i'm here instead: verbadverb.wordpress.com
forget the tumblr thing - i will use that as a link farm/bookmarks bollocks primarily - if you want to interact with me or read anything else i have to say that isn't just facebook fapping, it'll be at verbadverb.
RSS now! DO IT!
i'm finally over her.
i just wish my best friend were around to see this.
and now, for my next trick: relentless optimism.
just you watch.
I've been doing a bit of painting over the last few weeks, trying to create something to accompany a piece of written work titled 'The Water Library' appearing in the splendid anthology 'First Page', an upcoming release from the publishing wing of Love Is My Velocity. I wanted to make it seem as if water was welling up through the pages of the book in breaks between the text, whilst at the same time the viewer got further and further away so that in the end it appeared that you were looking at an abstract river-delta from a plane or satellite. Of course, I'd completely forgotten just how long it takes and how meticulous you have to be when hand painting, so I only managed to do three works plus the title page. I really enjoyed working with a visual medium though, and am now thinking of making some collages or taking some photographs in the future. Such a therapeutic few weeks; Iron and Wine on the stereo, ultramarine and phthalo green under my nails and in my hair, the feeling of achievement having completed it. It might not look like much, but I'm happy with it.
In this one you can't really see, but the white parts are cut-out using a scalpel.
First Page will be launched on August 2 at The Bakery. I'll post more about the book and its amazing contributors then.
a. Today I am 26 years old; the atomic number of iron, the age at which you can no longer be drafted into the United States armed forces, the number of the letters in the alphabet if you don't count capitals separately. Sometimes when I reflect on this age I feel quite young and green. Other times, when I reflect that it has been a decade since I turned sixteen, I feel quite old. I wish I'd written a S.o.M.L.A when I was sixteen so that I could remember what my dreams and aspirations were then.
b. I am currently living in the basement of my parent's house, having moved from my home near the park about a month ago. The reasons for the move were threefold - the priority reason being financial (so that I can save enough money to go and visit my sister in Holland later in the year), secondarily concerning my studies (the downhill run of my postgrad thesis) and thirdly to re-centre after twelve intense months. Here I live with the geckos and the centipedes underground. Last night I found a beetle the size of my thumb between the sheets. I like all the small life here, the crawling and the clicking things. A legless lizard lives in the shower and a jumping spiders inhabit the drawers. Where ever I work now it seems that the outside world wants to get in to see me. Within the first week of moving here my father broke the big window that looks in on the study upstairs and so I worked for a week amongst the finely shattered glass and the weather. At my old house last winter the air-conditioner just fell out of wall as I was typing, leaving a gapping hole. Sometimes I think I should just take my laptop and sit in the dirt.
It is quiet here. It is not a suburb made for walking. All the verges run down to the road. The phrase 'speed traps', a locution from my primary-school years, comes to mind as I wander around the contorting streets. There are many new houses being built. They start with the basements, deep pits in the ground set with cages of electrical wiring and thin water pipes. The roots of the houses going back into the earth. Later come house-skeletons with coils of insulated cable hanging from the rafters - all the loose vein-work. I miss living with MMM, DL & SB by the park for so many reasons, but I can see the advantages of being sequestered off in this (bricked) basement. I am trying not to be a child here, I am trying to better my relationship with my parents in adulthood. I do not think I am doing a good job in that respect. I often wonder how it would be if we could not live in the same city, if I didn't hear a passing 'how you doing there doll?' once a week. One advantage to having returned home after such a long period living elsewhere is that all the foibles of your family you assumed were solely meant to aggravate you have actually been going on in your absence uninterrupted - so you can accept them as nothing to do with you. My parents are renovating the front of the house at the moment. In the middle of the day I open the garage door and discover workmen sprawled asleep like road crash victims on the concrete.
c. I am currently sitting on the sofa in the front room. It is a ship of a sofa; wide and deep. Outside the clouds are hairy and threatening rain. This morning I ate breakfast at Aubergines in Fremantle and then drove up to the brainsick house in Beard Street, and quickly past it twice. I wanted to take some photos but I'd forgotten my camera. My neck is stiff and seems to creak if I move my head too sharply. Probably this is from laptop over-use. There is old French jazz playing in the distance, which I am enjoying. I am wearing black tights, a dress with orange leaves on it, a thick scarf and the bird earrings that twin a pair L has in Holland. My toenails are painted plum and my hair is newly dyed a chestnut/auburn. I still have all my limbs, all my digits and the ganglion in my left wrist.
more than a year.
proof enough of the same old dilettante approach i've taken to this thing. it's getting old.
which means, it's time for it('s author) to undergo some reinvention.
a lot has happened, naturally - love found and foolishly lost, address changed, and fortunes, too (more in weeks to come on that note...).
but i am certainly going to be back. it might be a while - i need to think carefully about the next step. i'll be milestone older... 'there's always time' is getting harder to blurt out and actually believe. can't fool anyone else if i can't fool myself.
crackbook has made it easier for me to be lazy with the 'rum, which was initially a way of staying in touch. FB does it better; i can't blog anymore without a purpose. the friends i've made through 'blogging' are now: my housemates, reasons to travel interstate, home-fires burning. i don't do it any justice being this sporadic.
so i'll be back when the nascent blobs are more clearly defined.
i know, i know - quitting your blog is soooo 2006...
love
It first happened with Pink Floyd. I attended the Roger Waters concert last year--Dark Side of the Moon played front to back, pot-smoking fathers, and an inflatable pig--and the first song in was "In the Flesh" which I happen to think is brilliant. I was feeling good. But as the night wore on, an awful and powerful conclusion was being crystallised: I don't really like Pink Floyd.
