Emma Russack Album Launch

Emma Russack launch for debut album "Sounds of Our City". Emma's excellent band includes my old mate and all round musical genius Cameron "Potsie" Potts. Selbst einen Gefallen tun!

Adaptability

Dirty Toilet Blues

Times you get so down-- you've been down for so long that you don't even notice that the toilet is dirty or the floors need a sweep or your laundry is piling up and it's a curiosity when you open the sock drawer and there's only odd socks left and then no socks at all. You look around your feet at the floor where the clothes havent made it to a basket or a bag, let alone the laundry, and you internally sigh, man Ive really let things slide.

Golden Plains 2012

Easy Street Boys.

Chic.

Wild Flag.

Wild Flag.

Bush Camp.

More photos from this set here.

Rakehell

Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap. - Kingsley Amis

Bobbie the Cat & Fond Farewells

By Sam Hood 1872-1953

From the Library of NSW

Jean-Michel Basquiat

"Plush safe he think.. SAMO"

Jean-Michel Basquiat

The People You Love...

Robert Montgomery has been accussed of vandalising situations with his words. Of sheltering in dark doorways and colluding with street urchins. Of disturbing people from the feast.

Robert Montgomery. Artist.

The Long Road Back.

Two hours ago this phrase was rattling around in my head as I reflected on how unfit I was and how far I'd fallen since last I'd made "A run at the title". The title? Yes its just a Shenton Park boys way of saying that one is going to try and achieve something good, something big, something worth living for...(An ideal for living?) here I am again on the floor amongst the dust, the boxes and the daddy long-legs spiders. I'm unfit, overweight and broken-hearted. But I'm on the floor and doing abdominal crunches. I'm on the long road back. Gets me to thinking about the nature of victory and defeat. How it feels as though we are always cycling out of one and into the other. Yet I imagined when I dragged myself out of the gutter years ago that victory would be permanent. That I would be awarded some sort of endowment befitting the achievement. Mayhaps a throne to sit upon and long weekends in wan lamplight telling tales of victories and adventures ---but I see it doesn’t work like that and there is no end in sight and I’ve been knocked out, got up, back down again several times since I first took my run. So that I begin to get it now as I work through a beginners fitness program (so mild that it wouldn’t have raised my heart beat above 80 three years ago) I'm on the long road back and whilst it's disappointing that I'm having to fight the same fights I thought I'd already won, passed and defeated forever, I do take pride --alone in the humidity dank dreamless Melbourne summer, so wet it forgets itself and knows of no season but the one tomorrow and there is no tomorrow and tomorrow: birth, death, fall, stand, hope, loss blow the top off a mountain --lava rebuilds it or something new entirely and what I'm trying for here is that I get it now. There is no final victory but renewed struggle and if anything just a brief pause to look back and reflect then gird up and sally forth for there will surely be another battle with self... just beyond our vision, in the quiet gloom ahead.

Listening to: Jaan Pehechan Ho - Muhammad Rafi

Ashley Dad of the Year

Ashley,

If you have a scrap of decency left in your soul then you need to find a way to help E. Her mental torment and anguish is in no small part a direct consequence of your parenting.

E told me that R will not pay for her to have counseling. The obscenity of this is beyond measure.  You two earn enough money to help your only daughter.

Whatever wrongs you believe that E did you let me remind you of this: She was a child and then a teenager. You were the adult. The duty of care, the burden of moral responsibility is yours. You need to own up to the fact that you failed her as a father and the legacy of that failure is that she is now chronically depressed. She cuts herself, is on drugs to combat suicidal thoughts and most recently she starves herself and then vomits up the food.

I will further go on the record here and add that if you and R don’t find some way to help her and restore her sense of love and belonging in this world then she will die.  Mark these horrible words down for they may haunt you in the end.

Ecotone

So this is my first of hopefully many little letters to you penned in yr absence but with dear thought and embrace as if I could reach through space and time and shake you up. I said 'hopefully' but obviously I'd prefer to not be writing such letters  at all now that it’s too late for the post to ever reach you. Or maybe it does. We don't know. Maybe you’re reading this over my shoulder, but maybe not on this occasion as I'm writing this sitting on the toilet, a place where I do much of my best work.

7.29am and feeling pretty good despite self. It’s an overcast morning, the kind which you loved. There’s a fragrance in the air (Not in here but out there) not quite damp--but moisture in it, post-rain freshness…an optimism. That I'm still alive and you might well be. There has just been some sort of colossal misunderstanding.

