AC402105 AIR CANADA TO:SYDNEY UA 839 SYD VIA 26SEP1800 AC 761 LAX TO:SYDNEY UA 839 SYD VIA 26SEP1800 AC 761 LAX AIR CANADA CLARK AC*A J/C YYZ 26 SEP 16:04 AGT65367 E303BB TO:SYDNEY UA 839 SYD /0057SEQ AC 761 LAX /0103SEQ PEEL BACK TO HERE ⟹ DÉCOLLER JUSQU'ICI ⟹ BAGGAGE CHECKED SUBJECT TO TARIFFS, INCLUD-ING LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY THEREIN CONTAINED. BAGAGE ENREGISTRÉ EN VERTU DES RÈGLE-MENTS TARIFAIRES Y COMPRIS LEURS RESTRIC-TIONS EN MATIÈRE DE RESPONSABILITÉ. IN CONSIDERATION OF AIR CANADA TRANSPORT-ING THE PROPERTY DESCRIBED BELOW, WHICH IS DEEMED BY APPLICABLE TARIFFS TO BE UNSUIT-ABLE FOR TRANSPORTATION AS CHECKED BAG-GAGE, I HEREBY RELEASE AIR CANADA FROM LIABILITY RESULTING SOLELY FROM SUCH UNSUITABILITY (AS DESIGNATED BELOW BY “X”). ATTENDU QU’AIR CANADA TRANSPORT LES AR-TICLES DÉSIGNÉS CI-APRÈS, LESQUELS SONT, EN VERTE DES RÈGLEMENTS TARIFAIRES APPLICA-BLES, CONSIDÉRÉS COMME IMPROPRES AU TRANSPORT À TITRE DE BAGAGES ENREGISTRÉS, JE DÉCHARGE AIR CANADA PAR LA PRÉSENTE DE TOUTE RESPONSABILITÉ DÉCOULANT EXCLUSIVE-MENT DE LADITE IMPROPRIÉTÉ DE CES ARTICLES (INDIQUÉS CI-DESSOUS PAR UN “X”). PASSENGER’S SIGNATURE SIGNATURE DU PASSAGER AC AGENT AGENT AC DATE DATE ☑ FRAGILE ITEMS- RELEASE APPLIES TO DAMAGE ARTICLES FRAGILES- LA DÉCHARGE DE RES-PONSABILITÉ S’APPLI-QUE AUX DOMMAGES ☑ PERISHABLE ITEMS- RELEASE APPLIES TO DAMAGE AND SPOILAGE RESULTING FROM DELAYS. ARTICLES PÉRISSABLES- LA DÉCHARGE DE RES-PONSABILITÉ S’APPLI-QUE AUX DOMMAGES ET À LA DÉTÉRIORA-TION DUS AUX RETARDS. ☑ UNSUITABLY OR INADEQUATELY PACKED ITEMS RELEASE APPLIES TO DAMAGE AND LOSS. ARTICLES INCORRECTEMENT OU INADÉ-QUATEMENT EMBALLÉS. LA DÉCHARGE DE REPONSABILITÉ S’APPLIQUE AUX DOMMAGES ET AUX PERTES. ☑ DAMAGES (SPECIFY) BAGAGE ENDOMMAGÉ (PRÉCISER) ☑ BROKEN HANDLE POIGNÉE BRISÉE ☑ BROKEN HINGE CHARNIÈRE BRISÉE ☑ SCRATCHED ÉGRATIGNURE ☑ LOCK BROKEN SERRURE BRISÉE ☑ TORN DÉCHIRURE ☑ OTHER (SPECIFY) AUTRE (PRÉCISER) U.S.A. PATENT NO.5, 543 191 – 5, 418, 026 DO NOT STICK NE PAS COLLER STICK HERE COLLER ICI STAR ALLIANCE PRIORIT ACF 511P (04-99) IMPRIMÉ AU CANADA ACF 511P (0 PRINTED IN ORITY STAR ALLIANCE

Consistent readers will recall my copyright battles, which one increasingly wins. Well, we’re winning again: The Globe and Mail has yet again lost in our continuing class-action lawsuit concerning unauthorized reproduction and resale of freelance articles. You will recall that I was the first freelancer known to have received the paper’s contract that attempted to extort my rights.

