I screamed silently to myself, and what sort of deranged psychopath has taken it upon himself to sort all this shit by size and brand and colour?? Even under my sunglasses everything seemed way too bright, like when you’re badly hungover, and all I know is I have to get out to that other area I was in before, where it’s comfortably dark and relatively quiet. But I feel literally like a rat in a maze, and have no idea how to leave. The usually-so-familiar aisles of Coles have become a bizarre labyrinth from which there’s no apparent escape – no landmarks in this environment; just rows of red-labelled tins and bottles full of black liquid and bright orange packets with shit like a grinning Negro and ‘Uncle Benny’s Egg Fried Rice’ written on them… a demented Andy Warhol-themed maze surrounded by a vast outer wall of refrigeration. Jesus, how the fuck do you get out of here? And how come everyone else’s so calm when we’re so obviously trapped?? I still faintly remember passing a woman with a pram and being tempted to ask her if there’s an exit. Not where is the exit. Is there one. Thankfully I didn’t want to interact with anyone any more than I wanted to spend the rest of my days with Uncle Benny and the Coco Pop monkey for company.

Eventually I stumble across the checkout area, with the dim-lit world of Melbourne Central beyond, and immediately realize there’s a ritual to be followed. Bolting out, hand covering eyes even though you’re wearing fucking sunglasses, is not the protocol and may not end well. So I stand in a line with a bunch of other customers, trying to stay cool and not attract any attention. In my hand I have a bottle of water, my primal thirst having asserted itself somehow in my search for the way out. Watching the other people, I remember you have to go up to the counter, hand over money for what’s in your hand, wait for change and smile. For some reason the smiling seems like the most important part: I keep telling myself to look friendly, at ease, because I know I’m anything but – and who knows what the consequences might be if you’re not these things. I step up and to my relief, the Asian checkout chick doesn’t seem too perturbed by me – either that, or she’s doing very well at masking any discomfort at this nervous idiot wearing pitch-black shades indoors. Money exchange over, I rush out with my bottle and fistful of change.

I have no recollection of anything between that point and Big Day Out. At all. By some absolute miracle that must’ve involved getting in touch with and getting instructions from Tanya, I manage to catch another train, not freak out or kill anyone and arrive at the Showgrounds, teeming with more people than I’d ever seen firsthand, with Tanya and the Hampton Stoners Club at the gate – by arrangement or coincidence, I can’t remember.

The drug then shifted gears in a way I find difficult to explain. On one level I was still pretty paranoid – not so much in a scared way anymore, but just unwilling to engage with anyone unfamiliar. At the same time, I felt extremely restless – the desire to lock myself in a safe, silent place had disappeared, and the positive, lively festival atmosphere had altered my attitude so that while it was still definitely abnormal and anti-social, I was happy, even eager to be a part of this vibe, albeit anonymously and on my own terms – like a kid who’s warming to his first day at kindergarten, but still far from ready to socialize and play carefree with the others. With everything appearing extremely intense – that super-heightened awareness of every single moment and its possible opportunities that only a drug can instil – my normally limited attention span had been decimated to zero, and I physically couldn’t handle the slow, inane conversation of Tanya’s group that even after a couple of chick drinks that morning had become painful. With an uncertain look, like she was letting a teenage koala out into the wild for the first time, Tanya let me go and I lost myself in the throng, a lone buoy adrift in a sea of humans.

The worst was over, but my memory again becomes hazy. I remember dancing with a group of girls at one point that, in retrospect, were clearly underage. At another point I wandered over to a distant area where a Pendulum-style drum-&-bass band were performing (hell, maybe it WAS Pendulum, I wouldn’t know). I stood behind a pack of typical festival dudes: all baseball caps, peeling tanned skin and wifebeaters, one of them a particularly boisterous wanker who’d nod and make dumb-arse hand gestures every time the beat kicked in. He noticed me standing quite close, staring at the stage, and whispered something that could only have been uncomplimentary to his friend, who turned around but as soon as he saw me, looked wary, turned back to his mate and brushed off whatever suggestion or observation he may have made. In retrospect I can probably see why I caught their attention, standing there in my plain black T-shirt and sunglasses, dead silent, dead still, by myself, gazing at the stage like I was monitoring rather than appreciating the band. Even Finnish gunmen show more expression than that, and possibly Finnish gunmen is precisely what flashed through the friend’s mine when he turned around and looked at me.

Shortly afterwards I passed out on a patch of grass for a while, feeling sick again – the weed, booze, chilled water and absence of any proper nutrition was taking its toll on my stomach. I desperately wanted to see The Prodigy and if nothing else, not waste my $100+ ticket, but whereas before I’d just been mentally wrecked, I was now starting to feel physically wrecked. Without even notifying Tanya, I walked slowly all the way back to the Showground gates and up to the train platform, the last frontier before the Point of No Return, where I asked a security guy if I could get a passout. No. Fuck.

In the end I didn’t leave, even though my knees had now decided to stop functioning. At some point I found Tanya and sat with them on the grass near the food stalls. I ate a shitty baked potato washed down with 3 or 4 gin-and-tonic cans, whose cheap, bitter flavour I found comforting and even head-clearing. A couple of attractive blonde chicks some way away waved to me and motioned for me to join them. Again – and I know all male readers will want to slap me for this, coz I sure as hell do – I just stared out at them blankly through my sunglasses, til they ceased and no doubt said to each other “Right, he’s some kinda freak.” I was grounded enough by then to know I was probably being a bit weird, but far from straight enough to regret it or care. Interaction with strangers – even blonde hotties – was still very much unwelcome. I had no qualms with grinding flesh in the midst of a pounding trance crowd, but anonymity was all-important. I didn’t want to talk or identify myself in any way. I was happy to enjoy the throng, be swept up in the collective worship of music’s abstract, wordless energy, but I wasn’t ready for individuals and chit-chat. So I sat there and sipped silently like a robot, like a human version of those novelty Coke cans that only come to life when you play music to it, my zanged-out brain now nearing the city limits of normality, but still with a good hour or two to go.

Anyway. Sure enough, I more or less returned to normal around sunset (8pm), with just a pleasant buzz remaining to keep me going for The Prodigy at 9pm. In a nutshell, it was amazing – one of the best nights of my life. Even though I was now without friends – Tanya and her buddies were seeing the festival’s other main act, Eric Clapton or someone at the opposite end of the Showgrounds – I had an awesome time, dancing like my life depended on it not far from the stage, to the earth-shattering boom of Voodoo People, Their Law and all those classics, played loud enough to give you bowel movements. When Take Me To The Hospital came on early in the set – the first time I’d ever heard its rave-anthem chords and rastafarian chipmunk vocals – it blew my mind and I felt like I’d taken a whole new drug – like 10 Jager bombs, Asterix’s potion and that green ‘ooze’ shit from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles all in one. I vividly remember one moment in particular, between songs, as Maxim was doing his thing and yelling at the crowd, calling us his “warriors”, and ahead of me in the summer heat and blaze of lights an Australian flag was waving (it was Australia Day that day), and I offered a cute girl I’d been dancing next to my bottle of water, which she accepted with a big smile – that moment I felt in love with life in a way not even the finest MDMA could achieve. At the end of it all, elated, drenched in sweat and feeling like the Energizer battery after an electronic gadget orgy – whatever that may mean – I caught the train home, drove my car back to my flat from where I’d bravely parted it with earlier that day, and crashed onto my bed for a very, very deep sleep.

Let me start off by saying this isn’t supposed to be controversial. It’s not one of those troll-esque articles making Steve Jobs out to be the Antichrist, using ‘Hitler’ as an embodiment of evil. I’m actually writing this having just finished Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, and as someone who used be deeply fascinated by the Nazis and interwar European history, I couldn’t help but notice a startling number of similarities between the two figures – most of them neither positive nor negative as such, but just little similarities that are pretty rare and unusual.

I guess the most immediately obvious one relates to Hitler’s and Jobs’ famed ability to achieve the seemingly impossible, bending reality to accommodate their grand ideals. Hitler called it “triumph of the will”; in Steve’s world it was referred to as the “reality distortion field” – basically where the sheer force of one’s conviction, induced upon others through brilliant oratory and fuelled by selective and cleverly presented truths, allows one to manifest one’s vision no matter how immense the scope or tight the deadline. Powered by intense and forceful personalities, both Jobs and Hitler were able to whip people up into a frenzy at events that were painstakingly staged to perfection. Their delivery was markedly different – Steve spoke slowly and softly; Hitler tended to work himself up into a rapid-fire onslaught of shriekery – but whether we’re talking the annual MacWorld or annual Nuremberg rallies, where the faithful gathered to hear their leader reflect on the year gone by and prophesize the one ahead, the staging would be planned down to the smallest minutiae, the lighting and backdrop and the theatre of it all just right, with the sole intent of transfixing the audience to see the future through the orator’s eyes. Both events were characterized by empowering rhetoric of “We will change the world” – simultaneously rebellious yet New World Orderish, embodying a key paradox in both Jobs and Hitler as underdogs obsessed with control.

In this respect, Apple and the Nazis were undeniably alike. Both started off as ‘rebels’ against an established order – IBM in the former’s case, the Weimar Republic in the latter. These two entities became obsessive focal points, representing everything that was wrong with the world of high technology / national governance. Apple portrayed Big Blue as Big Brother in its brilliant ’1984′ TV commercial; the Nazis condemned Germany’s democratic government as a similarly oppressive dead weight on their country imposed by their World War I enemies. Both saw themselves – quite justifiably – as a young, dynamic force that would overthrow the status quo and implement radical change; fresh and virile faces charging a stagnant, stifling, overgrown edifice to forge a new way forward. Both started off very humbly – in a garage and pub respectively – but grew to fulfil these lofty ambitions, led by the unshakeable, reality-distorting passion of their leaders.

Of course, you could apply this argument to a plethora of successful people and their organizations. Grandiose vision, burning ambition, dynamism, a desire to beat the system – these qualities are hardly unique to Apple and Nazism, and perhaps it’s a bit silly even comparing the two on these grounds, valid as the case may be. It’s really the similarities in the personal lives and characters of Jobs and Hitler that drove me to sit down and write this, and that’s what I want to focus on for the rest of this entry.

Both Jobs and Hitler started off similarly in life. Steve was abandoned by his biological parents; Hitler lost his father as a child and his mother as a teenager. Both spent their early adulthood as listless vagabonds: Hitler wandering between guesthouses for unemployed men in Vienna, Steve wandering through India and an array of hippy communes on the American west coast.  Even in this meandering early phase of their lives, the two displayed a very clear artistic streak with a penchant for perfectionism, manifesting itself in architectural design with Hitler and technology design with Jobs. Both spent this period looking for big-picture answers for why the world is the way it is: Jobs found them in Buddhism and the Beat culture of the 60s and 70s; Hitler in the racialism and nationalism of early 20th-century Europe. Both were avid readers of a publication that epitomized their corresponding ideology: the Whole Earth Catalog in Jobs’ case, the anti-Semitic magazine Ostara in Hitler’s.

Both were already vegetarian by this point, placing little priority on eating, and smoked/drank minimally if at all. Both were heavily into opera. Both held formal education in contempt and did not complete university, while dedicating much of their abundant spare time absorbing seemingly frivolous knowledge that would later prove useful. And as they left this period behind, discovered their love in life and dedicated themselves to it, both became convinced that they would die too early; a fear that drove them to achieve as much as they could in their life span – which, sure enough in both cases, was not as long as average. Both died aged 56.

After a remarkable and rapid rise to fame, both figures also suffered a major, almost career-killing setback after staging an unsuccessful coup. In Hitler’s case this was the Beer Hall Putsch, which saw him go to jail for several years; in Jobs’ it was his expulsion from Apple after trying to oust then-CEO John Sculley. Both used their period of exile to undertake important projects – the dictation of Mein Kampf and the foundation of NeXT and Pixar – which allowed them to solidify and broaden their radical ideas, rethink their behaviour and recharge for a Second Coming that completely eclipsed the first. In neither case, however, was their prodigal return a glamorous phoenix-like affair – Jobs returned to Apple merely as an advisor, before becoming interim CEO and finally accepting the position as permanent. Hitler, too, did not storm the Reichstag and seize the reins of power like some wild-eyed revolutionary, but played the democratic system lawfully, diligently and patiently campaigning across Germany until the NSDAP were finally voted in with a balance of power, at which point he negotiated a Chancellorship and only later, finally, invoked emergency powers to secure himself as Germany’s permanent Fuhrer.

There were even more similarities beyond these, not all of which I can remember right now. Another one that comes to mind is how both men were fascinated with the exotic spirituality of the East – while this is reasonably well-known and not particularly surprising with Jobs, it’s less well-known that the Nazis sent multiple expeditions to Tibet and India in search of artifacts relating to early Aryan spirituality, in a chapter of history that comes bizarrely close to an Indiana Jones script. It could even be argued that both men’s downfall stemmed from their belief in their invincibility and ability to ply reality as desired – that they were special and the rules of normal men did not apply to them. As he did throughout his life when faced with a problem, Jobs ignored his cancer diagnosis, dismissing advice from traditional experts (doctors) and believing he could overcome it his way, with fasting and diets. Hitler, too, ignored the grim prognosis that was reaching Berlin from his encircled armies at Stalingrad; then, as the outlook grew ever bleaker, believed a combination of steel resolve and new-fangled ‘wonder weapons’ would turn the course of the war back in his favour – again, against the advice of traditional experts (his military generals) who proposed strategic retreats and selective peace treaties.

There are differences between the two men, of course. Hitler would’ve been the better boss to work for, assuming you’d prefer humouring long-winded rants over tea to being outright abused (by all accounts, Jobs liked to yell at individuals in private as much as Hitler liked to yell to crowds in public). Hitler also had a very deep sense of loyalty and sentimentality that Jobs lacked; whereas Hitler cherished and surrounded himself with early “comrades” of the NSDAP even if they had no talent – Himmler was a failed chicken farmer – Jobs did the exact opposite, discarding the old in favour of the more talented new whenever convenient, friendships be damned. On the other hand, whereas Jobs had a string of relationships and was obviously more than capable of falling in love, Hitler’s life contained strangely little in the way of sex or romance, and he only got married to his long-time mistress, Eva Braun, mere hours before they committed suicide. While both were artists at heart, spending hours poring over models made by their special staff favourite (Albert Speer / Jony Ive), Hitler abhorred the functional cubic aesthetic of the Bauhaus school, whereas Jobs loved and was deeply influenced by it. (That said, buildings aside, Nazi design did have a bent towards modern minimalism and bold, simple iconography much like Apple.) Finally, whereas Hitler was, like Jobs, very interested in technology (he actually designed the original Volkswagen Beetle, and could rattle off detailed tank and airplane specs from memory), Jobs was not even remotely interested in issues of nationality or ethnicity, and never took any notice of Middle Eastern affairs despite his half-Syrian heritage.

I guess the two most significant differences are that Jobs did not leave a destructive and divisive legacy like Hitler’s, and his organisation has outlived him and continues to prosper. While Nazism perished in the rubble of Berlin, having decimated much of Europe and torn apart countless families, Apple lives on in its empire of white stores and arsenal of white iThings, bringing pleasure and ease of use to tech consumers around the globe. And while Nazism was very much about the masses, unifying the many and harnessing the base instincts of the mob, Apple is all about the individual user experience – creative expression over regimentation, individuality over assimilation – homogeneous as it is compared to the world of Windows PCs (read on, let’s not go there…)

I guess that pretty much sums up this entry. To finish – and to appease any Apple fanboys who might still be finding my comparison a tad hard to swallow – I did find Isaacson’s biography genuinely inspiring; more an uplifting lesson in life than a tome of juicy never-before-revealed nastiness. Being a long-time armchair student of IT history, I’m no stranger to the fact that Steve Jobs could be a real c*** so those parts of the book came as no surprise – what I did draw from it is simply that it’s important – indeed critical – to assert yourself in life. Which isn’t to say (as numerous articles following the book’s release have implored us to note) that being an arsehole is an acceptable managerial style, or that being mean and arrogant was an active ingredient in Steve’s recipe for success. But like Hitler, I guess, Steve Jobs didn’t waste time doubting himself, being non-commital in what to believe and pursue in life, and realizing his ambitions only when he could do so in a safe, socially acceptable way. Unlike so many of us, he refused to be just a passive observer of life, a mere yay/nay/do-as-you-sayer. Steve spoke his mind, developed a keen intuition and acted on it fearlessly, and these are things we – certainly I – do all too rarely these days with time that, as his death late last year reminds us, is all too short and precious. So for me, more than anything, reading about Jobs’ life has been a wake-up call to, as he himself put it,

“[Not] let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”

The book was my first introduction to what you might call ‘New Age’ concepts, describing how to raise the energy in living environments so that they impact positively on your well-being and on the various spheres of your life. These days this concept no longer raises eyebrows, even if many people still don’t believe it, but in the late 90s when I first read this, feng shui was only just taking off – most people mispronouncing it ‘feng shoo-ee’ – and it was considered pretty out there; in the same kooky boat as Tarot cards and chakra cleansing. Yet I not only grasped the concept immediately; I knew that it was true. On a practical level, I’d always been acutely aware of the draining effect of clutter and poor organization – and, conversely, the uplifting qualities of tastefully, practically and spaciously arranged living areas.

