oh what a year

Hasn't it just been a rollercoaster ride? In truth, as I am writing this on 3 October, I don't really know how the ride 'ended', but I just thought I'd put in a note about my significant return to the blogosphere in 2020, after, um, a major slump last year, back to the glory days (if 'glory' means 'frequently posting') of this blog.  As I think I had previously mentioned (maybe I haven't) the problem was I had to go into my-old-gmail-address-mode to get to this blog; the main reason I am back in business with Lorraine Crescent is that Blogger has somehow made it easier to click through, so there's none of the gatekeeperishness of 'god, what's that password again?' although I suppose it's been a year of much more sittin' at home not talking to people and maybe writing here fills in the time. It takes on a life of its own though of course, a blog, and once you've got the first ten years down you are probably not going to give it up fully. 

One thing I have been considering is whether to go back and clean up previous posts particular as regards to dead links, etc. It wouldn't make sense if I just clipped them out, I'd have to put something in there a la the Simpsons picture of the drunk cameraman and a 'stand by', except no point standing by, that film clip of the Bee Gees doing 'Sweet Song of Summer' is never going to be there (it probably is somewhere on youtube though, just not on that link anymore). Well, I'll think about it. I assume that just by dint of the fact that the world is six billion buzzing browsers, those posts still get hits. I just checked a random 2009 post, because for a second I thought each post had a record of how many views it got on the 'reader' side of the blog but it doesn't, I have to go back into the works to see that; but what I did note, also arguably important, is that pictures on this blog in its early years were tiny. If I went back and enlarged them they'd probably be horrendously pixilated, don't know, but maybe there's a sweet spot where at least it doesn't look like an out of focus postage stamp. 

I mean considering most of the time this is just a low-key ramble, and I have about five loyal readers (thank you) and that's it, it's probably if not a waste of time, certainly time spent that I could be doing better things with, but also it keeps the (writing) muscle active, and that's not the worst thing. 

Anyway, greetings from October! Remember us? We were naive, we had no idea what the next three months was going to hold. We were optimistic for the outcome of a US presidential election. Yes, we had something to focus on. 

trophy for trying

I suppose there are two kinds of people in the world, those who can get satisfaction and those who can't get no satisfaction. I must have decided sometime in my teens (?) (or earlier?) that the only way to live was to be suspended somewhere between not being lowest common denominator and striving for what is actually entirely attainable at least 'on paper' or in theory, and yet which dumb shit / self-thwarting would always make impossible. I am sure there are people who get up in the morning deciding they will get something done and then go to bed at night having done it. I can't imagine that life, although of course, every day I imagine doing just that. I presently have to write a complicated, fact-packed, eloquent chapter and I have about two weeks to do it in to show that I can do such a thing in a timely fashion. I also have to write other chapters for another book (and there are other things on my plate). After vowing to write the first mentioned thing day after day and only really scratching the research surface, I achieved 200 words (of a projected 4500) yesterday. The prep - not just the research prep but the clearing a workspace in the spare room prep - was extensive, though you'd barely notice much of a difference, as you aren't me. In the last 12 hours since I stopped working on that paragraph I have come to the appreciation that the central premise of the chapter is unsustainable, or at least, it can only be one element of the whole, not its backbone. (Without wishing to go too much into detail this is because the original premise came to look, in part like a justification for urban segregation on ethnic or class lines, which of course it was not: it was acknowledgment merely that this has been at the core of a lot of human history. However, consciously or otherwise, I had framed the whole work, for purposes beyond or extra to the purposes of historical argument, in terms of 'progress'.) 

But my point is I embrace this kind of wayward, directionless, unrealisable striving, and have done for as long as I can remember having adult thoughts, really. Nothing can be perfect and everything is a melange if not a morass. I realise that I never really thought about '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' but of course it's more of a boast than a gripe (I admit that the 'girl reaction' bit, if that's really what he sings, is potentially a little gripey, but in the main it's saying 'I'm better than all of you shit', and 'you are a vapid pack of satisfaction-getters', than anything else.) To be honest, I'm not usually down with Mick Jagger, but in this case I probably am. 