At some point the Globe will be forced to acknowledge that the facts, two court rulings, and U.S. precedent (in the form of Tasini v. New York Times, a substantially similar case) are all working against them, and throw in the towel. They can take it to the Supremes if they want; the Court may refuse to hear their appeal, but, based on the American experience, even if the appeal is heard, we’ll win.

…you’ve gotten a ride home – from a woman – in her husband’s blokey V8 ute, complete with rollbar and tonneau cover.

This is better than driving up and down the boulevard in a red Camaro.

Day 0: Feeling gravity’s pull

Thursday and Friday of last week, I enjoyed the honour of addressing the Web Essentials ’04 conference in Sydney.

747-400

The flight down had two highlights. First, business class makes even 19 hours in the air tolerable. It is true that it took me the entire 14½-hour leg from L.A. to Sydney to discover all the features of my reclining seat. Of more interest was the pre-takeoff announcement by the head flight attendant (a suspiciously young black guy with fascinating teased dreads) that we could expect thunderstorms of an hour’s duration four and nine hours in.

Now, I’m not a nervous flier. Even after reading The Tombstone Imperative, I know these things are overengineered. I’ve also done the Sydney flight in worst-case-scenario steerage (at the very back of a 747) and know well the effects of turbulence when seated that far back from the fulcrum of the wings. But, for gosh sakes, don’t be telling us about thunderstorms hours before we even hit them! We’re so far in away from them that they could dissipate before we get there, and we could run into other storms that materialized since we took off.

Hence, every goddamned wobble and jolt of the flight and I was like, “This is it!”

I kept thinking of lying down within an airplane, the plane and me mostly orthogonal to the gravity we were fighting against, as I mentally mapped the really quite astounding distance covered in a single flight. I imagined, in essence, levitating, feeling gravity’s pull. (Though that was not the song running through my mind at the time. For some reason, that was “Limelight” by Rush: “Those who wish to be must put aside the alienation, get on with the fascination, the real relation, the underlying the-e-eme.”)

It was amusing to note that the lovely and talented Doug Bowman was on the same flight, but I only talked to him before takeoff and landing. Lad needs his space.

Ingress and egress

Customs was fun, what with a gorgeous black dog of some apparent pure breed jumping up and sniffing each and every one of us. (She was happy and pleasant, but her handler looked like one of those nutbars you see wearing genuine British military sweaters somewhere other than leather bars.) Because I was declaring the various energy bars and Tetra-Brik®s I had on me, I got streamed hither and yon and eventually ended up in the North Arrivals, and there my adventure began.

(Quickie aside, though: I was thinking of a suitably but not stereotypically Canadian gift to bring my hosts, and en route to the store to buy some genuine organic Canadian maple syrup, I suddenly remembered that the Aussies are unyielding in their regulation of foreign foodstuffs entering the country. So I ixnayed the plan. Good thing, too, as the inspectrix later specifically asked me if I had any beef jerky [!], trail mix, or… maple syrup.)

Right. Conference organizer John Allsopp had been tasked to pick up Doug and me. But what did John look like? And where was Doug? And would they recognize me in my signature hat? After a half-hour of fruitlessly piloting my luggage cart past Japanese tour operators and Lebanese limo drivers, I talked to the two senior citizens in livid yellow jerseys who seemed to be shepherding the arrivals. In Canada we’d call them commissionaires. One of them came up with $1.40 in coins that allowed me to call Russ Weakley and have him call John, who, as it turns out, had been waiting with Doug in another arrivals section.

Are we having fun yet?

