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AUSTRALITES

It is not as fully compiled as my previous writings, but here you are. Part travel blog, part a conversation with myself about the big reasons of why I am here...friends, I bring you a travelogue on Australian humour, that chimera taking the form of Adelaide and Melbourne fringes 2019!

CONTENTSZ

DAY 1 DAY 2 DAY 3 DAY 4 DAY 5 DAY 6 DAY 7 DAY 8 DAY 9 DAY 10 DAY 11 DAY 12 DAY 13 DAY 14 DAY 15 DAY 16 DAY 17 DAY 18 DAY 19 DAY 20

TUE FEB 12, 2019 - AUSTRALIAN TAKEOVER

I do not have much to say as I did not even get a stamp on my passport which annoyed me a bit. On my way from London Gatwick through Dubai airport, where the balance between tradition and modernity finds its incarnation in the coexistence between a walled waterfall and the angst-ridden, smelly bathrooms, I sat for a 13 hours flight where not much happened, besides a glass of water being poured on my entire body whilst finally sleeping. I was so happy sleeping I carried through despite the sense I had pissed myself.

I woke up in a Melbourne flat and realized Jordan Petersen is a troll, like my good friend Luke says. Australia is like a quiet, mellowed-down US. It’s as if Australians are saying, “we know this is not worth the fucking effort to make it look it’s better than what it is”. I get it.

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WED FEB 13, 2019 - THERE WILL BE FOOTSTOOLS

There is no clear idea of Australia for me as of now; I am stuck in some muddy waters in McLaren Vale hoping to get a ride into the city which is probably anyway going to be one of those cities in which everybody wishes there was a city. It is ok, how can we get to the level of European civilization in only 300 years? There are only two Arab families in McLaren Vale and I met them both.

They sit and eat and speak, louder than these squirming sound of birds I have never heard in my life before. The homes have low ceilings, as to stop the sky from entering their lives.

So I thought about the Western World and its need to run and produce. I thought that skinny bodies signal a lot of activity. Which in protestant terms means that God has chosen you. Capitalism has spiritual roots, as much as dieting. The sun is setting over some plants I have never seen.

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SAT FEB 16, 2019 - FLAT SUN

In Adelaide there is the highest ratio of murderers pro capita in the world. Only Adelaide has one million inhabitants so what are we really talking about here? Dead hairy possums lay flat on the Southern Highway. When the sun sets over the high sea, I do not think of guns, as I did when one night in the Death Valley I felt the need of a revolver under my pillow.

Adelaide was built to be a city bigger than itself, but it failed. It now has too many shops for its people. It also has the highest number of homeless people, because the city has the best wifi.

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SUN FEB 17, 2019 - TRIGGERING TRESORS

Most names in Adelaide are like names I have heard before in dodgy London areas. There are women with green and purple makeup answering YE YE YE to their equally stylish looking friend as if they were mercantile sailors left for too long ashore; outrage is painted on the painted eyebrows. The shimmering gold of summer through the crests and wrinkles of such seasoned women makes my mind pop and twist and turn. The omicide-afflicted city reveals itself to me as both a place of prisonhood and delight, as the exasperated human control of concrete, on-time trains and borders clashes with ebullient trees, unyielding heat and quivering predators, and the voice says "this train terminates here"; of course it does, but they'll keep on building beyond their limits to prove this is humanity too, I am sure.

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MON FEB 18, 2019 - FOREIGN EXPENSES

The Travelex company has a fan of the current writer that you are reading (is the exercise of being read a performance? Does a writing come into life only when it is read? Does a piece of writing mean anything if never read? Such questions will never bring understanding; only torture), and she is of Indian descent and works there on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays.

She looked at me and asked me if I am a student, I said NO she said NO PROBLEM I will do student price for you, and wiggled her head so I wiggled too and the Japanese cats wiggled their paws and me and you were dancing in a sky where paper currencies were moving like birds and clouds and flamingoes (Flamingo Friday wink wink), but the dream quickly turned into reality as the foreign exchange was debilitatingly costly, despite the wondrous generous student rates. She smiled and smiled and smiled and said, making people laugh is the most important job in the world.

Gotta get more white shirts to make me look like I have more cash. Since the girls here only wear 3cm (metric system!) of foundation, I want to see your face dripping on my shirt when I get home alone! “Come to Adelaide where the grass is brown and the girls are shitty...” And looking at me from across the cut in the glass, counting the money and reciting their value in a high pitched voice, her dark eyes met mine and of course this is all platonic, for all money is platonic ...

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MON FEB 18, 2019 - LONG DAY AND BEARDS

The flees circus is one of the greatest hoaxes in the history of performing. Clowns are tragic. Comedians are cynical, clowns are sad. They must be sad to be funny. They must be in touch with their sadness. But if one is in touch with his sadness, can we still call it as such?

In a circus, I learn from the local performers of Adelaide city of churches and homicides (they never came to any southern mediterranean conurbation?), performers help each other. In stand-up comedy, the only true obstacle to doing comedy are other comedians, because they remind other comedians of each other’s limitations. It was a woman who was the first one to train flees to perform for the circus. Flees became quite good and demanded their own room and board. The rumor that these flees could be trained started spreading, and other performers and circus producers begun to believe that this flees business was a hoax. Some attempts to anyway uproot the flees business were tried: rooms where the flees were thought to be sleeping were set on fire, and people begun to clap at random in hope of killing the flees. Needless to say, the woman was smarter than this. Meanwhile, other men begun training their flees, or so they claimed. Soon the flees business boomed and it was hard to distinguish between the genuine flees and the fake ones (the ones which were not there).

