Everyone has a story about their first crush. I've got several.

As a kid, the first crush I ever confessed to was Leonardo DiCaprio - I suppose it would have been in Titanic, or did Romeo and Juliet come out first? I think he's probably the standard first crush for most girls my age - he's attractive, in a baby-faced, Non Threatening Boys Magazine sort of a way, and of course his pretty blonde face was everywhere when we were about thirteen.

Of course, just because it was the first crush I ever owned up to doesn't mean it was the first crush I ever had, or, for that matter, that I ever had a crush on Leondardo DiCaprio. It was more a question of politics: I had to have an answer to the inevitable 'Oooh, who do you like?' question, and everyone else was head over heels in love with him. Agreeing with everything anyone else said about how hot he was (I believe 'fine' was the term of choice at the time, thanks to an American exchange student) was much easier than thinking of anything original.

As an added bonus, it explained away my preoccupied expression during, you know, that scene in Romeo and Juliet, as I nursed lustful - but vague and confused - fantasies about Claire Danes. I may have given myself away at the end of Titanic, when I cheered as Kate Winslet pried Leo's cold, dead fingers from the raft - but nobody ever asked.

So, what was my real first crush? Johnny Depp - or more to the point, Edward Scissorhands.

How could you not love a face like that?

I do have another image - marginally, oh so marginally closer to the Non Threatening Boys Magazine ideal - here, but the image above is the one I tend to think about when I think about Johnny Depp (which is relatively frequently).

He and I have a long history - he's made my heart go pitter-pat ever since I first saw Edward Scissorhands, when I was about ten or eleven - but our relationship has certainly had its ups and downs. Most of his movies have left me cold. Donnie Brasco - which was the movie that he was most admired for among my high school crowd - was profoundly average (or at least I thought so. But I'm slightly odd). Chocolat was boring (maybe you need a sweet tooth to appreciate it - my mum and her ten thousand fillings certainly enjoyed it). And I thought I could never forgive him for the unmitigated awfulness that was Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Of course, then I saw Pirates of the Caribbean, and fell in love all over again.

I guess there's just something about a man in eyeliner.

I sighed over that movie for months. Johnny even overshadowed Orlando Bloom, who blew me away as Legolas, with the long blonde hair, and the tights, and the ... well, I don't want to get carried away. And in all fairness, I like Legolas much much more than Orlando Bloom, who is just too fey for words when he tries to act manly. Boring - he would have faded into the background of Pirates of the Caribbean even if I weren't fixated on Captain Jack.

Captain Jack preoccupied me for a very long time, but I fell promptly back out of love again when I went with my brother to see Secret Window. Secret Window was quite possibly the worst movie I've ever seen, and I've seen (most of) Flesh Gordon and the Cosmic Cheerleaders. Just as a tip, David Koepp? Surprising Fight Club style twists aren't very surprising when you, just for example, quote pivotal fucking lines from Fight Club at pivotal fucking moments in your uninspired Stephen King film. (But to be fair, you did what you could with what you had. Worst. Novel. Ever.)

Anyhow, I'm back in love. I saw Ed Wood today, as part of a film studies course that I've decided not to do. It was excellent. You must all go out and see it immediately (and I'm going to rent it next week, if anyone's around and wants to watch it with me). It's a Tim Burton flick, and on the basis that I've never met a Tim Burton flick I didn't like, I'm going to assume that neither have any of you. It's full of fantastic B-grade science-fiction in-jokes (love it!), and has the greatest line ever in it: "No glitter! You're the ruler of the galaxy! Show a little taste!" It was also the only film I've ever seen in which Bill Murray has played anyone other than Bill Murray.

Above all else, though - Johnny Depp, in heels and an angora sweater? Hot like whoa.

While I've probably destroyed my reputation - or made it, depending on your own proclivities - with the confessions above, I'm going to attempt to salvage some straight credentials (yeah, I know it's something of a lost cause) by adding that I thought Johnny Depp was smoking hot in Ed Wood even when he was out of drag, which was most of the movie.

It did help that he was wearing eyeliner the whole way through, though.

The uni situation is not sorted out.

