Idea Fix - The Blog

Suharto is dead. Just in time to make January’s bumper issue of (what we hope will be an ongoing series of special articles, here on Idea Fix) Dictator of the Month.

Yes, former Indonesian strong man Suharto has passed onto that great big Presidential Palace in the sky. Here’s a little profile helped along by The Associated Press with our own wee jokey shenanigans (in brackets and elsewhere):

Suharto was born in 1921 in obscure circumstances (possibly a little bastard). He rose up the ranks of the Indonesian military and survived accusations of corruption that put him in the dog house for a while in the 50’s. Those magic words “Absolute Power” came to him in September 1965 when the army’s six top generals were murdered under mysterious circumstances, and their bodies dumped in an abandoned well in an apparent coup attempt (Wasn’t me!). Our main man in da hood Suharto, next in line for command, quickly asserted authority over the armed forces and promoted himself to four-star general (naturally, as you do).

Suharto then oversaw a nationwide purge of suspected communists (good on him!) and trade unionists, a campaign that stood as the region’s bloodiest event (he went a little too far perhaps?) since World War II until the Khmer Rouge and that naughty Pol Pot established its gruesome regime in Cambodia a decade later (Damn, pipped at the finish). Experts put the number of deaths during the purge in Indonesia at between 500,000 and 1 million (chickenfeed, really… by mad 20th century dictator standards).

During the Cold War, Suharto was considered a reliable friend of Washington (’Our Man’ in Jakarta), which didn’t oppose his violent occupation of Papua in 1969 and the bloody 1974 invasion of East Timor. The latter, a former Portuguese colony, became Asia’s youngest country with a U.N.-sponsored plebiscite in 1999 (lucky Timor hey, kids?)

Even Suharto’s critics agree his hard-line policies kept a lid on Indonesia’s extremists (double good on him!). He locked up hundreds of suspected Islamic militants without trial (boo hoo), some of whom later carried out deadly suicide bombings (yikes!) with the al-Qaida-linked terror network Jemaah Islamiyah (I ate that Saturday night and it made me feel ill) after the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. (spooky)

Meanwhile, the ruling clique that formed around Suharto — nicknamed the “Berkeley mafia” after their American university, the University of California, Berkeley — transformed Indonesia’s economy and attracted billions of dollars in foreign investment (Greed is good)

By the late 1980s, Suharto was describing himself as Indonesia’s “father of development,” taking credit for slowly reducing the number of abjectly poor and modernizing parts of the nation (see, not all bad…)

Finally toppled by mass street protests in 1998 (boo) , Suharto’s departure opened the way for democracy in this predominantly Muslim nation of 235 million people (Double boo, surely, nothing but a boon for world peace there!)

So that brings us up to date with today, the Bali bombings and other mischief. Suharto…we hardly knew ya. Idea Fix salutes you…have a nice time in Hell.

Link to wiki Profile of Suharto:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suharto

Let’s get fucked up!

Picture of me at a Tiki Bar in Hawaii!

Enjoy Australia Day weekend…I know I will.

Looking around at our culture, the McLuhanean media environment of the 21st century, I can’t help but find it monstrous. I am jaded and normally don’t give a fuck “bring it on… the horror, the horror” but sometimes late at night it hits me, it gets me, it terrifies me.

Like the ad below for The Joker and Heath Ledger…”Not all jokes are funny”. It seems to carry an awful prophetic air. I hate mainstream advertising and it gets more insidious and more intrusive as life goes on. We all accept it as part of our mental environment but I fucking hate it. I hate with the kind of passion one hated things two thousand years ago.

I read somewhere they are inventing a technology that will enable advertisers to use our skulls as speakers for ads that only the owner of the skull will hear. Mad voices advertising products exclusively in our skulls…we are isolated in some Ad mans Dantean ring of hell. The story about this technology was presented as the latest hippest marketing tool. It is a monstrosity. When DID OUR HEADS BECOME THE PROPERTY OF THESE VAMPIRES?

But really, don’t our heads already belong to these vampires? …As long as I have lived some fucker has tried to sell me something. George Lucas colonized my childhood unconscious with dreams for his toys. I would dream and long for the latest action figures or space ship. What kind of vile pornographer does such a thing. And I like Star Wars…still do. Could I do otherwise?
I have been sold feces. You know what? I have bought it too. I have become monstrous. Our society is now so deracinated we don’t even know where to begin to look for answers. Sometimes in these billboards and ads the monstrosity is laid bare like augury.

Ads flogging some piece of shit camera present us with mutant one eyed beings plastered all over the city like some warning of some yet implemented eugenic experiment. Ads that threaten us with every form of roadside death, cancer or work place accident from activities we are fully aware are dangerous already. Hollywood for the 77th time giving us endless images of Apocalypse or a destroyed New York… a blueprint for some future terrorist attack planned jointly by Al Qaida, the CIA and Hollywood pitched first to us as an audience marketing exercise. Ads for rappers that turn everything that was once good about rap into a vast mockery of itself through vistas of overt endless expenditure and bling… belying an overcompensation for fear of poverty. Ads that present impossibly achievable physiques with air brushed faces like images of some future race of clones. That’s only the ones I can remember while writing this… the rest are monstrously buried inside.

Who will save us from this mental violence? What cleansing fire shall sweep away this thicket of the waste land? What bird will be able to soar above this omnipresent crepulence? For what is to come… how can anyone expect different?

A friend sent me this link:

https://www.military-genealogy.com/nameShow?war=1&sid=86953

Apparently a Richard Wolstencroft died in WW1. Maybe that’s why I’m fascinated by the 1920’s… making up for what my name sake missed out on. If anyone has any info on this Richard Wolstencroft let me know. I’d love to do a WW1 movie someday, hasn’t been too many good ones since Paths of Glory . The Great War…they didn’t call it that for nothing.

Welcome to Idea Fix!

The rantological thought palace of Richard Wolstencroft Esq., Filmmaker, Film Festival organiser (MUFF), writer, theorist, night club promoter, trouble maker, cultural terrorist and.…many other things. A Renaissance man basically. For those of you familiar with my work with the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF) you will find here more vented spleen along a similar vein as that to be found at: www.muff.com.au

This blog will enable me to mouth off here and to keep future MUFF writings more focussed on film related topics, controversies and criticism.

Why start a blog? I have been inspired in my endeavour’s here by reading friend’s blog sites. As well as other counter culture, film and underground sites that the format of blogging itself may have some worth as a form of diary, record or personal cultural barometer.

Most blogs are boring solipsistic bullshit, yes, we grant. But we shall try to at least make our own solipsistic bullshit not so boring and perhaps… not so solipsistic or bullshit.

I intend to try and keep this blog regularly (…unless it becomes too boring to me) with news, views, observations, reviews, treatises, manifesto’s, jibes, attacks, poems, jokes, harangues, rants and…the odd apology… (no doubt).

It may seem like a foolhardy project to open the mind of Richard Wolstencroft to the blogosphere. But here goes, people…

Let’s see what happens.

Richard Wolstencroft