plenty of nothin'

Here's some nothin' for you on the night of the day that Trump was found guilty (actually it's the day after technically but it happened this morning for us, but yesterday for Americans I think). OK so... 

The only interesting thing about this is that the guy in question spells his name with two Ls, I don't know why anyone would ever want to do that but that is what he does, and someone at the bookshop thought he had one L, the smart way. Ha ha. 

The Cheaper Buy Miles in Fitzroy is just a bit neater than the one in Brunswick - I haven't been to the new premises in Footscray so I can't compare with that one - still I think the Flemington one is best. But they all seem to have the same stuff. 

I mean blah to this. Though sometimes when there are things like this around it means there's something actually good somewhere nearby. But in this case, there wasn't. 

I found this highly irritating, not just the typo at the end (if that's what that is and not something incredibly smart I don't understand). But you know, Tattoo You, who gives a fuck and this has got to be the sign of Pitchfork going the way of Sassy when Sassy went mainstream. 

Perry waking up this morning. 

 Like I said... nothing. 

cherry lake

I am not kidding, as a child I was obsessed by Cherry Lake, also known as Lake Cherry. I used to look at it in the Gregorys and wonder wtf it could possibly be. I couldn't imagine what it could even slightly look like. It became one of those things, I don't know if you have things like that, but it was a place of great mystery that kind of entered into a particular plane of consciousness whereby I could hardly deal with it. Well today, without any particular forethought, I dealt with it. I went there. I was there. 

It was honestly an accident. Perry and I went to look at the Stony Creek backwash and having done that, coming out of the little cul-de-sac where I'd parked, I realised I didn't have a chance of turning right and going back towards the city so I turned left assuming at some point I'd be able to make a more convenient or practical turn. Then eventually I was just heading towards Williamstown and a worm in my head said go to Cherry Lake. It wasn't hard. 

Here is Perry examining not a cherry but an apple in Cherry Lake. It was presumably put there for flavouring. 

Here he is contemplating existence and ducks.

Oddly enough a lot of the path around the lake is placed in such a way you can't see it a lot of the time, so great is the distance, and the foliage. 

So, for instance, this is looking out across to the lake but where is it, ya know? 

Presumably this very overgrown and fenced-off path was once a path to the lake, but I wouldn't fancy your chances now. 

This is where something called Cherry Creek enters Cherry Lake. Whatever Cherry Creek has in it, the ducks love it. 

You can see them in the middle distance there. 

Picture where the oil refineries and the city skyline blend across the lake, #1. 

Picture where the oil refineries and the city skyline blend across the lake, #2 (with swans).

So that's Cherry Lake. I now have no more mysteries, at all, in my life. At all. 

Cherry Lake reentered my consciousness incidentally a few months ago when some paper ran a story on the actor Pia Miranda, who apparently walks its perimeter every day I think. I spent a lot of time there trying to remember her last name, my brain throwing up various other Pias, not that there are millions, but Pia Zadora obviously etc. I have since realised where I was going terribly wrong - for some reason I got it into my head that Pia Miranda was Pino Amenta's daughter, but I couldn't really remember his name either, and if I was sailing towards that notion, well, her name is obviously not Pia Amenta. It took a fucking long time to piece it together. Pino Amenta's actor daughter's name is Jade. Pia Miranda has nothing to do with the Amentas at all. Sorry to all concerned. I could have cleared it up with two minutes of wikipedia wandering but I was lazy. 

Oh, and here it is from not the 1975 Gregorys but the 1966 Melways when it was still known as a swamp. There was a lot more swamp around it then too seemingly. I MISS THOSE DAYS

evening stroll

After whingeing for a good 36 hours to anyone who had to listen about the impending implant procedure, it was really not as awful as I had anticipated. Also, as I was walking to the bus afterwards I was reading shit off my phone and #1 was re: the latest outrage (too pallid a term) in Palestine and then #2 was some random complaining about McDonalds getting their order wrong. True!!!! Truuuue!

The irony I didn't quite realise at that moment was I had just spent a long time complaining about a perfectly safe, ultimately beneficial procedure that wasn't even really going to hurt much. There are people around the world dying and watching their loved ones die and I've had a pretty sweet almost-sixty years. I think I'm OK.

This evening Perry and I went for a stroll running errands. We bought some dog treats, bought some tofu, and returned some random crap mail cluttering up the place to sender. It was nice. I will be taking some panadol soon but it's only very mildly uncomfortable at this point. 
 

implant

 

I had stage one of my implant this morning and it was less appalling than I thought it would be (so far). Turns out there is a zone between absolute dread and not even thinking about something at all, and it really helps you cope with the reality of the inevitable, that someone (a perfectly competent and skilled someone but someone nonetheless) is going to drill a hole in your jaw to stick a screw in it. The screw is then affixed with a cap and left for a couple of months and then the implant is screwed on top of it. That, at least, is how I understand it. Perhaps I am mixing up what I was told with the graphics in ads you get in the dodgiest part of the internet (that I go). They didn't give me a mud pack btw. 

