Lorraine Crescent

neighbours 2012

2012-01-31T18:39:00.002+11:00

Monday: Karl and Rhys meet Rhys’ mother (well, Rhys has met her before) a thirty five year old paraplegic who presumably had Rhys when she was about eight. Mia just pointed out that every time they have an outdoor scene there’s bellbirds on the soundtrack. Rhys’ mother has spinal degeneration, which is why she says the words ‘spinal degeneration’ carefully and cautiously as though she was talking a foreign language. Here’s Audrey, the dog whose name I was uncertain about, who seems unable to get out of her basket. Rhys has a popeye chin. Dig that tattooed guy with the mobile phone at Harold’s table when Karl and Susan had their Audrey chat. Callum has a picture of Sonya on her t-shirt. Does he know she’s his real mother? I was always a bit confused about that. Hey, Kyle and Callum, great chemistry. Karl has towels in his office, Room 23. Hey, Rhys just quoted Corey Worthington, kind of, when Kate told him to take a good long look at himself and he said ‘I do, every day’ then something else I can’t remember but quite a bit like what whatsername said to Corey Worthington. I wish I wrote for Neighbours.

Tuesday: Labby and Stav are – get this – to me, kind of annoying. Did you watch The Loop last weekend? I really enjoyed it, it reminded me of a lot of things, it didn’t go on long enough for me though, admittedly I started watching it about an hour in. Now Neighbours has started. Sophie in the opening credits should reflect Sophie in the show – the mature young lady. I wonder what’s going on with miserable Kate. Also, I wonder why Kyle’s got all this weird white shit all over his flanny. Also, why is Paul so into Kate doing office management. Does Andrew ever think about his dead brother? That kind of thing ruins some people’s lives. He has about fifty other siblings anyway. Summer was reading Truman Capote, but I’m not sure what. Corey is a crazy liar. Green girl brought a coke to Sophie and Corey’s table but did not do or say anything to expand her storyline. Oh, I saw her again and it wasn’t green girl at all, I guess they all wear green t-shirts in that establishment.

Here are Erin and Kate drinking amongst the reeds. Erin is a really annoying person, I've figured that much. She and Kate are going on the road, with 'a hot guy to do the driving'. Jade just asked Kate to a dance party in St Kilda and I thought she said Dad's party in St Kilda and I thought well, who's Jade's dad? That got me nowhere and then I thought maybe Dad's Party is a club in St Kilda, great name for a club. But actually she said dance party, one more example of how what you misunderstand in Neighbours is actually much more interesting than what is actually there. I mean Dad's Party isn't great, as a club name, but it is 20 times greater than what was actually said, right?

pip end january 2010 (two years ago)

2012-01-30T14:36:00.000+11:00

We went to see Pip Proud at Colton Close today. He was as usual happy to see us and he looked better than the last couple of times I've seen him but he obviously isn't. He says the cancer is back (actually, it never went away let's face it) and he may have to have more radiation therapy or chemotherapy but as far as I know those things were just mooted as possibilities that weren't going to cure him just prolong his life a while. He wore out more quickly than ever today and ended up wanting to lie down when we took him back to his room. I think this is the home stretch. He is still very lucid though. Talking about Obama, Haiti earthquake, etc. Very keen on Tom Waits (I downloaded some TW for him).

neighbours 2012

2012-01-30T12:07:00.001+11:00

This is funny I guess but just wanted to add an irrelevant postscript: who decided that when you extend the number of 'e's on a word ending in 'e' you actually extend the consonant preceding it? I.e., 'sameeee' is said 'sammmmme'. It's just one more example of what a pathetic, wrong-headed, drab, irritating language English is.

neighbours 2012

2012-01-27T18:30:00.005+11:00

Do you think that despite himself Dr Rhys is becoming drawn to Erin? I don't know enough about Dr Rhys to know whether he has a heart or not. Erin seemingly wears the same clothes all the time, that's interesting. No, now he's doing extra devious and appalling things to suggest Erin is an alcoholic. He really needs a moustache to twirl.

The woman who is talking with Karl looks very familiar. She must have been in something. I wonder what. Nice how Dr Rhys is lurking round corners to listen in to their discussions.

Sonya is going to have Susan's baby. Oh no, a sex montage. That was horrible. I'm glad it was really short. I assume if you see fireworks and trains in stations, that conception has taken hold. Certainly Sonya's head has gotten bigger.

Dr Rhys is going to celebrate getting into the surgery programme by cutting someone's hand off and attaching it to their head like a cocky crest.

Well, Dr Rhys isn't the only person who knows how to lurk.

Then it ceased. Good show what! I am very much anticipating next week's run of instalments.

local scene

2012-01-27T12:03:00.004+11:00

A few things happening locally this week. One is the odd placement of a big fence around a part of the reserve on the western side of the creek (we are on the eastern side). This has been fenced off then a bunch of bulldozers have been working it - particularly on Tues/Wed. Have to call the council and sort out what it's about.