Fast-forward a decade and we’re at New Year’s Eve, 2010. 2010 was probably the most pointless year of my life. Nothing changed, even though I really wanted it to. I wanted a more rewarding, better-paid job, but barely even got any interviews. I wanted a girlfriend, but didn’t meet any girls with that sort of potential. After writing off my first car during the one month it was uninsured, my new one turned to be a complete piece of junk, draining me of hundreds of dollars and endowing me with a powerful desire to murder car dealers. Not to speak of the pain (financial as well as physical) of tattoo removal, topped off by my general disillusionment with Melbourne’s bar scene and the same old drink/talk-shit routine of Saturday night.

So I knew when 2010 wrapped up that spiritually and psychologically I couldn’t afford a repeat of it, but at the same time I realized that the change had to come from myself – that you can’t just go through life wanting, hoping and expecting. The hard truth is that the Universe doesn’t give a shit how desperate you are and if anything, that sort of desperation only destabilizes your ability to tune in to the forces that Make Stuff Happen. In other words, to make stuff happen, you have to begin with yourself.

Though it took me a few more months, probably the most tangible fruit of this mindset is that I began attending Buddhist meditation classes and kung fu lessons – and they’re two of the best things I’ve done in a very long time. All of a sudden, the absence of a new job or partner in my life didn’t matter as much. I felt more energized and didn’t need things outside of me to happen to feel that good energy – it came from myself, from being active, from committing that one hour a day, two or three times a week, to Moving the Body and Stilling the Mind – when all too often, in the West, we’re incessantly moving the mind while the body sits stagnant. Then we wonder why we can’t sleep, why even the smallest obstacles stress us out, why we can’t focus on the smallest tasks – and why we can’t manifest. It’s interesting to realize, literally just as I’ve been writing the above, that I finally got that new, better-paid job less than a month after starting the meditation/kung fu.

Only a couple of weeks after I started, I was amazed at myself that I hadn’t done this earlier. I’d been reading about meditation for years – about five years ago I listened to Wayne Dyer’s Manifesting Your Destiny, a set of lectures that prescribed regular meditation to its listeners; a couple of years later I lapped up Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a book entirely focussed on how and why one should practice zazen. But as is so often the case, I guess, it took a crisis – hitting a level of desperation about where my life was going, or rather why it wasn’t going anywhere – that pushed me into not just reading and listening to this stuff, but actually practising it.

Similarly with martial arts. My first favourite ‘adult’ movie was Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, a biopic about the most famous and influential martial artist in history. I read Fighting Spirit, an excellent biography of Bruce Lee, several times as a teenager, relishing in particular the final section of the book, which examined Bruce Lee’s personal philosophy of life and well-being. Again though, it took the crisis for me to make that leap from cerebral absorption to physical emulation. And as with meditation, I’m very glad that I did.

I’m not gonna deny it’s difficult to make this leap at first. As Westerners in the 21st century, we’re constantly bombarded with movies and music and billboards and crowds and alcohol. We get a genuine adrenaline rush from watching the latest Jason Bourne movie or playing the latest GTA. We get a tangible cosy feeling watching Barney playfully tease Ted in that familiar booth in that familiar bar in How I Met Your Mother. Warm evenings like we’re having now must be spent drinking schooners of Hoegaarden in some hip bar on a graffiti’d side street, with hundreds of other people who feel the same compulsion. Yet we’re not actually doing anything in any of these scenarios. We’re just sitting. And this attitude of sitting as doing – whether it’s watching, playing, drinking – extends to reading. Reading a book about meditation is actually pretty damn useless unless you end up doing some meditation. Watching martial arts films is all well and good, but if it gives you such a kick (no pun intended), why not try martial arts itself?

For so long I made the same wrong assumption most of us make: I was already tired much of the time – tired from work, from shopping, from social and family obligations, whatever – and I simply didn’t have energy to spare, certainly not on activity as intensive as push-ups and star jumps and shadow-boxing. It would only tire me out more, deplete me of my very last kilojoule reserves – right? Wrong. As all fitness junkies know (and we who wonder how they’ve got so much energy don’t) is that the opposite is true. By engaging in exercise, you get energy – or ch’i, as it’s called in Chinese – moving around the body. Just as you need to Still Your Mind to settle the blinding ink of negative emotion, so you need to Move Your Body to shake around the ink of positive energy. People are exhausted after long days sitting in the office or at uni lectures or on long flights because they’ve just been sitting there. Still water stagnates and becomes heavy; flowing water remains fresh and dynamic.

Before I was ready for the MA-rated violence of something like Dragon, one of my favourite movies was the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Watching it as an adult for the first time last year, I could still see – despite its surface silliness, revolving as it does around four human-sized, English-speaking, pizza-guzzling turtles – that the movie is quite deep and dark, with distinct Buddhist undertones. In one moving scene, Splinter says to Raphael in words whose simple beauty and depth put many adult movies to shame:

My Master Yoshi’s first rule was: Possess the right thinking – only then will you possess the gifts of strength, knowledge and peace. I have tried to channel your anger, Raphael, but more remains. Anger clouds the mind; turned inward it is an unconquerable enemy. For you are unique among your brothers because you choose to face this enemy alone. As you face it, do not forget them and do not forget me… I am here, my son.

Splinter personifies Buddhism in the movie – the wise ancient force that guides the four young, brash turtles, instilling the necessary discipline and moral intuition necessary for maturity. We all need a Splinter in our lives. It’s all too easy in such a noisy, demanding and atomized world to become miserable, frustrated and run-down. But the moment that black inks starts squirting into your mind, it’s essential to identify it, to observe what’s happening, and rather than shake it up with aggravating hateful and resentful thoughts, to let it settle until the mind is clear and calm once more. It helps, of course, to visualize a counter-force, which is why we have religion and why people call on Jesus, Krishna, Allah, the Archangel Gabriel or whatever. Me, I think of Splinter

If Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was one of my favourite childhood movies, one of my favourite teenage ones was the Street Fighter II animated movie – like TMNT, a movie that went deeper than one might credit given it’s based on a video game. Its first depiction of Ryu, the main all-round good guy of the video game, shows him meditating on top of a mountain peak in the Himalayas, gathering his ch’i, then letting it burst out in a brilliant surge of energy… only to return to his former contemplative position to patiently muster it again. Part of me feels cheesey using this as an analogy but it’s a genuinely inspiring scene, and together with flashbacks to his training at a remote Japanese dojo, encapsulates the inherently dignified, internal and peaceful nature of martial arts and its necessary fusion with meditative practice.

To wrap up: we all know that old adage of turn off your TV and go read a book. I applaud that, but I’d go one step further: put down the book and sign up for a fitness class – martial arts, tai chi, yoga, gym, whatever takes your fancy. The point is to give the mind, which is always thinking What should I say at that meeting? Who do I have to call back again? How do I look? What are all these e-mail notifications? a much-needed rest – and a great way to suspend the mind is to activate the body. It’s almost impossible to stress about your overdrawn credit card or your boss’s criticism when you’re skipping rope or kicking pads. You’re completely in the moment. When you’re kicking pads, your focus is on channeling ch’i up from your leg through your waist and down your arm into your fist, and that’s a beautiful thing – simple, pure. After that hour, you feel far more sure of yourself – your mind has ceased to question why? and when? and how? and just accepts that whatever is, is, and that your situation will evolve and resolve in due course. No point in worrying… just be and let be.

I’ve already covered the story of the Warsaw Uprising here, so don’t want to use this entry to revisit the history and politics of it. What’s driven me to write this is, quite simply, how damn lucky we are today. It’s a theme commonly served up at military commemorations – in Australia on Anzac Day, for example, we’re always reminded how grateful we should be to the Diggers for the freedom that we enjoy today. The problem is, even a reasonably ‘historically conscious’ person like me tends to find the media’s predictable Anzac Day platitudes a tad tiresome year after year, and unfortunately – but almost unavoidably – you tune out to the rhetoric, ceasing to reflect on the message behind the memorials. Only when you leave the present and go back in time to revisit the hell that people lived through in World War 2, do you gratefully and humbly rush to accept its truth again, tinged with guilt for ever having rolled your eyes at the phrase “Lest We Forget”. Every night I’ve put Rising ’44 down – usually only because my eyes have blurred to the point that I can no longer read – there’s a part of me that does so with a tangible feeling of relief – relief in knowing that there will not be a Gestapo or NKVD agent bursting through my door; that I will not be kept up all night by the roar of burning and collapsing buildings; that I will not have to leap over barricades into torrents of gunfire at the freezing crack of dawn the next day. Above all – and this is perhaps the most important yet most easily forgotten point – I have ready access to food, water and medical care whenever I need it.

The food situation was deteriorating. Even black bread was meagrely rationed. Our hearts ached at the thought that the sick, and particularly the boys, were hungry, at a time when they needed intensive care. We carried dinner for the sick from the main building through a huge clearing in the wall dividing the villa from the hospital garden. But ever more frequently we had to wait a long time for the firing to calm down…

The passage above is typical of civilian recollections of Warsaw, 1944. Today, we whinge about food that’s high in saturated fat, isn’t produced organically or costs a few dollars more than we’d like. During the Warsaw Uprising, people eked out a living by tearing flesh off dead horses and boiling water from puddles over candles. A loaf of bread was a prized treasure, worth its weight in gold. Today, we complain when we have to wait at the doctors’ clinic for quarter of an hour… in wartime Warsaw, the feverishly sick and wounded had to anguish for hours if not days before being attended to by medical staff, who operated with the barest essentials while mortar shells and bullets tore up the street outside. During the Uprising, the Poles marked these hopelessly overcrowded facilities with giant red crosses, in the hope enemy combatants would have the decency to leave them alone and let the doctors and nurses carry on with their work. As usual, they gave their adversaries too much credit – the Germans targeted the red crosses specifically, dive-bombing the hospitals from the air and often finishing off with flame-throwers, grenades and bayonets what the Stukas failed to kill and destroy. Earlier this month, the evening news was dominated by flashbacks to the events of September 11 a decade ago, universally regarded as a tragedy of monumental proportions with its 3,000 people dead – and rightly so. Yet on a single day in a single district in Warsaw (Wola, 5 August), 40,000 people were ruthlessly massacred by the SS and Ukrainian/Russian collaborators. Nobody outside of Warsaw even knew, and it was just one of many blood-soaked days in the month of August 1944.

In spite of bearing witness to horrors that would send most of us into days of shock and months of counselling, the insurgents of Warsaw did not mope around and wallow in self-pity. What struck me when I got the photo gallery section of the book – having just read about the brutality, indignations and deprivations suffered by the Varsovians – is how completely normal they look in spite of their circumstances. Teenage girl scouts, who risked their lives every day crawling through filthy, claustrophobic sewers to relay messages, smile cheerfully for the camera. Young men wearing red-and-white armbands, though gaunt from lack of food and sometimes bandaged from wounds, calmly sit back, converse and share cigarettes in between skirmishes with SS battalions armed to the teeth. At worst, the Home Army and their helpers look only tense or sombre, crouched behind barricades or street corners; no-one looks miserable. It’s one of the most inspiring facets of the book.

Of course Rising ’44 does become deeply disturbing at parts, even for a ‘hardened’ student of WW2 like myself. What triggered me to write this in the first place was a single paragraph from a letter (published in full in the book) by the wife of a Polish Home Army soldier:

We then returned to my parents, who were sharing an apartment very close to the Ghetto where famine was raging. Every day, two tiny starving urchins would visit our house to receive a bowl of hot soup and a bit of food. One day I saw something that has been burned into my memory. Walking across the square, I saw two Gestapo agents standing over a couple of emaciated boys who could hardly stand up on their little legs. One of the agents grabbed the first by the ankles and smashed his head against the wall. Then he grabbed the other and did the same. That event affected my later life very deeply… From then on, our two urchins did not visit us.

I had to put the book down and call it a night at that point. It’s genuinely heartbreaking to consider for even a second the sad, short and suffering-filled lives of those two innocent, probably parentless Ghetto children – and the pure evil of that Gestapo agent. I was reminded of a similarly shocking scene in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, where a Nazi guard kicks a Jewish youngster to death for clambering out from under the Ghetto wall. What’s disturbing is that there were hundreds of these agents in wartime Europe – cramming unarmed civilians into cellars and setting them ablaze, burying prisoners alive in dirt pits. Fictitious World War 1 propaganda of priests being crucified to barn doors became gruesome reality in World War 2, courtesy of rabid Ukrainian nationalists. Without a doubt many of these perpetrators are still alive today – vicious thugs too low-ranking and obscure to be identified and brought to justice after the war.

Yet this behaviour is hardly unique to the WW2 generation – the war merely turned Europe into fertile ground for these weeds to prosper and strangle the delicate flowerbed of civilization. I hate to sound pessimistic about humanity but I’d say in every generation, there lie dormant three basic categories of people – 1) the indifferent; 2) those like the soldier’s wife, who no doubt risked her life giving food to the two “urchins” (helping Jews was a capital offence in Poland); and 3) those like the Gestapo agent, only too willing to maim and kill on whatever flimsy justification they can devise. In everyday life, the latter types are more or less indiscernable from the majority who’d mind their own business regardless, but at times when law and order breaks down, they respectively shine in their humanity or degenerate into monsters. We see it today in places like Africa, where wartime conditions still rage, or in those brainwashed by the similar ‘might is right’ ideology of fundamentalist Islam, who think nothing of bashing, stoning and burying alive their own daughters because of some perceived ‘insult’ committed against the family. Whether it’s to gain the Fuhrer’s, Allah’s or some other higher authority’s favour, there are many only too willing to carry out great evil in the name of some perceived “greater good”. Fulfilling the commandment conveniently justifies the means.

But it must be said that for all the dark side of humanity that it portrays, Rising ’44 is above all a story of transcending despair, oppression and betrayal to retain one’s human dignity, values and wits. The Armia Krajowa (Home Army) were exemplars of Jozef Pilsudski’s concept of triumphing even in defeat, by not succumbing to the degradation Poland’s overlords tried to wreak upon its people in order to break their spirit. AK units continued to subvert, sabotage and outsmart at every turn, with admirable cunning, bravado and even cheek:

Both sides were only too aware of the other’s activities; they we working the same patch; and, on occasion, they were obliged to cut a deal. In the autumn of 1943, for example, two men from the Home Army’s security corps brazenly stole an armour-plated Super-Mercedes belonging to a Nazi dignitary from the RSHA in Berlin, who had just arrived in Warsaw. The luckless car owner’s subordinates were more than eager to get it back, if only to save their own skins, so the AK decided that a suitable price would be the release of fifteen prisoners from the Paviak [prison]. As reported, the telephone rang on the Sipo’s duty desk:

Did you receive our letter?
Yes.
Do your superiors accept our proposal?
Yes, but…
Alright, tomorrow at 3pm, all on the list must be freed.
And the car? We’ll release the prisoners when we have the car. On my word as a German officer.
You release the prisoners…and after three days, we tell you where the car is.
What’s the guarantee?
The word of a Polish officer.

The exchange took place as agreed.

While I promised myself I wouldn’t go into the geopolitical aspects of the Uprising, the book does go into unprecedented detail to shatter the Good United Allies vs Bad Nazis picturebook version of history, more than anything I’ve read before. For all of the Germans’ much-publicized barbarity (and there’s no shortage of it in Rising ’44 either), there are moments that go some way to restoring your faith in humanity, such as the recollection by an insurgent (disguised as a civilian) of a Wehrmacht soldier eagerly obliging his request for a shave, apologizing profusely for the slightest cut made by his dull blade. At the very same time, Poland’s ‘allies’ the Soviets kept themselves busy by rounding up and arresting everyone with red-and-white armbands as “fascists” and “bandits”, even having the gall to fire at RAF planes attempting to drop supplies over the burning capital (all the way from Italy, since Stalin would not permit Soviet airfields to be used to assist the Poles). Ukrainian collaborators crop up regularly as perpetrators, alongside the SS, of some of the most horrific atrocities against civilians. On the other hand, Hungary – officially an Axis combatant, but historically Poland’s friendly neighbour – quietly issued a statement to its soldiers not to fight the insurgents. A Slovak who found himself in Warsaw as part of the Nazis’ reinforcements even yelled from the darkness across no-man’s-land, “Long live Poland!” Sandwiched from the east and west by massive and hostile forces, it is heartening to know that the Polish Home Army did not stand completely alone, and that just as its ‘allies’ were anything but allies, not all of its ‘enemies’ were enemies.

World War 2 will always be one of the saddest and most damning chapters of European history – and possibly nowhere is this more concentrated or evident than in the Polish theatre, which bore witness to not only the Warsaw Uprising but the Ghetto Uprising, the Katyn massacre and, most notoriously, Auschwitz-Birkenau and related death camps. The entire Eastern Front of World War 2 serves as an almost unbelievable and seemingly endless montage of how cruel man can be to man, when he foregoes his humanity in favour of blind adherence to an ideology or “orders from above”. It is incredible, for example, to read about the little-known but exceedingly grisly massacres of Polish villagers by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (and subsequent anti-Ukrainian retaliations by the AK), then remember the final line from the 17th-century epic With Fire and Sword, set in a time of war between the Polish Commonwealth and its Ukrainian borderlands: “Hatred poisoned the hearts of two brother nations.” Fast-forward 400 years and this line rings as true as ever; a sad example of history needlessly repeating itself. Yet contemporary multicultural Australia – a world away from the divisive festering grievances of the Old World – serves as a testament that camaraderie is the natural state between Europeans. A middle-aged key-cutter I went to recently, overhearing that I was talking in Polish on my mobile, jovially spoke to me in accented Polish as he handed me back the key. He was a Ukrainian from Lwow (now L’viv), and while his parents may well have been mortal enemies of my Polish grandparents who also lived in that city, today, free of the hatred fostered by hypernationalism (and happily encouraged during WW2 by the Nazis, who thrived in driving wedges between the nationalities they occupied), we were simply fellow Slavs, our ancestral home being common ground rather than ground to fight over.