Oh, but yes, we are: While walking to John’s bronze Mitsubishi rental, I was reassured I had arrived in a civilised country by noting Citroën and even Peugeot nameplates on cars. Then began the odyssey of driving on the wrong side of the road. My antidote was to strap myself into the centre rear and let Doug deal with the weirdness of the left front seat.

Doug Bowman, recommitting mutual digicamatio

We enjoyed a pit stop at John’s attractive Bondi home (with original mosaic tiles and stained glass); we met the third organizer, Maxine Sherrin; and I enjoyed a soy-porridge breakfast and double espresso right handy Bondi Beach. I’m sorry, but visiting the Beaches four times a week as I do, I couldn’t get excited about having coffee a city block away from the shoreline, though Doug was thrilled. In fact, visiting Oz is a dream come true for Doug, who can’t believe his luck that he’s actually here.

801

I was dropped off at the superfabulous official hotel and, exactly according to plan, the very first thing I did was to turn on the television to look at teletext captions. (Can you believe that I even visited the Australian Caption Centre in 1995 and they didn’t show me nothin’?) You have to tune a channel, hit the teletext key (if you can find it), dial channel 801, and hope it all works. Their fonts are dreadful, but boy, do their pop-on captions in newscasts ever work well. (Too bad the switch from pop-ons to real-time scrollup captions always misses one or two sentences. I’ll take verbatim, please.) I think they use colour adequately well and make only a few serious and incontrovertible errors. I’ll be dropping by Auscap this week; more on them shortly.

And by the way, Australian TV is provincial and backward. The local discount stores’ commercials hew so close to the Tex & Edna Boyle/Bad Boy archetype that, with my back turned, I thought on two separate occasions that they’d imported commercials from upstate New York and simply redubbed them in Australian.

What passes for Icebergs in Oz

John, Russ, Maxine, and various spousal equivalents and offspring brought us down to the Bondi Icebergs club for the first of many piss-ups – and the genesis of a running joke about cranberry juice as the only suitable beverage for me (surely Slurm?!) that grew old plenty fast.

Bondi Icebergs is a modern structure stuck on a peninsula at Bondi whose upper-deck balcony overlooks a saltwater swimming pool, the ocean, and, that night, nearly a full moon and a handful of alien stars. You have to believe we are magic. It’s the converse of standing at Cape Spear: You’re manifestly at the edge of the world and can immediately geolocate yourself, feeling gravity’s pull.

Now, that’s more like it.

One retraced his steps to Taylor Square and, in only 1.5 attempts, found the hole-in-wall entrance to the Manacle, oddly reminiscent of the hidden doorway of Garage in Montreal circa mid-’80s. (Imagine a kind of raised and very deep loading-dock staging area inset between storefronts. At the right rear was a hard-to-see concrete staircase that led to Garage. Or if that was too confusing, one just followed the poufters.)

I spotted the vaguely ridiculous leather-pride flag and in I went past the “fearsome” Brando manqué leaning against the rubbish can.

I just need an explanation why the gayest city in the Southern Hemisphere has a single leather bar that’s the size you’d expect in, say, Iowa City or Winnipeg. You can fit the whole thing (including DJ booth and wee dance floor) in the upstairs front room of the Eagle. (Loved the Super Hits of the ’80s programming – how many covers of “Mad World” do we need?)

After noticing that about one out of every five fellas had noticed me (was it the sweater?), it was time to nurse a pint of the hard stuff and chat up whoever was handy. The first two lads had the deceptive appearance of typical inverts, but, once probed, revealed they were DeGrassi fans. One was right chuffed when I explained that I live in the old DeGrassi hood and that my Shoppers Drug Mart is the one where Wheels bought his condoms. Talk about street cred. His mate had visited Toronto (and Woody’s), staying at the Royal York. He had no viable explanation for the size and uniqueness of the Manacle, but did advise me which FBEs were better.