Tonight between 7-9 I am doing a one-hour fill on RRR, and for the first time possibly ever I have actually gone some way towards planning what music I am going to play. I have produced a chart with timings and I haven't done this yet but I will sequence them and - this is the bit that really freaks me out - I am going to note some things I might make comment on between the songs. Crazy!!! I am crazy. I have always sought spontaneity in my radio shizzle. It was never a great formula but when it worked, which it rarely did, I got a buzz from it, just enjoying my thoughts. A structure might be liberating in one sense, but all it will most likely do is give me more time to fret about potential mistakes. As if they matter. 

Update next day: The fill was OK but just OK. Having a plan and sticking to it was not the revelatory cure-all I thought it could be. 

A propos of something above, I came across this in an old Mayo Thompson interview (from 1996). I don't know whether I am in sync with Mayo or he has just been too much of an influence on me:

I never read a self-help book, and I won't.  I just don't give a damn about that stuff.  I just think that the world is a set of fairly consistent problems, because we have certain functional things which have to be satisfied--gotta eat, gotta sleep, blah blah.  Comes to entertainment, maybe people want things they can go back in and feel at home with, and comfortable, and sort of things like that… I don't mind a bit of insecurity.  I don't mind a little of instability, don't mind a little quicksand.  I like it.  More fire, more danger, please.  Because otherwise I get bored to death…I can't imagine what people like.  I don't even know what I like.  I hate what I like every day.  I think to myself, why in the world do you like these tiny stupid pleasures for?  Life's supposed to be hard and edgy and all those kind of things.  This is a stupid romanticism, of course… It's also a challenge to find out, am I irrelevant?  Has history passed me by?  I don't think so.  I think I'm still ahead of the fucking curve! (laughs)   

body found in litter trap

(written 28/12/2010) Some kids found a decomposed body in the litter trap down at the creek. I heard conversationally when I went down to have a look (creepy? I was interested) that it had no arms or legs and was perforated up the front. The Age online says it is not known whether it's male or female. Being in the litter trap suggests it may have floated downstream but who really knows. As I was leaving the crime scene (4 or 5 police vans, a few onlookers) I think I heard someone shout, 'I have evidence! Evidence!'

* Jan 2010 - the body has been identified as being of Concetta Leone, an elderly woman who went missing in September. The police say there are no suspicious circumstances, which leads me to assume the no arms and legs thing was untrue. As was the 'I have evidence!'

the catch

I can't remember why, over fifteen years ago, I purchased all three Dave McArtney and the Pink Flamingos albums from Alley Tunes at Glenferrie Road Station for probably a dollar each. They were all promo copies, so they had clearly come from The Collection Of Someone In The Record Industry Of The 1970s-80s. I had the dimmest awareness of DMcA but I loved Dragon and Paul Hewson was a member of the PFs for a couple of albums. Alley Tunes was mainly non-rock/pop, more dance oriented, but this was good because it meant they greatly undervalued some of the other junk that got mixed up in their second hand accumulations, and when I say undervalued, I don't mean they weren't aware, I don't know if they were or not, but I'm guessing they didn't care. So thus began a bit of a low-key love affair with the work of Dave McArtney, mainly via the second Pink Flamingoes ('Flamingo's' - ugh) album We Never Close although the first one, a little more transition-y from 70s rock into 80s pop, was a goody too. 

Anyway sometimes I really am this dumb, or picky, or I don't know what you'd call it, but yes I had all three albums. Really, really liked the first one, loved the second one, and never played the third one, above, until yesterday. Now, I have no excuse for this, but somewhere in my mind I feel it had something to do with the notion that it wasn't as good as the others, that it was one of those contractual obligation records; the kindest I can be to myself is that possibly I feared it would be the key to the first two, and would make me realise they actually weren't as good as I thought they were (also it didn't have Paul Hewson on it; he was back with Dragon by that stage). You know where this is leading though, don't you.

Well, look, I've only played side one. But side one, while clearly not a 'band' - it's heavily synthesised, with either basic programmed drums or someone effectively playing drums like a basic drum program, very simple, almost eurodisco in various ways, is really fun. It's definitely of its time but amusingly if it was released now by someone currently young or at very least active (and not, for instance, dead like Dave McArtney) it would be celebrated for its upbeat tunefulness and inventiveness. Hey, maybe side two is absolutely the big one, and turns all the other stuff (including the excellent Hello Sailor - what a band) into dust and turds, so maybe I'll wait another 15 years to check that out. 