Then less curiously the extra carparking at Broady Plaza (as we call it but I can never remember its real name). A few years ago they built a deck over the original car park on the south side. Now they're doing the same on the north side. It's not that exciting but as my grandmother Mavis used to say, 'it's something in your life'.

neighbours 2012

2012-01-26T21:43:00.001+11:00

I already liked Sharpies (the pens), or should I say, I did at one stage really like Sharpies. Now they’re being sold to me so constantly on Channel 11 as a groovy thing that writes only groovy words and designs, I am somewhat over them. I also have something stuck in my molar which is bullshit. Labby and Stav are also very annoying. I must say I am keen to hear more about this show The Loop, is it my demographic? Apparently it’s been going two weeks. I should watch it on Saturday. These presenters seem kind of old. However, how weird to ask as a music question ‘what was the name of Eric Clapton’s band?’

In the opening credits of Neighbours, Karl and Susan are with a silky. Who is it?

The recap of the show was all about exes. Kyle is still wearing his Dead Kennedys t-shirt. Jade is still wearing her skirty pants outfit. So I guess the last few days of Neighbours have been one day – yesterday, because they’re talking about how they’re going to go to an Australia Day barbecue ‘tomorrow’. How weird that Tash, who when I last watched Neighbours in 2011 was pretending to be pregnant, is now musing over whether someone is ‘pregnant or too much pasta’ in a magazine. I wonder what her massive, massive, massive earrings are all about.

Kyle’s name, particularly as pronounced by many on this show such as Sonya, sounds a lot like ‘Karl’ which would make for fun if it could be incorporated into a storyline. Lucas and Kyle are in the same boat really. Sonya is wearing an amazing silk tent today, I don’t know why, it’s very orange.

Chris is apparently too dirty to be seen out, according to Tash, yet curiously he has absolutely no dirt on him. I guess Chris is the new Charlene – works in a masculine trade such as the auto mechanics, likes guys. If Tash so wants Aden and Chris to get together why doesn’t she dak them and push them in the bushes. Man, her sexual tension over their reluctance (or at least Chris’) to get it on is s-c-a-r-e-y. (Later: ‘I’m not forcing them to pash or anything’ she says.)

I have to say that although I have loved the last three (or has it only been two) weeks of Neighbours, I am somewhat feeling the urge to give it a miss for a day or two as not much is really happening (and I am becoming massively sick of the ads for instance that stupid overdubbed Star Trek ad). I wish Dr Rhys was doing something really, really evil and so on.

Kyle just told me and Jade that Zeke Kinski disappeared for two months and that he thought he’d killed him. I wonder what did happen to Zeke. I guess I will have to check that online again sometime, ‘cos you’re not going to tell me. I see Aden just dropped a Half a Cow reference. Interesting. He must be into (I’ll insert a gay nurse half a cow band reference later).

Ugh a kiss. (Jade/ Kyle)

That’s not a tent Sonya is wearing, it’s a parachute, no doubt to disguise her ovulation window.

Ugh another kiss (Emilia / Lucas) a less horny one though.

I’m really hyped about The Loop. 9 AM Saturday! I think I might watch it. You probably want me to blog it. Look, I don’t blog everything I watch on TV you know. Like I don’t blog The Simpsons when I watch that f’rinstance. Or The Mentalist etc or when Mia watches Hell’s Kitchen or Nigella and I am too bored to leave the room.

Hey someone with a speaking part just put an icepack on Aden’s eye. Must be serious – I mean, speaking part.

Dr Rhys and Erin are back tomorrow, that’s a relief, I need more evil.

Then it ended! It was grand, can’t wait for Friday’z.

neighbours 2012

2012-01-25T18:25:00.003+11:00

You know Lou's been in the opening credits of Neighbours all year and he hasn't been in the show once.

I did actually do some research on Kate and Sophie and came away absolutely none the wiser. In fact, I was more confused than before. Interesting that at the garage there is still an ad for the shopping centre development.

Wow Susan's shirt looks mathematically, scientifically calculated to make Sonya's dress sense less absurd. Hmm, Summer just called Andrew a 'suck', apparently under the impression that 'sucks' are people that 'suck up', rather than whatever a suck really is - I'm not sure what that is, but it's not that.

Charlie's is a real hive of activity I can't be bothered writing about right now if that's OK. I thought Tash's way of finding out Aden was gay was pretty good though.

Thenitendeditwasgreatcan'twaitfornextepisode.

neighbours 2012

2012-01-24T18:39:00.007+11:00

It’s the actor who plays Erin who has it tough. She’s the one who has to put forward this thing about being flattered, confused and thrilled when Dr Rhys throws out these sort of full-on hardcore capital H hints about how he Really Likes Her.

‘My brother took me to the Brink last weekend at St Kilda’ Corey says to Sophie. Sophie has apparently seen Zero, so I guess she is older than she looks – they split up around 32 years ago. Maybe she meant Xiro, I think they split in ’84.

Lot of product placement for Harold’s Store going on – close-ups on uniforms and the shopfront. He should open a chain. I wonder who the girl behind the counter is – she looks like she has a story to tell. I hope she appears again soon.

Kate has Sophie's stationery list for Year 9. I am not quite sure why this requires P S Y C H O music, or the megadramatic grimace on Kate's face as they go to ad break. That was almost blue steel!

