judge for yourself

Penis pump judge gets 4-year jail term

A former judge convicted of exposing himself while presiding over jury trials by using a sexual device under his robe was sentenced Friday to four years in prison.

Donald Thompson had spent almost 23 years on the bench and had served as a state legislator before retiring from the court in 2004. He showed no reaction when he was sentenced.

At his trial this summer, his former court reporter, Lisa Foster, testified that she saw Thompson expose himself at least 15 times during trial between 2001 and 2003. Prosecutors said he also used a device known as a penis pump during at least four trials in the same period.

Thompson, 59, was convicted last month of four felony courts of indecent exposure for incidents that took place in his Creek County courtroom.

Thompson, a married father of three grown children, testified that the penis pump was given to him as a joke by a longtime hunting and fishing buddy.

"It wasn't something I was hiding," he said.

He said he may have absentmindedly squeezed the pump's handle during court cases but never used it to masturbate.

Foster told authorities that she saw Thompson use the device almost daily during the August 2003 murder trial of a man accused of shaking a toddler to death. A whooshing sound could be heard on Foster's audiotape of the trial. When jurors asked the judge about the sound, Thompson said he hadn't heard it but would listen for it.

from

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08-18-judge-sentenced_x.htm

clip from dylan & nathan (aka snawklor) and dave with his vodka organ at foundsound last week

excerpt from The Hunter

It was nearing midnight when I heard an awful cry that had almost certainly come from a human; although not a human in any state that I had ever encountered before.
I was, as usual, in the veggie garden behind the bungalow searching for snails and slugs. They squirmed and scurried under my halogenheadlamp, and after a dismissive twist of my wrist, clacked and frothed in the blueplasticbucket (and the spout along the rim of the bucket, it had just occurred to me as I heard that cry, was shaped like a silent speech bubble, and the humour of this observation only heightened the horror of the cry that echoed in the hollowanywhereness of that darksuburbannight). It was regular midnight activity. The snail hunting that is.
You might ask what was I doing planting a veggie garden so close to my bungalow and in an area dominated by greatconcreteslabs. Good question. Yes it is haven for pests if that’s what you’re getting at. Yes my silverbeet is in tatters. Yes my basil seedlings have returned to their creator. Yes my beans are few and rest on bareskeletalleaves. But options are limited. It’s either this or nothing at all.
The cry. It was like a stripe of blood in milk. I looked up uncertainly in the general direction that it may have come from and my head-mounted laser beam cut through the sparse foliage of the silver birch. I listened again, my heart thumping, the night air erect and porous. There it was again. Something inside me twitched. That cry. I felt sick. By the frantic jostling gills of the fence, I crouched with silentshallowbreaths.
Another cry! I ran up the side of the house with a mind of zeroes. The street was empty. But it wasn’t. A figure zigzagging up the street, or in circles. The hard bloody sap of the gum tree in frozen flux. My head lamp cut up the darkened street into stripes and daggers. I slowed as I approached her. She was raving. Could be a junkie, I thought, or a zombie – so I held back. She started to sob and sway. Through her longdamphair and spider-webs of mucus I finally caught her eye. Hey, I said. I motioned her over towards my house via a bright bobbing path. We followed it like weary miners to the old horsehairchair on the veranda.
We sat. She blinked uncontrollably. Oh. I turned off the halogenheadlamp. The air was sweet because it was early summer and the alleyway jasmine was in full bloom and I dreaded what she was going to say, so I said nothing either. We sat, and our eyes had the fragile expectation of cats. And then she spoke, slowly, carefully and with such conviction that my ears and eyes were hers for as long as she needed them.
When I woke she was gone. She wasn’t gone at all. She was making tea. My forehead was sore from where the headlamp had branded me with an itchy “O”. She didn’t smile once. She sat down and told her story again in case I hadn’t heard it properly the first time. We stared out at the suburbs under the curdled arm of the galaxy and I almost cried. I didn’t. The sun reintroduced colour to various things in the garden.

excerpt: Orange Aqua and Silver

Once upon a time I would have begun like this: Once upon a time I would have detailed by obscure origins to you, like new lovers at a dimly lit bar, stripped by spirits, revealing their scars and tender spots. I am reminded of this by the fragile pages of this book, liver spotted by the faeces of insects and remorseless faceless mildew.