The truth is, I found most of the gig pompous and boring. There were magical exceptions (aforementioned song; "Wish You Were Here"), but by the end of the night I had developed quite the fury towards the lead guitarist, who looked like Tarzan but with a larger ego, and who stood, I thought, as a powerful cautionary tale to misspent masculine energies.
Anyway, something similar happened last night at Air. By the end of the gig I realised this: I didn't like them anywhere near as much as I thought I did. Not even close. With Floyd and Air conventional wisdom and my own breezy self-denial had forged an opinion of these two groups that was nowhere near how I really felt. So here it is. The unvarnished truth:
a) The Waters gig was as tacky and inflated as the giant pig that was sent--dangerously--off into the night sky. Apparently its airless carcass landed in a backyard pool in Stirling. I might add that the pig's skin served as a canvas for fluffy, ineffectual and misspelt pronouncements on the state of habeas corpus in the Western world. With half the stadium stoned out of their fucking minds, I was doubtful of the appropriateness of lectures on constitutional complacency, &
b) Air left me flat. It has something to do with the fact that they don't have a heart. And shame on me for not realising that earlier. Also, their new stuff is embarrassing. There's no other word. You know how Phoenix have put out two great songs, and the rest is execrable garbage? This new Air business sounds like the absolute worst of Phoenix. Shame.
That's about it, folks. And I also didn't purchase any new music. So shame on me.
It's been a fair while since I've posted anything serious on here. There are reasons for that, but it'll be changing soon, promise guv.
However, it just occurred to me that I never actually post much on here about what I have been doing. It's not like I haven't been keeping the usual level of ridiculous busy (and coming down from mad round-world travel), I just forget to mention it in anything other than Facebook status updates (when those aren't about building sentient robots).
So, here's a couple little websites I've launched this week that relate to larger stories.
Firstly, Cottonmouth. If you've been along to any of the Cottonmouth nights so far, hopefully you're as excited as I am about this one -- I'm on an excellent committee that grew from the WA contingent of the National Young Writers Festival last year. We've packed out the ace little bar we've been having it in, and (surprising to someone who has always considered watching spoken word to be something akin to gargling hydrochloric acid) we've had some pretty damn good readers. Some not so good as well, but we're working on that as we figure out exactly what the night is, and what it can be (and as I threaten people with Gantt charts). Anyway, it excites me. Check the website - there's audio and video (including some of me. ergh.). If nothing else, it forced me to write fiction, which was nice.
Secondly, and slightly less seriously, Novel Badges. Not going to say too much about this one, other than the fact that it grew out of some (possibly drunken) conversations three or four years ago, and we've finally done something about it. Buy some badges!
Plus of course there's still all the radio stuff -- my playlists, shows and interviews should all show up automatically in the sidebar over there, and thanks to my tragic geekery, you can restream any of it from the RTR website (in fact, you can restream any show from the last six months or so). I'm currently presenting Out To Lunch on said station every Monday from 12-3 (Perth time). Not quite so politic as previous involvement, but tune-spinning is always a fun break from the harsh realities of life outside the studio.
The next year promises much in the way of experiment with radio and podcast, particularly some fun ideas in relation to Cottonmouth. My little recording studio is slowly taking shape. Stay tuned/subscribed in your favourite reader.
Workwise, there's been the Laneway Festival site, the FTI redevelopment, and a bunch of others. Much madness abounding in future months on that front, including a website for (sort of) my old high school.
So there, that's a few things, and a reassurance that this blog ain't dead. Now leave me alone, I'm trying to write. Thank you for listening.
"...music, like colour, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent--it just is. The chord, the simplest building-block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing...
I don't want to read inane books, but books are built from words, our only instruments of thought; all I ask of music is that it sounds good. Despite its crudity and simplicity, "Twist and Shout" sounds good--in fact, any attempt to sophisticate it would make it sound much worse--and I fundamentally, profoundly disagree with anyone who equates musical complication and intelligence with superiority."
--Nick Hornby, 31 Songs.
"Echos Myron" is playing now, and I have no idea what it's about. It's by Guided by Voices, and, when it's finished, I'll hit "play" again, and be as happily ignorant of the lyrics as before. I'm sure that'll change, but for now the song's more than enough to provide that happy/wistful vacuum of harmless self-absorption.