Then I changed the channel. It was great though! I can't wait for tomorrow's.

neighbours 2012

2012-01-24T15:35:00.009+11:00

Does Dr Rhys live with Kyle and Jade or has he broken in to their house?

Is Kate like a greek chorus of one? Why does she hate Summer (the person)? Why is Karl drinking out of a baked bean can? Why is Paul talking to Karl? Have they ever met before? I have a feeling they should have been introduced. Karl is very open to suggestion, all it took was for Paul to tell him to get the feminine stuff out of his house and next scene you know he's doing it. In-karl-red-ipaul.

I love the Rhys-Kyle-Jade house's backlit cupboards.

Erin has this thing about how ugly she is. It's so bizarre that they got someone like this to play this character. You'd think there were no objectively ugly actresses or something. It's ghastly to think they found this person to play this character. Anyway, I am finding this whole thing really awkward.

Now Paul is focusing on Karl's penis. I don't know what happened between Karl and Susan, it's just you know, the 105th bust up between those two. You could compile a shortlist, without even thinking, of the things that will bring them together again (potentially fatal illness, potentially fatal fire, Susan will get a new love interest, Karl won't).

What did Kate do that means she can't do now whatever job she previously did? I suppose I could research this too. Michael has 'back to back meetings' - what kind of meetings are these perchance? It's some kind of variation on face to face meetings I suppose. Now he's resigned. Way to get out of the show man. He's going surfing with Freya Stafford.

I loved the way that Dr Rhys, his evil plan working, can barely bear to touch Erin when she hugs him. Why does Dr Rhys tell Kate constantly what he's up to in this crafty scheme? She could, let's face it, just warn Erin that Dr Rhys is evil, and why isn't she doing that? Oh, wait, back from ad break and she's doing it. Cool scene coming up. She slapped him that was reasonably rad. It was funny then the perspective on tiny Karl. I'm going to have to research the Kate-employment thing, and the Kate-Sophie thing. I guess they are probably connected.

Then it ended. It was grouse! Can't wait for the next ep.

butterball

2012-01-24T15:35:00.005+11:00

It's typical of humans to say things like 'he's a very friendly cat', or, 'he takes so much interest in what I'm doing.' Both of these are true but they omit the extra reality that he hopes that he will get some kind of food out of it. In this case he is on the chair in the kitchen watching me do the dishes (he hasn't quite figured out the difference between person-at-stove and person-at-sink). Won't be long though as 'he's a very smart cat' too.

peggy seeger

2012-01-22T09:39:00.003+11:00

Last night we went to see Peggy Seeger at the Oakleigh Caravan and it was an inspiration. The audience was a sedate bunch of older people (over 60s mainly I am guessing) and they did not mind a singalong, which suggests to me they might have been folk afficianados from way back, but I might just be romanticising. PS to my mind was best when playing her clawhammer banjo, but also marvellous with her long-bodied acoustic guitar. By the time she got to the piano it was more whimsy than anything. Some songs she sang a capella. She had some truisms in a looseleaf folder which she recited occasionally. I enjoyed it very much.

There were two young drunks (a man and a woman) up the back near us who were whooping and stomping and interjecting, much to the intense fury of others around. I found them annoying too but I found the response to them even stranger. PS was, I think, oblivious.

note to self

2012-01-21T16:34:00.003+11:00

Usually when I'm walking in this neighbourhood the only people I see walking as well are people walking dogs. Not so today - I saw about 8 or 9 people walking and no-one walking dogs. I want to note this in case it becomes a trend and I can say, 'I first noticed that on 21 January 2012.'

* NB similar story on 26 Jan 2012 though only about 3 or 4 people.

neighbours 2012

2012-01-20T20:58:00.003+11:00

Rhys is cracking onto a woman called Erin who is apparently unattractive (I think you can tall this by the fact she has long, dribbly hair, at least, there is absolutely nothing else about her that would indicate this) but Kate is getting in the way because she is suspicious.

Freya Stafford's character's name is Emilia, or at least, that is what she is known as on the Neighbours website. Here she is with Lucas and his nudity. Now she is zooming on his penis.

Susan is going to end up living with this woman called Priya. I am a bit confused about their friendship but for some reason it has gone from enmity to frenmity in a nanosecond. I wonder who she is. Oh they are bonding over husbands, or lack of.

Note at the front of the hospital ambulances go one way and emergency is in the other direction. Sounds potentially troublesome. Rhys and Ugly are going to a vietnamese place in Box Hill. And that's all. Not much happened, really. Half an hour of my life I'll never get back. Mind you, I could have spent it being offensive and ghastly, so at least it kept me out of trouble ay.

hugo

2012-01-20T10:23:00.001+11:00

Yes, Hugo is remarkable and I urge you to go and see it in 3D in particular. It's a little slow but very enjoyable and looks amazing at all times.

neighbours 2012

2012-01-19T18:24:00.004+11:00

Sonya and Toadie are looking at the enormous payout he's being offered - six figures (so, starting at $1000.00). But they're not saying how much, as they never do in Neighbours unless it's 20c. Why do they have that policy? It's not like they'll be able to show it in 5 years and pretend it's still new.