To get back to the original point, Rising ’44 is more than just a compelling read and a ground-breaking revision of the Hollywood version of World War 2. It’s a veritable Bible for appreciating what you’ve got, and realizing how very, very lucky you are that you have only the problems you have. Even as I write this, I’ve got an ear infection and didn’t eat a proper dinner, since the earache’s too painful to go shopping or get takeaway… but while it’d be easy to feel a little sorry for myself, I have my antibiotics and a coffee plunger full of tea and a bed of my own with clean sheets – luxuries which the sick and hungry civilians of Warsaw could only dream of. May no ideology – whether Communism or neo-Nazism or shariah law or Christian fundamentalism – ever be allowed to rob us of our humanity, and lead us to deprive each other when there is so much to go round. Only by using our innate human faculties of common sense, honour and compassion as our guiding forces, can we live worthy lives and go forward rather than backward as a civilization. I’m glad to have found, in the Polish Armia Krajowa, a sturdy example of not giving up – not merely in the struggle against external oppression but, just as importantly, against the internal temptation to act like a beast when hurled into beastly circumstances. Their story – Rising ’44 – is simultaneously an uplifting and appalling and mind-boggling read, but above all, it is a potent reminder to never forget… not so that we can re-erect old demarcations and hate each other anew, but exactly the opposite – so that we can be thankful that we made it to such a better place, and to heed the stark and harrowing call from those who had to endure the mistakes of the past – to tell ourselves, in the words of a French slogan after World War 1, “Never Again!”

And he, when the city was just a raw, red mass,
Said: “I do not surrender.” Let the houses burn!
Let my proud achievements be bombed into dust,
So what, if a graveyard grows from my dreams?
For you, who may come here, someday recall
That some things are dearer than the finest city wall.

When I was a kid, I considered my 8-bit Sega Master System a superior machine to our PC. It seemed like a no-brainer: the SMS never lagged, its sound chip was better, it displayed more colours. By comparison, the PC’s default sound chip was downright painful to listen to, and most games were made in either CGA or EGA graphics, allowing for only 4 or 16 on-screen colours respectively. Addictive as they may have been in their stick-figure simplicity, games like Elevator and Catacomb had nothing on the infinitely more colourful, diverse and epic adventures of WonderBoy or Alex Kidd.

Just as significantly, playing a game on the computer wasn’t a matter of just jamming a cartridge into a slot and turning the power on, or double-clicking an icon like it is today. The IBM 386 we had at home had such pitifully low virtual memory that it couldn’t run a game over the top of Windows 3.1 – I’d have to first of all exit the latter to DOS then painstakingly type out commands. This often included the bizarre step of executing a program called ‘slowdown’, which allowed you to customize the speed of games such as Egaroids and Pitfall that otherwise were pretty much unplayable. By the time I was 10 years old I knew all sorts of DOS prompts and shortcuts off by heart, creating, exploring and sorting directories (now known in our GUI culture as ‘folders’) with ease. A positive byproduct of our shit computer was that it turned me into a very fast typist from an early age – partly because of the text-driven nature of DOS; partly also because, with our PC’s extremely limited capacity for games, I took to making up and typing out stories as a past-time instead.

One of my old friends still remembers the insane amount of time it took just to load WordPerfect 6, the word processor on which I wrote these stories (and which was, I believe, the most popular word processor of the early 90s before MS Word rose to supremacy). Literally, you could double-click the WordPerfect icon, go to the toilet, put the kettle on and amble back just in time to see the fountain-pen logo finally disappear and the program to finish opening. Even then I had to be careful not to type too fast, as the computer wouldn’t be able to keep up and would either stall (at which point I’d have to wait for it to catch up, watching the words I’d typed seconds earlier scroll out like TV subtitles), or even crash. Yes, I shit you not – my computer would crash because I typed out a few sentences at more than 70 or so words per minute. Browsing through fonts too quickly was another surefire way to freeze the system and have to restart, go and make another cup of tea, and generally want to rip your own face off.

Fast-forward a few years. I’m now a teenager and have a big biege box of my own in my bedroom, “borrowed” from my dad’s workplace. It’s got a whopping 900mb of space and runs Windows 95 (later, 98), which basically is more awesome than having a girlfriend. It can finally run the sort of games my friends talk about, like Warcraft and Wolfenstein 3D, with MIDI sound, textured graphics and mouse support. Of course, I still have to painstakingly install them from floppy disks – Doom 2, for example, required no less than 16 from memory – and use a little program called Splitz to split single files bigger than 1.4mb (the size of one floppy disk) into 1.4mb-sized pieces – which I then have to re-join once they’re on my hard drive. It’s a slow and laborious process, and it’d take just one disk to corrupt – a ridiculously common occurrence, now that I think back on it – for the game to be uninstallable, rendering the other 15 or however many disks of data worthless. And while this new & improved computer, compared to the 386, feels like going from a Japanese coffin-bed to a honeymoon suite at the Hyatt, I still need to regularly uninstall games to make space for new ones, with Windows alone taking up a good quarter of the drive.

An interesting aside is that, thanks largely to the mechanical A:/ drives and drawn-out boot sequences of old computers, they used to be a lot more noisy. Compared to their predecessors, today’s computers are blissfully quiet – pretty much silent most of the time, with only the faintest of data-crunching noises when put under the pump. 80s and 90s computers used to play a virtual symphony of beeps and blips upon being turned on, often accompanied by a rush of air like it was preparing for takeoff, and would emit all kinds of additional sounds when reading floppy disks or executing more challenging commands. I remember getting into serious trouble with my Year 8 English teacher once, after she kicked me out of class and made me sit in her adjoining office… being the restless little shit that I was, I turned on her Macintosh hoping that it might have a game on it, and its boot sequence was so loud that she heard it while teaching at the front of the classroom next door. True story.

Of course, the infamous ‘Bad command or file name’ message in DOS always popped up along with a certain sound, which entertained me & my friends as we’d sit there typing in vulgar commands and pretending the computer was being indignant. When it came to games, the PC sound chip was so loud and annoying (there was no volume control for it, to my knowledge) that I often played games such as the loveable Alley Cat on silent. The music for Elevator was possibly one of the most torturously abrasive sounds in the world – imagine a five-second loop of bagpipe music sped up to a rave bpm then played through a PC chip, and you’ve pretty much got it.

The Internet we now take for granted 24/7 was the same in its early days. Now a constant, silent presence on our computers, it used to require a dial-up process that produced some of the most off-key sounds known to Man – a cacophony of dial tones, sirens and static that was, along with the so-called ‘Microsoft sound‘ from Windows 95, definitely one of the iconic pieces of audio from the 1990s. It’s interesting that as Windows has progressed, through XP to Vista and 7, its startup sounds have become ever shorter and less interesting – Windows 7 being nothing more than a tone. Windows 8, based as it is on phone/tablet software, might do away with having one at all.

A lack of virtual memory and sound quality were just two of the more obvious problems of early PCs. Another classic was the limitation that folders and files could be no more than eight characters long – so that often my directories looked like C:/APPLICA~/WORDPER~/DOCUMEN~ or GAMES/CAPTAINC~.EXE. It wasn’t just a DOS issue either, translating over into File Manager (the ancestor of Windows Explorer), with directories displayed as folders but still limited to just eight characters. Only Program Manager – the Windows desktop, essentially, except covering a background picture – was able to display full program names, such as the simple programming tool ‘Visual Basic’, then a staple of Windows’s offerings but now unknown to today’s Facebook-trauling teenyboppers.

Computer hardware, too, used to be very different back in the day. Monitors – now flat, black and lightweight – used to be big biege cubes as heavy as lead. Mice – now elegantly contoured, laser-guided, and black or silver-coloured – used to be plain white, mostly rectangular things, guided by rubber balls that you had to take out and dust off periodically, and which would eventually – like shopping trolley wheels – fail to function properly and need to be replaced. The front of a hard drive itself used to be characterized by two large slits – the 1.4″ floppy A drive, and the virtually prehistoric floppy B drive – both now long gone, replaced by a CD/DVD ROM drive that you’d barely know is there until you eject it. Only the humble keyboard has remained more or less the same, minus the hideous biege colours that made them look like they’d been tea-stained as part of a high-school history project. (Even then there’s those ergonomic ones, though I’ve never actually come across anyone who uses one.)

IT’s always fascinated me because as a Gen Y-er, I’ve been part of the first wave of people to grow up alongside computers, having not only been born at around the same time they went from science lab/college geek club oddity to domestic appliance, but having interacting with them day by day, year after year as they evolved from sluggish productivity tools into the mind-blowing entertainment units of today. They’ve certainly come a long way since the days of ‘Abort, Retry, Fail?’, and in my focus on desktops I haven’t even touched on more radical developments like notebooks – portable computers now more powerful than an entire 90s office network – or the still more revolutionary tablets, where the screen is also the mouse and keyboard. Just a couple of weeks ago I shopped around for a mini SD card for my new phone, and was astounded that these miniscule things – literally the size and weight of the fingernail on my pinky finger – can hold up to 32 gigs of stuff – a storage capacity probably unimaginable 20 years ago, even for computers the size of Kombi vans. Considering Bill Gates once declared that no-one would ever need more than 640kb, who knows what leaps and marvels the next 20 years will produce, and how much more this ever-unfurling technology will continue to change our lives.

Yet Warsaw was, once upon a time, heralded as ‘the Paris of the east’; a vibrant, visually gorgeous city that, with its crossroads position between the east and west of Europe, reflected in its architecture the entire spectrum of European civilization – from the onion domes of St Mary Magdalene’s Cathedral to the intricate Baroque flourishes of St Anne’s Church, from the medieval red brick of the Barbikan to the chalk-white neoclassical columns of the Saxon Palace. Historical treasures dating back centuries, such as the 700-year-old Royal Castle, stood side-by-side with the latest architectural trends, including the ultra-modern (at the time) Hotel Warszawa, one of the earliest skyscrapers in Europe. Its leafy cobbled boulevards, ringing with the clatter of electric trams, horse-carts, bicycles and shiny black motor-cars, gave Warsaw a cosmopolitan ambience comparable to neighbouring Prague and Vienna, with perhaps just a smattering of Paris, the makeshift capital of Poland’s emigre community during the 120-year-long Partitions period. It buzzed with the confidence of a city that, having endured a prolonged and harrowing period of oppression, was now restored its rightful place among the great capitals of Europe, the future full of political, artistic and cultural opportunities that it had been denied for so long.

Tragically, this Warsaw – charming and elegant, buzzing with confidence and the dreams of a proud and progressive people – did not get to enjoy its newfound freedom for long. Between 1939 and 1944 it was shelled, bombed and dynamited to oblivion, and while the Communist puppets installed in 1945 did agree to rebuild some isolated elements (such as the Royal Castle and Old Town Market Square), they erected an essentially new city on top of the rubble – the elegant, cream-coloured facades of old replaced by bland concrete blocks, the city skyline now dominated by the sombre, harshly rectangular Palace of Culture and Science, the familiar panorama of Gothic spires and ornate clock towers gone forever.

Thankfully, with the advent of photography in the early 20th century, the city’s former splendour has been preserved in images now easily accessible on the net (at least if you know Polish!). Although many proved too small, grainy or faded to merit inclusion here, others – with the help of a little digital remastering – provide an immensely absorbing and rewarding insight into what Warsaw was once like. Some of the below photographs were taken mere months before the outbreak of war, while others (predominantly the paintings) go back as far as the 19th century – though I’ve tended to focus on the city during its tenure as capital of the Second Republic.

In addition to the above, I’ve also uploaded some footage of Warsaw (specifically, the Saxon Gardens) from pre-war 1939, which was used in the opening scene of Roman Polanski’s film ‘The Pianist’. The music’s my addition, incidentally – a Jean Michel-Jarre track appropriately titled ‘Chopin Memories’ :

For those after something a little longer, this heart-tugging pictorial journey is 10 minutes in duration and comprised of a much vaster treasury of images than I could muster:

If you’ve got some old-school 3D glasses lying around this clip caters for a more immersive viewing experience, and finally, I can’t not mention this truly stunning animation condensing Polish history (including the interwar period) into an action-packed 8.5 minutes.

It’s worth footnoting that today, Warsaw is an exciting and attractive metropolis once more, much of the Communist-built ugliness still standing but now part of a unique juxtaposition of Old World, Eastern bloc and modern-Western styles, reminding one of the city’s dynamic history at every corner (as celebrated by this American travel writer in her blog). With Poland’s economy on the rise, Warsaw is now not only full of new and dazzling construction projects, but has seen a revitalized interest in restoring more of the iconic landmarks destroyed by the war. Of course, unlike Poland’s relatively unscathed former capital Krakow, the vast majority of Warsaw’s antiquity has gone and will never return. But it’s been a genuine pleasure to collect, remaster and look back on these vintage images over the past few days, as they sum up, for me, the innately sophisticated and western spirit of the Polish nation at a critical point in its history – and reveal why so many Varsovians were willing to fight to the bitter death for their beloved city.

What fascinates me in particular is recurring dreams – themes and settings that crop up again and again in dreams, even years apart, giving that other dimension an apparent continuity and cohesion that makes you wonder if it isn’t more than just a reel of eclectic psycho-garbage. Speaking for my own vast backlog, there have been a number of identifiable themes that stem back to my childhood and still manifest every now and again, including:

Spiders. I attribute this largely to the fact that the suburb I grew up in, close to wetlands/rural territory, was riddled with spiders – and we’re talking big hairy fuckers the size of your hand. More than once I fell asleep to the sight of a grisly, eight-legged silhoutte clinging to the flyscreen outside my bedroom window. In my dreams, these huntsmen spiders often lurked in cardboard boxes, with only a couple of legs sticking out of the top, while in one dream that felt more surreal than scary, they were actually able to float through the air, their legs dangling limp like the tentacles of a swimming jellyfish.

Trains. Probably the most repeated theme of all has been railway tracks, stations and trains – always of an old, industrial nature, and often the only animated elements of an otherwise silent and stagnant industrial world. Dream encyclopedias cite train dreams as relating to upcoming/recently-commenced journeys in life, or, conversely, a lack of direction or progress if you miss or are continually waiting for one. Again, my childhood almost definitely had some influence here: as a kid I used to be fascinated by trains, especially the metal pipes, gears and other machinery beneath the carriages, whose heavy, intertwined and rusted appearance these industrial dream-worlds emulate on a grand scale.

Teeth falling out. Probably the most universal theme – everyone’s had the teeth-falling-out dream. I don’t think there’s any mystery as to its meaning: the dream quite clearly symbolizes insecurity. You need your teeth to smile, eat, assert yourself (by gritting or baring, like animals do), so the loss of them is inevitably traumatic and leaves you feeling extremely vulnerable… not to mention hugely relieved when you wake up to realize they’re still firmly locked into their cavities!

Supermarkets. This is the only theme that still recurs regularly for me, and whose meaning (if any) eludes me. In a sense it’s easily explainable – supermarkets have been a part of my life far more than spiders and trains. One of my earliest childhood memories is shopping at Moorabbin Safeway with my mum; my first job was at Coles Sandringham, where I worked for three years; and now, as an independent adult, I wander through the aisles of Balaclava Coles and Safeway every week. But why I dream about these places – and why it’s always a Safeway; usually the one in Mordialloc or Chelsea – I have no idea.

Haunted rooms. Occasionally, even today, I’ll have a dream about finding myself in a room where the presence is simply, diabolically evil – and usually becomes so (or it dawns upon me that it’s there) very suddenly. I’m not talking about a tangible monster, axe murderer or something like that here, and that’s largely what makes it so frightening – the presence is invisible, omniscient and can’t be defeated; at best, merely fled from.

As I touched on above, there’s no doubt that dreams often serve to express stresses or desires currently occupying the back of your mind. Sometimes it’s not clear what they are – for example, the oversized spiders lurking in sheds and boxes probably represent some unfaced anxieties packed away in my subconscious. Other times these stresses and desires are presented openly, as is, without any need for interpretation. A good example that pretty much everyone’s experienced is dreaming about kissing and/or holding hands with a lost or potential love interest. Very occasionally, I’ve had this involve a female for which I actually have little or no attraction to in real life, but from whom I may have picked up some subconscious cues. My co-workers at Channel 7 have also shared stories about ‘captioning dreams’ – apparently an inevitability of working in the industry too long – in which they are either captioning exactly as they do in real life, or, more bizarrely, where the dream itself is actually subtitled as if it were a TV program.

I believe that themed dreams in particular are symptomatic of deep and long-term mental baggage, such as self-esteem issues, guilt, loneliness or childhood trauma. They seem to indicate that dreams are not just random, one-off ‘movies’ that your mind makes up to pass the time, then cancels and deletes when you wake up, but broad and tangible universes that you revisit from time to time in your nightly comas – landscapes animated by a subconscious that, like a ghost, won’t reveal itself in broad daylight but calls out for attention or resolution at night. Many of my dreams have been set in a vast industrial city, full of crumbling skyscrapers and abandoned infrastructure similar to Leo di Caprio’s dream world in Inception (image here), which I probably return to whenever I feel a project has run down into failure or I’ve neglected some area of my life.

Having mentioned Inception, it is possible that, like Leo di Caprio’s team in that film, we go somewhere when we dream, at least in a cerebral sense? Is it possible that while we’re asleep, our dream world is just as real and crucial as waking reality – and waking reality just as vague and unreal a memory? Could some dreams be reliving key past life experiences – say, one in which I was abused in a room as a child, fled, and spent my teenage years as a vagabond, walking along railway tracks, living in abandoned buildings full of spiders? I don’t really believe that but it’s an interesting thought, and recently a number of movies like Shutter Island and Inception (which I reviewed against The Matrix here) have explored the fascinating concept that our minds actively construct or distort reality instead of merely absorbing it.