McArtney had almost completely nothing to say about this album, by the way. It is mentioned on p. 244 of his memoir Gutter Black as 'my solo album'. The rest of that paragraph is very non-fascinating detail about the licensing details regarding the album, but nothing about its content or creation. The facing page features a big picture of the album cover where it is captioned as 'the third Flamingos album'. I suppose it was the very tail end of McArtney's ambition to get to the big time outside NZ, using Australia as a stepping stone (though unlike Dragon, who he/the PFs might be seen to be following not least by having Hewson as a member, DMcA had already had a bizarre stint in LA with Hello Sailor, so he'd come close to the big time then failed). (That sentence probably doesn't make much sense but on the other hand who in the world will ever read this? No-one! So I think I should spend some time tidying up the spare room and listening to the amazing Joni Mitchell 1967 live record Laura gave me for Christmas). (That said, this is another sad example of my drivelling meander no doubt getting up there as one of the internet's most informative and valid discussions of a particular cultural product some people once slaved over and had great hopes for and put their passion into, and which no-one now cares about at all really, but if anyone does go searching for information on this record, they will find this, so I guess I'll just say: sorry). 

market this morning

Yeah I did go to the market this morning it was pretty empty and closed. It didn't open till 9 am and even then, it opened in a closed kind of way. I bought some spring onions, broccoli (such a staple of my diet that I feel fine about dinner if I have some in the fridge) a cauliflower and some oranges, in case of scurvy. Nothing happened and nothing was interesting about the experience overall. Oh, this wasn't interesting but I bought some rice, really expensive rice that was expensive for no reason. I'll probably go to Woolworths later so there was doubly no reason for me to buy that fucking rice.*

Update 24h later: worse. I went to Cheaper Buy Miles where they were selling the same quantity of rice, grown locally (which is of course a conundrum in environmental terms, but/and I don't know what the origin of the market rice was) for a dollar a bag. Lesson: always go to CBM first, fill in the gaps elsewhere thereafter.  

una dempster

I was quite tickled a few years ago when my father told me a story his mother had told him, about her friend Una Dempster who used to come and visit her (they both lived in Hawthorn) and would sing-song her own name as she came to the door, 'Una Dempster, Una Dempster'. Oddly enough although I liked the story I had a complete mental block on her last name, and when I dropped in on him this afternoon I got him to remind me and this time I wrote it down, deciding that - knowing absolutely nothing about Una Dempster except that she was my grandmother's childhood friend and she sang her own name - I would see if I could discover more. 

Una Ethelwyn Dempster b. 13 April 1906 only daughter of Arthur and Gertrude Dempster of Wellesley Road, Hawthorn. She had a brother, John. She married Harold Niewand in October 1928 and they went to live in Murtoa which is between Horsham and Minyip. Almost exactly a year later they had a daughter, Joan and a son (name unknown) some time later. Una Niewand died on the 24 April 1954 in Rupanyup. 

Strangely my father said today that maybe his mother had made the story up about Una Dempster singing her name but I said really out of the two people, Una Dempster and Mavis Heilman(n), one of them had to have been adequately imaginative to conceive of a girl who sang her own name so why not give the honour to Una. 

My father also said that if Una was still alive she'd be 114, good guess, but actually she died before she turned fifty. 

fuck finland

I have absolutely no idea what any of this means.

In November I guess last year in probably my second last or last night in Stockholm I purchased a diary (in Swedish, just for the exoticness, but it was a nice diary) and spent some me-time mapping out the dates my rent was due and the dates my pay was due, etc etc nothing that interesting just looking to the year ahead and a few things that I knew were coming. Hilariously, I found that diary again today while cleaning up, and of course it has virtually nothing in it because I had virtually no appointments or goals. But then I thought, well look I did enjoy the idea of a Swedish diary but damn it how much would I love the idea of a Finnish diary? And maybe even the diary itself. So I went looking online and once again, well, I don't know how much this happens with other languages, but seriously, the Anglosphere is so Anglocentric that the idea that you'd even want to buy something as utilitarian as a diary in another language is unbelievable to (for instance) eBay. Try looking for a diary in the Finnish language, and you get all kinds of books about the Finnish language for English speakers, and then a whole lot of diaries about Finnish Lapphunds, and then a whole lot of diaries with a particular 'finish' (presumably 30 December LOL). Now, of course you can get to websites for Finnish bookshops ('bookshop'+'Helsinki') but then you run into the problem that they cannot conceive that someone outside a few (non-English-speaking) European countries would be interested in a diary in the Finnish language, and to be honest I can kind of understand why that's an odd idea but you know some people are into licking other people's anuses, I'm into Finnish things. 