I think we need a new word for the current quasi-skinhead hairstyle trend – a mohawk that’s only the length of a Nº 2 buzzcut. Suedehawk? Anyway, we had “various degrees of suedehawks” at the bar, one of whom looked my way for a short time. Putting down my demon liquor, I headed to the head and was able to make a confirmation. I think I’ve now seen the very best ever nightclub getup: A large-nosed barman in black T-shirt, distressed acid-wash jeans that were little more than a waistband and a few denim strips down to the intact calves, a black jockstrap, and… a yarmulke. I was dazzled by this, totally charmed. And the confirmation I was able to make? The headgear wasn’t a fashion accessory.

Circum… stances prevented me from snapping a digipic, as a stout Welshman and I had gotten to know each other a bit and had other plans.

My opening line was the provocative yet candid “I’m down from Canada. Who or what is interesting to do?” Now, where else should I be trying out that line while I’m here?

I warned friends for weeks that I would finish the Web Essentials ’04 conference (about which further reportage is in preparation) and then spend every other night DOING EVERY BAR ON OXFORD ST. I have a lot to make up for: When I got here in 1995, the bus dropped me off in front of the Rough Guide–“recommended” hotel at 6:00 A.M. Sunday in the cold rain, and all I wanted to do was run back home. (The place was an unheated dump with unheated communal showers and a manager who waited up for me in the mistaken belief I hadn’t paid.) I remember walking along Oxford St. and being pretty much ignored by the locals. Perhaps it was because I was the only one wearing shorts in mid-winter (at a temperature of +11°).

Friday night I had bailed from, since my esteemed colleague Lachlan could only scare up some kind of giddy lesbian duo as party hosts. Saturday, after reading that the night was the occasion of the Sleaze ball (a circuit party with $130 tickets), I got up from one of my endless naps at my host’s Modernist studio and promptly dolled myself up in my genuine British military sweater, which, as with Liz Taylor’s diamond earrings, has always brought me luck. And that is all I brought with me, apart from my CaptionMax cap, surely the only one in Australia.

Here is what I have to show for my Saturday night in the biggest city in a country whose gay Mardi Gras is globally notorious:

Yipper. A Type I Saw Today photo. And that is it.

So what happened?

• Affectles Algerian taxi driver recounts visit to Montreal and quizzes me on immigration for his brother  —  
• Dropped off at Taylor Square on the wrong side of the road directly against a barricade  —  
• Bookstores surprisingly open  —  
• Espy obvious inverts behind me; take a walk in the other direction  —  
• Church at corner ominously underilluminated  —  
• FCUK (everywhere you go is FCUK, even my closet) features election-related vitrine with Aussie flag as cups of bikini (somebody’s fantasy, shurely?!)  —  
• Each bar has bouncers. Decide to chat them up later  —  
• First of a dozen or more ramshackle Holdens rattle by packed to the gunwales with Roosters or Bulldogs supporters for Sunday’s NRL final. Each car flies one or more flags with the surface area of a good-sized bathroom and each car has a full-on drunken yobbo hollering out the window  —  
• Road takes a turn. Head back and (quintessentially) skip the first bouncer and talk to the second set  —  
• “G’day. I’m in from Canada. Where’s interesting to go? Less dancey.” I’m sent down to George St. They’ve never heard of the Manacle. Why wasn’t that a tipoff?  —  
• My, what an alarming distance to trod, and what complicated crosswalks (I witness even the Aussies repeatedly giving up trying to jaywalk)  —  
• Pass a few places with 60-person queues at 11:30 at night, and noticeable wide-open space inside. Artificial scarcity?  —  
• Shark City has a similar queue and way too many bouncers. And why are there so many girls? I begin to have doubts  —  
• Keep wondering if it was really all that wise to wing it and not bring addresses of, say, the Manacle and the FBE. Have I scuppered my own mission because I didn’t jot a few details down?  —  
• Note the monorail only a few feet overhead – surely a Shelbyville kind of idea – and flash back to walking this same hood nine years previous  —  
• Trudge laboriously uphill. Only attractive bouncer (an Ultimate Fighting Championship–style baldy) guards a ground-floor boîte with an all-Chinese clientele  —  
• Stop back at Taylor Square. Somebody snaps a photo of three short guys and two tall transvestites, prompting them to smile not with “Cheese!” but with “Sleaze!”  —  
• Ignore the Woman’s Intuition to ask the bouncer at the Taylor Square Hotel if he knows where the Manacle is  —  
• Rest for a moment on the granite ledge. Yobbos stopped at light make tsk-tsk chickiemama clicks at two obvious inverts, but ignore me, and I’m actually closer  —  
• Pass the Midnight Shift and note that its logo is that of the CBC a few design iterations ago  —  
• Note a barful of girls and their would-be boyfriends going apeshit with joy singing and dancing along to Men at Work’s “Down Under,” a song older than they are. Also spilling out from bars: “Se a vida é” and a mega-remix of “Kiss”  —  
• This is my rowdiest crowd ever. I kept thinking of a place like Rio. However could I handle that?  —  
• Decide things are seriously wrong when I have to walk by a punter passed out on a recycling bin, with his mate lying knackered in the vestibule of a shop. Those aren’t the problems. The problem is the punter’s full square metre of puke on the sidewalk  —  
• Reëngage my Sydney pattern of waiting on the side of the road that’s in the direction I’m going rather than the side that has actual cabs driving by  —  
• Contend with chatty-Cathy Strine-speaking driver who foul-mouthedly recounts road-rage drivers, runners, and a male passenger who had him pick up two girls to later pick up. (The only phone number the girls left with was the cabbie’s.) “A lot of single men on the street tonight. Makes you wonder”  —  
• Arrive back at my host’s kicking myself. Two minutes’ Web consultation shows that I had been, at different times, 40 feet from the Manacle and 300 feet from the FBE  —  
• And all the places the bouncers had sent me to were, in fact, meant for the other species