Anyway, to end I’ll go right back to the start – to one of the very first dreams I can remember. It was short and utterly plotless: just picture a perfectly normal, well-lit butcher’s shop operating in the middle of the night as if it was the middle of the day, and dangling above the meats by a piece of string, an extremely creepy blue mask. The bizarre thing was that nobody but me could see it – or at least paid any attention it – so it’d bounce up and down on its string, cackling to itself, and if you can imagine this from the point of view of a camera, every now and then the blue mask would ‘fill the screen’, so that you could see nothing but its blue oval-shaped face, with its soulless gaze, slit-like eyes, effeminately rosy cheeks and slightly upturned mouth. At this point the rest of the world would freeze or ‘pause’ except for me and the mask, and this is why it seemed to be laughing to itself – it knew that I alone was aware of its malevolent presence in this random butcher’s shop in this innocent small town, but was powerless to make anyone else aware – and therein, perhaps, lay the dream’s meaning.

As with previous dream subjects, the mask itself has clearly identifiable roots in my childhood – in this case, an Ishka store my mum used to visit in Brighton. It’s a a very tame sort of outlet these days, full of jewellery, earthy tapestries and incense sticks, but years ago the upstairs was pretty much a disorganized attic full of authentic tribal paraphernalia, the walls adorned with spooky African masks – to the point where I refused to go up its creaky narrow stairs by myself. I even wrote a poem about the blue mask dream when I was 15, with which I’ll conclude this blog entry…

In the dead of the dead of the night,
When the world becomes lifeless and still,
The villagers their torches light,
To get rid of the darkness and chill.

But it is not the darkness nor chill that they fear,
Nor the shadows that dance by the light;
They’re afraid that they just might happen to hear
The laughter of the spectre of night.

They move without making at all any sound,
Oblivious to the spectre so near them,
They know that the spectre is somewhere around,
But know not that it can too hear them.

The Mask – the face of black magic and sin,
Possessed by a life of its own,
With its thin slanted eyes and malevolent grin,
And a stare that chills down to the bone.

A week or two after my first encounter with Breathe, I got my first glimpse of the band behind it: an in-your-face frontman with menacing dual mohawks; a black guy with gold teeth, cats’ eyes and tiger-stripe tatts; and a skinny dude with peroxide-blonde hair, utterly silent and stand-offish in contrast to the former pair’s manic posturing. The video clip, with its gritty haunted-house imagery, fascinated me as much as the song itself, and before long, whenever it came on during Video Hits, my mum would call me over in Polish with “Mateusz, your freaks are on telly!”

It’s funny but it’s been years since I last listened to Breathe – probably because I burned myself out on it so completely during those initial years of Prodigy fandom. But I can honestly say that I’ve listened to Prodigy in some form pretty much every day since that evening in late ’96. After converting my friends at the time, one of them promptly bought the newly-released Breathe single, which I recorded onto cassette and listened to nightly – to the point where I could recite Maxim’s MCing of Their Law and Poison from beginning to end. I got Music for the Jilted Generation for my 14th birthday – still my favourite album of all time – and slowly acquired every possible CD, MP3 and video of the band since then.

I guess the reason I’m writing this is because Prodigy music has been one of the oldest and most consistent elements of my life to date. It’s virtually the only thing that directly and without interruption, ties my present self all the way back to the 13-year-old kid I used to be. It’s pumped me up before hundreds of awesome nights out, spruced up a thousand long car rides, and their performance at Big Day Out 2009 – the first time I got to see them live, after so many years – remains one of the most memorable nights I’ve ever had.

Above all though, I’m proud of The Prodigy themselves. Even though everyone knew Breathe and Smack My Bitch Up back in the day, they were never that popular a band. They hit the charts globally when Fat of the Land was released – the album containing those two tracks, plus my beloved Firestarter – but imploded soon after, and it wasn’t for years afterwards (something like a decade in fact) that they regrouped in earnest and set about conquering that peak again. I still remember talking to a girl at work one night during this hiatus, and mentioning that my favourite band was Prodigy… to which she replied “Oh yeah, I remember them”. It hit home how little anyone knew or cared about them even by 2003, but now… wow.

In a couple of hours I’m going to the cinemas in Chadstone to see a movie – a fucking MOVIE, released worldwide – of their Milton Keynes concert, the headline act in a day-long music festival hosted by the band themselves. How many bands can claim to have their own feature-length movie? While The Prodigy are not major celebrities in Australia, in their home country of the UK they rule the electronic music scene, supported by a fanbase that’s not just huge – the Chemical Brothers concert I went to recently was just as big as Prodigy’s – but fanatical. As they’ve acknowledged themselves, that’s the unmistakable difference: people virtually never “like” or “don’t mind” The Prodigy; they love it – and how could you not? Liam Howlett is, in my mind, not just one of the most talented musicians of our generation but also a genuinely humble and cool dude, as are cohorts Keith and Maxim. To you guys, big respect from one of your old skool fans – and can’t wait to experience it all again tonight!

Of course, my childhood experience of St Ignatius is hardly unique, reflecting a long association in popular culture between Gothic architecture and the forces of evil rather than good. Fast-forwarding to my teenage years, I can instantly think of such examples as the Temple of NOD in the Command & Conquer computer game series, or Sauron’s temple in Lord of the Rings. But I’m getting a bit off track, because what I wanted to discuss here isn’t so much the Gothic connotations of evil but of Paganism (though the two are related, albeit unfairly, ever since the medieval church spent centuries corrupting Paganism’s image as “Satanism”). It should also be noted that while Gothic churches are often quite dark and gloomy, like St Ignatius, many – such as Paris’ Sainte-Chappelle or Krakow’s St Mary’s Church – are resplendent with natural light and colour, and it is these latter, more perfect expressions of the Gothic style that best exemplify my point.

So, exactly how is Gothic architecture “intrinsically Pagan”, despite being funded by the Church to explicitly market its power and Christian theology? Consider the following stylistic elements, clear indicators of the Pagan undercurrent still flowing through a supposedly converted Europe:

Rose windows. These circular, kaleidoscope-style windows – usually located at the rear of the nave, facing the altar – are a staple of Gothic churches/cathedrals the world over, including St Ignatius. While their visual content is not always floral itself, their shape and composition clearly imitates that beautiful, basic reproductive instrument of Mother Nature – the blooming flower.

Spires/steeples. One of the most characteristic and venerated objects in Pagan society is the phallus, used to symbolize male power and fertility as well as associated deities. Phallic towers were common in pre-Christian societies around the world, from stone obelisks in Egypt, believed to house the regenerative sun god Ra, to wooden totem poles in Slavic Europe, representing warrior-gods such as Perun and Triglav. During the Middle Ages, as the Romanesque style of architecture evolved into the Gothic, the Christian Church also began adorning its buildings with phallic towers to imbue them with a sense of spiritual potency, and inspire awe at the all-seeing, on-high position of the vengeful god they supposedly housed.

Gargoyles. These statues, memorably animated in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, look like they belong on the helms of Pagan Viking ships – yet they adorn many of the Gothic churches built throughout the Middle Ages. They generally depict strange, animalistic creatures very similar to the demons and sprites of Germanic, Celtic and Slavic folklore, though perhaps the most common gargoyle incarnation is the Green Man – a human face comprised of, surrounded by and/or seemingly sprouting from foliage, who in Pagan culture symbolized the cycle of regrowth each spring. Full-body gargoyles often take the form of horned, winged creatures – a belittled representation of deities relating to woodlands, animals and hunting, in whose image Christianity also fashioned its Devil.

Flying buttresses. Unlike spires or rose windows, flying buttresses aren’t common and, to the best of my knowledge, have been used only in particularly old and ambitious Gothic constructions. For those who’ve been to one (Notre Dame again serves as a famous example), they’re the big ribcage-like appendices jutting out from the building proper. While they serve an engineering purpose, helping support the colossal weight of the building’s ceiling, they also lend the building’s exterior an almost organic appearance, like the fossil of some gigantic animal, the likeness reinforced in some cases by comprising of light stone the colour of sun-bleached bones. While I wouldn’t argue this is an innately ‘Pagan’ touch, it certainly reinforces the structure’s impression as something very much of the earthly rather than heavenly realm.

Altar. Inside a Gothic church/cathedral, the central element is invariably the altar – a large, often legless block of stone from which the priest conducts his religious service. Again, the resemblance to a Pagan sacrificial block is striking, and it doesn’t end with the altar’s physical structure but its function as well: at the altar is where the priest, dressed in plain white robes not unlike a druid’s, consumes “flesh and blood” in celebration of his deity, which the congregation is then invited to partake in.

It’s tempting to talk about localized cases of Gothic Christianity’s Pagan foundations – such as the fact Paris’ Chartres Cathedral, which is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, was built on a much-revered Pagan site dedicated to the Earth Goddess – but it’d be getting away from the point, which is purely to examine the Paganistic qualities of the Gothic architectural style. It’s certainly fair to say though that in the walls and windows of some of Europe’s most renowned religious buildings dwells evidence of a still-beating Pagan heart underneath the opulent Christian facade. Even one of the most treasured monuments of devoutly Catholic Poland, Wawel Cathedral, has faint hints of it in its rose window, leafy gargoyles and, uniquely, three giant bones chained to a wall next to the main entrance, supposedly belonging to a fire-breathing dragon that had been slain there.

A quick final thought to wrap up is that it’s perhaps no coincidence that in today’s society, “Gothic” refers to a style of fashion, art and music that is inextricably linked to Paganism (“Satanism”) and its practices (“the occult”)… but analyzing that branch of Gothic is another subject for another time.

Anyway, just a quick thought for the day… probably not really blog material but a bit wordy for Facebook.

Which isn’t quite what I’ve done here, but it’s a start.

The idea to create a YouTube clip came to me less than a week ago, but as happens with certain creative brainwaves, the moment I thought of it I felt compelled to get it done as soon as possible. I was amazed I’d never thought of it before and knew straightaway what I’d do – a combination of text and photography celebrating the weird and wonderful beauty of inland Australia, an expression of my pagan and patriotic nature, set to Solar Fields’ 8-minute track ‘Summer’. But I figured I’d better start with something shorter & simpler first – a sort of practise run to familiarize myself with the free software I’d downloaded – and after burning the midnight oil for the last three nights, that practise run is finished. The result is Melbourne – A Musical Montage.

I’ve always had this idea that music can be divided into two basic categories: daytime and night-time. Music for the Jilted Generation, for example, is very much a night-time album, while its successor Fat of the Land is very daytime. Seeing as my Australiana clip is going to be almost completely ‘daytime’ – full of vibrant colours and sunscorched landscapes – I decided to make its predecessor a night-time clip… and few songs are more night-time, or indeed more Melbourne, than Sander van Doorn’s Bliksem.

To get back to my opening paragraph, the first time I heard Bliksem, images of Melbourne’s CBD late at night immediately played through my head. With its combination of stone/wrought-iron Gothic architecture, looming alongside cloud-scraping steel towers with black-tinted windows, Melbourne has a distinct Gotham City atmosphere that’s beautifully complimented by the song. Bliksem itself represents the kind of trance that I love – dark and brooding, slightly epic, and stirring emotions more subtle and complex than the braindead euphoria most commercial trance is geared for. Starting off as a deep, sombre hum, it begins to pulsate with a contemporary rhythm offset by unusual Baroque-style chords, resulting in a very Melburnian mix of modern and Old World vibes, heavily imbued with the mystery and melancholia of night. It also lends the song a somewhat ambivalent, bittersweet quality that encapulsates my own feelings towards Melbourne: a city I both love and loathe, but that in the end I recognize as my home, the place I grew up in and have gone out and dated and worked in countless times, and whose shady laneways and brightly lit boulevards I’m familiar with in a way no other place in the world can share.

So without any further ado, here it is – my very first video clip, painstakingly sourced and and lovingly arranged, celebrating our unique waterfront city in all of its haunting and colourful glory.

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The Nazi attitude towards Poles and Slavs has been the subject of some debate. One problem lies in the fact that the National Socialist movement did not really foster ‘intellectuals’ who penned philosophical treatises on such subjects. No document exists that clearly spells out how Hitler & friends categorized Europe’s multitude of ethnic groups. That said, evidence does exist in the form of Mein Kampf and Hitler’s private and public speeches, and, even more revealingly, in Nazi actions and policies during the Second World War – often contradictory, but nevertheless following certain broad patterns.

Having studied Poland’s wartime experience in depth, my own conclusion is that the Nazis did not consider Slavs to be ‘sub-human’, a phrase too readily bandied about in many textbooks. While the Nazi occupation in the east was undeniably harsher than in the west, this can be attributed in large part to the markedly greater resistance the Germans encountered there, through partisan activity and civic disobedience. Warsaw was heavily bombed in 1939 whereas Paris in 1940 was not, but then Paris surrendered without a fight – Warsaw’s citizens, on the other hand, set about digging trenches and erecting barricades even as Nazi leaflets ordered that they cease or evacuate immediately. It’s also worth remembering that non-Slavic countries were not exempt from severe Teutonic punishment either, as evidenced by the heavy aerial bombing of Rotterdam, Holland in 1940.

Nazi policy towards Poland was more or less a re-establishment of the Prussian policy that preceded it. As during the years of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, Polish culture rather than Polish blood was the core issue. In the sector of Nazi-occupied Poland directly annexed by the Reich, the official policy, as endorsed by Gauleiter Albert Forster, was that Poles could receive the same benefits as Germans provided they sign the Volkliste – essentially, a declaration of membership and loyalty to the German racial and cultural community. While this meant having to completely abandon one’s ‘Polishness’, it also indicated that even senior Nazis like Forster did not view the Poles as racially inferior, unworthy of integration – cultural allegiance, not blood, was the discriminating factor. But few Poles signed the list, and as a reward for their impudence were put to work in labour camps or as servants for the next wave of German settlers, ushered in by the Reich to Germanize Pomerania and Silesia once and for all. Polish culture, naturally, was outlawed  once again, and something as petty as hearing confession in Polish could see a priest locked up, brutally beaten, and even pay for the ‘crime’ with his life.

In the General-Government zone, Poles did not have to choose whether to betray their heritage or stand by it at their own risk, but suffered heavily as the Nazis tried to demoralize and destroy the subversive and highly active Polish Underground. There, the governor, Hitler’s murderous lawyer Hans Frank, famously declared that if a piece of paper were printed for every seven Poles shot, there wouldn’t be enough trees in Poland to supply all of the paper. While reprisals against the civilian populace took place all over occupied Europe, there is no doubt that Warsaw’s citizens suffered more than most, and today, plaques around the city still quietly remind passers-by of mass executions by Hitlerowcy (‘Hitler troops’), carried out at random in bloodthirsty vengeance for partisan strikes.

As barbaric as these reprisals were, however, Poles were rarely executed or seriously abused simply on account of being Poles, at least once the heat of the 1939 invasion cooled. The general impression created by school-level history books is that the General-Government was a disorganized dumping ground for Untermenschen – an unhelpful catch-all term used by writers of these books to refer to Poles, Gypsies and Jews alike – which is blatantly incorrect. One of the first things the Nazis did after their victory parades was to wall off the Jewish ghetto in the city, herd all the Jews there and force them to wear Star of David armbands, completely segregating them from the Polish community which was allowed to continue on as normal to a large degree – provided, of course, it was in complete adherence to Nazi orders. While Hans Frank hosted chess tournaments in Krakow’s Wawel Castle, playing host to Europe’s (overwhelmingly Slavic) best players, behind the Warsaw Ghetto’s walls existed an entirely different world, utterly wretched and hopeless, where Jews were piled in to die of malnutrition and disease.

My own family is an interesting case in point. My maternal grandad, who grew up in Gdynia (a newly-constructed port next to Gdansk), remembers German troops commenting “What a beautiful boy” at his appearance, probably mistaking him for one of their own. His father, however, was sent to a POW camp the year of the invasion and never returned. My paternal grandad experienced similar extremes – recruited into the Hitler Youth itself for some time, then, when the war effort became critical for the Germans, whisked to Berlin with other members of his family as mandatory labour, making boots and living on meagre, irregular rations. Earlier in the war, his own father had been bashed so severely by Germans that he spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

One of my favourite books, The Polish House, tells of similar dichotomies, with Germans using Poles as virtual slave labour and even guinea pigs for medical experiments, in an effort to find a cure for malaria and other diseases afflicting the Wehrmacht in the latter half of the war. Yet the diaries upon which much of the book is based mention a young Belgian slave laborer as well, treated as brutally as anyone and with eventually fatal consequences. All in all, the Nazi treatment of its Polish subjects was barely any different to the non-racialist Soviets. In the west as in the east, high socio-economic status in an ideologically different society was what made you a target for execution or deliberate degradation – in Bydgoszcz, even the director of the local botanical gardens was singled out and shot as an ‘intellectual’.

