"You are so lovely it does my fu^%ing head in"
Listening to: Boom Bip - new order
Monday, May 14, 2012
Sunday, May 06, 2012
A Thousand Times Good Night
I have had a beautiful week. So here are some photos snapped with my ever present HTC phone. One day I will take photos with the SLR again.
 |
| Paste-up Cnr Lygon & Glenlyon, Brunswick. |
| Lady Cockfeather |
 |
| Digitalism @ The Forum. |
 | |
| Melsy |
 |
| Lydia Street Mantid. |
 |
| Kitchen Kultcha, Brunswick. |
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Khe Sanh & The DMZ
The next day we bought onto a day long DMZ tour. As is often the case with such tourist packages it was poorly conducted from the beginning. The inclusive breakfast was pretty ordinary but worse still it was served in a terrible room. A long, narrow and dirty space with no windows that seemed to be housed within a former hospital ward…or a prison. Our guides were trying very hard to pretend that it was a restaurant. I tried to order a coffee and they didn’t have any apparently so I tried to order a coke. First I was given a warm can of some local weirdo soda, which I declined. I am all about exploring the wondrous mysteries of Vietnam cuisine, but I draw the line at exploring their bad interpretations of crappy Western confections. I was pretty grumpy about the whole situation. I explained to the guide that I could not understand why we had to eat such poor food in a country where there was superb food everywhere you went. You can get amazing local food whilst standing on a corner huddled under a tent or sidled up in a large crevasse in a wall section of some crumbly building. There wasn’t much she could do but look embarrassed. We both knew she was just doing her job. Somebody much higher up was responsible for this con-job tourist trap.
The main reason I signed on for this tour was so that I could go and see the former US Marine and later Air Cav base, Khe Sanh. It made its way into Vietnam War era consciousness because it was an isolated base like something from a Western movie. A frontier fort surrounded by thick jungle and the NVA. A siege unfolded as intelligence came back that one elite NVA division after another were staging in the surrounding jungle for an attack. LBJ made his chiefs of staff promise that they
would hold Khe Sanh....at any cost. A base manned by a generation of marines so full of pride in their own institutionalised toughness that they didn’t even dig in properly. Most of their bunkers couldn't withstand a mortar round. I had read Michael Herr's 'Dispatches' in the weeks leading up to my visiting Khe Sanh. Herr starts the third chapter of his book with an in-depth section on Khe Sanh so I had the place and its war history richly drawn in my imagination. Visually it was a bit of an anti-climax when we actually got there after two & a half hours of slow climb through the Central Highlands. When the US forces finally abandoned the base they destroyed anything significant that might be used as propaganda by the NVA.
The remains of the old airstrip are fenced off to protect silly tourists like me from getting blown up by mines or unexploded bombs. Our guide told us that on average 50 Vietnamese people a month are killed or injured by mines and other live ordnance. After all these years the Vietnam war is still raging away for many people.
The most remarkable thing about the Khe Sanh site for me was the quiet. I guess one imagines that the ghostly reverb of past battles might still echo on the wind...and in fact I'm now going to go in a different direction to which I intended when I commenced this sentence, because I realise now there was a presence. In the quiet breeze rustling through the underbrush and tall grasses in the centre of the old base: the faint echo of all the fear and fighting...the immeasurable violence mixed with human traits— little displays of emotion by humans bound together in times of extreme adversity. But it's dominated by death...just death and its long painful memory drawn out on the wind like a wire or a bow drawn to breaking...quivering like
that for years afterwards...all that energy and tension — all the lost dreams and lives flashed out of being. It was still there. I understand it now. Sad and lonely...something lost and confused walking mournful circles in the red
soil beneath the clay filled mountainside.
Inside the Khe Sanh museum the walls are covered with childish propaganda displays. Photographs of Marines doing different things: climbing aboard a helicopter "US Marines panic to flee vicious death", digging latrine trenches "US Marines try to desperate escape futility of battle", on patrol in the DMZ "US Marines fall away in blind surrender at their panic stations" and on and on like that. I guess somehow I thought it would be like the Diggers and Johnny Turk. Telling each other that they were brave and noble even when they were doing unspeakable things. I re-read what I just wrote and it is merely a different brand of absurdity.
I found myself getting strangely annoyed at the propaganda. But why should I care if they lie to their people about what actually happened? If they glossed over a few facts here and there to tell the Great Story better. Do Australians do any different? All my Diggers are sun drenched warrior-poets falling over themselves to kill their enemies quickly and with respect. Frank and curious eyes full of love with hands of flaming steel. This mythologising is not a Vietnamese trait or an Australian, US or English trait. It is just a human trait.