And the debate continues still nowadays, in the raging world of performance art and circuses, where comedy and hardship, success and sadness coexist, in the orange and violet sky of the first city of Australia made by free people.

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FRI FEB 22, 2019 - REST BEFORE FIGHT

This is what I have gathered so far from Australia and its vines. None of these gathered grapes are from here, and yet they are treated as if they were. There are wild vines growing on the side of the street, on the porch, maybe even in the submarine, the only one destroyed by the Japanese, no war, no danger, no predatory mammalians, only vines brought here god knows when, growing freely, attached to the ground of Australia, ripping other plants away, and taking their land, these tasty vines after all, have brought so much company and sugar.

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SUN FEB 24, 2019 - CYCLING OUT OF NOWHERE

This chair has no meaning. A chair would not be a chair as we know it if we were all blind and could fly. You would not need chairs, al least a guard dog you can hold on to while you are floating in the air. But not a chair! And this is why there is no meaning in the world. We do all kind of stuff in life to make sure we keep distracted from the fact that there is no meaning in the world. We make bread and stuff, war and famine. Or not? You could say. Well this chair does not exist in itself. It was made with a purpose. The purpose of being a chair. So this chair has a meaning in itself, because it was build with purpose! It’s 6 in the afternoon and there does not seem to be any answer to my mind. All morphed into a web of misunderstanding, which I am just recently learning to enjoy. I think that the confusion in our heads comes from the fact that at all times we have access to what we need. We do not work out problems any more: we look for the solution that somebody has already found.

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TUE FEB 26, 2019 - SKELETONS IN THE FRIDGE (IT’S HOT)

These thoughts are buried deep inside of me It's not a pun, it's poetry.

I want to urge everybody to understand how private property is important! The whole movement of "let's not pay for shit because we are all one” has created more poverty for poor people and more wealth for the wealthy. Because by private property is the only way in which a democracy can work, in which you can state your rights. If your body stops being private property we are done. If the private stops existing all human rights are gone.Social media has appropriated the left wing language of sharing and psychologically tricked is into thinking we are becoming more connected. Connected to what? Connected to our social addiction to be seen. True connection occurs when we develop a sense of boundary. Not when we forget about our limitations. But the history of recent humanity is about claiming property away from each other. Some claim the frequencies of music have been altered to 440hrz, to create slippage between us and nature. And yet nature creates its own castration. We live in times in which we know we are doing it wrong. Do you think I am being negative? No No No lolz I love Britney Spears she reminds me of jizz on pants.

FRI MAR 1, 2019 - DUTCH AND DUCHESSES

Australia is upside down. Let’s be honest, I am far from knowing where I am. I have spent a good week pretending everything was in order, as if I was in a very dry South of France where people speak English with various degrees of castration in the hottest July ever recorded. But this is way more serious. Every day, I feel like I am waking up in a mirage in which I am the sole participant. Everything looks and feels familiar, but there is nothing I can completely perch on. Of course I can lie and act as though this is some weird extension of a hidden European location one has to have obtained the pass to, like a Coashitella or a Burning Turd kinda situation.

Plus this is the spectacular Adelaide fringe in which the respectable city of Adelaide (Radelaide for the supporters. Why Radelaide? Because it is RAD, excellent, impressive, probably from 1980s RADical; did you imagine a different, traditional, historical explanation for that? Of course not, Captain Cook was not a Captain and this is not Europe!): from Gluttony to The Garden of Unearthly Delights, the city comes to life for a five weeks of artistry that really cannot compare to the overflowing nastiness of the Edinburgh Fringe, where the water is free and soon we’ll know if we’ll need a visa to get artistically blackmailed there too. RADelaide will still be good for a couple of years, then the excitement for this mostly physical performance-based festival will turn into regret, nastiness and the usual exploitation that will jack up prices and really nothing will change, cos it will still be better than most of the other festivals. BUT I DIGRESS, because really Adelaide is a wonderful place where to have mirages. Everything I think is out of order, and the only good thing to do is not to mind it.

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TUE MAR 5, 2019 - I HAVE NOTHING

There is smell of vegemite everywhere one goes, no matter creed, colour or level of education (which to a very non attentive eye can look just low everywhere). The orderliness, cleanliness and sense of quiet in which the city of Radelaide is enveloped makes one forget its complete lack of sarcasm. I am meant to start my show just today, when the air is calmer, softer, nicer, cooler, after the overfeeding of sensations, energy depletion, disintegration, and melting. I have never made much sense, even to myself, and yet these days have found me in complete confusion, despite the fact that confusion is a properly human feeling. I do agree with the sentence “the brain is human, but first of all deriving from fish, reptiles, and possums”. Lovely possums! The national animal of urbanite Australians who cannot wait to turn them into pets to show how cute they are!

Outside there is smell of decay with the ending of summer, a triumph of nationalism made of Coopers beer and recycled water bottles.

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