Yet for all their Draconian measures against Poland’s cultural heritage and social elites, Nazi propaganda tended to portray the Poles as strikingly similar to Germans – Aryan in appearance, dressed in prim military uniforms, even quite facially handsome. One propaganda poster, distributed in Slovakia, depicts a blonde Polish officer being shot in the back by dark, savagely grinning, ape-like Bolsheviks – a clear reference to the horror of Katyn, and illustrating the lack of logic in speaking of a single Nazi perspective on ‘Slavs’ (see here). A large amount of Nazi propaganda in eastern Europe was addressed to Slavic citizens and written in the local language, designed to foster a common hatred of Jews and Communism, and therefore a common goal of aiding, or at least not hindering, the Nazis’ military and ethnic cleansing efforts (examples here). In late 1944, as the Soviets advanced towards Warsaw, Nazi propaganda even implored the Poles to join the German fighting forces, going so far as to spread false news that the Armia Krajowa had allied with the Wehrmacht to keep the Red tsunami at bay.

There can be no denying the brutality and callousness with which Nazi Germany, as a whole, fought and oppressed its opponents, but just as much has been made of the ‘Righteous among the Nations’ who sheltered Jews, so too there were Germans who assisted Poles – particularly in the later phases of the war, when a German defeat seemed imminent and, as explained by the German officer in The Pianist, a good word from someone over whom they still had power could mean better treatment once the tables turned. Within the German armed forces, as well, there was still an honourable element personified in such men as Rommel, who felt that the barbaric actions of some of their kin tarnished Germany’s proud military tradition. During the Warsaw Uprising, in which certain SS and Russian-collaborator brigades unleashed a nightmare stint of rape and murder against helpless civilians, the German High Command complained all the way to Hitler about these “animals” and called for their withdrawal from the war zone.

The Warsaw Uprising represented the crux of the three-way German-Polish-Soviet conflict in the east, and was interestingly – and accurately – described by one historian as the germinating episode of the Cold War. In less well-rounded history books, it is mentioned in passing as something like Australia’s Gallipoli – a heroic but pointless failure; a final stand by the romantic and incendiary Poles to push out the invaders against the odds and common sense. Looking at it without its proper context, Operation Tempest – as the uprising was formally known – does seem somewhat unnecessary. The Germans already had their backs to the wall, the Russian steamroller was grinding unstoppably westwards, the United States was leading a fresh counter-invasion from the west and pumping out extraordinary quantities of war machinery, all with the sole purpose of crushing Germany. So why not just wait for the inevitable, as many of Europe’s other nations did? After all, the Poles had already done so much – they’d been the first to fight the Reich, and subsequently made huge contributions across a broad range of campaigns – the Battle of Britain, the siege of Tobruk in North Africa (where their Aussie comrades also earned a reputation as resilient defenders), and the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy. Back home, the Armia Krajowa – the largest underground army in Europe – caused the Nazis constant pain through sabotage and espionage, and scores of ordinary Polish citizens risked their lives sheltering Jewish neighbours under threat of death.

One reason for the Uprising was that the Poles had been planning for such a moment since Warsaw’s capitulation in 1939. The AK had a saying that it existed “for today, tomorrow and after tomorrow” – today being the training and sabotage, tomorrow the fight, and after tomorrow, the rebuilding of free Poland. After five frightening years of occupation, it was clear that now was the moment to strike. Moscow Radio heartily encouraged this, broadcasting a virtual call to arms with the lure of impending assistance from the mighty Red Army, rolling ever closer to the Warsaw arena. The AK knew that if it didn’t strike, it would not only disappoint its own people and possibly lose standing with the Western Allies, but its inactivity would be slandered by the Soviets as evidence of Fascist collaboration and sympathizing.

Yet as soon as the Uprising was launched, on 15 August 1944, the Red Army abruptly stopped its advance. Through Moscow Radio, which days ago had jostled the Poles to leap into action, Stalin now derided the insurrectionists as a band of criminals and opportunists with whom he wanted no association. When Churchill and Roosevelt requested that Soviet airfields be made available for critical airdrops to the AK, Stalin refused. When Churchill hassled Roosevelt to back him in further, firmer requests, Roosevelt declined, revealing a key change in attitude at this late stage of the war. Polish independence had long ceased to be the point anymore – the war had to be won and however significant the Poles’ contribution, no country had worn down the German war machine more than the Soviet Union, and there was still a lot of wearing down to do. Uncle Joe had to be placated, even if it meant sidelining moral considerations.

But on what grounds did the Soviet Union betray its anti-Nazi compatriots in Warsaw? Why did the Red Army sunbake on the banks of the Vistula, its guns and mortars suddenly silent, as towering flames and black smoke rose from the Polish capital, its fighting men slowly bleeding to death in a horrible battle of attrition? The answer was simple. Stalin knew that the Poles wanted to liberate the city themselves, in order to secure it as the base for a free and democratic postwar Poland. The AK’s allegiance was to the London-based Polish Government-in-Exile, with whom Stalin had cut all ties following the discovery of the Katyn massacre, and whom he wanted supplanted by his own organization of Polish Communists. If the AK succeeded in retaking Warsaw, they would be a major obstacle to imposing Communism on the country, and Stalin would have the same problems on his hands as the Nazi occupiers had – if not another Polish-Soviet War. Now, the Germans were effectively removing the obstacle for him – as in 1939, a military victory by the Germans converted into a political and territorial victory for Stalin.

The evaluation of the Warsaw Uprising as a ‘hot’ prelude to the Cold War is quite apt. A review of the communiques between Churchill and Roosevelt at this time reveal the former’s agitation at Stalin’s determination to block Allied air drops to the insurgents, only about a quarter of whom were armed at the start of the Uprising. One can almost sense his dismay at Roosevelt’s disinterest, whose only concern was maintaining his comfortable illusion that Uncle Joe was an OK guy and the chummier things were with him, the better – an easy stance to take all the way over in distant Washington. One wonders what the outcome would’ve been had Truman, a far less passive character and the first of America’s hardline Cold War presidents, come to a power a year earlier.

This isn’t the time or place to relive the Uprising day by day – the purpose of this piece is to provide a revised geopolitical overview of the World War 2 story – but it stands alongside the Rape of Nanking, the siege of Stalingrad and the firebombing of Dresden as a prime example of the horrors of the Second World War. Though the Poles and some Germans fought honourably, others – particularly a notorious criminal battalion commandered by Otto Dirlewanger, and a group of Russian collaborators under Bronislav Kaminski – were responsible for some of the ugliest crimes imaginable – breaking into hospitals and mowing down the wounded, massacring crowds of innocent families in churches, raping teenagers and pregnant women. Even by those Germans repelled by such conduct, it was hoped that these atrocities would at least drive the Poles to an early surrender – instead, it only cemented their resolve to purge Warsaw of these murderous monsters as soon as possible.

The end of the Uprising encapsulates the apparent contradictions in the German side towards the Poles. On the ground, the Poles were given a dignified surrender as promised – German troops stood solemnly as the AK soldiers filed past to give up their arms. Some even saluted. Nazi radio did not condemn the insurrectionists as bandits or adventurers, as Stalin had, merely declaring  “After weeks of fierce fighting which has led to the almost total destruction of the city, the remaining rebels, deserted by all their Allies, have given up and surrendered.” In his private diary, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels praised the Poles’ inextinguishable fighting spirit, while a common soldier on the German side reflected in his own journal, “In reality, they fought better than we did.”

At least one account states that upon surrender, the German commander even suggested the AK’s remnants join what had, by then, been broadly marketed as a Europe-wide, German-led holy war against Bolshevism. But after all the cruelty and loss they’d endured, the Poles were in no mood for working with the Hitlerowcy they’d been firing at just days earlier. Hitler, incensed that the Poles had cost the Germans so much valuable time and resources at this crucial point in the war, ordered that their capital be destroyed “as an example to the rest of Europe”. And so it was – special demolition squads went from block to block, systematically dynamiting or burning down with flamethrowers centuries of priceless architecture. By the time they were done, Warsaw was more decimated than any other city on the continent, big or small. American military personnel would later suggest, upon surveying the “liberated” landscape, that the Poles relocate their capital elsewhere.

The first line of the Polish anthem goes, “Poland has not perished yet, so long as we still live”. This was the feeling all Poles had towards wartime Warsaw – as long as it stood, with its thousands of brave volunteers running underground printing presses and improvised weapons factories and intelligence-gathering services, as later generations would during the 1980s Solidarity revolution, there was hope for Poland. Hans Frank wrote that Warsaw “was and will be the center of chaos and a place from which opposition spreads throughout the rest of the country”. No matter how hard the Nazi boot pressed down on the city, and perhaps because of it, Warsaw remained a defiant battleground – if not of bullets and grenades, as in those two months in 1944, then at least of words and wills. In nearly every apartment, in every street in every district, families believed with cautious confidence that they would see the red and white flag unfurled from the lamp-posts once again, and hear Chopin’s grand polonaises broadcast over the airwaves, as they had in 1939 before the Germans marched in and took it all away.

The failure of the Uprising, then, crushed the Poles’ spirit in a far more profound way than the capitulation of 1939. The AK had been either wiped out or imprisoned – for all of their incredible ingenuity and courage, deprived of Allied assistance its soldiers were doomed to defeat by an enemy that still had endless reinforcements, ammunition and the latest military technology at its disposal. General Sikorski – a uniquely charismatic and well-connected Polish leader who held impressive sway over the British Government – had perished a year earlier in a suspicious Soviet plane crash, leaving the Polish Government-in-Exile decapitated. Without a strong leader backed by a united military force, the Poles had no bargaining chip left in the critical, highly politicized closing chapters of the war. Their deeds in the skies of England and the deserts of Africa had already been forgotten, overshadowed by the Soviets’ immense effort on the Eastern Front and the American-led counter-invasion in the west. The tempest in Warsaw had not even broken out before Poland had already been sold out at the Tehran conference, where its borders were rearranged behind closed doors at Stalin’s insistence – reverting, in a height of irony, to virtually the same demarcation line he’d arranged with Hitler in 1939.

To wrap up this massive entry, it is fitting to look at some of the ironies that resulted from the Second World War. Launched to guarantee Poland’s territorial integrity, the outcome of the war saw the 1939 Nazi-Soviet border – now referred to as the ‘Curzon Line’ – cemented as Poland’s official eastern frontier. Its genuine representative government was sent to the dustbin of history in 1945, in favour of blatant Stalinist puppets who promised free elections then rigged them to install a Moscow-backed dictatorship. Germany’s holy crusade against Bolshevism gave the Soviets the ideal means to capture and liquidate the cream of Poland’s military and civil society, and not only remove the nation as a regional pillar of liberty and democracy, but march into it as an apparent liberator.

While Communism is gone from Europe – thanks largely, again, to the determination and brilliant organization of a patriotic underground movement in Poland – the vast territorial losses sustained by Germany and Poland remain. The Third Reich not only lost everything it had gained through its conquests, at the cost of millions of lives, but such historic cities as Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) and Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). But here too, Poland was a loser not a winner: despite having no interest in acquiring German territory, and despite the lessons following the First World War, it was given all of Silesia and Pomerania while robbed of its own thousand-year-old eastern provinces (see map). Even Lwow, perhaps the most purely Polish city of all with its Baroque architecture, Catholic spires and wide bourgeois streets, was to be wrenched from Poland’s bullet-riddled body, now an associate of Kiev and Moscow rather than Krakow and Warsaw. Its residents, including my paternal grandparents, were forcibly uprooted and moved to Wroclaw, itself recently emptied of its former German populace in a vast and pitiless ethnic cleansing operation that rivalled the Nazis’.

The greatest tragedy, however, was not political or territorial but human. Treated as regular POWs and freed from Colditz and other camps in relatively good health, many of the surviving heroes of the Warsaw Uprising were later made to identify themselves on a false pretext, deported to the Soviet Union, put on ridiculous show trials and, in an example of Soviet treachery that defies belief, convicted of collaboration with the Fascist forces and sentenced to up to 10 years imprisonment. Indeed, the entire Armia Krajowa was blasted as a bunch of pathetic, impudent troublemakers, their gallant fight for Poland wiped from official history – but preserved, of course, in the minds and hearts of all those who were there. Even many Poles who fought alongside the Red Army were, as soon as the bear hugs and celebratory dancing was over and political necessities came to the fore, promptly disposed of if they in any way inconvenienced the project of turning Poland into a Soviet satellite. Over in the west, Polish soldiers were treated little better – in a final sad and disgusting move to keep Uncle Joe happy, even the Polish pilots who protected London from Luftwaffe bombs were banned outright from taking part in V-Day parades – they were not part of Stalin’s Red armies, now the only officially recognized Polish force. It is no surprise that at least one veteran, featured in a documentary I watched many years ago, told how his eyes welled up with tears as he stood aside from the festivities, utterly excluded, disillusioned and futureless.

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“The Poles are the nation who really lost the Second World War.

“They fought continuously from the first day to the bitter end and beyond. They put more into the struggle than any other society; they lost over half a million fighting men and women, and six million civilians; they were left with one million war orphans and over half a million invalids.

“According to the Bureau of War Reparations the country had lost 38 per cent of its national assets, compared to the 1.5 % and 0.8% lost by France and Britain respectively. They lost vast tracts of their country and the two great cultural centres of Wilno and Lwow. They also saw the greater part of their heritage destroyed.

“Although they were faithful members of the victorious alliance, they were treated as a vanquished enemy; robbed of much of their territory and their freedom.

“Even worse than the physical wrongs done to them were the humiliations to which they were subjected. Men and women who had risked their lives for 6 years plotting and fighting against the German order in unspeakable conditions were dragged into jail by their Soviet masters, tortured and accused of collaborating with the Nazis.

“In the west their sacrifices were belittled and ignored. Their continuing martyrdom aroused no sympathy, and their appeals only irritation. Not only had they been consigned to Hell – they were supposed to enjoy it.”

- Adam Zamoyski

“Particularly in relation to Poland, the immorality of the Soviet Union tainted the actions of the Western leaders. The Western Allies’ treatment of the Poles was unworthy: from the cover-up over Katyn to the secret deal at Tehran that eventually shifted Polish borders without the consent of the Poles; from the meeting in Moscow when Churchill accused members of the Polish government in exile of being ‘callous people who want to wreck Europe’, to the exclusion of Polish troops in the Victory Parade in London in 1946. It is a sad catalogue—and one I certainly wasn’t taught in school when I was told that we should all only ‘feel good’ about the conduct of the Western Allies in the Second World War. … The central popular myth that surrounds the war, a kind of Hollywood version of the history, is that it is a simple story of an alliance of good people who fought an alliance of bad people. It’s an immensely consoling way of looking at the past, and it’s sad to let it go. But let it go we must.”

- Laurence Rees

More on the Warsaw Uprising:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4738013458382009886#

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e67_1276401474

http://www.poloniatoday.com/uprising1.htm

http://www.warsawuprising.com/paper/davies1.htm

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1939. Those four figures immediately conjure up, in my mind, tanks rolling over hills at the crack of dawn; Stuka bombers diving from the sky to the terrifying wail of sirens; and before long, columns of Wehrmacht troops goose-stepping down the boulevards of Warsaw. Most people know that 1939 is the year Nazi Germany invaded Poland, thus triggering the Second World War, but few know much beyond that. The basic what, where and when might be familiar enough to those who studied history at school or uni, but there’s generally very little knowledge as to why - why it happened, and why it happened the way that it did. Myths such as Hitler’s mass hypnotic powers, or foolhardy Poles charging tanks on horseback, are probably more prevalent than the fascinating and, at times, equally bizarre and unlikely facts. This is what I want to blog about today.

As someone who developed an intense interest in World War II from an early age, the first thing that strikes me about it – when I step back and look at it from a detached, ‘big picture’ perspective – is the unlikeliness of it unfolding the way that it did. A second world war was almost inevitable considering the outcomes of the first – the humiliating and ill-willed reparations clauses, the controversial territorial arrangements, and above all the October Revolution, transforming the vast expanse of Russia into a zealous Communist behemoth. Interwar Europe was full of grand plans and political  intrigue, engineered by the extreme Left and Right, and most of the cards in play prophesized a ‘hot’ expression of the Cold War – much like the scenario that drove the hit computer game series Red Alert.

It very nearly happened too, almost as soon as the Great War and Russian Civil War ended. In 1921, following heated skirmishes in the Ukraine, the Soviet Union invaded Poland, with the express intent of marching all the way to Berlin and setting up a Moscow-backed republic in the heart of Europe – the natural end goal of Lenin’s internationalist vision of Communism. But this time, history did not favour Lenin or his Red Army, still buzzing with revolutionary fervour and their success against the White armies in Russia. The resurrected state of Poland was not about to roll over and disappear into oblivion again, and through some daring military strategy and characteristic fighting spirit, the Poles splintered the Soviet spearhead at the gates of Warsaw. Had the city fallen, and the Red Army trampled on to Berlin – as was to happen some two decades later – Germany, its social fabric in chaos and on the brink of anarchy, would’ve almost certainly become a socialist republic as Bavaria did for some time. And considering France and England were willing to send battalions to Russia to extinguish the Bolshevik fire there, there’s no doubt they would’ve done the same had it spread to their own neck of the woods.

It therefore seemed only a matter of time before the White armies of Europe once again either attacked the Soviet Union in an effort to stomp out Communism, as happened in 1919, or the Red Army attacked the West in an attempt to disseminate Communism, as happened in 1921. Yet what ended up happening in 1939 was that Nazi Germany – a hostile reaction to the Communist-fuelled instability of Weimar Germany; a self-styled pan-European crusader against so-called ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’; and the Slavic world’s age-old chief antagonist – hooked up with that bastion of Communism and Orthodox Slavdom to take out the state that had, less than two decades earlier, protected central Europe from the incoming Reds and still represented, for many at that time, the outpost and bulwark of Western Latin civilization. Of course, as most people know, the Nazi-Soviet honeymoon wasn’t to last, but that the next war even began with such a configuration is remarkable.