Anyway, I digress. You are gone.

But the pages are no longer even real pages any more. What options are left behind in the trail of the blinking cursor? Reclining in a fictional pose (slowly turning my hunched back) I could destroy my desires like an aging man who fictionalises and destroys his with pornography. Everything would be made explicit, nothing would be hidden, I would dissect this life until it became nothing but a mess of guts and text-book genitals, a bedroom scattered with unnumbered pages.

I know. I promised to explain. I can’t.

I want to wander away from this world – this prison of words, this promise of a new Jerusalem, this orgiastic heaven of thousand willing virgins, this transcendent Nirvana – far from this theatre where they taunt me from the stalls jeering and shimmering in orange and aqua and silver (and why those colours? why in that order?) – away from this torture chamber of razor sharp Braille for my eyes and weeping mind, and leave the treacherously thorny tangles of well crafted words…

I want my scrotum to hang heavy and low like a gypsy’s swag, I want bells in my matted hair and on my toes, I want to smell like earth and sex (clean and wholesome).

I want to be silent, I want to nod and smile and for that to be enough, I want the strength to not speak when someone utters the infamous and evocative names of________ or _______ I want it to sound like the song of birds to my ears I want to grin unknowingly at the meaningless babble in my skin-and-gristle-shells and adore with innocence the gentle fricatives the spouting little rushes of air from unpolluted pouts the tender choreographed antistrophe of lower lip I want my mind to be silent I want images not words I want the corrupt rabble of language to shatter and explode silently onto the unremarkable uneven ground and no-one will cry they won’t even know what to cry over

helen, marysville 2009

excerpt from Broca's Area

It was a check-out chick who first noticed it. She said, “[whatever it is she said]” to Bridget, who looked back blankly at the girl who couldn’t have been more than thirteen, in a tight black hijab and possessing an unnatural interest in people’s grocery items. She repeated it again. Bridget replied using her of course in that rather typical way that in fact signifies the very opposite. And left hurriedly for the automatic doors which obliged not out of courtesy but on reflex. And in the carpark, surrounded by windswept eucalypts and disposable softdrink cups and chewed-on straws, reflected on what had just occurred and knew instinctively that some thing deeply wrong was already well underway in her brain. And cried dropless tears, her throat contracting in sympathetic choking jolts.

It started with the occasional noun. It could have easily been the usual silly parental forgetfulness, but it wasn’t. “The er thing… the scrunch… crinkly er with the….and you…” was all she could manage, while she mimed the actions for its various uses. Her daughter replied sarcastically with, “[whatever it is she said]” implying of course that it was in fact a plastic bag she was after. Her daughter thought nothing of it, having something close to zero on a scale of empathy, where zero is no empathy whatsoever and 100 is enough empathy to just about debilitate your every action until you stop imposing your consumption of oxygen upon the rest of the world and die. Bridget’s own mother had told her that sarcasm was the lowest form of humour; but as we all know this moral delineation meant very little to the subsequent generations following Bridget’s mother’s and is currently so antiquated that Bridget’s daughter has in fact No Idea Whatsoever it is that the old phrase could be have been referring to.

Nouns began to disappear this way and that, not suddenly, but at such an insidious and deliberate pace that Bridget was often betrayed into wondering if there was a problem at all. By the time it was evident that there was a problem, it was too late. There was a hole in her brain. The hole was in the Broca’s Area, which happens to be the area that deals with words. Words were exploding and dispersing their information like seed pods, simultaneously giving and dying all over the place. Words were unwravelling in her mind like protein strands denaturising. Or rather their semantic quality. The images in her head were very clear. It was their alphabetic signifiers that were going. Wherever it was they were going.

