my sailing away

I think I already told you my mother and I pulled together my grandmother's memoir and self-published (well, she paid) it as My Sailing Away. Last night I was bundling up copies to send to important repositories like the NLA, British Library etc. I have no idea what they do with these things when they get them but I assume they get hundreds every day, it must be sorely tempting to store them perilously close to the furnace in the basement and oops... 

It's hard impossible for me to be objective, and it just occurred to me that I might have the same affliction, but really I think Marion's writing style might to some degree have been affected by the fact that she made a bit of money on the side in her early middle age by both editing crap for public consumption (she used to rewrite international romance and light fiction for local republishing) and writing short pieces for, I guess, women's magazines (amongst her papers there was a short humorous piece about the perils of getting people ringing the wrong number when you have a common last name like Miller, we had no clue if it was published or not). Late in life she wrote some actual memoir stuff she submitted to The Oldie, they didn't publish it. In her writing she would often adopt a slightly bemused, but generally genial, tone which was one side of her character but only one. In the memoir we published, which was really two memoirs which we synthesised, she was writing for her daughters not the world, so there's a slightly more 'real' Marion in there (IMO). Indeed I suspect that if she thought she was writing for strangers (and they would not read it for twenty years after her death) she would be somehow inhibited, or at least, feel the need to contextualise excessively. In this case she leapt in with the attitude that she was filling in blanks more than that she was writing a life story and I think the text is better for it. But still, I think her writer's training held her back a little in really getting into the scuttlebutt but maybe that's actually a good thing - hard to tell. 

We laughed one time when, a few years after my grandfather died, Marion was in hospital with something and had a near-death experience (?) where she hallucinated all the men in her life came to see her, except my grandfather, who she seemed not even to notice she had omitted from the cohort, except of course she must have. Similarly he is quite an absence from this book, which is mainly about her life before she met him, although there is a little bit we contrived to squeeze in because it concerns the Petrov Affair, and he is mentioned in the diary section from the 1960s. Also, there are some great pictures of the two of them. But when it comes down to it it presents interesting problems, about whether she might really have preferred him to be kept out of her story, although I think she might understand that now she's dead her concerns or preferences no longer really matter and it's enough for us to acknowledge them. She can't deny she married and lived with him for over fifty years, and no-one's insisting they enjoyed it. I remember when I was a child and she was telling me about her coming from the UK on holiday and staying, I asked her why she stayed and she said she was swept off her feet by a dashing young journalist and I confusedly asked who that was. She laughed and said it was my grandfather. It was the 'dashing' bit but more importantly the notion that they once liked each other that surprised me. 

What does bother me is that he didn't write his life story, which was surely just as fascinating as hers, but would of course be even more infected by journalese. However, just yesterday my mother relayed a story from a friend who had read the book who told her that her son interviewed my grandfather for a school project and he refused to answer a question about Petrov. So, you know, there were some things we were never going to get. He did, however, answer a lot of questions on that when he went before a royal commission on it... and the answers weren't that interesting (they read like the answers of a man with a family caught up in something completely accidentally; he had Russian friends, etc). 

I really loved both my grandmothers and they had an unbelievable amount of impact on me. Actually it was my father's mother who I was closer to in the sense that she looked after me a lot when I was very young, so we had that kind of a bond, whereas my mother's mother had a job and things to do. But my absolutely favourite story about Marion which to me says a lot about her, is the story she herself told probably in the late 80s. She was waiting in line in the milk bar and getting agitated about being served, and the woman behind the counter told her a smile cost nothing, to which Marion replied, 'fuck that'. She enjoyed getting a rise out of the milk bar proprietor but what she also liked was (her words, paraphrased) 'this sweet old lady' using the second worst swear word to cut through a mealy-mouthed fool's bullshit. There's enough of that in this book, I think, to make it a credible and rewarding read. 

1964 homicide

I bought the first DVD set of Homicide, episodes from 1964. You can immediately see why the show was such a hit, I guess, at least, I suppose I like it because it's full of shots of Melbourne in 1964, and I gather people in 1964 liked it for that reason too. My DVD player, for whatever reason, won't allow me to change the screen ratio so everything's a bit squashed or stretched or whatever but it is a lot of fun seeing 50+ years old Melbourne and also the same two walls and a door dressed up to look like two or three different rooms each episode. 

Often you get the sense that they are just filming the streets to add something visceral to the whole thing and I guess extending a bit of screen time. But they also do great long 'silent' action sequences outdoors - they're really good - car chases (on empty streets) and so on.