The DMZ looks different today but it is all still out there...on an alternative frequency...humming away... madness.
Monday, April 23, 2012
In the Evening of the Flesh
In the evening of the flesh and all that sorrow that is swept alongside it and sad first times of doubt and recognition of life’s passing and traveling with no hands on the wheel and the seed of doubt that grows a tree of your own demise — following around in all our backyards, glinting in the moonlight to be known — but we ignore it as it rises up above the yard above the house, towers above the death of childhood essence and before you know it you are old and see it reflected in the faces of the youth who look upon you as if you had been born this way, as if they were the first to know youngness — that there is only youngness and no real grasp of what lies in wait for them
Fill me with forgiveness because it was only yesterday kind
sir that I too wondered how long I had been young and tree glowering in the
sweltering summer sun breathes its sad refrain all over us a-woosha-a-woosha
and this too shall pass and all must be turned again to swirl and mirl —
Irrevocable spin into tomorrow; we search out tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow—
Thinking that days end and that days don’t end — that there
is only today and all days and no days and that’s no matter because your light
is off in space and I suppose that atomic ray is a type of immortality as it
slow beats its boat out into forever.
Apologies to: Shelton Lea, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Enid Blyton.
Listening to: Crisis - UK 79
Monday, April 16, 2012
Titanic 100 Years.
I was always fascinated by the Titanic. At about five years of age I realised my birthday was on the same date that the Titanic sank. I felt a special connection with the story which was heightened at the time by the fact that nobody knew where the wreck lay. It seemed to a child's imagination that the great ship had simply dissapeared from the world. Things that vanished without a trace held a special place in the pantheon of my childhood imaginings. When I wanted to impress the adults gathered at my Mum and Dad's house I would ask them if they wanted to hear about the Titanic. I would reel off all the facts that I had memorised until my Mum rescued her guests from me. People searched for the wreck but their primitive vessels imploded before they could descend to the ocean floor nearly four kilometers down. I was obsessed with seeing her found so I designed a submarine that would be filled with water, opperated by adventurers in scuba gear and could, to my non-existent grasp of physics, withstand the enormous pressure at that depth.
Yesterday it was 100 years ago that the great ship sank beneath the chilling dark waters of the North Atlantic ocean. It was a special birthday for me anyway. I got lots of love from all over the place, watched an amazing Titanic doco on Discovery channel and had a date with a beautiful woman. But it felt extra special because of the centenary and a reconnection with my childhood passion.
It saddens me that rich white folk who really ought to know better have salvaged a section of the Titanic's hull and then auctioned it off or housed it in a casino in Las Vegas. So much of the Titanic has been raised over the years. I heard it suggested that the salvage (Or should that be theft?) numbers over 7000 pieces. Maybe it's just me but it seems a bit ghastly. I concede that I might need to evaluate my feelings on this in a deeper way. But hey, there you go.
Yesterday it was 100 years ago that the great ship sank beneath the chilling dark waters of the North Atlantic ocean. It was a special birthday for me anyway. I got lots of love from all over the place, watched an amazing Titanic doco on Discovery channel and had a date with a beautiful woman. But it felt extra special because of the centenary and a reconnection with my childhood passion.
It saddens me that rich white folk who really ought to know better have salvaged a section of the Titanic's hull and then auctioned it off or housed it in a casino in Las Vegas. So much of the Titanic has been raised over the years. I heard it suggested that the salvage (Or should that be theft?) numbers over 7000 pieces. Maybe it's just me but it seems a bit ghastly. I concede that I might need to evaluate my feelings on this in a deeper way. But hey, there you go.
PS- There is a nice bit of video here from which the screen cap/still on the left comes.
Sunday, April 08, 2012
Recollections of a Hooked Fish Frying.
— The darkness of life first becomes known to
adolescence like a surrealist depiction of pre-cognitive lightning. And so it
was thus that I was struck on the chest a full blow. My old man on an interventionist
mission of marital redemption — Dressed himself up seven ways from Sunday.
Spruce, paced out steps, penitent steps in his head, his hair combed back and
organised in the mirror of Aunt Eddy’s bathroom — scrubbed forward false
dentures, waxed shoes, buffed soul, flowers bought at noon.
— At the back gate strode through high with built up confidence, ring
of marriage and ring of pride. To face his wife again with flowers and a
fistful of passion owed in arrears....for him it was the dawning of a new day —
Yawning out over plans and planned loves once confused and lost. Now found
again and polished up, carried up the path to the family heart.