I went to my Modernism seminar today, and the lecturer (who also took the mind-blowingly awesome 'Sex, Violence and Transgression' course last semester) said that she would love to supervise my thesis ... were it not for the fact that she's going on leave next semester, which would leave me supervisorless. Which, come to think of it, is no different to my situation now (although I suppose it may be a little more critical later on).

I have in mind that a supervisor would vanquish my elective-unit problem in an instant. I can pick any of the subjects here, with the obvious proviso that they're being run in this semester. Right now it looks like I'll take 'Science, Technology and Social Change' - but it's a little outside my field, being a sociology unit. The other option is probably 'Contemporary Hollywood', which is a film studies unit - but has a screening on Thursday nights, when I'm at work. Both units are probably relevant, but I'm not sure which will be more useful. I bet a supervisor could fix it.

Decisions decisions.

Whee! Bureaucratic travails!

Uni having started yesterday, today I went to see the Honours co-ordinator to remind her that I exist. It turned out that the Faculty had neglected to inform the department that I'd been accepted into Honours, and that was why I hadn't heard anything about a supervisor or classes.

Wheels are now in motion to get me a supervisor (she's decided that, instead of asking someone she thinks would be good, she's going to ask for volunteers - I don't know if this means I'll be waiting awhile for someone?), and I know where my compulsory class is being held tomorrow.

What I need to do now is find an undergraduate course - pretty much anywhere in the faculty - that pertains to my thesis topic, and whose convenor is amenable to having me around making a nuisance of myself.

There are lots of possibilities here, since I've settled on a thesis topic which includes pretty much everything I get excited about - sex, violence and physics, all united by trashy television.

I'd been vaguely intending to take a course called 'Women in Science', which is offered by the History & Philosophy of Science people - or more to the point, was offered by them. Apparently it was last run in 2003 (which is naturally why it's still on their website, which didn't exist until last year).

So then, I thought I'd take 'Science and Society', which is run by the same people, since the course description talks a lot about scientists in the media, and social implications of society. But it's run in first semester, not second.

And now I don't know what to do, so I've decided to do the sensible thing, which is to open it up to the legions of readers I'm confident I have, despite the fact that they all seem to pass unnoticed in the night. Find me an undergraduate unit of study at Sydney, which has some bearing on my thesis topic, and which is being run this semester. Fly, my pretties, fly, fly!

Also, if anyone knows anything about a banned film called Phases of Death, I'd love to hear about it.

I finally caught an episode of Big Brother Uncut the other night, and interesting stuff it was, too.

I have a few observations.

1. I'm still surprised that you can show frontal nudity - particularly male nudity, which isn't legitimised by artistic history in the way that female nudity is - with an M rating. This is not to say that I'm against the showing of frontal nudity; simply that I'm surprised it's allowed.

2. It was way more debaucherous in my head, and I'm disappointed.

More than anything else, though, I'm totally intrigued by the politics of showering in the Big Brother house. From what I saw, the girls tend to shower in their panties, and the boys tend to shower nude; the one exception (again, that I saw - once I found the show to be relatively un-debaucherous, I turned most of my attention to reading Harry Potter twincest slash) was the young blonde chick that my brother tells me is called Kristy. Whoever said 16-year-olds aren't good for anything?

Anyhow, this girl has taken off all her pubic hair (shaved, I think), and as it is now growing back, she has decided she's going to start wearing panties in the shower again. I find this really odd; I know that in Japan, pubic hair is one of the biggest taboos there is, but I'm really struggling to think of why it might be that, here and now, a naked vulva can be exposed while a hairy one can't.

It's bizarre. While it may be that she's covering up the "Ingrowns! INGROWNS!" that she squealed about, and which, in my experience and from everything I've ever read, are an inevitable part of shaving pubic hair, the things are easily dealt with, don't last long and are only visible on close inspection. Really close inspection. They're not going to show up on TV (which is why pictures of shaved women always look smoother than shaved women really are). Why does this warrant wearing panties in the shower? Clearly, though, it is some sort of an aesthetic issue - I'm just buggered if I can figure out what it is.

I mean, if you're going to be naked, just be naked. We've already seen just about everything you have to offer. And we're going to see less of you once you grow your hair back. What's going on?