(When staring out my Shoreditch window, not knowing what had happened --I knew enough to know that life would never be the same...so I paused for some time to reflect in the ecotone between the past and the future that awaited).

9.46am and I'm back again thinking of the Masters Ice Coffees and Coffee Chill highs. Mornings in Subiaco on Hensman road when West Australian iced coffee (The best in the country BTW) and cricket were all that really mattered to us...maybe a smoke or two and Southern Cross cricket game if the mood prevailed. That giddy laxative feeling in the stomach -- post Iced coffeed metabolic spike. Had one just now and thought of you old friend with my same old percolating stomach, adrenalised need to shit. Not pretty for you like writing about flowers and philosophy, (No flower like that flower what knew itself), but true daily true like showers (Dirty/clean) and dishes (That needed doing).

PS - My apologies but that’s all I wrote before this day ended

Wordless, Formless Love

There's found beauty in the mundanity if only we'd notice it. Look at the eye of the thing. Is there life there? Beyond the stars there's darkness and dust. It's unlikely we'll ever see it for ourselves nay some formless incarnation.

The accidental conjunction of art and the mundane spoke to me today--wordless, nameless love and a flat tyre on my rubbish truck.

The 112 Tram

Sitting in my truck alongside the Miller street tram line. Waiting for a coffee. Thinking of Max as I do so often and grinning on his move toward being the central theme of this blog. Thinking how he took the 112 to work. Staring out the window with tired, glum eyes. Wondering how it might end and how he could escape the cycle of the same routine, the same fatigue, the same view traming through and the gloom of another day gone on the return leg only to be sure the same again lay in store tomorrow and tomorrow. And I think of him that last night I saw him alive. He asked when I'd return. I told him I didn't know. Felt bad and added, "It'll be soon though man" 

It wasn't soon enough and and when I did return a year later it was for his funeral.

The poet saw beneath the skin.

Vergissmeinnicht

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

--Remember the War poet: Keith Douglas.

Sticker Herd

Paper over the lines,
Paper around the edges,
Sticker behind the signs
and hidden above the ledges.

Fragment 2006

I'm sick of buying and selling rubbish,
I'm sick of watching you do it.
You look pretty vacant to me.

Outside the rain is falling in stair rods.

"Outside the rain is falling in stair rods. But in Athill’s room, all is cosiness. There is a bed, a desk on which stands her battered laptop and a comfortable armchair in which Athill sits, a handsome woman, her striking profile framed by a halo of silver hair, elegantly dressed in a brown-linen trouser suit. The two hundred or so books she eventually deemed as 'necessities' are arranged in a case – the collected works of Chekhov, the letters of Lord Byron and the first editions by V S Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Margaret Atwood and Brian Moore"

Excerpt from Mick Brown's Interview with Diana Athill
The Telegraph

Hanging From Flory's Shoes

We will all experiment
With different ways
To an out-of-it State
Mainly an escape
But really a mind rape

And at the mad gate,
We're in and standing
Down
Having our silvery gown
Hoky drug boy clown

We might be feelin'
But
It's shifting though
And everything smacks of an LSD glow

We was all snaky climbin'
Through craters etching
Tunnels through the chambers
Of his heart

Falling Faster than the Stars

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."

Kerouac - On The Road.

"Falling star"
Witold Pruszkowski 1884.

Max Snap Dreaming

When we were kids Maxie spoke frequently of making a snap kick on goal during tennis ball road soccer. And so it came to pass one drousy Perth summers eve that he found himself there in position and conquered the strangeness of the game and the glowering unforgiving stickiness of the tarmac and blew that volleyed kick through the goals, mercurial Flory and snapped its reality goalward so that the heavens gave pause and the birds stopped twittering and we were suspended in time. Yokes for all before us. It was two-on-two dynamics and he and I roared around the empty stadium slapping imaginary hands and being hugged by the invisible crowd that spilled over the hoardings as only invisble crowds don't.

We all slept on the floor that night and I replayed moments from the day in flashes of golden eternity…a brilliant spotlight that cloaked all matter around the spot where Max picked up the ball and looked long into the sky. “Oh my eye…oh my eye”

The last thing I remember before I fell into sleep were the final words of a poem…a poem written for us as kids forever lording over the declining years…
The voice in soothing timbre: “A thing of beauty, a thing at rest, a thing asleep o’er the top of the nest.”

Max mumbled far-off sonnets as he slept content that the long long days numbered ahead.