So, having got through that, I am now watching Hidden Assets, an Irish-Belgian (I think) co-production about organised crime-terrorism-hiding assets and Taking. It. Easy. 

By the way, when I came back from the dentist Perry thought I smelt really interesting. I wonder if it was the chemicals or the blood. Both perhaps. But he was sympathetic. 

ferdie and perry walk in jacana reserve this morning no words

 

aberfeldie

Yesterday Perry and I went for a drive without really knowing where we'd end up but in the end we ended up in Aberfeldie. Here is a fetching design to alert you to the presence of some drinking taps at what looks like some kind of running track. 

Here's Perry getting a good view of everything in a kind of imperious pose that is actually all front really. He had to be helped up onto this wall (he wanted to be up there though) and also helped down. 

Here's a deco house I quite liked. 

A walkway alongside some flats. We went down here but there was nothing to see but a carpark. 

I was slightly interested in this church. 

Mainly because it had these flats alongside it. 

I want to tell you something. There is no Saint Kinnord, there never was a Saint Kinnord, the only St Kinnord you will find anywhere in the world is St Kinnord st. Doesn't it seem weird that there's a church in it. Because St Kinnord is a fake saint. 

Something new being built.

Cool verandah on 70sish house. 

Got a bit late to this one

I liked this but I don't think the photograph does it justice.

And finally here we are leaving the area I just have some questions about this hotel, the Waterloo:

Were those blank windows ever windows? Why then were they bricked in? And was there an expectation when this building was constructed that there would be a building of equal size next to it (effectively, behind it)? The ornate street side, and the bald side seen here, are just such a contrast. 

puppets of his imagination

Since deciding to experiment with the possibility that screen exposure late at night is responsible for my general sleeplessness, I have shown that I can quickly read a trashy propaganda novel of 70 years ago without much difficulty, and that's all I've done. OK. So In the Wet (1953) was a Nevile Shute book that tells a story-within-a-story linked slightly with a bit of musing/speculation on buddhism, though that link is so loose it's easy to imagine it not being in there at all. Basically, a north Queensland vicar called Roger Hargreaves (I remember his name because of course that is the name of the author of the Mr. Men books) who is not properly recovered from a bout of malaria attends to the deathbed of an old alcoholic called Stevie Figgis. Stevie is in severe pain, sometimes alleviated with opium supplied by his Chinese housemate. So both he and Hargreaves are possibly hallucinating. It doesn't help that (sort of as per the book cover, above) they are in flooded terrain on a temporary island with a large number of animals in a circle outside watching the hut they are in. Almost without us noticing it, Figgis' rambling conversation with Hargreaves becomes an extensive (like, 4/5 of the book) narrative set in the early 1980s, so, thirty years in the future, concerning a North Qld pilot called David Anderson (known to everyone as 'Nigger')* who is in charge of jetting the royal family from place to place throughout the commonwealth. 

To put it succinctly, the issue in the early 1980s is that Britain has been in the throes of socialist governments for decades largely because of its refusal to graduate from the primitive 'one man, one vote' system. Australia, Canada and New Zealand - these are the only three mentioned, though apparently Kenya and Gambia are also in the Commonwealth still, South Africa isn't discussed at all (all three remained in the c'wealth until the 1960s). On p. 177 Rosemary's father says 'One man one vote has never really worked' and on the next page he explains that 'the common man has held the voting power, and the common man has voted consistently to increase his own standard of living, regardless of the long term interests of this children, regardless of the wider interests of the country.' In the white-dominated commonwealth countries, individuals can achieve such greatness as to obtain up to seven votes compared to the one accorded everyone at birth. So, Britain is backward and losing population at a rapid rate because anyone intrepid or motivated to better themselves is migrating to Australia (mainly) (Shute lived in Australia for the last ten years of his life, migrating in 1950).  At one point it is suggested that Australia can reach a population of 150 million. 

Pretty thrilling so far, right?

Well there there is what might pass for an action sequence where Anderson locates a bomb on his plane while it has the Queen and Prince Philip on it, and he has to find a way to get rid of it. This is one of the strangest bits of the book, because although there is quite a bit of discussion about various ways to get rid of the bomb, I read these pages twice and could find no description of how it was actually disposed of. It was, though, as Anderson is awarded the highest honour of the commonwealth by the Queen - seven votes. But where do they drop it? I just can't say. Does it explode? Don't know. Maybe not. How do they drop it? All I can say is it was very difficult to decide how to do it, because they tried some alternative scenarios. 