Unfortunately Mum’s day had begun earlier.
Under the fragile pink sky draping life in its post stormatic cape, and
though she knew he was coming, she could not trust him in her space yet, and
left urgently; space intact but heart like weary punch drunk circus pugilist. A
heart as big as Phar Laps and ready to relent and give way to peace love and
contemplation. Too far past however the black stump of no return....she wept
fleeing or fled weeping, I can’t remember which....
When I saw him stroll through the back gate my heart burst into flames.
Danced before my eyes like mirror shades of the trance — Caught a glimpse of
the game in a way I couldn’t fully comprehend...but felt it...the
import-gravitas of such — Surge to sway giddy in the horror of my juvenile
naivety, rotor-bladed like so much
talked about roses, in the twilight of a furiously burning millennium close.
Fearful Fuckin’ Reckoning...Titanic shirt front of the soul...
And his pain must have been so
much worse than my own...
I might as well have been blind. Darkness so thick ya couldna see ya
hand before ye face...
Further still I might now spare you the detailed portrait of the colour
of hope seeping through soles of his best feet forward. Draining colour from
his face —
Last ember bright but only a moment hence, blink out....
FADE TO BLACK
bearing straits roaring out to sea,
sinking surely stone,
liquid jungle of bone,
immeasurably depthy greatness of dark great beast,
fantastic fucking dark shark of life ocean jungle.......
...but I didn’t get that far then.
Enough that I was on the drunken steps to the set of someone else’s
urban stage production —
And the act rolled on; Me lying on my bed as the old man poured petrol
round our house. He’d “Fuckin’ show her now!”
I told him I’d burn with our beloved old house, and the situation deflated beyond anger’s vorpal-bladedness — Could not cut a sweet swathe thru the Black Sea and could not set a man free...
Anger is usually the last bastion of a man determined to wrought his
will on the ugly mug of reality — If he’d been a solipsist he could of written
it all off as a bad dream or a dream that’d gone bad. Like an apple forsaken in
its bowl; decompose to earthy brown; fade to black...
Deconstruct it all to black?
And alas-alack he believed most strongly in the preciousness of Her
& the ‘wholeness’ of Us, Family —
Perhaps he had a vision of himself that led him out onto the Great
Australian Night trail lit up by MimMim light; An Australian man on the trail
of his life, with a map of where he meant to travel and a beleaguered sense of
its own divergence into fields of the past. Recognised now, only as points upon
the map….Upon Horizon Treasure Map. Pots, rainbows and the gilt edged frost
bitten lakes at the end of them. Glancing back then forward, a few pauses on
this otherwise frenetic trail. Too hard to read the map whilst keeping the
lodestone on the road. Damned shortcuts and cul-de-sacs that cost the sort of
time that never-a-moment-spent of could ever come again...set forth in new
directions...
His teardrops exploded, rolled down the hill of his cheek and ignited
the old map in his hands. He rubbed his eyes and found that he was still lost,
swaying on the backyard footpath of our old house — Limbo like old ghost haunting itself in its
old house on its old hill overlooking great old vast wretched unknowable ocean
of its future.
He must have thought he’d die
alone on such bluffs — Love crashing out in crescendos with breakers breaking
forever breaking, forever breaking..........
She spared him such fates in the end—
Still, we all must reap what we’ve sown.
In a monumental act of selflessness, she forgave what had too-late-already-past
and focused on the future that limped into itself, never quite the same. She
remained and found freedom in the honour of remembering what she had loved in
him. Fixed Focus on afore said, giddy future, limping into itself for eight
more years till he died —
For mine, the cigarette cancer had killed him off a decade or so
earlier....like a partial absence for the last few years. And maybe in his way,
that I just impressionise for you now, he was still out there on his ‘trail’. Studying
the ashes of his old map and trying to recollect where he’d digressed at, where
he was hooked at, where he was frying.
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
John Cooper Clarke @ The Northcote Social Club
My wonderful and canny friends Robbie & Tone surprised me with this gig. Like a shimmy sham down a time tunnel to a punkier time.
 |
| John Cooper Clarke |
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Emma Russack Album Launch
Friday, March 30, 2012
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
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.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Sunday, March 18, 2012
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
Thursday, March 08, 2012
Monday, March 05, 2012
Sunday, March 04, 2012
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.
Monday, February 27, 2012
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
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
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.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
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
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
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.
Saturday, February 04, 2012
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