How about this scene. I love this fence. What on earth is it. 

This is an example of a house that ... hmm, I was going to say is real but now I come to think of it I think I've been tricked with the incredibly elaborate pictures. 

I love this woman's anguished response. Whoever played this character she did really well delivering about as much dialogue as everyone else in the show combined in the space of about two minutes. 

I have watched five episodes now and it's always about a blonde woman being murdered. I suppose Homicide invented that idea. 

Closing sequence from the backseat driving down the first increment of what is now known as the Monash Freeway, is excellent too. Interstate cast (I wonder if there were any) chose, we are told, to stay at the California Motel, which was the modern building put opposite Xavier in Barkers Road, on the site of the old Kew railway line. I took pictures there one time when it was just about to be pulled down, I wonder where they are. 

baltimore sun 10 march 1968

 

beatles get back #1

Have to get into the day so won't spend forever writing about this but I have to say that if anything the first episode of this Peter Jackson spectacular seems pretty much to accurately reflect everything everyone has ever said about the actual experience. It additionally reminded me of how boring it can be rehearsing and/or writing music, although when I've been involved in that in a group scenario I certainly never felt the weight of the entire world's expectations on me as well.*

George's constant rambling which the others can barely be polite about is true to the band experience as well. There's always someone doing a self-interested commentary on proceedings, not just at band things, I mean it's human nature. The guy playing George is great, I hope to see him in more things.

As Alexis Petridis said in the Guardian today, after all that stuff people have said about Yoko over the years, you just have to admire her fucking patience during that week. And seriously considering she's a better artist than 9/10 of the tossers in that room I am amazed she didn't just walk out or at least just go and do her thing. For crying out loud. 

That said, viewing this schemozzle 50+ years later, we have the luxury (if you can call it that) of hearing them play 'Don't Let Me Down', a rubbish song in and of itself, a hundred times over, badly, and thinking 'god it's so obvious, why can't you get it right?' but I suppose it's that 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration thing. I certainly feel like I've been given insight into a process, a process in this instance of polishing a really worked-over turd (btw the story in the Get Back book is that George was constipated throughout, not sure the talking cure was ever going to work though).  

*TBF much more boring watching it than doing it. 

irony that possession previously considered almost entirely useless is now discovered to be useless

I probably told you some years ago when I bought this amateur printing set from Helping Hands in Airport West. It is absolutely the sort of thing I would naturally purchase as it is (1) impossibly arcane (2) impossibly archaic (3) smells bad (4) comes in an unrelated but quite delightful box (5) has the feel of something that, at some time, might have been in some way useful if only to a specially-contrived project formulated entirely to utilise it. So, this is the box:

But its contents is not a nice thick stack of heavy duty tubes. It is the elements of a printing set, or actually, a few printing sets combined, along with at least one date stamp. This is the biggest glom of printing letters, they are made of rubber:

There are also some metal ones (not pictured) (actually now I think of it probably lead?) and also some much smaller rubber ones, in fact at least some of these are I think cut from a date stamp:

Yes, they are as blurry as this photograph in real life.

Anyway, last week or probably the week before I got copies of my grandmother's memoir which my mother and I worked on way too long and which we finally forked out to print (so much cheaper than I thought it would be, by the way - if you ever want to print a short run of a book, christ, so cheap) and of course as with all of these things we forgot one important element i.e. we forgot to put our address on it. 

This doesn't matter massively in the scheme of things since the book's not for sale, but I have a feeling that it is technically illegal, so, I wanted to put an address on the copies we sent to institutions (eg the libraries and historical societies in the towns she grew up in the UK, and so on). At last! A job for my crazy little printing kit(s). 

I'd never used them before, so this had never really occurred to me previously, but I was very surprised to discover that in fact that although there were masses and masses of letters here, there was a substantial deficit in numbers (I needed to put a PO Box number and a postcode). I have a 7 (useless), I could use an O for a 0 (not exactly very professional, but bearable) but otherwise no numbers at all! (And why a 7?!). Also, no capital B and no lower-case fs (as far as I could tell anyway). 

So, now you understand why I titled this post the way I did. Hope you're well. 

the new breed of comic readers of 1967

Also while cleaning up I found two or three copies of Wham! from, yeah, 1967. I had absolutely no memory of owning these and I have entirely no idea where they came from. I was too young to buy them in 1967 - I must have bought them this century somewhere, but they don't have a big fat 21st century pricetag on them. It's a mystery. Maybe they were a present - ? 