There is a kind of Finnish eBay, I forget what it's called but all transactions are conducted in Finnish. I do actually want to buy at least one Finnish-language history book, for a book I'm writing - I mean look, I have a book in Portuguese for the same project and for which I google-translated four or five pages, it wasn't hell. But there is just no understanding that someone might want to partake of these things. I am reminded of a time during the year when I was very desirous of obtaining a 100th anniversary t-shirt for a Helsinki suburb I love as advertised on their facebook page but no chance - the person selling them was very certain I had to show up in person to get one. 

I mean I'll live, but it is kind of weird. Surely there are other affluent Australians who enjoy random arcana. Someone should be brokering this shit. 

i love to wake up with my cats on the bed

So, given that, I am pretty happy most mornings, because it almost always happens (and I can guarantee at least one, Helmi, but almost always, also, Nancy). Last night I slept better than I had in weeks, I can only put it down to having discharged my (probably) final duties at work for the year. Now I just have a huge amount of writing to do, but that's OK, I like writing. As you can probably tell. Regardless of whether I'm any good at it, it's basically all I've got so be kind. 

This morning I think I was woken by some dork mowing the grass in the middle of the roundabout with a piece of equipment surely only really useful on cricket pitches or fields of hay but somehow they got it down Park Drive (airlifted maybe?) and set it to work on a tiny patch more suited to manscaping equipment than the giant tractor they used on it. (Have I mentioned to you how much I despise all the manscaping ads I am currently being exposed to? Ugh, fuck off). 

Nancy, disturbed by noise

Helmi, observing Nancy being disturbed by noise

Helmi trying to avoid reality of that which makes the noise. 

 

Jane Sullivan, 'The Cartoonists' Melbourne Age 20 December 1980 p. 31

 Melbourne Age 19 December 1980 p. 12

 Melbourne Age 19 December 1980 p. 16

trying to think up a name for new comic book

Don't worry, I've got a name I'm happy with. But there was a process of trying to find a really great Finnish word or words that summed up the overall feel of the product. As you do.

flook and moses maggot

So you will remember my interest a few weeks back on the origins of Flook and the difference between Flook in the UK (est. 1949) and Flook for the few years it ran in the U.S. (1951-53 or thereabouts). The US Flook story is not told anywhere else and I think probably Flook just became more and more of a UK political/social satire and less and less of an entertaining adventure for children, which was why it ended up unusable in North America, but we'll see about that when I finish my research.

Anyway, as I think I mentioned probably last week, I forked out big time for a copy of Rufus and Flook v. Moses Maggot, and when it came it had a whole lot of pages missing (not sure how many). The good news is, I got a refund. The other good news is that as far as I can tell (and I'd never sit down and compare anyway) the pages that do exist in this damaged copy of the book absolutely go right up to where the US version picks it up. You see the 'flying buttress' frame, which I made a point of talking about a month ago in the post linked in the previous sentence, at the end of these pages. None of the rest of this version of the story appeared in North America as far as I can tell. Whether it then goes straight into the US version I don't know, obviously. 

The only other thing that I find interesting in this original/alternative reality pertains to the whole reason I got into this Flook business in the first place: Colonel Pewter. Just as Flook was ostensibly a response to the Crockett Johnson strip Barnaby, about a boy with a fairy godfather, Colonel Pewter was apparently a reply to Flook a few years later (by which time, incidentally, Barnaby had been discontinued - it ended in February 1952). These strips were all in different papers, so I'm not suggesting there was any real connection other than inspiration/competition (I'm not even sure Barnaby ran in the UK). Rufus (which was the original title of what soon became Rufus and Flook and was, pretty quickly I'm sure, Flook) was about a boy of that name who lived with his uncle who, like Martin in Colonel Pewter, he calls 'uncle'. Rufus' uncle is not himself of great value except as a launching point and doesn't seem to have any interest in Rufus (or Flook) but only in his own home zoo (e.g. the 'dear animals') despite the fact that, yes, Flook himself is an animal and often referred to as such. Odd contrast too with the North American beginning of the strip where Rufus is thrown out of the house for the day and told to go to the natural history museum rather than collect a 'menagerie' of animals in the bathroom. I wonder if page 4 above ('bye uncle') is the last time Rufus ever saw his uncle? Also, speaking of lasts, re: the next page - is that the last time in western culture a boy was ever depicted running towards someone with a massive box of eggs, neither of them looking where they were going, but which merely led to a conversation about something else entirely not even pertaining even slightly to eggs, the value of looking where you were going, or really anything else that even slightly 'spoke to' the initial scenario? Answer: yes.*