Her husband (whose name isn’t so important) the aforementioned crustacean did not defrost one bit. Once the niggling worm of doubt in their marriage had begun to nest, he could think of nothing else but leaving her. She seemed pathetic; hyperbolically so he thought. He ogled other women calmly and with intent. The Department now seemed ripe with opportunities that had never noticed before. Appropriately bouncing bends and curves beckoned him from beige blouses. One woman rose above them all in his eyes and behind them, and after a secret courting period of courteous secrecy, they announced to their rather unsurprised colleagues that they were a them. Oh. She was a PHD student in the department. Her mind was full of good words and all in the right order. She had pages of them. She articulated mouthfuls of them. He unfurled his middle-aged body before her. She took it. Like a hungry seagull takes an old chip. He once said to her, tenderly and without a trace of irony, “[what ever it is he said to her]”.

Her husband would leave suddenly and without explanation. He had winced as she grappled to find the words for keys, stockings, frozen fish. He had become sick of filling in the gaps. He felt superior. Sharper, younger. He sensed her pulling him into a domestic sized hurricane of semantic senility. He wanted nothing of it and his eyes glazed over every time she breezed into a room, gently, so as not to disturb him.

Found Sound: the experimental instrument project launch

Albert Mishriki & Ros Bandt & mice



Ros Bandt & Albert Mishriki

Found Sound launch

Found Sound: the Experimental Instrument Project
begins this very steamy evening:

Ros Bandt and Albert Mishriki
Tonight at 7-8pm, Guilford Lane Gallery, Melb.
Doors open 6:30

This is part of the Wednesday Project: stay tuned
http://foundsoundproject.blogspot.com/

a noldie bu'tagoodi

your menacing arms outstretched
a pier perpendicular to the horizon
sky proteins thicken, somewhere a tangled nest
of doors falling open,
meanwhile the edge of the town
luminous and buzzing
the fine itchy fissures, the eruption of days
cut the night and the corners of the sun yep
all winking their way to who knows where
while an orgy of zeroes squeak and wheeze; the stink
of bitumen that ripe spread is groping the trees (the bars are in the gutter;
that window smashed again) i open and close all the plastic
packaging i hunt for my keys i cover my machines in persian silk
and close the asthmatic blinds you think they'd be used to it by now

Ol Darwin Town

direct from the frontline of metamasturbation

I stop every thirdorfourth block
sloSHishingly like an angry bottle of milk
shaking bad thoughts into my littleblackspiralbook
The gravel of time is bumpy but roughly speaking even
the scent of her pure fume
I have enough time
My scarf a scent of primary red
Smooth steps. Water cressed. The soothed
ripples roll to her bed. The gravel of time
ah the lap of the water
I row out to you
to hear

The stutter of my fingers
Loving where they’ve been
the gutters of your body
the rivulets and seams
My mangrove moods
so thick and muddy and kind
My reptilian heart conversing
slowly with my m,mind
your face melts a future
another beige dream
(the reptilian slats of the
watchful vents); the disordered
events send messages
I hear every single one
the plan was always to surprise and here
I am arriving at myself more in need
of surprise than ever
your running legs
like tears
in a book
my logic bound by a spiral and all the while
I purchase another book to jog my memory
and put another log on my fire until I'm like all ash
I’m trying to weigh that up as I sit here unable to sleep
I’ve eaten too much again I’m gasping and panting and shifting in my creaky chair
to the gossiping heater while you grow thin limbs in the next room