It can’t be denied that despite being at opposite ends of the political spectrum, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had a lot in common. Both were totalitarian, militaristic with imperialist ambitions, and utterly convinced of their own self-righteousness and ideological superiority – which justified taking any means to achieve their ends. Both had also lost vast swaths of territory with the collapse of their empires in 1918 – virtually all of it in Poland. Historically Polish or not, this land was valuable if not vital to their future plans – as Lebensraum for the German Volk, or as the key artery through which to forment revolution in the West.

Early members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – the NSDAP or ‘Nazi Party’ – tended to sympathize with the Soviets, a workers’ state that, like Germany, was treated like a second-class citizen of Europe by the spiteful, arrogant and power-hungry elites of France and England, as represented by the harsh and damning Treaty signed in the opulent Versailles Palace. In the many street brawls and protests that wracked Germany in the 1920s, the Nazis and Communists even teamed up on occasion, contemptuous of a common enemy represented by the stagnant and ineffectual Weimar Government, overtly installed and backed by the Western Powers.

However, Hitler’s rise to prominence in the Nazi Party saw this attitude promptly switched around. Although France continued to be vilified as a pompous sore winner that needed to be cut down to size, the Anglo-Saxons were, in Hitler’s view, a brilliant if currently stagnant and mismanaged group of people – ancient kin and natural allies of the Germans. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, became the embodiment of all the Nazis disapproved of: a hulking, devious Frankstein state, stitched together from a mish-mash of Mongoloids and dreg Slavs and lorded over by a Jewish ruling class – a waste of space and human resources that would be put to better use under the efficient and visionary administration of a new German Reich. Dull and meandering as it is, anyone who’s read certain chapters of Mein Kampf would undoubtedly recognize that Hitler dreamed of seizing “the fertile lands of the East” since his early days in politics. What nobody could’ve predicted, from the time of Mein Kampf’s dictation all the way up to mid-1939, is that the Soviet Union would become a willing partner in Hitler’s first move eastwards. But the truth, as they say, can stranger than fiction.

Interwar Poland – the victim of Hitler’s first swift, knock-out blow against free Europe – was, in fact, probably the best-suited partner for Nazi geopolitical and ethnic cleansing on the continent. Unlike Hitler’s buddies in Fascist Italy, the Poles appreciated and shared Germany’s ‘problem’ of huge Jewish minorities. Poland was in fact the first nation to come up with a ‘Jewish solution’, of deporting Jews to a newly-established homeland in Madagascar – a plan the Nazis themselves initially adopted then replaced with their own ‘Final Solution’, following obvious logistical difficulties and an increasingly war-hardened attitude. Poland was also fiercely anti-Communist – probably even more so than Nazi Germany – and, like the Nazis, the Poles were deeply suspicious of the Godless Red dragon that lurked beyond their Christian parishes.

At Poland’s helm throughout most of the interwar period was Marshal Pilsudski – a national-socialist World War I hero whose strategic brilliance won the Polish-Soviet War, and whose no-bullshit attitude to politics saw him take over Poland’s Parliament by force of arms – something Hitler had tried himself in the 1920s, and failed. Hitler held Pilsudski in the same sort of esteem as Mussolini, and tried – albeit unsuccessfully – to meet him several times. Even after the merciless 1939 invasion, he took the time to pay his respects at the late Marshal’s tomb in Krakow – perhaps wondering what might’ve been had the old trooper stayed around for a few more years.

Essentially, Pilsudski was Poland’s Otto von Bismarck. Of Polonized Lithuanian heritage, with socialist leanings counter-weighted by an aversion to Soviet Communism, Pilsudski was above all a pragmatist who wanted to see a return to the old Polish Commonwealth – and was happy to conduct his foreign affairs according to whatever might help bring about that reality. Pilsudski made Poland the first country to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler – in 1935, just two years after Hitler became Chancellor and the rest of Europe still didn’t know what to do about it. In subsequent speeches up to 1939, Hitler referred glowingly to his friendship with Poland as “one of the most reassuring factors in the life of Europe”.

And indeed it was. Pilsudski was a canny man, finely tuned into his times – he recognized that Germany was a volatile force, rapidly on its way up again, that either had to be patted on the back as a mate or punched in the face before it got too strong. With France, Poland’s traditional ally, positively phobic of any military action after its 1914-18 experience, Pilsudski realized that it was in Poland’s best interest to engage rather than snub this new face across the fence. And while Pilsudski still strived for equilibrium in Poland’s regional relations, also signing treaties with the Soviet Union, Jozef Beck – Poland’s Foreign Minister right up until the outbreak of war – grimly stated that while the Germans might deprive Poles of their freedom, a Russian occupation would rob them of their very souls.

So how did 1939 come to be the year that these friends turned into such bitter enemies, whilst two bitter enemies became best of friends? Why, in spite of these common factors with Poland, did Hitler ruthlessly wipe it off the map in collaboration with Stalin, condemning more than half the country to Soviet obscurity and plunging Europe into continental war? The answer can be summed up in one word: Danzig.

‘Danzig’ was (and still is) the German name for Gdansk, a city on Poland’s Baltic coast. Part of the Polish Commonwealth for some 800 years of its history, it became heavily Germanized during the 19th century as part of Bismarck’s attempt to integrate that part of Poland into Prussia. At the time, Poland had ceased to exist on official maps, having been jointly invaded and partitioned by its neighbours Prussia, Russia and Austro-Hungary – the latter, ironically, having been saved from certain extinction by Polish forces some 100 years earlier, during the Ottoman siege of Vienna. When Bismarck’s Second Reich, like Europe’s other continental empires, collapsed under the four-year barrage of mortars and mud known as the Great War, Gdansk emerged as a politically autonomous ‘Free City’ – but the German population remained, now a clear majority, and abruptly finding itself residing within foreign borders.

More so than liquidating Jews, conquering Europe or banishing Communism from the face of the earth, Hitler’s number-one goal was to unite the German people into one state under his leadership – ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fuhrer. As most people know, he began by annexing his homeland Austria (the ‘Anschluss’), then moved onto the Sudetenland (a German-heavy portion of Czechoslovakia), promptly followed by the rest of the country, with a small portion left for the Slovaks to enjoy as a German satellite (see map). Despite the myth of Czechs putting out welcome mats for the Germans, the Munich Crisis could have actually been the beginning of World War II, had the British and French leaders of 1938 shown more metal and respected the population’s wishes.

Emboldened by an endless stream of daring gambles paying off since their ascent to power, the Nazis had boldly threatened to send in tanks and bomb Prague from the air should their demands not be met – their threats so morbid and vivid that the ageing Czech President reportedly had a minor heart attack. But the Western Powers, unwilling to take up arms again over a small strip of central Europe, sold the Czechs out – a situation they would experience again soon enough, together with the Poles and other Europeans of the region, in 1945. In doing so, England’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain – who declared it “peace for our time” – merely succeeded in forestalling war rather than preventing it. If anything, the whole experience convinced Hitler that he was dealing with “little worms” – to use his own description – who hadn’t the spines to face up to a bold and ambitious new Germany.

Though Hitler declared the Munich Crisis “his last territorial concession in Europe”, he couldn’t ignore the thorn in Germany’s right shoulder. Having Danzig within Polish territory (see map) was particularly aggravating because it actually divided Germany from East Prussia, a Teutonic enclave below the Baltic States which formed part of what is now known as Kaliningrad. Although the ‘Polish Corridor’ that cut through the province of Pomerania had hundreds of years of precedence, forming the north-western frontier of the old Polish Commonwealth (map), in this new age of more logical, ethnic-based borders it seemed out of place – and represented a final and unignorable obstacle to Hitler’s dream of a unified Reich.

It’s worth noting at this point that Hitler was, all things considered, comparatively amicable and open-minded vis a vis Poland. Hatred of Poland was, after all, a staple of most Right-wing Germans’ diets at the time. After a long 120 years of partition, occupation and Kulturkampf (systematic imposition of German culture over Polish culture), Germany had come to see all of Silesia and Pomerania as its rightful backyard. An important but little-known fact is that, barely had the guns gone quiet on the Western Front, than they began blazing in these hotly contested territories as tensions between the two ethnic groups came to a head.

Back from the trenches in France, psyched on nationalist propaganda and with no clear purpose in peacetime society, many demobilized German soldiers formed Right-wing paramilitary units called Freikorps, which set about terrorizing these peripheral areas and attempting to rid them of Poles. The Poles, true to their historical record, promptly responded by forming their own armed bands and fighting back. The issue became so difficult and heated that even a League of Nations peacekeeping force, sent to settle the issue, ended up fracturing and fighting each other – the British contingent supporting the Germans, the French adamantly backing the Poles. The spilt blood led to a great deal of animosity between the two nationalities, and while the Poles prevailed in asserting these areas as their own, the Germans moved out looking back, muttering darkly that they’ll be back soon enough.

In this context, then, Hitler was more open to Poland than some old-school German conservatives, who wanted a straight, uncompromising return to the glory days of Prussia – and to hell with those upstart Poles. For Hitler, these upstarts ticked two very important boxes – firstly they were anti-Communist, and secondly, though not ingrained with the same rabid anti-Semitism as the Germans, they were not enthusiastic about their Jewish minorities either.  While these traits might not be relevant to a bygone world composed solely of bloated monarchies, they were certainly important to him in this daunting new world of crumbling values, radical ideologies and racial defilement. Moreover, Hitler recognized in the Poles a yearning to create permanent security in eastern Europe – i.e. multilateral containment if not removal of the Communist menace – and, more importantly to an “actions first, words later” man of the National Socialist movement, the Poles had the grit to back it up.

Nevertheless, the Danzig issue needed resolving. Over the summer of 1938, as the Reich digested its Czech meal, the Nazi and Polish leaders flirted. In Warsaw, Hermann Goring was repeatedly treated to his two favourite things – lavish banquets and hunting trips. With everything cosy and buttery, Hitler took the opportunity to make his first move in the delicate diplomatic chess game that was to follow – Danzig, he suggested around the start of 1939, should “revert” to Germany. Of course there would be token concessions, and juicy hints were dropped of possible joint action against the Soviets, with territorial prizes in it for Poland should they agree to take part.

But the Poles, despite their daydreams of Commonwealth glory, did not really have an appetite for war, and unlike the Nazis had not modernized or significantly expanded their military. More to the point, Poland needed an outlet to the sea for economic reasons – and having endured 120 miserable years of partition, was unwilling to relinquish one of its key urban centres in exchange for some hollow benefits and promises. It soon became clear that there was very little scope for compromise – either Gdansk remained Poland’s one and only access point to maritime trade, or it reprised its 19th-century role as a Hanseatic link between Stettin and Konigsberg. And while Hitler took the first rebuttal with surprising calm, before long, the hunting trips stopped, diplomatic exchanges went from cool to tense, and finally to threatening – with the Poles counter-warning the Germans that they were not Czechs. A coup was plotted to take over the Free City “in a lightning strike”, but when it became clear that the Poles would smash any interference in the bud, the senior Nazi leadership made the decision to start work on a much bigger and bolder project – ‘Operation White’, a full-scale military invasion of Poland.

As the first plans were drawn up for the 1939 offensive, things took a very strange turn, though the sequence was logical enough. Finally realizing that Hitler’s appetite for land was insatiable, and knowing that he would resort to brute force if necessary, England and France abandoned their appeasement policies and suggested – then pleaded – for Poland to join a Franco-Anglo-Soviet alliance, against which even this overgrown and extensively remilitarized Germany stood no chance. Poland refused. Though relations with Germany had deteriorated – and perhaps because of this – it did not want to antagonize its neighbour any further. Just as importantly, such an alliance would mean allowing Soviet troops onto Polish soil – and as was confirmed less than six years later, the Poles knew such ‘allies’ would arrive with their own agenda and not leave once they did so.

In the meantime, Hitler became determined to complete the final piece in his new Reich by any means possible. Though he held England and France’s resolve to fight in contempt, he knew he’d exhausted their goodwill. Poland, meanwhile, had proved itself just as determined to stand by the territorial status quo as Hitler was in reshaping it. His ally Italy was of no use to him in this northern European affair, leaving one other major player – the Soviet Union. Sweeping 20 years of anti-Bolshevik rhetoric under the Reichstag’s carpets, Hitler sent out tentative feelers to the Kremlin, knowing that Poland had to be isolated in its upcoming battle with the Reich. Stalin’s acute hyena instinct smelt meat, slowly but surely took the bait, and within weeks Hitler’s English-loathing Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was sitting in the Kremlin with a drunk and jolly Stalin, the two assuring each other of much cooperation and friendliness going forward – over Poland’s dead body.

As incredulous as the European community was when the news broke, it made perfect sense to Stalin. A young and ambitious general in the Polish-Soviet War, Stalin harboured a particular spitefulness towards the Poles for foiling his record as the man brought Communism to Europe (something he finally did, of course, in 1945). He was also wary of the powerful and hungry new Reich Hitler had created. This was a perfect way to kill two birds with one stone – take revenge on the Poles, and form an unexpected but formidable friendship with a potential predator. And so when the time came to clink shotglasses with Ribbentrop, not only was a Non-Aggression Pact signed between the two nations, but a secret protocol added – a death warrant for Poland, relegating it back to the history books with a new and permanent partition (see map).

Around the same time as Nazi Germany hooked up with Soviet Russia, England and France signed a treaty with Poland guaranteeing its independence. This move infuriated Hitler so much that in hindsight, it probably only strengthened his resolve to go to war – though interestingly, his venom was reserved more for the Brits than for the Poles, whom he regarded as meddling in regional affairs in which they had no relevance. Once the war was underway, pamphlets were even dropped over Poland (see here) showing a Polish soldier desperately crying out to Chamberlain, as rubble and dead bodies fill the background, “Anglio! Twoje Dzielo!” (“Englander! This is your doing!”)

When it came to the crunch, the Western Powers’ guarantee proved worthless. From day one, the Poles fought according to a strategy that assumed help would come from the West – holding on to difficult-to-defend areas instead of falling back to more secure, long-term defensive positions. Hitler, on the other hand, hoped if not assumed that the West would resort to haggling rather than fighting for peace again – so an integral part of the blitzkreig rationale was to take over as much Polish land as possible in as short a time frame as possible, so that if the armistice siren were called again, Germany would be in the most advantageous bargaining position possible. Of course, both sides were proved wrong: on 3 September, Britain and France did declare war – much to Hitler’s fury – but subsequently did nothing to assist the Poles.

As everyone knows, the blitzkreig itself was a roaring success – possibly the most well-planned and executed campaign of the Second World War, further aided by an abnormally dry and clear summer as well as bonus Slovak contingents on the German side. Although the Poles resisted fiercely – a tiny outpost on the Hel Peninsula delayed Hitler’s victory speech in Gdansk by eight days, and 720 men in Wizna held at bay a mechanized juggernaut of 42,200 – by 25 September, it was all over. Poland’s fate had already been sealed on the 14th, when, to the surprise and dismay of the rest of Europe, the Soviets – now confident they’d allied with the victors-to-be – moved in to take their share of Poland (see map), meeting almost no resistance in the ensuing confusion, and tricking thousands of Polish military personnel into imprisonment and, eventually, execution.

It’s rarely considered but had France and England acted on their treaty with Poland, World War II could have been wrapped up there and then, sparing Europe five long years of grief and devastation. Hitler threw virtually everything he had at the Poles, leaving Germany’s western border (and skies) wide open to attack. Yet not a single French foot soldier stepped forward, and during the so-called ‘Phoney War’ that followed, Germany had more than enough time to absorb and exploit its new acquisitions in the east, re-group and revitalize the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, and lay fresh plans for the tense but inactive west. Luckily for these subsequent victims, many Poles managed to escape to the west through Hungary, where they would re-emerge as some of the most resilient soldiers in the North African campaign and most talented pilots in the Battle of Britain. Those who stayed back wasted no time in forming Europe’s biggest and most well-organized underground army – the Armia Krajowa or Home Army – whose exploits and significance to the war’s big picture I’ll examine in the second entry.

An interesting postscript to Part One is that Hitler initially intended to keep a Polish ‘rump state’ following the September invasion – what later became the General-Government zone of the Nazi sector. It was Stalin who insisted that no trace of Poland or Polishness survive the Fourth Partition, immediately outlawing the very expression “Poland”, and ensuring that wholesale elimination of Polish culture and leadership become the norm once again. And while much has been made of the suffering and atrocities that took place in Nazi concentration camps and the Warsaw Ghetto, the Poles’ own saddest chapter took place deep in Soviet territory, in a fog-shrouded forest called Katyn where some 22,000 officers were shot in cold blood and hurled into pits. Ironically, it was the Germans who brought this to the world’s attention, having stumbled across the graves during their invasion of Russia, and who were declared by the Western press to be the perpetrators – a charge quietly dropped from the Nuremberg trials due to glaring evidence to the contrary.

Clearly, the Second World War was no simple matter of Allied good versus Nazi evil… and that’s a myth I’ll deconstruct more closely in Part Two, 1940-45.

Thoroughly amused by such entries as Nutri Grain, Velvet ropes and Doing their back in, I decided to go through the list and copy & paste what also applies to me, with the following results:

#2 – Buddhist Iconography as Home Furnishings

#24 – Underbelly

#36 – Self Help Books

#37 – The Secret

#39 – “Political Correctness Gone Mad”

#50 – Discount Airlines

#54 – Thailand

#59 – Joining Moronic Facebook Groups

#70 – Tennis

#95 – Freedom of Speech

#106 – Mixed Martial Arts

#113 – Shaolin Warrior Monks

#134 – Pre-Mixed Drinks

#136 – Foreign Tattoos

#137 – Their Taxpayer Dollars

#139 – Bear Grylls

#141 – Suiting Up

#145 – Hot Asian Chicks

#169 – Mild Curries

#174 – Pyramids

#181 – Sarcasm

#185 – History

Not sure tennis or history are exclusively bogan pursuits, but still… I guess 23 out of 205 ain’t bad, making me precisely 11% bogan

P.S. Catholicism, bogan? Really?