Obviously, there are grim forms of self-absorption, but this is a period of down-time and shameless ponderousness. And why not? If you're half doing your job on this planet then you have things to worry about; some cruel and unusual, but most simple, banal, and necessary, and it's refreshing to listen to Robert Pollard's 2.5 minute pop-miracles and be reminded of the giddier elements of experience.
We can of course find plenty of those elements elsewhere in life--my cup brimmeth at the moment--but the sheer concentration of mirth in Pollard's best songs (and there's a lot of junk) is gold.
It may be that pop--or the fine consequences of listening to it--is neglected by contemporary criticism or popular wisdom. Edginess and politics and danger often wins out in the perceived importance stakes.* Put the preference down to middle-class guilt, or, as Hornby has it, the result of "peacetime and prosperity and over-education" which may be the same thing. Or disregard the idea completely as just so many words, words, words. Music criticism--or at least my counterfeits of it--must surely rank as one of the more superfluous pursuits of our culture.
But all that said, I still ask myself, what does pop--The Byrds, Big Star, The Posies, REM, Teenage Fanclub--mean?
If we consider our existence important--not important like Churchill's, but important because it is valuable, because it simply is, and is predicated on potential--then pop, for this guy, anyway, is a sweet tonic to that existence. A spur, a hug, a smile, an injection of badly needed vitamins.
Pop can be a small holiday; a feeling differently when whatever recipe of modern responsibilities is temporarily relieved. And it can be a drinking partner; a wildly sympathetic source of confirmation of freshly discovered love, or anything else wonderful.
Christ knows that when you deal with madness in this life, both abstract and the appallingly concrete, pop is a partner you should happily walk down the aisle to. That hackneyed metaphor deserves a song to replace Mendelssohn's "The Wedding March": insert your own.
*Sure, Bragg was political, but his self-deprecation never made him dangerous. What he did for me was to light up certain experiences from a fresh angle. And The Pistols? They were no more a threat to the British Government than the Argentinean forces would be a few years later, and far more a danger to themselves, their lovers, and music journos who dared to be snotty-nosed enough to exist. Fuck them.
Records/songs bought:
Guided by Voices Human Amusements at Hourly Rates (Best of GBV)
The Wannadies Bagsy Me and Be a Girl
Yo la Tengo Painful
The Jesus and Mary Chain "You Trip Me Up"
"And even after all my logic and my theory,
I add a motherfucker so you ignorant niggers hear me."
--The Fugees "Zealots" (1996)
Back in 2000, when George W. Bush was just a presidential candidate, Oprah invited him for a sit-down, and began grilling him on the issues. "What's your favourite sandwich?"
"Peanut butter and jelly."
"On white bread, or whole wheat?"
"White."
There were harder questions, sort of, and one came with a response that may now be hard to reconcile with Bush's long and infamous history of verbal stuff-ups. Oprah began by asking Bush what he had done in his life which required forgiveness.
"When my heart turns dark; when I'm jealous or when I am spiteful."
"But I'm looking for specifics."
"I know you are, but I'm running for president."
Boo-ya.
The two moved to music, and Bush told Oprah that he didn't mind some of the Beatles' earlier records, but he switched off on their later stuff "when they started to get weird". This was 2000, before the weirdness of September 11, and the national exhaustion his administration would inspire. In 2000, things were simpler, and a man who nominated the Everly Brothers' "Wake Up Little Susie" as his favourite song--but stated a general preference for country music--took the White House.
And now, and now. Bush is all but gone, and Oprah's thrown her weight behind Obama, who, on his Myspace, nominates John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Bach (the cello suites) and, gasp!, The Fugees as being his favourite artists. There's some politicking here, no doubt, but I'm thrilled--nearly delirious--at the thought of trying to reconcile The Fugees with a potential US President.
Not only did the Fugees rock--clever, creative, devastatingly articulate--but 1996's The Score is one of my favourite records, and contains what may be my favourite lyric of all time, delivered by Lauryn Hill, and included at the top of this article. The lyric is admittedly rivalled by Paul Simon's "'Kathy, I'm lost,' I said, though I knew she was sleeping" and Naughty by Nature's "Naughty's back, like vertebrae". Still, when Lauryn fronts, you listen.
What the hell is there to take from these men's musical preferences? A whole vague swag-bag of romantic attachment and hopes. That's fine. That's sometimes the stuff of change. And that's certainly the stuff of Obama's momentum. And if nothing else, it's fun to play in the palace of speculation, drawing fun but probably erroneous lines between musical preferences and personal, or presidential failings. But I like to think there's something real there, as there is when one reads that John McCain's favourite book is Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Mitt Romney's is Battleship Earth. For the record, Obama nominates Moby Dick, amongst others, and you can be sure that he won't be adding any "motherfuckers" on the campaign trail. He's got enough people listening.
Records/songs bought:
Mojave 3 Puzzles Like You
Slowdive Souvlaki
Bruce Springsteen We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
Dinosaur Jr. Where You Been