Freya Stafford has just shown Lucas her naked body in a book. Now Paul is looking at it too. I wish I knew her character's name, sorry. There is a very loud rock band playing in the other room so if she told me I wouldn't be able to hear it. It's like being at the Red Cotton show except I am not kissing a small boy in a spiderman outfit.

Toadie is looking for a new job on some kind of online job thing. Here's Calum anyway, who we haven't seen for a month. Paul has a journalist lined up to interview Toadie although he (Paul) now describes himself as a journalist too.

Purple Anna is still wearing purple.

Tash's father whatsisname is wearing pyjamas in Harold's. Tash is wearing a yurt. Charlotte McCammey has come in and asked to be a character in the show fulltime. That is the subtext. She likes that he's a straight shooter who won't back down, so do 'the partners.' Paul has noticed that Charlotte McCammey looks like Rebecca, and so assumes the writers have marked her as his future love interest.

Freya Stafford is remembering the old days, which once would have meant remembering in black and white but now means remembering in bleached-out yellow. She and Tash's father once practiced surfing on a precarious frontyard surfboard. I don't quite understand whether she is meant to be thinking she wishes she was with him or that this was symbolic of some other very free period she once had, when she could be either nude or precariously on a skateboard or having it off with a man while his wife drowns.

Then it ended. It was great! Can't wait till tomorrow's.

neighbours 2012

2012-01-18T18:41:00.008+11:00

Charlotte McCammey? She's a piece of work. 'The partners have to consider their 'uptions'. Man Toadie is so going to start his own law practice with the huge payout he gets from 'the partners' and the girl in purple (Anna) as receptionist.

Loving the art on Toadie/Sonya's wall. Not the Calum drawing, the 70s brassy picture. Goes with the lamp and the fern. Today Sonya is wearing a... oh it's just ridiculous.

Tash's storyline about studying 'Contemporary Arts', an 'easy subject' because 'uni is all about parties', is kind of dull, actually it's dumb, because her chumz are unable to be certain whether other subjects (such as advanced economics and brain surgery if I remember correctly - it was about ten minutes ago) are more interesting or more ultimately financially rewarding.

Lucas' garage has become a sinister, terrifying location for Chris Pappas who is now imagining the roller door falling down as he hears his own tortured breathing. The guy playing Chris Pappas' father George really looks familiar. Was he once a teen actor on Neighbours fifteen years ago?

Wikipedia is blacked out so I can't check out who plays him, so I went to the Neighbours website, which I feel is a little in need of updating ie because it says stuff like:

2009 is shaping up to be a big year for 12-year-old Kaiya Jones; she started high school and scored a regular role on Neighbours as Sophie Ramsay. Not a bad start.

Well, so Wednesday was the day on Neighbours when (1) Toadie solved all his problems (2) Tash decided she was going to do the loser 'fun' subject Contemporary Arts which any nong could do and (3) Tash decided she was not going to do the loser 'fun' subject Contemporary Arts and (3) Chris couldn't, and then could, return to automobile maintenance (4) Toadie made some more problems for himself.

George Pappas is played by Lliam Amor. Is that an anagram of something? Aside from Rim O'Llama. (He has a blog and a baby)

And then it ended. It was great! Can't wait for tomorrow's.

neighbours 2012

2012-01-17T18:33:00.010+11:00

'Dasha' Blahova in 2009. Check out full article here.

Spiderboy is called Corey. Sophie's not touching her soda.

Now I see for the first time the Eastvale devleopment picture. 10 cinemas! I would have enjoyed that version of Neighbours, where they just went to the movies all the time. Now we are in Chris' hospital room, not only does he have an x-ray on the wall he also has a still life and a diagram of an ear. Oh, and a painting with tall trees and a red road. Someone's given him a get well card with a labrador on it.

I reckon Anna the receptionist should be more of a character, the way she said 'Toadie?' it was cool. And as for the delivery of the line 'I've already told the police everything I know'... and the 'there was one thing.' The man who bashed Chris had a tattoo of the word 'Dasha', no doubt a reference to Dasha Blahova, who was part of the original Neighbours cast. Her name wasn't really Dasha Blahova, it was/is Dagmar. I was once in Chippendale post office and she was in it. It's been closed down now and neither of us could be there.

(Unless we bought an apartment there: it is now the ugly face of an uglier building. I stole this picture of what it looks like now from flickr where someone thinks so highly of their own photography 'skillz' they won't allow it to be shared. I took it back!!! Razz! Kill!)

OK actually it was Dasher. Like the reindeer. I think they are on the wrong track looking for a greyhound. Anyway Sophie had more luck being stalked by Corey. It seems like Chris's injuries have done something to his head and now he is no longer interested in cars (I have no idea what he used to be interested in but I assume it was cars). Lucas and Kyle have spotted the guy who they think bashed Chris. He has turned up to watch stock footage of a greyhound race apparently. Even he doesn't realise Dasher was a reindeer and the woman who played Marier, Max Ramsay's indeterminately originating but certainly European wife and mother to Danny and Shane.