*It was also the first and therefore the only 

as good as it gets

Helmi went under the bedclothes as is her wont earlier this morning but pretty soon she came out again, I assume because she found it too warm even at that early stage. Instead she is sitting next to me on the bed. 

I can tell when she and Nancy are going to fight and when they are going to just bump noses as per above. Note that wherever I lay my hat that's my home. 

december

Today will be 34, tomorrow 31, and it won't be till Wednesday that we actually get a bit of relief from this crap which has come too early this Summer and which is not in any sense my idea of a good time. I am just going to have to hide inside for the next two days and occasionally gripe or grizzle. Nancy loves it.

chuck e's in love

 

Hits are so difficult, I am sure. Hard to get one, hard to live with it ever after. Better to have a few than just one, probably, but one is often enough to keep a career going if you manage it successfully. I told Carmel last week I was really enjoying Rickie Lee Jones and she went off about 'Chuck E.'s in Love' (I could be wrong but I heard her saying it as 'Chunkie's in Love') and  how much she hated that song. Well, sure. I wouldn't say I hated it, but familiarity hurts it, so now it seems like the weakest song on the first RLJ album. There was a kind of 'healthy icy pole' being advertised a lot on the tv in the late 70s, I can't remember what it was called but I can remember the banal, nursery-rhymish jingle that was I'm sure meant to echo the female folk singers of the 60s and 70s in terms of wholesomeness and, in a weird way, earnestness ('this means so much to me I'm prepared to rip through the craft I have painstakingly learned, and phrase myself clumsily'). 'Chuck E's in Love' is just so goofy it's practically coming at you with its hand out to shake and a big slack-jawed grin and stumbling in the gutter. The bit with the twist is when it's revealed - OMG - that Chuck E is in love with the song's narrator, ugh. 

I am so sure, now, though I don't think it ever occurred to me then, that 'Chuck E.'s in Love' is likely to have been some smart person's (obviously RLJ wrote it, but also probably Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman, who produced both of them) attempt to replicate the success of Randy Newman's 'Short People'. It has the same kind of rhythm and feel, and while it's not so 'unreliable narrator', it has a measure of 'storytelling' quirk in its outlook.* 

What I found odd looking at press material on RLJ from 1979 was how often she was referred to as buxom and big-boned. I wouldn't know (and don't care, naturally) but clearly her album covers were very geared towards making you not think this about her. I imagine this probably ultimately worked in her favour. Look at the kind of bullshit people like poor old Linda Rondstadt had to negotiate in the 70s/80s and for that matter the kind of bullshit poor old Billie Eilish has to handle now. I'm not saying that I have anything very rad to say about that situation only that there seems to have been quite a bit of work put into RLJ's image to remove her from standard sexualisation, I don't know whether it was because she wasn't cut from the right cloth for that kind of treatment or for another reason. 

*On 25 March 1979 (p. 101) Bruce Rosen in the Hackensack, New Jersey Record said of the first RLJ album 'She does soft mood pieces - similar to those Randy Newman is known for'. I would say that in 1979 RN was known for 'Short People', rather than soft mood pieces, though of course he did do many of those and they were super effective. Incidentally RN also plays on RLJ's debut album but telling you what or where would entail getting up and removing the album sleeve from the shelf and looking at it for half a minute i.e. expending less time than I have just used writing this excuse to why I won't bother. 

a hotel in canberra

 

Deciding how satisfied you are with a service as intimate as staying in a hotel should necessarily require a lot of self-awareness and soul searching because let's be fair; it's like being a guest in someone's house but you don't meet the person only their staff and although the staff are there to look after you they don't have to like you and in fact to pretend they should is preposterous and in fact if they resented you that would be quite reasonable. 