I feel duty bound to mention Anderson's love interest, a sort of attache to the Queen whose name is Rosemary, who is only described as slender (Shute is really bad at describing people, or at least, if he's good at it he doesn't do it here). (The Queen, by the way, is by contrast, 'plump'). Rosemary and the man she soon learns to be comfortable calling 'Nigger' spend a bit of leisure time on boats or having dinner in their apartments but never having sex (although he does once see her unmade bed and it makes him feel a bit giddy) and arguing about whether they should get married; she is conflicted, or rather, completely against it because her first duty is to the Queen. Also, they have a long conversation about new houses; Rosemary has never seen one before. Except she thinks she might have, actually, in France or something (oh really, how interesting). She is delighted by the idea that if they move to Australia when they are married, she will be able to not only have a new house but have a say in its design. 

So yeah, the book is kind of like this. Sort of science fiction except no science (maybe the aeroplanes of 1983 are imaginatively conceived, I don't know, but no-one watches TV, everything's on the radio or in the papers; there are films, with made-up popular stars; etcetera). 

Shute ends the whole blessed shower thus:

The underlinings are not mine. The whole thing is very, very silly but like a lot of things I heap shit on, I have to admit, it kept me engaged adequately that I got to the end, so it must have something to it. 

*He is described as, and describes himself as, a 'quadroon', no inverted commas.  

ugh why do I care

'Punk rock had caught fire, establishing strongholds in England and America, and eventually reaching X's native Australia. Drawing on its predecessors for inspiration, this music is burning with a primal intensity that is vintage 1979.' So reads a review reproduced on a website for a label which is releasing the umpteenth reissue of the wonderful X-Aspirations (or is it just called Aspirations?) by X. Australian X. The best X, let's be fair, because while the US X had their moments, they also had a lot of noments.

The line is from a review by someone called Nathan Bush. I don't know who that is but when I googled that name I got a lot of hits about a podcaster whose speciality is e-commerce. I don't know if it's the same person. 

Why do I care? I'm not a patriot and I don't even really see myself as flying the flag for Aust culture at all, though I suppose I do. I just want to say, if it's a competition about 'who invented punk rock', then there is an extremely good case for The Saints as the first, and the admittedly terrible-sounding (until Peter Jackson's audio technology gets onto it and we can hear everything inc. the kettle whistling in the house over the road) Most Primitive Band in the World album recorded in 1974 shows that punk did not 'eventually reach' Australia but was created in Australia as much as anywhere. 

Anyway as I said it's stupid but I guess I just hate lazy claims about 'influence' and assumptions that Australians just sat around twiddling their thumbs for people in other places to give them things to do. I will ultimately cope though. 

By the way that X-Aspirations is a massively great album. Just so you know. 

southern lights

 

I know it's a fact, and I'm like everyone else in this regard, all you really want to know is what Laura is up to, but she hasn't blogged for over a year. This evening we went to Campbells Cove to see the southern lights which dazzled everyone in Melbourne last night and which were reputed to be making a big splash again tonight. Well, Campbells Cove is a weird little backwater place between Werribee South and Point Cook and everyone in Melbourne decided it would be the place to see the lights tonight. It was the place, but there weren't any lights (unless they're happening now, which I guess is possible). As you can see above there were cars everywhere having a lot of trouble passing each other and there were heaps of people as well hanging around in the dark (Perry wants to mention there were at least two dogs just walking around like they had a right to be dogs, and I would like to mention that there were two other dogs he didn't see, luckily). 

Anyway, long story short, there were no lights, but there were a huge amount of 4WDs and a lot of people just hanging around, also some fog. It was interesting. 

mixed business

I can't remember when I last visited Mixed Business (probably 2019) but clearly it went out of business without much warning, if the blackboard etc is anything to go by. Shame, it was a good place, but obviously I've been in the wrong part of town to be a regular customer. Maybe we all, my demographic I mean, left the Clifton Hole/North Fitzroy area. 

In this instance I only went past because Perry and I were going to visit Ruffey Lake Park.  

'Maps on my phone' (as I endearingly call it - they need to do better branding) said it would take just under 40 minutes to get there. 35 minutes later we were still driving through Clifton Hole, so I just thought fuck it, this is a non-starter. We walked around North Fitzroy instead (the distinction between the two places is very blurry) and I got an apple pie and a coffee from a shop in NF and we ate it in the park at Rushall Station - Perry likes apple pie, could that have been predicted? 

Nothing else happened really. Oh, I would like to note this: last night I was on RRR and there is a textline, as you might know, and someone sent the message (this is the whole message): 'fuc on'. New catchphrase.