They're at the Broadmeadows greyhound track, just down the road from here. I've never been there, I'm surprised that's what it looks like.

Wow, lamest blackmail ever, and it worked. Sophie just got Andrew to let her go and see Corey by saying she'd tell Paul he let her kiss Corey if he didn't let her go and kiss Corey now. This could go on and on.

I wish Kyle would change his shirt.

The basher who owns Dasher just named Toadie as the facilitator of the bashing. The police will go for that. The scottie policeman referred to Chris as 'Chris Paparse', and I'm not joking.

No Doctor Rhys this episode. Never see Toadie and Doctor Rhys in the same place. Come to think of it we never see Spiderboy Corey and anyone else in the same place.

Long ad for Young Talent Time. They know Mia wants to watch the news and they're just trying to annoy us. Now Toadie is going to get arrested. 'Some new information has come to light.'

Then it ended. It was great! Can't wait for tomorrow's. Oh tomorrow is going to be good. And Tash, who I'd forgotten about, is back, studying something she's not interested in.

neighbours 2012

2012-01-16T18:43:00.006+11:00

Things move fast in Erinsborough these days. Andrew has taken Sophie's advice and Red Cotton are already ready to play a show, and Paul has entrusted Sophie to Andrew's care, though of course the rest of us are perhaps wondering wtf he has to do with it.

'This gig is gonna rock'. Can you believe I was once told that I couldn't be a Neighbours scriptwriter and should leave it to the professionals. It's probably true, I probably couldn't write a line like that.

What's Summer's problem? Apart from the fact that last week I called her Sky? Kyle is watching chix going down into the squat. Oh, actually, Jade is their trainer. I guess she has a job doing it or something. They really splashed out on crutches for this show.

I guess for each episode Stefan Denis has to ask continuity and the director whether Paul has a false foot this time or not.

Jade is going into a masky face thing as Kyle grills her over some relationshippy stuff. I have finally more or less figured out who she is, but who is he? Hey we're at Eden University now. They have african huts there. Why is Summer guilty? Did she steal someone's identity? She seemed to once look very different. Now she is wearing a spray-painted garbage bag. She's really getting off on wandering tha campus. Red Cotton are my new favourite band! Forget Francolin, this is like, woe dude! Oh Paul likes them, I've gone off them. Sophie is seriously sucking some spiderman face there. Still no sign of the Toadster, man has that storyline been parked.

Then it ended. It wuz great! I can't wait for tomorrow'z.

Later: I did some research on Red Cotton and they are actually a Melbourne band called William and the Tells. It's not my job to make Neighbours keep a proper website and it's apparently not anyone's job at Neighbours to keep the website proper but why does the item on Red Cotton/William and the Tells begin:

On the rise local indy band William and the Tells, have been given an international boost with a guest role on Neighbours.

neighbours 2012

2012-01-13T18:24:00.006+11:00

I missed a lot of yesterday's episode because I had to go to the airport and pick Annabel up. This was not an issue (and of course it was lovely to see her), because I could easily catch up on the Neighbours site, but you know, that's not the way to really watch real TV - if you miss shit, you miss it, no biggie.

In fact, having watched probably about 4000 episodes of Neighbours in the last 25 years, I find that one of the best bits of watching Neighbours is to miss bits of it and make up the bits you miss. Who are the guys (are they really called Labby and Stav?) who host inbetween shows on 11 in the afternoons? This guy in a devil costume with his face superimposed on a baby's head looks so much like John Howard. The rest of the time he looks like woman I used to work with.

They should alternate the bit in the beginning when Lou bowls Sophie out with a scene where she bats. Don't you reckon? That would stop it seeming like it was the same mundane meandering day in day out.

Lucas and Freya Stafford are driving up to Eden. Freya Stafford is Tash's father's sister, and there are a lot of cushions on that couch. Kyle is being really pushy about the 'couple thing' with Jade. When Kyle says 'Jade, I fixed your bed, I didn't build you the Taj Mahal', I thought 'oh yeah, what happened to Taj, as played by Jaime Robbie Reyne?' Hey I didn't realise Sophie was a gothy bass chick. Where have I been all this time?

I wonder what Kyle is saying wrong here. He wants to take Jade down the Peninsula, I wonder what that means to her. Dr Rhys (if that really is him, I have no idea real idea what he looks like, I always just look at his fine new threads not his head) is pushing the limits of Kyle and Jade's so-called relationship. I am sure Jade looks very very different from how she looked last year, so I didn't recognise her at first. Jade is a bad name for a person, it's like being called Bore or Deadene. Wow, there's a Kyle-Jade showdown in the works.

Sophie is talking about a band called I think Red Coffin, or Red Copy, or Red Coughing. Andrew's first question in that absurd scottish-hungarian accent of his is, 'are they signed?' (Or it might have been, 'are they sane?').

I broke my rule of researching and discovered that Freya Stafford is not Tash's father's sister but his sister-in-law, or rather, the sister of Tash's dead mother. I had to check this out because when Tash's father got Freya Stafford into the car to go to Jan Juc the close-ups and so on seemed awfully incesty if they were actual siblings. So that's a relief.