There's a lot of interest here but I am too busy right now to do any kind of close read (sorry fans). I will just say that about half of the comic seems to be drawn by Leo Baxendale, though of that half I imagine some of it was inked by someone else so most of it is Baxendalesque (and why not - he was surely the most popular British comic artist of the 60s). The Tiddlers are (duh) obviously the Bash Street Kids with the unusual extra element of a reader being a special guest star:

How excellent is that. I guess Timothy Maggs of Monmouthshire is in his late 60s now assuming he is still with us and probably doesn't think every day about how he was once on the cover of Wham! 

I'll revisit Wham! again sometime soon, or update this post, whatever. Oh, one weird thing that I just want to mention - the cover of Wham! is the only full colour part of the comic, and even the back cover is monochrome (blue and white). How weird is that. Surely it wouldn't cost them anything more to at least make the back cover colour?! 

sentimental jamboree #2

A few more interesting bits and pieces:

I don't recall at all what I did this for, though I am pretty certain there was never any music of any sort to go with it. There were quite a few stories about Winky as singer in the band Long Pig. I think there was also a boofy boy bass player in those stories, or maybe a male drummer to replace Melissa. I'm a researcher on my own long-lost output lol. 

I do not know what I was driving at here but I note that Winky in the first frame is taking the same attitude as I take to beer. It hasn't happened yet. I have no recollection of whether 'shit-lipped' was a term I heard or whether I just made it up. It's in the Urban Dictionary and ostensibly either means someone who 'talks shit', someone who likes shit around their mouth, or a practical joke on someone who's passed out. In every way, classy. 

In a manner of speaking, the Winky world was one of eternal possibility, and I think I did conceive of one strip where he was much older, had children and stuff, how much of it I got into I don't remember. But Fastidious Frog was a much more enjoyable character to work with. This is a page that I drew and then rejected a redrew later, I think, because the last frame was rubbish (the wheel for instance). I don't seem to have any other FF things to hand. But, you know, if Winky wrote himself, Fastidious Frog was beyond that. I could sit around extrapolating FF stories all day. One good thing about him was he talked all the time so you didn't have to spend time trying to figure out drawing stuff, you could just put his head in the corner and fill the frame with his speech/thoughts. This is not an example of that but just take my word for it. 

sentimental jamboree

More stuff from under the house at Lorraine and more storage quandaries. Actually the storage quandaries come not from this tranche of drawing, which I can almost live with close to thirty years later (Clearly what I needed was just enough time to be a slightly more mature commentator on the very slightly younger people I was encountering as a mature age student at the University of Sydney). The real problems are with material older than this, when I just had no capacity to end anything. I would just break the fourth wall to finish the page. By this time I could at least come up with a kind of punchline, even if it was a bit non-secaturish. Winky Pinstripe never broke the fourth wall. This is half a random Winky comic strip that I suspect was never published anywhere, though who knows. The frame where Winky pushes Mal to the ground is pretty well-drawn for me. 

In the early-to-mid 90s I did a few Winky Pinstripe comic books (the best one was, I think, the fourth one which was very long and basically made for my grandmother Mavis, so it had no casual or coarse sexy stuff in it, not that she would have said anything if it did, indeed, she probably didn't even read the fourth one, who knows). Clearly in the story below I used some version of Ben-Day film, very inexpertly, to give the drawings a little bit of texture. This has now yellowed. I also cut and pasted bits out of magazines to suggest ambient background conversation snippets in the party scenes and it's so unclear that's what this was, that it took me a while today to realise it wasn't just random decoration. Obviously there was another version of this page, photocopied, which became the 'master', where I fixed whatever mistake I made in 'addressed' (frame 2 - looks like I spelt it with one D) and decided to change the music playing at the party in the last frame to 'Punky's dilemma' (as per margin note: 'If I were a 1st lieutenant').  

If you haven't seen any Winky Pinstripe comics before basically the idea is that he is a hipster of sorts a bit like Rik from The Young Ones I suppose though less consciously trying to break away from privileged roots. It was such an easy character to work with it was ridiculous, wrote itself. As I said above I encountered people like that all the time at university which was a slight eye-opener but of course also I was parodying myself, and not even myself at a younger age necessarily, though more myself at a younger age than my late twenties self. 

