comprehension and memory

 

This picture was taken by Darren Howe and I stole it.

I have spent a little time lately reworking the X wikipedia page, from pretty shitty to slightly less shitty. All the usual wikipedia rubbish had to be snipped away (these usually involve things like referring to men by their last names and women by their first names; curious interjections of seemingly irrelevant information that skew the overall; half-remembered semi-true facts that have to be reordered and clarified). Best example of the last issue that I can think of is a previous writer falsely claimed that Lobby Loyde had been a member of Rose Tattoo with Ian Rilen. But no, Loyde had been in RT some years after Rilen left. In a sense with (they both belong to the category of 'decent and talented men who have unfortunately been involved with Rose Tattoo') but not actually with. It's surely someone's memory playing tricks on them, and although it doesn't really matter, it also messes with the chronology of X to imply that Rilen was in RT in the early 80s which he wasn't. 

But it's amazing how hard it can be to defeat a memory with facts. I was writing a walking tour of Sydney Road last week and had to battle with my own firmly-held memory that Franco Cozzo had shops only in North Melbourne and Footscray in the early 80s. I know that is true, that his catch phrase was 'Norda Melbourne i Footiscray'. Knowing it in your soul isn't enough - I found newspaper articles from the source which show that Franco Cozzo has had a store in Brunswick since 1979. I just have to accept and reassemble the reality.

I also have to accept that it's really hard for me to, um, accept new facts. Maybe it always was hard. It's also hard for me to read critically. Rewriting that X entry in wikipedia I passed over so many bits and pieces, focusing first on weird turns of phrase (someone had written that Ian Krahe played guitar without a pick and therefore had 'blood on his hands'; I thought, no, we have to put that another way) while ignoring other much more important actual errors. I do suspect that I still have too much respect for the written word, and it takes me some time to reassess things written by others which I've seen not exactly in print but in, you know, typing. That might be an outcome of being old, I don't know. 

* updates, always updates: I finally got around to looking in Ian McFarlane's Encyclopaedia of Australian Rock and Pop and found there were quite a few earlier members, inc. Geoff Holmes who I'd put into the wiki entry as an early member then taken out because I couldn't find evidence anywhere else. So I guess I will have to go back sometime and fix the fixin's.