Mind you Home and Away had unknown-sibling incest and no-one even discussed it once the scriptwriters decided that the two characters, who had previously been in a relationship, were actually long-lost brother and sister. Jade can't cut a pineapple or open a drawer, so now I feel a particular empathy with her. She appears to have scratched her toe with cutlery. I think she's broken it.

Andrew just looked at the facebook page of the band Sophie likes and they are called Red Cotton. But you know I'm sitting here with facebook too and there is no such thing, at least, there are a couple of bands called Red Cotton (shitty name!) but they don't have thousands of fans. Neighbours, you owe it to us to fake Neighbours life into the real world as much as possible!.

Andrew is getting Sophie to do an online media campaign for Red Cotton. Her favourite member of the band is 'the guitarist'. We didn't see any Toadie today so that was good.

The closing credits go too fast.

Anyway, it was a great 'ep'. Can't wait for next week's!

neighbours 2012

2012-01-12T18:24:00.007+11:00

The end of Sabrina featured Martin Mull.

Tash, a character I have never fully understood (last time I saw her she was faking pregnancy, she always seems to be bad or is she just troubled and will become benign, like Donald Duck?). I think she has been mentioned by name and appears in the opening credits (in the pool with Sky), but hasn't appeared. Freya Stafford is in this show now, I don't quite get her. Oh, Doctor Rhys (I got his name off the front page of the Erinsborough News) just mentioned Room 414, which means there are at least 414 rooms in the Erinsborough Hospital... doesn't it? Maybe not, that was a misapprehension.

I just looked Freya Stafford up on wikipedia and discovered that, although she had a bicycle accident two years ago, 'she did not sustain any major scaring on her face.'

neighbours 2012

2012-01-11T18:33:00.006+11:00

Lou, Tash, Caullum and Sophie are in the opening credits, and have not yet appeared in the show. What's going on? John Wood is in a flashback however - maybe he's playing Callum now. Susan is being a detective. Now she's talking to some guy called Kyle. He has a limp, I wonder who he is. Now Paul is doing the same kind of thing, or something. Now Kyle is arguing with some girl and now she's kissing him.* Apparently they have sex a lot, according to their brownshirted, browntied room mate. Actually i think that's the doctor who saved Chris. I have forgotten whatever I was meant to know about him.

Now Sonya is wearing a flannie.

So is Paul the only reporter on the Erinsborough News? I wonder if Paul has any kind of deja vu reporting on this whole pull-down-the-whole-of-Erinsborough thing, since that's what brought him back to town ten years ago or whenever. Great Paul line: 'Why does everyone get their hackles up when I show a skerrick of benevolence?' He's really happy about the shopping centre development being over. I am confused about this. He's quoting Bob Hawke too. He's talking about the little people to a white haired man whose head-back is the only thing we can see. Classic end-of-scene Neighbours where the background music in the pub ends in a kind of groan-scream.

* Jade. I don't know who she is.

Then I got up to feed the cats and my foot totally went to sleep. It was nice feeling it wake up for a while then it got really weird and ticklish. Has Karl had a hair transplant? He seems to have more hair than he used to. Another headback person just gave Karl and littledoctor a drink. He's going to visit his quadraplegic, illiterate mother and reading the newspaper. 'I'm-so-proud-of-you,' she says, the way people who can only use their mouths talk. 'You-must-be-the-star-of-the-surgery-program.' I wonder who he is, and why. A blonde lady is suggesting he run someone over with a bus to get into a surgery program or something. Rad.

Something weird happened with littledoctor. He needs to be taken down a peg or two. Too many long blacks, Karl thinks. But he is actually going to take the nobbling advice.

Then it ended. It was great! Can't wait for tomorrow's.

neighbours 2012

2012-01-10T18:33:00.005+11:00

Today as Toady discusses the strange business of his framing by Peter Noonan, he is wearing a scout uniform. The woman at reception at Noonan Enterprises was obviously going to help him out as she had a speaking role. Karl is apparently cohabiting with Sky now. He said she was very much a part of the household, at least he didn't say 'family'. He is looking younger. Here is someone called Aden, I wonder who he is (a nurse, but is he otherwise a character?). They are very concerned about this strange person called Chris, whose only decoration in his hospital room is his own ribs' x-ray. I see Chris is in Room 123. Does that mean there are at least 123 rooms in Erinsborough Hospital? There may even be 124. Sonya today is wearing a glittery cowboy jacket over a spotty shirt dress.

Paul is here. He appears out of breath. He appears to be Rupert Murdochesque, on a small scale, insisting on an interview on something or other for I assume his newspaper, or for Paultel.

I don't understand what the problem is with Susan and Karl but I have to say I am fairly not interested in the third major bust up of their Neighbours tenure. It's hard to know what incarnation of their family unit they'd be most likely to put on display, there must be a hundred. At least they still have that mental family portrait on display above the fireplace.

Toady's name is actually spelt J-a-r-r-o-d.