I always feel uncertain in a hotel because I fall between the cracks of being a middle aged white man and we always, notoriously, get everything on a plate, and of course at the same time I am an extraordinarily empathic cod-socialist who thinks everybody deserves the opportunity to fulfil their destiny particularly creatively even when frustratingly a lot of 'folks' seem resistant to doing so in a way that pleases me. I know, I sound more like a columnist for The Spectator every day. My grandmother would be proud. 

The hotel I am staying at in Canberra has these things wrong with it. First is the bathroom, with its lidless toilet and hand rail, its shower which is basically half the room itself (which is, I think, almost the entirety of what was once a complete bedroom; at least, it looks like each room is two rooms joined together then split a bit into bedroom-bathroom) and a central plughole has a lot of the feels of an aged care home. For all I know that is an OHS/public liability requirement so I won't get too worked up about it. But the general rudeness/apathy of the staff (I don't blame them, but why am I part of this process) and the ugliness of the fixtures etc. This hotel has importance in the history of early Canberra and every time I walk to the lobby (they put me right at one corner of the building, as far as possible from the rest of the hotel, for reasons unclear) (to me anyway) I am confronted by four or five of my least favourite prime ministers. I amused myself a couple of times (I am embarrassed to admit this I suppose) with the idea of writing a letter to the management claiming to feel personally triggered/affronted/singled out by a route that takes me past so many 'loser' PMs (Frank Forde, Earle Page, you know, the ones who served a week and a half) but then I would have to concede that I also get a good view of Menzies, the one who served about as long as the rest put together, and I'd have to mount a case for why he was a different kind of loser (don't even start me on Stanley friggin' Bruce, who I also saw in the rogues' gallery near Menzies). 

People used to say, in the days of the cinema, that cinemas made most of their money from the popcorn and oversize buckets of coke, well, sure, I don't necessarily believe that but I have to assume that hotels make a sizeable amount from the minibar and things like giving you absolutely lowest-grade, smell-of-an-oily-rag wifi and then charging you extra for something you can actually use. 

I have a lot of other complaints, but they are gazumped by how irritating it is to write down the complaints, particularly in the knowledge that I am checking out in two and a half hours or less, so I'm not going to persist. It doesn't do you or me any favours. I think perhaps the truth of the matter is that, counter to expectations, airbnb has spoiled me. I've only had really one or two terrible airbnb experiences, and I suppose on a certain level airbnb goes overboard on trying to make people's experience of staying in someone else's home they actually don't even know, bearable and not gross, and you have heaps more choices about what you eat and do and you're not in some little cell surrounded by angst. Necessarily. 

 Melbourne Age 9 December 1980 p. 12

 Melbourne Age 6 December 1980 p. 22

 Melbourne Age 5 December 1980 p. 12

new musik

The last few weeks I haven't thought about much in the way of new music except I've really been getting into Rickie Lee Jones - again, I suppose, as my father brought the first RLJ album into our home in whatever year that was released - 1978 maybe? I now have the first three RLJ albums and one from last year which are richly enjoyable particularly I think the second one Pirates but they're all great. I think I'm going to get a lot out of these. Oh, and I also bought a bizarre 12" RLJ remix (in fact I think it is literally credited to 'RLJ'), a 10-minute version of a later song which I am not familiar with (because I haven't flipped the record over to play the original yet) which I greatly enjoy. 

But this morning I got an email from bandcamp to tell me there is a new Cool Sounds album coming out in February and I'm excited. I have seen them many times but the last time was probably about 18 months ago and I bought More to Enjoy then and it has been frequently enjoyed around here. I can't be more conversational or interesting about it or them because I am soooo tired. I chaired a two-hour meeting and for some reason decided I had to try and get my 20 000 steps in (even though technically Friday is my day off) and I headed to the shops and I just couldn't make it, well, I did make it but I felt like I had a disease or something, the disease of extreme weariness, and it was a slog to get back and I came back and went to sleep for an hour and 20 minutes and woke up but not really and here we are. Both Helmi and Nancy are sleeping on the bed with me and the baby downstairs is crying relentlessly and it's too sunny still and I cannot wait until tomorrow happens. 

outdoor living room in gatehouse st parkville

 I do find this pretty appealing I have to say. I also have to say I don't recall anyone actually inhabiting it though they must. I wonder if when you do this kind of thing to the front of your house you run the risk of randoms deciding that they can settle in for a while, well you would have to be prepared for that eventuality and ready to deal with it. It wouldn't be the end of the world but it might occasionally be confronting. 