So, below, welcome to a conception of the internet, 26 years ago. The character Judy had a fanzine called Arsewipe thereby contriving the opportunity to write the line most authors dream of, 'Dear Judy I love your Arsewipe'. The thing that pleases me most about the Winky stories is that absolutely no-one has any redeemable qualities - Judy here for instance is absolutely the female Winky - and even  his friend Mal who appears superficially to be some kind of voice of reason is only a voice of reason insofar as he knows a little more stuff than Winky does. I feel a twinge about evoking 'Slim from Kill Rock Stars' (i.e. Matthew 'Slim' Moon who started and ran the record label) only because I have never met him and had nothing against him at all. That said a lot of the time I had an extra depth of deceptive/self-deceptive behaviour running with Winky - in this case either, 'he only thinks he was talking to Slim Moon', or, 'he thinks Judy would be impressed if he said he was talking to Slim Moon'. I also like how the next day he stumbles on her name, because he is only ever focused in the moment, and even then only barely. 

This (below) is in amongst the same stuff, so it's probably from roughly the same time, but it's a good example of not being able to finish anything. (I don't know what the last frame is/was, whether it was the beginning of an idea or what):

This below is also from the same bunch of drawings. I don't know what I intended for this but I am going to guess it's unfinished. 

This is in the Winky vein and pretty much a cheap shot, I think it's from 1995 and a time when it felt dangerous to be casually withering about Andy Warhol and Lou Reed though of course these characters are clearly not them. Creatively strange (inept?) use of Ben-Day in the fifth panel. When I see things like 'Arté Farté' (last panel) I just groan inwardly but you know, it's long ago and far away isn't it. 

I almost feel like republishing some of this material properly although to what end? Maybe I'll set up a website for it. It would seem less self-aggrandising if someone else did it but when other people put things I did online people assume it's me doing it anyway so what difference does it make. 

manicured noise

This is such a great compilation album. It came out years ago (six years ago) and no-one told me. I am very happy to have got a copy recently. 

Forty years and a few months ago I had a big bunch of money, and for whatever reason I bought a few singles that proved to be highly influential in my tastes and interests ever after. Import singles were quite expensive (I don't remember how much, under $5 probably, but that was quite expensive then) and I really went with my instincts, but I am sure someone somewhere was mediating on my behalf (I don't remember where I was buying from though). Three things I recall buying that particular day, probably around August-September 1980, were Essential Logic's 'Music is a Better Noise', a record that is not my favourite Essential Logic record (that's probably 'Eugene') but I love all that band's output; I'm So Hollow's 'Dreams to Fill the Vacuum', a transparent vinyl single in a plastic see-through sleeve; and Manicured Noise's single 'Metronome'. In each case I knew absolutely nothing about these bands, and I mean nothing. NO THING. I had not heard of any of them! I liked the idea of 'Manicured Noise' as the name for a group. I liked the cover too:

Loved it then, love it now. Still have it (somewhere). The group is funky in that way that we now call post-punk and Steven Walsh - who apparently wasn't in the band when it formed but, in the nicest possible way (or rather, in the absence of anyone else) joined, took it over and made it essentially his own - sings in a slightly strangulated but articulate and smart way. It bugs me that more than one person has compared them to Talking Heads, which I kind of get but I don't like getting it. I mean the comparison is more than 'both bands had a really competent female bass player (Jodee Taylor in MN's case) who kind of defined their sound'. Although in the case of Manicured Noise the definition comes also from a really solid drummer in Stephanie Nuttall and a very busy, overbusy, superlatively excellent saxophone player in Peter Bannister. 

So the album above collects the sum total, apparently, of what MN recorded in their time (I just realised that in obtaining the vinyl version I diddled myself out of six more tracks on the CD, however, all tracks are on spotifuck so that's fine). (My favourite track is 'Payday', particularly the bit where they turn the bass up). 

The weirdest part of the story is, apparently, can this even be true? very soon after the band split up Stephanie Nuttall went to - I'm still not sure I believe this - Buenos Aires and either joined or formed a group called Sumo. That's one thing. But is this really a picture of her in that group?! 

I mean maybe it is. The discogs listing says that Sumo were a very influential band ('Considered one of the most influential bands of the Argentine 80s. ' - easy to say) but Stephanie Nuttall doesn't play on any of their records and indeed they didn't make a record until 1983 it would seem. If she was a member of this band then I guess I need to go and find some kind of emoji to express how weirded out I feel about this picture and the unknowableness of this story. Here's another picture of her though which indicates that she was definitely amongst the coolest looking drummers of 1980 (she was also a really solid and brilliantly inventive drummer as evidenced by the record). 