I really should look at the website or something to get some appropriate background to figure out why Karl and Susan have split up this time, but I'm worried I might get bored.

Then it ended. It was great! Can't wait for tomorrow's.

neighbours 2012

2012-01-09T18:32:00.005+11:00

I barely watched Neighbours in 2011 (Mia says it's because I don't get home before 6:30, but this is somewhat untrue). (Apart from anything else, I've been overseas for three months).

So now my new year's resolution is to watch as much Neighbours as humanly possible. Right now I am watching Toady and Sonya and, erm... someone else talking about Chris, who is collapsed in a garage apparently and who we have just been told is 'shutting down' and not breathing. Someone with a tie is looking after him. I don't know who Chris is so I'm not that invested in his life - except that of course he's another human being, however fictional. Sonya is wearing a very unusual white and green angel robe. Perhaps she died and Toady's imagining her a la Sixth Sense?

Toady is being very defensive of someone called Peter Noonan - perhaps over some Hermanan's Hermitans reformation? Someone (hereafter known as Woman Thing) has come to Kate's door looking for Lucas and I don't know who she is. Woman Thing who Kate wants to know has been dared by Kate to go out with her because Jade, whoever that is, and whoever Woman Thing is.

The interesting part of the Chris in the garage story is that it's a lot about a new supermarket development and corruption surrounding demolition and rebuilding. Toady has now just been visited by a scottish superintendent who has in fact insisted, not requested, that Toady come to the station to address some serious allegations.

All that happened between the opening credits and the first ad break!!!

Now Toady is being grilled by Scottie. Sky and Andrew (?) have gone to the hospital. Lucas was the man whose name I couldn't remember above, I have never quite worked out whether he was a good thing or a bad thing. Dr Red Shirt is now reminiscing about what he had to do in the garage with a stanley knife to keep Chris alive (actually by what we just saw I would have said to kill him, but according to reviews I read in the paper, it was to save his life). Now Kate and WT are drinking yellow cocktails. I give them (oh shit, I was going to say I give them 3 seconds before one of them spots a guy, but I got to that part of the sentence and they did). I got the sense Kate was about to come out or something but who knows. Another ad. Not much happened in that segment.

Then it ended. It was great! Can't wait for tomorrow's.

Grand Tour 2011 part three

2011-11-28T16:59:00.006+11:00

6 September 2011

The highs and lows and ups and downs of travel. I guess most Australians think of travel as a noble pursuit and we are conditioned somewhat to believe that a traveled person is a knowledgeable person and so on. People resign themselves to crappy jobs because they are saving money to travel, parents take their kids out of school to travel.

I am traveling for research purposes so I feel justified in all kinds of things but it does get me down all the hidden costs. For instance, the travel sim which I wisely procured months ago I just discovered does not fit an iPhone, despite the fact that the cover of its booklet features something that looks shockingly like an iPhone and despite the fact the booklet urges users to upgrade their phones etc. I suppose I should have checked before I left but I didn’t because that goes in the known unknown category for me – who would have thought there were different sizes of sim, or that the makers of the travel sim available at Australia Post wouldn’t bother packaging their product with a warning: does not fit iPhone 4 (or whatever kind of iPhone I have). So now I have to try and find another phone that will take this sim, I suppose. I am just annoyed at having to write, and think about, the word ‘sim’.

Another drag is replacing my suitcase. A few months ago Mia very ingeniously put wheels on an existing old suitcase to make something that looked very groovy. She always said it would only be properly usable once it was packed, and had weight in it to give it gravity. It was half-full for some time and it worked. What we didn’t consider was that full weight was going to push the wheels out sideways. This is a hassle and makes it precarious. Not only do I have to buy a new one, I have to get rid of the old one, and although I try hard not to get sentimental about inanimate objects, I am, often. Also, the other side of the traveling drag is always spending more money than you intend to, and getting into credit card debt etc while you’re doing it. If I was supersmart I might just be able to make this trip come out relatively even at the end, particularly considering the work I do on the way which I’m going to be paid for. But that’s just not going to happen, I would say, because of all the extra mobile phones and suitcases that are going to be left in my wake.

Fortunately, there’s an upside, which is that Tel Aviv is a freakin’ incredible city, and so far so great. I have done two site visits today, which were very productive indeed, and which inspired me so much I have already begun writing a new version of the conference paper for Baltimore. Aside from the work-related thing, the people are friendly (I met a man probably 10-15 years older than me in the street; he first asked me a question in Hebrew to which I could only say ‘sorry’ then later on my perambulations I ran into him again and we talked briefly about where I was from, what season it was there, and so on. He had a John Lennon t-shirt on and I didn’t catch his name and he obviously had my number because he recommended I go to Jaffa and the flea markets) and speak at least a little English. I had a sandwich from a café down the road and it was extraordinarily good. There was a little plastic container in the bag which I had assumed was something lame like dressing (the thing was pretty oily as it was – but that was fine) but in fact it was two big green olives. I was so pleased. It was only 26 shekels too which is AU$6.50 – not bad at all for something so substantial.