if talk is that small maybe it’s time for silent teeth

how I dream of silence is perhaps what I should written

i detour my real thoughts
past the tracks, past the factories all apartments now that they are apart from their meaning the skin of this suburb is changing it's mentally unwell I’m not going to dance around my assessment of it the brothels stay they seem to be the one crossover in the process of gentrification the city now all caffeine fuelled neon and gumchewin security a circular shadow like a reverse halo a liverspotted footpath we had almost forgotten what rain was in tears it falls through the smog almost forgets to drop nocturnal cars feel their way through the night the night is asleep. I tiptoe past the drunken businessmen ugly stubbled children in microfibres whisps of cruel drunken laughter. A big fat one with a tie bent into permanent parabolation is made of a highpitch sound and he seems to laugh out his slits of eyes windup soldiers they all stand to attention like hard jelly, in reverse moan like schoolboychoirs smooth carefree bitumen, shiny marble shops, seamless concrete barriers, the highheeled sparkly one leans against all these impeccably clean surfaces - they multiply under greedy diamonds in a paddock of ladders – and spews not food but liquid champagne at $17 a glass it really was fucking awesome I guess i just went a little over board I’m never doing that again fuck though what a nightwooohoooh! but the night is asleep it forgot to drop away. the city trees are lit the bridge is lit the ferriswheel is all lit of course. all in blue all in impeccable unimaginable blue. the lawn is fresh and buoyant and even like an ex-army casual cut I’m feeling fresh and buoyant and even. I feel like the night is pretending to be asleep out of politeness I feel like the trees so impeccably and unimaginably blue cannot sleep.

From within the building, jagged white light stabbed the foggy street air. From without, high above, it looked like an ultraviolet cage of a bug killer, exploding erratically in the dark with the all the joy of pre-programmed killing machine.

On closer inspection the old pub on the corner sagged in the rain as if made from a wet cereal box. It sagged and sopped and stained dark lachrymose Vs over its own rotten yellow façade. The neon bottlo sign out the front flickered as if to turn on, then dissolved back into darkness. This is in turn seemed to wake a nearby street light. It woke confused. Died out.

Susana stood with back wedged against the blacked-out window of the pub listening to the dying sounds of a Thursday night. An obstinate barnacle on a sinking ship, she hollered and spat pieces of tobacco from the side of her mouth, steadied herself on wide sea legs and surveyed the towering streetlight slash mast. Raindrops streaked through the icy orange beam like falling stars onto her upturned cheek. A voice from inside, like gravel in a plastic tube, for the somebody or anybody out there to fuck off. She bared her teeth between puffs on a soggy ciggy. A man with shaved head and a scalp ridged like a pea-brained dinosaur, poked his frozen unblinkable blue eyes out into the street.

Can’t stay there all night luv.

Her face puckered like an arsehole, let go with an involuntary sigh putt-putting out like cartoon machinery.

ffFucken, she slurried out with a generousness of Fs. Fffuckencunt. She threw her cigarette down stepping on the butt like a precocious child doing the twist. See Susana twist.

She begrudgingly carries her own dead body home in a sack. It’s heavy and gruesome. Her shoes slapping down on the glassy puddles seem disconnected from her legs. Some strangers’ feet stagger and totter below. She watches them dance above the dreamy ripples of street facades and glistening cobweb cables.

A tram slid by with insect emotion, humming and clacking with its beaming impartial eyes. The light reflected off the tracks shimmered caught her eye she stopped, with wide sea legs again, to absorb shadows that arced across the shop front windows. and then a smooth voice like a glassy emulsion spun her around on her heels. Made the voice snigger.

silence is not golden

he pulled into the olympic doughnuts stand on his bicycle barely needed more than a nod to get his baggie and that was the way it always was - always was - (always was). she stiffened as some stray crystals gasped in the pool of boiling oil like imploding stars and then without moving his lips or even touching his hat he whispered ...TIBET
btw:
http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/OlympicSilenceIsNotGolden&id=373

speaking of which...

...if there ever was a day worthy of ritualising it would be this one.
could this be every good capitalist's ramadan?