I don’t know if this really constitutes snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, since I’m gonna do it all over again, properly, tonight. And tomorrow’s a public holiday, so here’s hoping the crowd decimated by Sleaze decides to head out to its usual haunts.

I used to answer the immortal question “You don’t drink, don’t smoke – what do you do?” with “I go to leather bars.” Lemme give that another go here, all right?

WEB ESSENTIALS 04 SYDNEY • 30 SEPTEMBER · 1 OCTOBER 2004 Web standards and accessibility resources H2 1-1-1 0405181435-784448

Date 20040928 Name PLEASE PRINT Joe Clark Full Residential Address PLEASE PRINT Toronto Signature Joe Clark Please Select the Appropriate Category Below MEMBER’S GUEST ☐ I declare that I will remain in the reasonable company of the member at all times & will not remain on club premises any longer than the member Members Signature Member No TEMPORARY MEMBER ☑ I declare that I reside outside a 5km radius of this club OR am a member of another registered club with similar objects to those of this club Club Name Member No BONDI ICEBERGS CLUB Bondi Icebergs Club Co-Op Ltd. 1 Notts Avenue, Bondi NSW 2026 Telephone: 9130 3120 Facsimile: 9130 7174 • I declare that I have attained the age of 18 and if required shall show identification, details of which may be recorded. • All Temporary Members and Member’s guests must adhere to the directions of the management of the club and also the club’s house policy on responsible service of alcohol and gaming. • All visitors and guests must assume the conse-quences of entering into club premises where smoking is permitted. • Only visitors who are members of RECIPROCAL CLUBS may purchase takeaway liquor. • This slip must be carried whilst on Club premises and shown on request or when claiming poker machine payouts. • This slip is valid only for day of issue only. 134216

WELCOME ON UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT    839 J              CLARK 6F                   WE HAVE PREPARED THIS     VEGAN VEGETARIAN CODE  7657 ESPECIALLY FOR YOU. ENJOY YOUR FLIGHT! LAX – SYD 09/26/04 D83 ETD 2305 OB Meeting your needs one meal at a time. We've taken care to make sure your meal tastes good and is nutritious by partnering with The Culinary Institute of America and Heart Smart International™. So sit back and enjoy. UHH4609