Thursday, May 13, 2021

outré

I stole this picture of the Young Marble Giants because I think a blog post looks better with a picture. It was either this, or a picture of Nancy sitting on a cutting board. 

'Instead, the former president has launched a personal “communications platform,” otherwise known as a blog—a throwback to the style of pre-Instagram personal websites that celebrities once used to share their daily goings-on with fans.'

I'm not 100% certain whether this is Vanity Fair actually explaining the concept of 'blog' to its readers or whether it is hedging its bets - or even poking fun at the idea of 'communications platform' - ??? Anyway it sort of drives home to me the reality that blogging is a little outré or should I say it took me from knowing it 'intellectually' (to the extent I know or appreciate anything intellectually - you know what I mean) to knowing it in my heart 'where I live'. Well, that's OK. I am fine with it. 

Do you know what I did the other day, I played not one but two CDs.* In fact, after rescuing another box of crap from under the house at Lorraine I discovered quite a lot of CDs of albums that I have more recently bought on vinyl in a 'wow, I love this album, why don't I have it' moment not realising that I actually did have that album, just, on CD (the albums I'm thinking of were Wire's Pink Flag and the Young Marble Giants album, though boring detail, the YMG album I bought on vinyl has a whole extra LP of everything else they did, notwithstanding I never really understood why the Testcard EP was by YMG given that it didn't have Alison Statton on it, but let's not go there**). CDs are actually pretty good you know. They take up less space, they don't get scratched (yeah, I know, they do skip annoyingly if you don't look after them) and often they have bonus tracks on them that you didn't get on the original record. 

I know you know all this. I'm just recounting it as if I woke from a dream, that's all, or as if I travelled into 1995 from 1985*** and had to ask someone why they listened to music on little shiny discs not bigger black ones. 

The great/weird thing about the CD stash is that it'll be a bit of an archive particularly of Melbourne indie music (or indie music that visited Melbourne) in the 90s. Mia also told me recently that there's at least four other big fat repositories of four other people's junk under the house at Lorraine, lol. Two of those people are overseas apparently permanently, and the material is more in the realm of abandoned snakeskin or vomit the dog will not return to than I-can't-wait-to-get-back-to-my-beloved-possessions, it's probably all mouldy and full of dirt too. I guess she told it to me in the spirit of I had more right to store my stuff under there but now she's the sole owner of that house, that's probably not really true anymore! It's a surprise to discover as well that those plastic bins that are still sold by the stacked pile as storage solutions? The plastic gets really brittle really fast and breaks into long, sharp bits. I threw the lid away on the current box of crap already (I 'recycled' it but the only recycling I can see for that shit is as weapons, the 21st century version of the broken bottle). 

Anyway this is diversion, I've spent four days trying to write a promotion application and I'm at that point where I've nearly reached the word limit and it's time to refine, which is anathema. But it is intriguing of course to have this blog at my fingertips, so I can remind myself of the post from a decade ago where I talked about 'the necessity of applying for promotion... which has essentially got me nowhere'. Some would see this as a reminder that one can be dispirited and yet succeed in spite of oneself, actually for me it just causes more anxiety (apart from anything else - the pandemic has dulled me a bit I think, at least, I hope it's the pandemic). Anyway back to the grind. 

*Scott 3 and Next Stop... Soweto

** Also most of the other stuff is substandard tbh. And I will never listen to it. 

*** Which by the way I did. It took ten years. 

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