I have been here since Thursday night - I joined Laura and Lenny who had been here for a couple of days already - Laura came to Canberra to get an honour for her book, a triumph of a project that she picked up by its neck's scruff and took to its logical conclusion and made a magnificent success. Which I guess was capped by getting an award at a lo-o-ong but not horrible ceremony at the National Library, truly one of the great places of this nation. Proud doesn't cover it. Aside from that, we have done some sight seeing and wandering, and also went to the Liam Neeson Naked Gun, a project inspired (from my perspective at least) by hearing some goofs on the bus discussing it, in the case of one goof, dissing it thoroughly for no good reason. I'd heard it was good and I thought while clearly it is the kind of film one could not too horrendously see on tv or probably even on your phone without feeling you'd missed too much... ok quick switch it is now the next day and I am on the terrace at the National Library, one of my favourite places in the world (the library not the terrace though the terrace is not awful). I have been looking through a wide range of bizarre things (one of the librarians asked me what I was working on and I said everything which she might have interpreted as me saying 'shut up/mind your own business' or 'I'm just this amazing chameleon', depending on what kind of person she is, though also, she might just have not been that concerned either way and not really cared, and that is also pretty fine by me, though I will say I am usually (not always but usually) interested in what people are working on.
It is a tepid day and sunny, not awful at all. When I went out this morning for a coffee to a fuck-off-bourgeois cafe a block away from the hotel, it was 0 degrees and I was definitely thinking, this is what I want more of. To be honest I am still thinking I may have to disappear to Finland this coming summer, partly because I just need to go there frequently and also, because, summer. I mean if there was somewhere closer that was cold where I could go in summer, yes I would but I don't think there really is. Perhaps NZ is at least more sensible, temperature-wise. Perhaps a NZ south island week might be in order. But knowing my luck it would end up in a heatwave. From where I sit I just saw a huge rabbit run across the manicured lawn and a big magpie just scrambled up onto the top of the glass barrier disturbing a little round tit or something similar, I am not good with bird names, I can hear people at other tables (quite a way off) talking about house prices or telling their children not to climb on things. You got to love Canberra. Canberra has everything and a little bit more. Off in the distance there are people cycling on the lakeside and pushing prams etc. It's all so nice.
I am dead keen to get back to my research, I have a lot of good things ordered. Some of them are just silly bits and pieces perhaps to aid my wikipedia projects (like my aim to give Henry Clive a proper entry, he was the Melbourne magician who went to the USA and became a portrait artist and/or creator of pictures of possibly hypothetical beautiful women; he was also cast as the millionaire by Charlie Chaplin in City Lights then refused to jump in the water (as per the script) so was sacked - he had also been the art director on the film, I don't know if he was sacked from that job as well at the same time - ? Maybe there's a way to find out. I don't know if anyone's actually written a book about the making of CL that goes that far into the weeds. Anyway, the wikipedia entry said something idiotic like that Clive played the bad guy or something that ridiculous, and mentioned nothing about him being sacked. But if we're talking ridiculousness I do have to admit I got confused and instead of ordering press cuttings on Henry Clive I ordered press cuttings on Clive Henry - who was or is a sculptor of much later period, so that was dumb.
I've been looking at other things too but now I'm 60 I've stopped trusting the internet because AI and I don't want to have my ideas (or rather my research) fed into the melange. To be clear, it's not that I don't trust you, it's bots I don't trust, and perhaps bots read blogs, I don't know.
Here's something a bot won't care about. Since I have to read a whole lot of shizzle trying to sift out things I want from things I don't, I listen to music, and in this case I decided it was time to check my opinion previously expressed of The Twenty-Seven Points. I remembered absolutely none of it, and it's actually lamer than I thought it would be - just bad versions of lesser songs, in the main.* Then for some reason there's this stuff where MES is telling someone (he's reading this off a page!) to go back to Ireland. I really can't imagine what this is about, or who it's about, or why we should care at all. Did people have fewer things to worry about in the mid-90s?
The one thing I will admit may have affected my re-appreciation of this album is the fact I had to listen to it quite quietly, because I was in a library (though there was no-one else really nearby). Perhaps if I blasted it that joke about the man with the spade in his head being called Doug would really cut through.
Speaking of English music I had a hankering yesterday for hearing some song or other by the Experimental Pop Band, from the Discgrotesque album, but I was suprised (perhaps in some way pleased) to find I couldn't access it online. But I could access another of their albums which I'd never heard (or seen) and it's pretty good. If you're nice I'll tell you what it's called sometime.
Now I'm going back to the trenches. Can you believe idiots like Elon Musk or Donald Trump or, I don't know, Vladimir Putin, who can afford to not work and could just spend their days looking through stuff in the National Library in Canberra but instead they just spend their days burrowing into big mounds of shit to the degree that no-one can tell where the big mounds of shit end and they begin. That does no-one any good.
LATER: So in the afternoon I did listen to This Nation's Saving Grace as I had threatened to some weeks ago to everyone's amazement. It's not a terrible record although that 'I Am Damo Suzuki' is, like, a sort of lazy racial stereotype. I'm not imagining that.
The version on spotify has a whole extra album's worth of versions and outtakes, some of them are pretty interesting. There are neat extra flourishes on some songs that were inexplicably taken off. What I assume is the 'proper' version of 'Paintwork' sounds pretty great without the fuckups. Anyway in the main I can live without it.
Got a lot of worthwhile stuff in the NLA, will take a while to process it. Both personally and IRL.
* 'Free Range' is not a terrible song.