But I am still confused to what extent she was a member of Sumo, or I suppose more importantly what she did next and how she went to BA. There is a person on fb who loves Argentina, is called Stephanie Nuttall and had her picture taken sometime this century with the man who plays drums on most Sumo records, so I guess it's just something that happened.* 

(Incidentally basically no-one in MN did anything really prominent again. I have a 12" record Steven Walsh made under the name The Weatherman, but it's a little too 'straight' for my liking atm. I remember hearing once that he lived in Australia for a long time.)

* A comment on this page from 2015 reads (translated by fb): 'She is the first female drummer in Argentina and should be received as such, what memories of those beginnings of sumo by god, besides her parents did well to take her when the war broke out, there are many lunatics in Argentina.'

toddle along

I was listening to a group gripe on the Slate Culture Gabfest which by the way I have listened to every week for possibly ten years now and it has really informed my worldview* and they were griping about the terminology/underpinnings of the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame and apparently Todd is going to be inducted along with Tina Turner, the Go-Gos (I bet the Bangles are really pissed off) and Carole King, and Todd was not dismissed exactly but categorised as 'rock of course' the implication that this was one of the old school people who you'd expect to have been inducted any year.

I don't feel dudgeon or anything on his behalf and I am sure he can take care of himself but he is a lot more iconoclastic than 'rock' and I'm pretty sure that anyone who categorised TR as 'rock' just doesn't really know/care what he does. Certainly he has committed many crimes in the realm of rock the most heinous of which in my book is producing Bat out of Hell though the one thing I will say in his defence there is that apparently he thought the whole thing was a Springsteen parody. Since I don't 'get' Springsteen I suppose it makes sense that I don't therefore 'get' Meat Loaf except insofar as that record makes me feel about as queasy as real meatloaf. Anyway - TR's actual output tends not to be rock, is my point, or at least it's at least as often other styles and genres (most of the time in the last ten years he's been putting out dance records, of some variety) and hearing him described/dismissed as 'rock' makes me want to pull out a bunch of his less rock records and not only that but also to play them while I make corrections to an article I first wrote about a decade ago and which possibly might even just see the light of day next year. A nation exhales lol. 

*Fascinated to hear them not pronounce ABBA the way most Americans often seem to, with the a sounds as in Java or guava or lava but to rhyme with the 'abbas' in yabba dabba doo. I had a feeling there might have been a chat beforehand just to get everyone on track there and that they went through a few minutes of getting the members' names right, too, which they didn't really, not that I could do better. 

why are you like this

 

Helmi is growing as an individual, I mean, spiritually and perhaps even intellectually. She is sufficiently in touch with her emotions at the same time that she will very happily connect to real world 'acting out' options when she feels it expresses her experience. Often, when I sit on the bed, she will sit like this in relation to me: more or less perpendicular, facing out. I have never had a cat (as I recall) so keen to face away from me. I don't understand what she gets from this arrangement.* 

Needless to say she is as different from Nancy as could be imagined, and if I were a fly on the wall it would warm my little fly heart to see how much I** try to convince myself (and them) that they are starting to get along a little better. Every moment when they are not hissing at each other, in fact, is perceived by me as sisterly, and in a good way. Unfortunately their tolerance towards being in (for instance) the same room as each other does not extend to having that pointed out i.e. once they have to acknowledge each other it goes to hell. So every day is a domestic violence stress out really. But I do enjoy having them both around. I also enjoy imagining that, when I get my dog, the troubled twosome will come to appreciate that they have more similarities than differences. Perhaps Disney-style they will plot to rid the household of the dog, and also, Disney-style will eventually come to accept and even adore it. 

This is how I see the world and by the way, I blame Disney.

* Possibly it's not about me and it is more about the pleasures of staring at a blank wall. Nobody knows what goes through a cat's mind, least of all the cat. 

** Not me the fly obviously, me the real me

the adventures of bunyip

 

Melbourne Argus 4 November 1955

your wedding

I still have nothing of great value to tell you so I will show you another one of my drawings, I really should stop with this one or there'll be no surprises (well, the surprise might come in trying to reconcile how I thought these images would illustrate any part of any poem). I can't actually remember the line that this was supposed to illustrate but I liked the idea of an open-air wedding party by a big body of water. The clouds here are pretty insane I have to confess. I am not sure what clouds actually look like I suppose. 

My next commission is some t-shirt designs which I am looking forward to very much but I won't be posting them here because I know what you're like you'll just steal them and put them on a t-shirt. You think everything can be solved or resolved just by t-shirt messages but I think that's an overstatement. 

rabbit rabbit