It’s tempting to sit here and muse about last year or the state of the world in general, but one of my resolutions for 2011 is to do more and think/talk/sweat the small stuff less – it’s too easy to waste time getting bogged down in the latter at the expense of the former.

So I’m just going to share a little something a friend of mine e-mailed a few weeks ago, which struck me as one of the most poignant and succinct spiritual passages I’ve ever read, and something I’ve resolved to think back to throughout this year whenever I find myself slipping into negative emotions. So without any further ado, a Red Indian Tale of Two Wolves…

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.

He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.

“One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

“The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Happy New Year, everyone. Let this year be one where the good wolf totally prevails.

So, have I developed some mental issues over the weekend? It’s certainly possible.

SEEEEEEEEEE-GA!

(Those who know will smile, the rest just read on.)

It’s funny to think of it now, as someone who hasn’t owned a gaming console for more than 10 years, but I used to be a bit of a video game geek. I guess almost all of us guys were back in the day, and our generation was unique in that it grew up with the video game industry – from the primitive pixels of Pacman to the huge, high-resolution virtual worlds we have today.

One of the things that defined the early history of video games was that it was pretty much a rivalry between two big companies: Nintendo and Sega. Either you played Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers or Alex Kidd and Sonic the Hedgehog. Fate landed me on the Sega side, and there I stayed for a very long time as a fervently loyal, card-carrying patriot.

I still remember the day one of our family friends came over and gave me his Master System – Sega’s first console; a pretty slick-looking (even by today’s standards) black machine. It was the first time I’d even seen a video game – which sounds ludicrous now, a 7-year-old kid never having held a controller and decimated monsters & aliens – but of course, this was the late ’80s and even PCs hadn’t become a household item yet.

Immediately I was hooked. The first game I played was Astro Warrior, a space-based shoot ‘em up which lives on after all these years in my e-mail address – Surely Revive Zanoni being a mysterious Jinglish phrase that flashes after you destroy the first boss, Zanoni. So much joy was to follow – I received WonderBoy for Easter and then for my birthday, Fantasy Zone and The Ninja. Despite being a stupidly cutesy & bizarre shooter that sold for a bargain basement price of $20, Fantasy Zone is still one of my favourite video games of all time – highly original, addictive, easy to pick up & play yet a son of a bitch to complete.

My cartridge collection grew and the spot where my Master System lived, under the TV, became a little shrine to video gameage. For my 11th birthday I got upgraded to the 16-bit MegaDrive, which instilled a love for Sonic the Hedgehog that became borderline obsessive. I didn’t actually think that much of Sonic for the Master System, preferring the depth of the WonderBoy or Alex Kidd series, but Sonic 2 for MegaDrive blew me away with its gorgeous graphics, catchy music and pinballesque speed. I’d become a full-fledged, blue-and-white Sega fanboy, who recognized that Sonic’s real arch nemesis was not Dr Robotnik but another silly fat bastard with a moustache – Mario, Nintendo’s mushroom-stomping mascot.

As any guy my age would remember, Sega vs Nintendo was a big thing back then. We fought over it regularly at school. In Grade 5, the topic became so frequent and heated that in exasperation, the teacher set up a formal debate one day so we’d at least be civil and productive. We were, but the division only deepened. I still remember the teams: Joseph Pavone, Daniel Raso and Daniel Angelini on the Nintendo side, and me and Hakon on the other (possibly we had a third person, but for the life of me I can’t remember who). There was no clear winner, and so the arguing raged on.

High school eventually severed my connection with Sega. Consoles evolved into 32-bit and even 64-bit powerhouses, but rather than upgrading me to a Sega Saturn, my dad opted for a new PC for Christmas. I didn’t have the money to buy one myself, and armed with a CD containing demos of Quake and Duke Nukem 3D, I began to look to this new Pentium III for my gaming outlet. More importantly, I just didn’t feel the need to play games that much anymore. As suddenly and fanatically as I’d got into video games, I kinda lost interest, even as most of my friends continued to buy up the latest & greatest consoles. I guess partly because of that, I still had regular access to games – all I had to do was walk down the street to their place to battle it out on the latest Street Fighter.

Then in 2001, during my last year of high school, came the incredible news that Sega would cease making consoles and become a platform-neutral, software-only company. Just like that, the Great War of the video game industry was over. Like the Great War itself, there are many (including me) who say that Sega lost not because Nintendo and Sony “beat” it, but because it haemorrhaged from within thanks to mind-blowingly bad business and marketing decisions, as well as an increasingly arrogant, out-of-touch management at its Japanese headquarters that, fatally, ignored the vital but culturally very different American market. While Sega’s hardware technology remained as competitive as ever, it had been financially outsmarted by Nintendo and out-hyped by newcomer Sony and its much-anticipated PlayStation.

Even so, the white-and-blue went out with pride. Sega’s final weapon in the Great War, the 128-bit Dreamcast, was a technological feat miles ahead of its time, pioneering online console gaming and wowing gamers with its extraordinary graphics processing capability. The Megadrive, the sturdy black stallion that Sega used to hurtle out of ’80s obscurity, all the way past Nintendo into early 90s dominance, has just recently made a popular resurgence as a handheld console.

So anyway – that’s kind of a mixed history of Sega and my own Rise & Fall of Video Game Fandom. What got me to take this nostalgic trip was actually some articles floating around on the Web that Sega might, just might, be planning to become a console manufacturer again. To be fair, Sega’s CEO has come out and categorically denied this, but still… the tech industry’s full of surprises and strategically, Sega might want to make their prodigal return to the console arena a secret – rumoured but unexpected; a joyous surprise for all us latent ex-fanboys who spent their pre-teen indoor hours on Floating Island rather than Marioland.

Whatever the case, the likelihood/wisdom of a new Sega machine is not really what I want to write about… pretty much I just wanted to let the idea of it bring back all those innocent, pixelated memories. It’s also made me realize that Sega’s been the only brand that’s ever inspired loyalty in me. I have no brand loyalty whatsoever – I mean, I like and admire certain brands; I think Pioneer make excellent audio equipment for example – but I don’t necessarily stick with them if there’s a better deal around. Yet it’s interesting that after so many years, I’d still buy a new Sega console – should one ever make it out of the rumour mill into reality – even though none of the others interest me, and even though I could live the rest of my life quite happily without saving any more robotized animals or damsels in distress.

So Sega, here’s one customer you’re guaranteed to nab if you get back into making those slick black machines. But whether you do or not, the key thing here was to say thanks for all the fun I had a blast.

Surely Revive Zanoni!

Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien

Back when I actually was a kid, I usually cited this book as my favourite. Surprisingly believable, considering it centres around a bunch of talking rodents, the back story of how they came to be being my favourite part of the tale.

Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (+ Through The Looking Glass) by Lewis Carroll

On a page-by-page basis I never found Alice’s adventures that compelling – although I loved the Jabberwocky and committed every line & made-up word to memory. Being a product of Victorian England, the charming, opium-induced nonsense of Alice’s adventures is served a little dry at times, thanks to Alice’s excessively prim nature and proper English (relative to today, anyway). Even so, there’s no way I could ignore this classic because the sheer, mad brilliance of its characters has burrowed like a slithy tove deep into my consciousness, and even inspired me to get back into drawing of late.

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

This book completely shits all over Harry Potter or even Lord of the Rings, being a similarly epic fantasy novel full of magic, monsters and mythical creatures, but generating landscapes, villains and heroes of far greater beauty, originality and complexity into the mind’s eye. Most significantly, the grand saga of Atreyu’s and Bastian’s quests has quite a profound moral and philosophical core – so much so in fact that The Neverending Story has actually helped me to shape and define my spiritual beliefs, as I explain somewhere in my pre-Wordpress blog here.

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

As a kid I thought this book was pure genius. Filled with witty wordplay and memorable characters, the book is entertaining above all because it is clever, but in precisely the sort of fun, light-hearted way that children – like me, once upon a time – find endearing.

The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling

One word: Kaa. Kipling’s hypnotic, enigmatic python rivals the Chesire Cat as my favourite animal character of all time. That aside, The Jungle Books is a highly evocative and unusually ‘mature’ depiction of jungle life – almost documentary-like, at times – compared with the sugar-sweet, “one big happy animal family” version young audiences are usually fed.

Tomorrow, When The War Began (+ sequels) by John Marsden

I already wrote about the importance of this book to me here. If John Marsden had never written TWTWB, The Journey would probably be here instead – a strange but beautiful book by the same author on the journey from boyhood to manhood.

Making History by Stephen Fry

Discovered this book during my teenage obsession with Hitler, and it was probably the first ‘adult’ book I really enjoyed. Thought-provoking read interpersed with painstakingly-researched events from Hitler’s life, based on what might’ve happened had the Toothbrush-Moustachioed One never got into power.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

My two other obsessions as a teenager were Salvador Dali’s paintings and Oscar Wilde’s stories. I actually enjoyed many of his short stories more than Dorian Gray – the Happy Prince literally made me cry – but seeing as we’re talking “books” this will serve nicely.

The Outsider by Albert Camus

This was one of my “texts” for Year 12 English, and apart from maybe Lord of the Flies, the only one I’d actually read in my own time – as I have many times over. Meursault’s carefree, existentialist narration had a spell-like effect on me from the very first page, so much so that reading the book became a summer tradition for years to come. If reading Fear and Loathing is like taking a hit of speed, The Outsider is like a big, fat joint enjoyed at dusk on the balcony of an Algiers apartment.

The Polish House by Radek Sikorski

For its sheer readability and charming personal touch, I rate this as the best history book I’ve ever read. The author uses his restoration of a derelict chateu as a springboard for a very human and engaging account of various periods in Polish history, from the religious geopolitics of the Middle Ages through to the tragedy and heroism of World War 2 and its Communist aftermath, skilfully blending the microcosm of his project and his relatives’ experiences with the broad panorama of Poland’s past.

Dune (+ Dune Messiah) by Frank Herbert

This book is pretty much the closest thing I have to a Bible. Absolutely amazing work of the imagination that has etched such incredible visuals upon my mind that I refuse to watch the movie adaptation or mini-series for fear of spoiling them. More than just a science fiction epic that has entered the public consciousness – so much so that I actually thought giant sandworms were real as a kid – Dune is also an extraordinarily insightful spiritual, ecological and geopolitical tract, a masterful combination of study and story spoiled only by a long line of inferior sequels that, in my opinion, muddy and water down the visionary power and wisdom of the original. (Its immediate successor, Dune Messiah, was decent though.)

Chopper: From The Inside by Mark Brandon Read

What can I say. Everyone likes a bit of smut now & then, and this book serves up plenty of it with all of the black humour and colourful language Chopper Read’s reknowned for. I’ve accumulated about half a dozen of the Chopper diaries but the first one remains the best – just don’t read it before bed, unless you want seriously fucked-up dreams.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Probably my all-time favourite book when all is said & done. On the surface it’s just one long, demented account of ridiculously antisocial, illegal and drug-fuelled behaviour in America’s tackiest city, but beneath the madcap veneer is also a very serious critique of America’s worsening political and social degeneracy – ‘the Death of the American Dream’, as Hunter S. Thompson called it. It’s the manic, anything-goes energy of the book that I relish though – reading Fear and Loathing literally energizes me, like a good drug. There’s something addictive about seeing the modern world caricatured in all of its vice, glitz and stupidity through the perpetually drug-hazed lens of Raoul Duke, lending it a warped, comic-book quality where anything can happen but you can also get away with anything.

“We were somewhere on the edge of the desert, near Barstow, when the drugs began to take hold…” …no matter how many times I return to the book and read that first line, I know I’m gonna enjoy the ride as much as I did the first time.

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk

Everyone goes on about Fight Club and Invisible Monsters but in my opinion, Haunted is Palahniuk’s best book. It’s a series of dark short stories within an equally dark broader narrative, the skilfully woven whole being a damning indictment of modern society generously strewn, in Palahniuk’s unique style, with bizarre factoids and dry, incisive one-liners. Haunted felt distinctly deeper to me than any of his other novels though, exploring the most base layers of the human condition – and Mr Whittier’s rock-grinder theory, like The Neverending Story’s symbiosis of Fantastica and Reality, remains a key illustrative element in my spiritual beliefs. Again, see MindFields for more details.

Masters of Doom by David Kushner

The only other non-fiction work apart from The Polish House, and written much like a story in a very immediate, magazine-article style full of striking metaphors, vivid characterization and titbits of contextual history. The book is really an intimate study of the two conflicting personalities that brought the world Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D – gory and ground-breaking games that me & my friends all grew up with – set against the backdrop of the burgeoning computer and video game industry. If The Polish House is the most interesting history book I’ve read, this is hands down the most interesting biography.

Now let me rewind a few years for a moment. I used to have an e-mail account, lil_polish_boy@hotmail.com, which I eventually ditched because apart from starting to sound decidedly juvenile, it got hopelessly riddled with spam. One of the most frequent spam e-mails was a Q&A thing called ‘Double Your Dating’, from a guy called David D’Angelo. Not sure how I ended up on this guy’s mailing list but then, not sure how I managed to keep winning the Canadian lottery without ever buying a ticket either.

So anyway, I read some of David D’Angelo’s e-letters – inevitably consisting of him verbally high-fiving guys who used his ‘techniques’ to score, and reinforcing where they went right. It eventually made me curious enough to read, over time, a handful of e-books that are best described as the sex equivalent of Get Rich Quick. How To Win Girlfriends And Deflower People. The thing is – and I don’t know whether this is well-known or not – there’s a massive subculture of these things. ‘Game’, it’s usually called – a whole branch of pseudo-psychology on how to pick up, get some, whatever you wanna call it – all with slightly different takes but the same essential worldview.

The idea is this. We’re all still essentially cavemen, but wearing pants and living in cities. And once upon a time when it was like the intro to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the monkey-women looked to the alpha monkey-man for protection, in return giving him sex and happily doing so, because they wanted their babies to be alpha monkey babies. Now, these books make it sound a lot more convincing but it’s really no more complex than that. On the surface, it even seems pretty believable. And with this foundation, the authors set out to teach you how to become an Alpha Monkey, with gems like “Lean away from rather than towards your friends” – regardless of whether this makes conversing in a crowded bar impossible. There are literally dozens of ridiculous pointers like this, scribed into these Game Bibles with utmost seriousness. When in public, stand around with your thumbs in your pockets and puff your chest out. Never offer a woman a favour, because kindness is weakness. Don’t pay for dinner on a date, coz it’s like paying for sex. Under no circumstances hang out with friends who aren’t ‘cool’ – their uncoolness will rub off on you like cooties. Hang out only with dudes who pop their collars, have at least 200 Facebook friends and use Hugo Boss shower gel. Don’t talk on the phone too long, coz you’ll come across as a tosser who’s got nothing better to do than load up bangbros.com and jack off all night. Better to be the first to say “bye” than have a long and meaningful conversation, right?

Right.

The thing is, David D’Angelo and his player friends are actually dead right – but not for the reasons they think.

At this point, if you haven’t already, it’s worth reading an earlier entry I wrote triggered by a retarded (no, really) Today Tonight story. If you can’t be bothered, the premise is that the media dictates or at least heavily influences our culture – and by “the media” I mean TV, magazines, the advertising industry, Hollywood – the whole shebang.

Where these players have got it wrong, unwittingly or not, is that they’ve taken a very specific period of time in a very specific part of the world – the Americanized West; late 20th to early 21st-century – and then gone backwards, writing history to suit. Sorry folks, but that’s not the way it works. You start at the beginning, then move forwards. An entirely different reality emerges when you do this.

Quite simply, history doesn’t support the Planet of the Apes thesis. For starters, however some species of animal may construct their societies in the animal kingdom, it’s of no relevance to us as human beings in the Year 2010. Chimpanzees also rape and cannibalize each other, and spend most of their afternoons swinging between trees hundreds of metres above ground. I think it’s fair to say we’ve put that lifestyle well & truly behind us, and as much as the boss might give you the shits on a long Monday, there’s really no biological drive, deep down or anywhere at all, to jump up and down on all fours, bite off his face, eat his ears, seek out his relatives then scuttle up a tree shrieking. Do correct me if I’m wrong.

Moreover, there are hundreds, nay thousands of years of legends, art and literature – from Homer’s Odysseus to the Wachowski Brothers’ Neo – that indicate, overwhelmingly, that monogamy and love is the true calling of the Human Being – even if lust is an ever-present temptation. And while the Middle Ages is generally considered something of a backwards step in European civilization, it crystallized a concept that has been central to our culture ever since. Emerging from the Dark Ages, a time when Europe was wracked by plunder, rape and a lack of spelling & grammar skills, emerged this idea that a warrior should not be a ruthless mercenary but an upholder of virtue – honour and morality began to trump “might is right”. Chivalry was born, and today we still use terms like “knight in shining armour” and “Prince Charming” to describe a woman’s ideal.