4 Dec update: yesterday afternoon/evening I went past and a very elaborate, seemingly intergenerational birthday party celebration was going on there. It felt like, and hopefully was, the opening scene of a novel

Auburn Road #3 with a tail including walking to Tooronga Station (not pictured) and a psychedelic moment

I'm a little confused but this house might have had a DeGaris connection. It might be the 'Camelot' that the DeGarises (and Violet DeGaris's mother) lived in in the mid-1920s. But I'm confused. A little. 

This is Ercildoune, where at one stage the mayor of Hawthorn lived, I mean not because he was the mayor, he was obviously just a rich and arguably important man. I always liked going past this place and seeing a really big laundry detergent box (I think it was Rinso) in one of the windows. I don't know why I liked it but I did and I remember it too. 

I can't tell if this is a complete rebuild of the original (1959) shop that was a milk bar I remember being called Louie's. It was a classic milk bar inside, classically awful. 

Look obviously I was walking for the sake of walking, but I did have a purpose in my Auburn Road perambulation, which was to see what was left of the Bills St Housing Commission housing. And here is the answer: nothing at all. 

This is my old high school, scene of squalor and misery. 

Here is poor old Gardiners Creek where Toorak Road and the Monash Freeway meet, a bit of a sad place, but always has been in my experience. 

The playground underneath skyrail. 

Some place you can't go

Apparently this happened.

People on the tram - yes - I walked from Flinders St to Victoria Market and then - yes - I got the tram. And that is the end of my journey from a few days ago
 

auburn road the other day #2

So this building used to be the butchers (and the newsagent obviously also once was a butcher too, but that was long before my/our time). I actually had a kind of cringey, visceral response to this building because I remember (a) it used to be a butcher and (b) the butcher's apprentice cut his finger off in one of the meat slicing machines (and had it sewn back on). But I went in anyway because for once I thought - for no reason - I deserve a treat. I didn't deserve a treat. But that was what I thought. 

This quinoa and cauliflower salad was actually really, really good. I was very impressed. The owner (?) called me 'sir' too, quite a lot I'm not entirely sure why. 

One of the houses in Auburn Road had been demolished and it's amazing how big the lots are on the western side of the road. They're paddock-sized. Which I guess is how, fifty years ago, people found it expedient to demolish nice big houses (I assume there were all nice big houses down the road - maybe some were vacant blocks) and build endless units, as per the below:

Of course the 2020 version of same is this kind of dogshit:

I just want to say: I was once in a taxi going home to Scott Street past this house and the taxi driver said he used to live in this house and that it had a huge, hidden basement and he wondered if the owners knew. 

More soon... 

auburn road the other day #1

I grew up (well, lived from the age of 7 to the age of 18) in Scott St Hawthorn, a trivial side street off Auburn Road which is a main-ish street in, you guess it, Hawthorn. Actually Auburn Road almost runs the length of Hawthorn within coo-ee of the longest section of that more or less triangular suburb. A few days ago, I walked most of the length of it - from Auburn Station, south. 

Soon after alighting I went into an op shop that looked promising but wasn't. Although it did offer the tantalising opportunity to purchase works by the two great Gilberts, standing side by side.

The Murphy grain merchants seemed an anomaly in the 70s when I lived around here, and who would have thought it would still be trading in apparently, well, if not grain, then grain-related (animal feed) stuffs. When I was trying to get to the bottom of the story of the land across the road from my mother's house, which had been occupied by a grain merchant, I discovered a lot of grain merchants ended up branching out into fuel - which makes sense on one level - and no sense on most levels. Murphy Brothers apparently chose not to go there. 

I just like this:

This was an op shop very influential in my youth. I bought secondhand copies of both 1984 and Brave New World here, for instance. It is largely unchanged since whenever I used to hang around here, probably the late 1970s, and it's still actually a pretty impressive shop.

This was our chemist,  back in the days when people had chemists

The Riversdale Hotel - a pretty bog standard hotel in my day. Amazing red ('flock'?) wallpaper. Then. 

This was the local branch of the State Savings Bank. Pretty cool building, I wonder what it replaced. 

This was 'our' newsagent. Another remarkable building. 

 I'll get onto what happened next later on. This is a big walk and it's tiring.