I touched earlier on the artistic history of the female nude, and in order to explain my perspective on that I'm going to have to explain my (mildly controversial) stance on the high-culture/low-culture divide. It's probably pretty clear that I don't subscribe to the traditional view of that divide, which is that it Exists, in a capital-letter, inarguable, immutable sort of a way, and that High Culture is inherently (and inarguably, and immutably) Better than Low Culture. Nor am I wild about the idea that the divide doesn't exist at all, and that it's all just a construction of some patriachal conspirators somewhere, and that we should all run around singing the praises of, oh, Fran Drescher because she's the crassest thing I can think of right now. (The angry lesbian school of feminism, anyone?)

My view lies somewhere in the middle: while I don't think there's anything inherently Better about Anna Karenina compared to The Da Vinci Code, I do think that each book will be treated in a different way because they are thought of in a different way - in other words, because they are seen to belong to different literary traditions. Anna Karenina, while long, wordy, ostensibly romantic and boring, is a literary classic, whereas The Da Vinci Code, while long, wordy, ostensibly romantic and boring, is a manufactured hit which people either adore or consider themselves above. Is there anything inherently different about them? Nup. Just their histories. This is apparently not a very postmodern view for me to hold, despite the fact Foucault was an historian. All this academic blather* does, though, have a point - and a connection to Big Brother.

Think about these pictures:





Do you find any of these images confronting? Why?

Is it because there's blood and ropes and things in some of them? Is it because some of them are pornographic? Does anyone think all of them are pornographic? Which ones are artistic? Which ones are exploitative? Which ones are Art, and which ones are "just photos"? And what difference do these answers make?

It's history, people. William Collier's smoking-hot picture of Eve with snakes wrapped around her is Art. L'Origine du Monde is Art. Bleeding cunts and bondage pics are internet porn. That gorgeous black-and-white photo of June Palmer exists in some kind of unstable middle-ground - much the same middle ground that Big Brother Uncut occupies. More on this in a sec.

First, take a look at this:


"Is it a masterpiece, or just some guy with his pants down?"

Ah, Simpsons - a quote for any occasion! This, though, is pretty symptomatic of the problems surrounding male nudes; it's hard to fault the artistic credentials of Michelangelo's David, but the statue is consistently targeted by the morality police for being indecent. Hell, the city of Jerusalem turned down a copy because they considered it pornographic. So what's the problem? Apparently, just that it's a naked man. Odd.

So, pussies can be Art or can be dirty; all cocks are dirty. It makes sense, then, that there's a lot of talk about men having their penises out on Big Brother, but no comment at all about bare boobs or naked ladies. Who said history's not fun?

As for this whole hair thing - well, I don't know that I have an answer. I've got photos up there of hairy and hairless pussies, and that's pretty representative, not only of the general population, but of the history of Western Art, too. There's no clear pattern to the depiction of pubic hair; like anything else, it's gone in and out of fashion, and at any given point in history, it's a straightforward matter to find examples of any pubic hairstyle you care to mention.

--
* For those interested in academic blather and my ongoing bureaucratic travails, my letter of acceptance into Honours for next semester (ie. next week) arrived yesterday, giving me slightly less than 24 hours notice of my enrolment session this morning. When I got to uni - and more to the point, to the front of the line at the faculty office - I was informed that my enrolment package hadn't been delivered, and while it "wasn't any reflection on the standard of [my] application" (damn straight, I got my letter of acceptance, together with a transcript of straight HDs in gender studies, right here), they couldn't do my enrolment until tomorrow. I suspect that this is a stuff-up on the part of the ATO (they that I hate so much), since most of the paperwork I need to do appears to involve pre-printed HECS forms. With any luck, it will all be sorted out tomorrow.

The new Harry Potter is hot like whoa. I put down the book and wanted a cigarette. Is there a word for that?