NOVEMBER 29 2 008

http://www.buynothingday.co.uk/

computer love

next time you (one) update your (one's) ipod slash laptop slash mobile, (one might) ponder its path to an e-waste importing nation, like Ghana, whose waters are being slowly poisoned by rotting mounds of computers. but don't (one shouldn't) feel so bad - there's a lot of more work now for kids picking through highly toxic cathode ray tubes and heavy metals and coils of burning plasticated cable from those little glowing machines that make our life so meaningful and fuzzy and well global

Well i guess its a trickle down effect, finally those innumerable unnameable dark masses can get a taste of our western delicacies such as: cancer of the everything. hey before you (one) knows it Ghana might even have their own mcdonalds

god cycnism on the wet page is ugly. ouch
http://www.computertakeback.com/the_problem/export_hazard_waste.cfm http://www.consumersinternational.org/Templates/Internal.asp?NodeID=97620

we are not donuts we are cinnemen

howling mound

may all the unwound hounds found abound in rounded howling by the sounds of chow mounds.

http://www.myspace.com/howlingmound

crojingalong excerpt

the sun that split bloody yolk being yanked up by a hook invisible through impervious granite clouds past the roughly sawn line of the horizon, actually more like a melancholy peach bobbing for air through translucent emotionless alcohol. drinks up i said to no-one wrestling my bag for a book it acquiesced without too much of a struggle i thought peering out into the flat architecture between the pages but all i could see was a sil'o'wet of the net i'd cast and besides the waves had already set my head in motion, back in the city i envisioned a innumerable chiselled keroaucs rocking on hard wooden jazz floors in too ready agreement. every forest every lonely beach, how sad (not to pet this emotion but) i thought, a parody of my metastatic world of rooms. unfolded i felt and thought i heard the feint giggle of thousand doors falling open.

our autumn of ezcema

you arrive through the mist
breath like vodka and fingernails
the moon falls
like a half bitten coin
through the window
past the horizon
of white paint leaden and odourless
quilted to this landscape of unforgivable numbers.

you arrive through the window
with money in your mouth
moon falling like half-bitten fingernails
in my mind you are quilted
to this landscape
of odourless numbers.

your bloodshot cheeks
rise through a mist of geraniums,
my spidery hands descending
into the soup of our bodies.


________________________________________________________

A nest of shadows
bathed hopelessly in hospital green
a thousand loveless spots on peaks and troughs and plateaus.

A pile of blanched elbows and knees
undifferentiated, scattered
seeds across an open field of masturbatory socks.

Armies of incisors gleam
under a mere husk of a night
rooted by nasturtiums and wormwood.

Dense faecal soil
packed inbetween my teeth and cavities
little creatures making tunnels out of collapsed and bloodless veins,
systematically and almost militaristically carrying away my final secrets to an undisclosed who-knows-where, meanwhile

an entire garden under my fingernail
deepens into the soft bed of flesh,

fingers and toes fall off decompose and nourish me
and each night the sun falls into the soil so i'm not alone but

that's not to say that i don't
I swim through this mess of ancestry muck
with a certain degree of childish abandon,,,



_________________________________________________________




in meditation, a dark abyss
in orgasm, hollow shafts of lightning
in lust, thoughtless quotation
in sleep, reflections on water
in conversation, feint postcards
patiently awaiting for a time
that escapes me like poisonous gas.
But its not like we didn’t have fun

drinking vodka by translucent clouds
eating fingernails under the lavender moon
discussing the moons of our childhoods
succumbing to the sly jelly of mute lust.

___________________________________________________


A song of teeth
ribbing the horizon.

___________________________________________________

Directionless rain
clear tartan on the windowscreen.

___________________________________________________

The weight of steam
counting steps to your door.

___________________________________________________


Tendrils of forgetfulness
fossilised in syrup.

___________________________________________________


My feet lifting themselves
through a hueless sea.