For centuries to come, though many men were anything but chivalrous, it was understood that the best ones were. Women yearned to play Juliet to a romantic Romeo, or Maid Marian to a valorous Robin Hood. Novels, plays and poetry espoused gentlemen like Jan Skrzetuski in Ogniem i Mieczem (a classic of Polish literature), who upon meeting the fair Helena Kurcewicz for the first time, carries her across a bog so that her dress doesn’t get dirty. And this is all rightly so, because to throw the players’ philosophy back at them, yes, women want to be protected – and there’s no point seeking out a strong, aggressive “alpha male” if he’s a callous, misogynistic prick. The Sherriff of Nottingham was an assertive, influential and ‘I don’t give a damn ma’am’ type, but what woman in her right mind would want to be with such a character? It’s a man’s character and moral quality that make him protective and supportive, or not.

Then came the twentieth century, with its massive wars and associated social revolutions.

There’s a book called The Polish House in which the author writes, in reference to Polish society, how thousands of fine, upstanding young officers went to face the Nazi & Soviet guns during World War 2 and never returned, leaving a sad and gaping void not just in their respective families but in the broader social fabric. I just grabbed the book and found the exact line, actually:

“Sobieslaw, a Polish officer of the old school, heel-clicking and honourable, is also gone. Sobieslaws went to war in 1939 and never came back.”

To me it sums up the tragedy of that 6-year fratricide, because it rings true across the West in general. With the Old World in ruins, loud, brash, materialistic America set the new reality, and as with every empire, created it in its own image. Hence consumerism trumped culture, and instant gratification, not finding a soulmate, became the primary objective for young people. (Feminism also came along, with its repellent idea that women should reject their innate femininity and behave and dress like men – the equivalent of telling black people to “act white” to counter their historical subjugation. Appallingly retarded, but that’s probably a subject for another time.)

What we don’t realize is, while it did affect the entire West to some degree, this new age of style over substance, status over spirit, actually replaced the old social dynamics only in North America and Australia. Watch something like Chappelle’s Show – already a staple of 7mate, Australia’s first exclusive channel for men – and it’s obvious you’re an alpha monkey if you swear, smoke, throw your hands around like a retard and consciously avoid any form of work or altruism. David D’Angelo calls this “Cocky & Funny”. Some people call it “being a fuckwit”.

Of course, the Idiot Box isn’t the sole exponent here. Calvin Klein billboards make it clear you should have as much chest hair as a 5-year-old, maintain a too-cool-for-school gaze in your eyes, and that your pants should be lower than your underpants by at least a few centimetres. Flipping through RALPH gives you the distinct impression that getting a girl is about buying the right watch (i.e. the one that Pierce Brosnan’s wearing), working out 22 hours a day, and eating a diet of broccoli, kangaroo liver and Jock McJock’s A-Grade Whey Protein Supplement, so that you can make up for your small penis with large biceps, triceps & whatever other ‘ceps. In other words, the dating game has become utterly superficial, driven by appearances, status signifiers, and a need to feel secure in a world that’s constantly asking “ARE YOU HAPPY WITH YOURSELF AND YOUR LIFE??”

So. With things made so unnecessarily complex and shallow, it’s no wonder many of us are gasping for air, unable to make sense of the modern world. Hundreds of books have been written by “experts” who look like 40-year-old virgins, proclaiming that men are from Mars and women from Venus and all that bullshit. Let me say, as someone who has travelled around the world, that it is bullshit. It’s just a product of our Americanized culture.

In eastern Europe, where my parents hail from, none of this applies. Guys don’t see each other as competition. Hot girls – of which there are astounding quantities – don’t think the sun shines out of their arse. Last time I was in Warsaw, walking down the street eating a kebab, two gorgeous girls wished me smacznego (bon appetit). Here, you’d sooner come across a crocodile on a skateboard wearing oven mits, than get a sweet salutation out of nowhere. Over in Europe, young singles are more open and relaxed in their interactions because there’s none of this convoluted, over-sexed, ego-driven paradigm. Pussy isn’t put on a pedestal, nor is it some sort of trophy, so girls don’t see a smile or a friendly remark as something precious to be dispensed only on those they believe have a Certificate of Alphanicity. Here, male-female interactions are treated by both parties as a see-saw that everyone dreads finding themselves at the bottom end of. So instead of showing you care, pretend you don’t care. Instead of saying something nice, say something sarcastic. “Negging”, game players call it. Negative over positive. Beautiful, isn’t it?

What constitutes desirability is also different in the Old World. Here in Oz, there’s still this notion that girls want a “Prince Charming”, but it’s pretty much overridden by the teen-movie/CLEO/Sex and the City “I’m a single woman, I’m gonna fuck around and I’m gonna love it” mentality. Over in Poland and most of the rest of Europe, there’s something wrong with you if you carry on like that. Quality, not quantity, is the aim of the game, so the aim is to score a man who’ll take you to the snow and cuddle you by the fire and charm your nan at Christmas dinner – not some dumb cunt whose hobbies in life are limited to Chap laps and wandering around music festivals in a wifebeater, to show off the same tribal tattoo 6 of his mates have.

Of course Europe’s just one example. To get back to Youtube Rant Guy, the contrast with Asia is even more blatant. In Japan – and I use Japan as an example because somewhere like the Philippines, to be fair, girls being eager to please can have economic incentives – a woman would not even look at you if you carried on like a so-called “bad boy”. You’d be recognized as someone with no brains and no future, full stop. Which isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with being your own man, or even eccentric – Japan’s choc full of eccentricity and self-expression – but carrying on like a Neanderthal or a fifth grader with ADD, the way so many cockheads do in Melbourne, would see you shunned and silently loathed by everyone. Back here, this is largely stock standard behaviour for our sporting heroes and TV celebrities. Role models for the current and next generation.

I think in a meandering, unplanned sort of way, I’ve pretty much made my point. The Great Dividing Range we’ve got between men and women these days, in the New West – it’s not rooted in some heavy psychological differences from millions of years ago, when we shared our ‘hoods with mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers. It’s a cultural thing – or to be more precise, culture vs a lack thereof. Because in the older and wiser countries of the world, it’s not your pick-up line, your ironic T-shirt or how many bros you’ve got around you on the dancefloor, that counts for your success in the relationships sphere. It really is the thought and integrity behind your actions that counts – you’re appreciated above all for making an effort, putting your heart on your sleeve and being chivalrous.

It’s probably no coincidence that I met the first love of my life less than a week into my first holiday around Europe. She told me much later what it was that left such a lasting impression on her, the morning we met at a hostel reception area. Quite simply, it was the fact that as we strolled through a Salvador Dali gallery in Vienna’s Old Town, I was able to explain to her the symbolism in the paintings and how they reflected events in Dali’s life. Which is funny, coz David D’Angelo never mentioned an education or an interest in the arts as being of any value to the opposite sex. According to him, I should’ve been wearing a leather jacket and making fun of her shoes.

I doubt there are any teenagers reading this but if there were, I’d wrap it up by saying this. There’s nothing wrong with paying for a girl’s drink or dinner. There’s nothing wrong with calling her straightaway if you’re thinking of her. There’s nothing wrong with staying up late to reply to her e-mail, or driving 50km to meet on her side of town. And girls, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a guy who does that. I understand that for all the criticisms I’ve made of the ‘player’ view of the world, there is nevertheless some instinct in females that gets a buzz out of being fucked around, at least to some degree. Fair enough. But like tattoos or drugs – other key elements of our contemporary youth culture – while it may be invigorating and exciting for the time being, give you a buzz, it’ll also bring plenty of pain and regret later. I know from experience.

Bottom line is that men aren’t from Mars and women aren’t from Venus. We’re all from Earth for fuck’s sake, and if you want to hark all the way back to the Stone Age you’d think that living together for so long would mean we’d get along pretty well by now. Only a fucked up culture has spoiled and made a mess of the magic that blooms and sparkles naturally when young men and women meet. That’s sad, but like anything, it can be transcended – if we choose to do so.

American McGee got it so much more right, both in retaining the otherwordly madness of the original and giving it a dark, psychological makeover for the 21st century.

Here’s the trailer for Tim Burton’s Alice, superimposed over graphics from AMG’s… THIS is the movie I wanted to see, with songs like this on the soundtrack.

Of course it’s one thing to merely criticize and another to put forward solutions, so here’s the soundtrack for TWTBT as I imagine it. I’d suggest just listening to rather than watching the links provided, so that you can appreciate the music on its own terms and picture it in the intended context.

Opening credits – Smashing Pumpkins – 1979

Singing along in the 4WD on the way to Hell – Bloc Party – One Month Off

Hiking through Australian landscape into Hell – Icehouse – Great Southern Land

Discovering the clearing in Hell – Dan Gibson – Kookaburra

Wirrawee Showgrounds/preparations for Show Day – Connie Francis – Everybody Somebody’s Fool

Discovery of Wirrawee’s fate – Synaesthesia – Surface System

Occupied Wirrawee by night/approaching the Showgrounds – Aphex Twin – Spots

Romantic rapport with Lee – Sophie B. Hawkins – As I Lay Me Down

Preparing to blow up the bridge – Aes Dana – Onset Data

Return to Hell + credits – Enigma – Return To Innocence

The other night was supposed to be just a typical movie night. Dinner, couple of drinks, then kick back, watch some trailers and enjoy a bit of cinematic escapism. Mull it over briefly afterwards, say your goodbyes, drive home and forget all about it.

Not with this one.

As soon as the film concluded with its ill-fitting, James Bond-style credits sequence, I immediately became aware of feeling strangely melancholic. By the time I got home, it was apparent the events and dialogue of the movie weren’t the reason for this… rather, it was the sheer fact that 15 years since reading the book for the first time, I’d finally seen the movie adaptation of Tomorrow, When The War Began. I guess it’s like when you hear about or see a picture of someone you once loved – even though they might be buried deep in the past and long forgotten, hearing their name or seeing their face can nevertheless stir something hidden away and, at least for a time, bring old emotions and memories back to the surface. That’s exactly what Tomorrow, When The War Began did.

To put my objective reviewing hat on for a moment, the movie itself wasn’t brilliant. In trying to establish their very different and distinct personalities, the opening scenes resorted to almost cartoon-like exaggeration when introducing the seven teenagers. For starters, Homer wearing a “Fuck the police” T-shirt was the crudest, most uninspired attempt at signifying a bad boy that I’ve ever seen. More damningly, casting that Home and Away guy as Kevin was a serious mistake, since even though I don’t watch Home and Away I just kept seeing… yep, the Home and Away guy. I didn’t see Kevin at all, and I’d bet a lot of Australian viewers – TWTWB’s target audience – had the same problem with such an identifiable star, who looked and behaved exactly the same in his TWTWB incarnation as he does in his H&A one. Overall though, the worst characterization of the lot goes to the late eighth entry, Chris. The movie’s Chris was, in my mind, utterly at odds with his book persona. In the book, from memory, he was a skinny, nerdy, mysterious genius, reserved and serious in demeanour, with a penchant for spending time alone and writing dark and beautiful poetry. A far cry, I would’ve thought, from the unabashedly retarded, socially comfortable and down-to-earth stoner of the movie, who gave me the recurring impression that a sidekick from some Adam Sandler comedy was just taking five on another set.

To be fair though, Ellie was pretty much spot on and most of the others weren’t far off the mark. Lee was great too, now that I think about it – a just-right blend of Buddhist calm and dark horse intensity; an archetypal piano prodigy with a hard, Viet Cong-type edge that you could see coming through as soon as things get ominous. But all this is digressing off the point, which isn’t a review of the movie but what it did for me.

Even though it fell far short of the book, the movie was still a faithful adaptation and basically brought it all back. Essentially, it made me remember how much I loved those books and in particular that first installment, When It All Began. Reading TWTWB was, all in all, probably the most powerful reading experience I’ve ever had, and throughout my teenage years I revisited the series several times, often re-reading the entire backlog whenever a new one came out and loving it every time. Hell, weird as it may sound, I even fantasized about being in Ellie & Co’s scenario… there’s undeniably a certain romance in finding yourself part of a teenage partisan gang, hiding out in the bush, fighting for freedom & country, and all the while discovering love, camaraderie, an inner strength you never knew you had and a profoundly changed, raw and mature worldview. Reading the series absorbed me into a much deeper, more rugged and more meaningful world, and now that I think about it, it even made me love Australia, the way it captured the regional Australian way of life, the Australian bush etc, at a time when I felt little in common with Australian teenagers… a little like Chris, I guess. Book Chris.

Anyway. As far as the movie goes, it could’ve been better but I’d still recommend seeing it – although it lacks the soul of John Marsden’s writing, and the acting occasionally regresses to a wooden, school play-esque reciting of lines, it’ll nevertheless bring back everything that you loved about it… and like me, you’ll remember how much something like a book can mean to you, and what a beautiful thing that can be.

I can’t find – especially these days – dance records that really inspire me, and I always go back to like old records that kind of pull out certain vibes from the late eighties with the hip-hop stuff. I felt like… going out on a limb, to show that the record wasn’t a total dance record, you know?

I don’t have to sort of try and be a dance DJ, you know, you’ve got the Chemicals and Fatboy Slim doing that stuff. So I felt that, what I’m about, what music I do actually like, you know, is really old school hip-hop, punk and the breaks. The type of people that will buy this record will be the people that want to know what goes on inside my head when I’m in the studio writing the music, and so that’s basically the whole idea behind it, you know.

- Liam Howlett, The Prodigy

This pretty much sets the stage for my blog entry today. About a month ago I started mixing shit together in Ableton Live, and as I taught myself more tricks and started having real fun splicing, mashing & rearranging my favourite tracks, I decided to have a crack at producing a proper mixtape. More than just a compilation of beats & pieces, the end product is kinda like my personal expression of Mr Howlett’s philosophy: that a real mix should do more than just smooth the gap between songs; it should be an innovative tapestry for the ears that gives listeners an entirely new perspective on the music involved and make the songs sound fresh, hard & funky all over again. The file’s located over at my new profile on DJ Passion – check it out!

DURATION

39 minutes

TRACKS

Michael Jackson – Ghost
Rob Dougan – Clubbed To Death [Kurayamino Mix]
Dust Brothers – Space Monkeys
Chemical Brothers – Song To The Siren
The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Band (Reprise)
Hardnoise – Untitled [Instrumental]
Erther – ErthForce
Propellerheads – SpyBreak! [Long Version]
KLF – What Time Is Love
Kraftwerk – Home Computer
Equinox – Electronic Dreams
KMFDM – Professional Killer
Pro-Tech – Re-Thread
Paul Oakenfold – Speed
Paul van Dyk – New York
Raul Cremona – Total Infection [Tribal Again Mix]
UMC Communications – Rebel State
Prodigy – Funky Shit
Prodigy – Shadow
Chemical Brothers – Hot Acid Rhythm 1
Solar Fields – The Sight Is White
Chemical Brothers – Hey Boy, Hey Girl
Rammstein – Stripped [Charlie Clouser's Heavy Mental Mix]

SAMPLES (BEATS/BREAKS/VOCALS/AMBIENCE)

Sonic the Hedgehog 3
Fight Club
Prodigy – Jericho [Genaside II Mix]
24 Hour Party People
Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels
Prodigy – Everybody In The Place [155 & Rising]
Puff, Puff, Pass
Random porn
Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn
Frank Klepacki – Hell March
Future Sound of London – Egypt
Arrakis – The Spice
Intermix – Sonic Ritual
The Matrix
Dream Frequency – Take Me [Prodigy Mix]
KMFDM – Ready To Blow
8 Mile
Mortal Kombat II
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Prodigy – Phoenix
Batman
Dust Brothers – Fight Club Theme
Norman Bass – Go Back
Prodigy – Full Throttle
Alien (Arcade Game)
Prodigy – Warrior’s Dance

Edward Scissorhands - Bizarre and contrived but in a thoroughly enjoyable Tim Burton way. Johnny Depp said he cried like a baby when he read the script, and you can see why – certain personality types will relate to the character on a deep level and appreciate what’s being symbolized here.

Event Horizon – Creepy, clever and mind-opening – I’d rank it up there with The Matrix for the authentic and foreboding sense of the future that it constructs.

Pirates of Silicon Valley – Probably my favourite of the lot. I knew I’d enjoy this because of my interest in the early history of computers, but the movie goes well beyond an adequate dramatization of those years to a touching and poignant piece of cinema, brilliant portraying the characters of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and the shared dynamics and dreams that led to their ascendance, teaming up and falling out.

IN-BETWEEN

Sunshine – Bit sterile, first half drags on and the first few deaths have no impact – just feel like part of a very deliberate effort to get the death toll rolling. Somehow all the characters manage to be slightly annoying as well, making it hard to sympathize with any of them. These negatives aside, the film is beautifully shot, tense with a few twists towards the end and, most significantly, has an interesting, apocalyptic yet very believable/scientific concept carrying the storyline.

Baraka – Awesome in the true sense of the word – it inspires awe: in our natural world as well as the long, rich tapestry of human civilization. Main problem is that with its almost complete absence of dialogue and reliance on subtle sounds and sweeping/panoramic cinematic photography, it’s hard to fully appreciate on a domestic screen & sound system, coming across more as an (overly) long episode of Planet Earth rather than the feast for the senses it would be in a theatre environment.

DISAPPOINTMENTS

Alien – I was expecting a classic like this to be much more atmospheric and scary. As it was, Alien didn’t absorb me that much into its world, it lacks explanation and, most damningly, the alien just wasn’t as insidious or intelligent as it should’ve been – it may as well have been a stock standard wild animal (lion or something) on board the ship.

Spinal Tap – Again, was expecting more from a cult classic. A few lol moments in the first half seem promising but then the movie loses its sense of humour, goes absolutely nowhere and by the end (not that it even has an ending), has completely lost the gritty charm and engaging fly-on-the-wall immediacy that shone through in parts of the beginning.