It was a real testament to the power of good editing. My favourite thing about the early Harry Potter books is just how tightly written they are - a characteristic that was notably lacking from HP5. I've always felt that the greatest danger to Harry Potter would be that it would grow too big, by which I mean that publishers would grow reluctant to interfere with what they (rightly) see as a winning formula and allow J.K Rowling free rein in her writing. It's been a trap that a lot of publishers and authors have fallen into - think of the difference between the early works of John Grisham and Stephen King, and the later tripe they were allowed to publish by virtue of being pulp-fiction superstars - and I feel like that was what happened in Order of the Phoenix.

Well, somebody at Bloomsbury grew some balls this time around - and it shows. Seriously excellent book.

I want to go back to bed and start re-reading (ah, what does work in twelve hours matter compared to re-reading?), but am looking forward to picking over the book again and again in the next few days. Three days off next week equals six re-readings ... or something.

Let us now sing the praises of late night newsagents where new tax return forms can be had.

I've just gotten my address wrong on this. Instant dyslexia strikes again.

Damn the ATO.

I stuffed up my tax return four times, but decided to cross things out and initial all my changes. Right up until the last one, which was the same mistake I make every year. I don't know why they put the instructions beneath the boxes to tick. Surely I'm not the only one that goes through these things in order?

Anyhow, having gotten it all done, I crammed it into its envelope, and remembered my most hated thing about tax returns - they're not reply-paid. Surely the ATO can better afford a stamp than me?

I am so loving this.

Particularly the Bret Easton Ellis version.

There are moments when I'd kill to have a camera easily to hand.

Such a moment occurred yesterday, when my mum and I were on our way back to the car, after a day spent doing touristy things around Sydney (we are united in our general disdain for modern art). We'd parked Ethel near my old house, thanks to my old parking permit, which saved us five dollars and one bus ride.

As we were walking down the street where Ethel was parked, mum - small town girl that she is - pointed out a car that had a smashed rear window. The next one down had a smashed front window. So'd the next one, and the next. Most gloveboxes were hanging open; one passenger seat had been slashed. The look on mum's face - and, I imagine, on mine - as we walked towards Ethel was priceless; this slowly burgeoning expression of horror. We could see broken glass in the gutter all the way down to the end of the street, well past where Ethel was parked.

And yet my baby is fine. Completely untouched. Clearly she is protected by supernatural powers beyond human ken. Or something.

Happy days, at any rate.

PS - On Saturday, I think I will be getting a copy of HP6 without giving money to my favourite bookstore, as a result of having given so very much money to my favourite bookstore over the last year. Whee!

The ATO helpfully provides two forms with each Tax Pack, in an uncharacteristic - for a government department - display that they are aware of the mind-boggling complexity of their forms. Every year, I sit down to do my tax, confident that I can just whip through it and everything will be fine. Yet every year, I find myself going back to the newsagent for a second - or last year, third - Tax Pack.

Really speaking, it shouldn't be that difficult. I work a minimum wage job, receive no government assistance, have no income from shares or property - the only complicating factor is my HECS debt, and all that requires me to do is tick a box. I add up two or three numbers, and drop the form in the mail. Easy, right?

Nup. Every year I stuff it up. I tick boxes where I should draw crosses. I transpose numbers everywhere - my tax file number, my income, my tax paid. I add things up wrong, or subtract things at random. I tick the boxes that say 'Tick here if you are a senior citizen'. I put things in the wrong boxes. I sign in the wrong places, or don't sign at all. On one memorable occasion, I misspelt my own name. W-I-S-E. I spell it out for people every day of my life (does it sound complicated?). I don't know why I'm struck with dyslexia at the merest sight of a form.

What I don't understand is why the ATO finds it necessary to put me through all this every year. They have all the records I do. They know how much I've earnt, what my employer's ABN is, how much tax I've paid, how big my HECS debt is. They do the same sums I do, and if my answers don't match theirs, I wonder whose conclusion would be the definitive one?

It's just double-handling, and it strikes me as utterly pointless. How hard would it be for them to add everything up at the end of the year, and send me a cheque? (Or a bill, but preferably a cheque.) It would save them the cost of printing a tax pack (or two, or three) for everyone in the country, the cost of staffing a call centre to deal with the plaintive and confused phone calls, the hassle of dealing with what I imagine are reams of hate mail, and generally a lot of grief. I bet they don't even read the tax returns anyhow - and I say that with some degree of assurance, given that, for the last five years, I've submitted returns that are not only riddled with errors, but which contain complete fabrications in the matter of my health insurance. I suppose it's not beyond the realm of possiblity that my imaginings have hit on the truth, but somehow I supect that's not the case.

I'm not sure what my conclusion is here, beyond the fact that I should like very much to believe that there's a better way. I am prepared for disaster, with a total of four forms in front of me - one of which I've already ruined by ticking the box marked 'Male'. I'd like the ATO to fix their ridiculous system, but failing that, if there's anyone out there who wants to come round and fill out my forms, drink tea and watch Doctor Who, you're more than welcome.

Terry Pratchett has no sense of humour, and he doesn't love books.

Yeah, I know. That just sounds wrong, right? He's a comic author, after all. I used to think that too. Bear with me - all will become clear.

Last year Terry Pratchett came to Sydney. He did a booksigning at Galaxy, and I naturally enough went along. I'd been to a signing of his about a year prior, at the same place, and had found myself at the very end of the line - several hours. This time I got there earlier, and so only had to spend about forty minutes in line - sadly between a Dungeons and Dragons player, and a guy who offered to let me stand under his umbrella, so long as I listened to his ideas for a screenplay of Wyrd Sisters. I politely failed to mention that there's already a screenplay of Wyrd Sisters. The guy behind him was a god-squadder that used to try to talk to me in physics class. It was all slightly painful.

As an impoverished student, I don't have the disposable income (or the bookshelf space) to be the kind of bibliophile I would sincerely like to be (to wit, a completely unrestrained one); however, this hasn't stopped me from building up a fairly respectable collection of 1960s pulp sci-fi compilations, classic literature, heavy gender studies theory, and of course Terry Pratchett novels. The latter are mostly in paperback, and universally well-loved and -read - with the result that they look well-loved and -read. For this signing, I selected the three novels most easily to hand. One was a hardback edition of Night Watch which I had only recently splashed out on. The other two were second-hand paperbacks, the names of which currently elude me. This is relevant.

When I reached the front of the line, I had done the thoughtful thing and opened the books to the title pages, ready to be signed. I handed them to him in a pile, with the hardback on top. He put the bottom two aside, and placed the hardback in front of him.

He looked at the book, made some inane and clearly habitual comment thanking me for coming, and asked me what my name was.

'Beck,' I said. 'B - E - C - K.'

He scrawled on the book. Then he looked over at the other two, and he looked up at me.

'Well,' he said. 'These others aren't in very good condition, are they?'

My jaw literally dropped. Good condition? There's no such thing as a paperback in good condition. Nine times out of ten the spine'll be cracked before you even get it home, just from people looking at it in the store. I was struck dumb.

Then it clicked. Terry Pratchett just made a snide comment to me. Nobody makes snide comments to me. This cannot be stood for, even if I am significantly cowed by being in the presence of my hero.

So I gathered my wits, fixed the man with a steely gaze, and opened my mouth - still not sure what I was going to say to him, but hoping I wasn't about to embarrass myself.

And I said to him, 'I believe some people refer to that condition as well-loved.'

The chick in charge of the bookstore laughed. Some guy browsing the shelves nearby laughed. Mr. Wyrd Sisters behind me laughed.

And Terry Pratchett glared at me, and he said, 'You know I can't personalise all of these.'

Five minutes later, I walked out of the store with glee, clutching one personalised hardback and two grudgingly autographed paperbacks under one arm, and very happily texting everyone I knew about how Terry Pratchett was rude to me, and how I stood up to him.

It was my favourite story for several weeks, but gradually slipped off the radar as I ran out of new people to tell the story to. Until now.

I just went to bed with that personalised hardback, and about six pages in it occurred to me that there was something wrong with the personalisation on the front page. I flipped back.

Terry Pratchett, in his haste to belittle my well-loved paperbacks, had neglected to actually sign the hardback. There's my name - happily not misspelt, as I have come to expect - and a formulaic inscription, and that's it. No initials, no meaningless concluding scrawl, nothing.

It seems that Terry Pratchett doesn't even love books that are in good condition. Fucker.