When I say ‘down the road’ I should explain that I am based for the day in an apartment on Dizengoff, a very trendlicious street. Because I was getting into TA at 3 am, I emailed my host Adam a few days ago and said – what time can I come by, because I don’t want to drag my suitcase around all day. He obviously didn’t want to deal with me in the morning (I wasn’t, by the way, proposing to come around at 3, but maybe wait at the airport for a few hours and then come by at a decent hour) so he said I should come to this apartment which he manages for relatives and which is temporarily empty. Magic! It’s pretty great, although being on the 4th floor takes some getting used to (walking up the stairs-wise).

7 September 2011 re: 6 September 2011

Yesterday was exceptional, and last night was particularly strange in some disappointing yet interesting ways, and some just very fascinating ways. I did do some fieldwork (the reason, after all, that I am here) for a couple of hours but it was just too hot to go out. Of course, I did procrastinate (in my defence, I had barely slept the previous 24 hours) until midday which, if Tel Aviv is like the rest of the world, is about the hottest part of the day. The other issue is the humidity. Actually, that’s the main issue because it’s not incredibly hot (31 today apparently).

As I mentioned Adam, my host who I found through AirBnB (a budget internet service whereby people stay in people’s spare rooms, etc) allowed me to hang out in his relatives’ apartment for the day. In the evening, I went to his house – where I assumed I would be thereafter staying – and he told me that in fact the Diezengoff apartment was vacant till the end of the week, till I wanted it. I decided I did want it. It’s closer to the places I want to study and it’s in a pleasant part of town. The only bummer was that I had lugged all my, well, luggage to Adam’s house and up three flights of stairs. But I guess he didn’t want to make this proposition without meeting me and/or gauging the situation. And ultimately I think it was a happy outcome (thus far).

Adam’s apartment was exotically adorned with unusual archaic pictures – what I took to be cartoons from fifty years ago and strange wood or lino cuts. Quickly it was revealed that this was in fact art he and a friend had created for a book they hoped to publish. In the interim they are publishing the art and accompanying stories online. There was one which particularly intrigued me which he said he would give me a copy of. I hope this happens. We talked for a while about my reasons for being in Tel Aviv and so on; he had some very interesting looking architecture-urban books which were unfortunately all in Hebrew (unfortunately for me, I mean). We discussed one particular author, Sharon Rotbard, who he thought would have some interesting ideas relevant to my research. I later discovered all of Rotburg’s work is in Hebrew too.

He then made a very generous offer to take me to a theatre event, to which he could get free tickets via his mother; a performance of the play Requiem which he said was an Israeli classic and which had toured constantly since its opening and was a vehicle for its central actor. I warned him that I may still be subject to jetlag but was nonetheless very happy to take this opportunity to do something cultural with what was 90% bound to be a fairly mundane stay in Tel Aviv.

The play is based on three stories by Chekhov, interwoven imaginatively, all with themes of death, but it was comedic in the main. English translation was provided by subtitles projected above the stage. I started to nod off about half an hour in. I managed to control myself and then the blackouts came fairly frequently. I had some odd hallucinations: at one point a huge white flower – perhaps a lily – unfolded on stage, at another point a big black genii appeared to advertise a cleaning product sorrowfully. I went completely to sleep in the last five minutes, so I have no idea what happened (Adam helpfully pointed out that the play could be found on youtube). I was very disappointed that I missed something that was so obviously enjoyable, but it was completely out of my control.

After this point we walked back to Adam’s house, then took my luggage and rode a bus to Diezengoff where I was once again ensconced.

I did not sleep extremely long but I slept well when I slept.

8 September 2011 re: 7 September 2011

In the morning I visited two more internal reserves, neither of which were particularly spectacular, but I dutifully photographed and otherwise documented them. I then did some laundry at the only coin Laundromat I had seen, on Remez. For some reason I thought I would be sneaky and not buy the washing powder (2 shekels for 2 cups) but instead went to the supermarket over the road and bought a packet of washing powder for 16 shekels. Smart stuff. Now I have washing powder to lug around the world along with everything else. I also have a large container of brown sugar – I decided I’d have porridge in the mornings.

Shekels are worth about 25c. It took me around a day to realise that all the coinage I kept being given was actual shekels, not whatever the cent equivalent of a shekel= dollar idea. I should have paid more attention, and for a while I kicked myself a little, and then later I realized that one reason why I got the impression that there were shekelcents (apart from the fact I’d never encountered a currency before that didn’t have a cent/penny element) was that in the shops some things are actually sold as (for instance) 15 shekels 99; that old trick. I imagine that if, for instance, you bought 100 cans of beans at 3 shekels 99 you might get the 100th one free, but as far as I can tell otherwise there’s no constructive or valid point to that absence of the mythical shekelcent.

In the afternoon, I decided to do something that might either be the smartest thing I did, or the stupidest thing I could do. I bought a bicycle. I took a train to Herzliya which is an outer suburb of some sort (that was all a big process, too, particularly as I got confused with the relevance of all the English numbers the woman who sold me the ticket was throwing at me – one was the ticket price, one was the platform for the train, and one was the time it came. I thought I was being charged 27 shekels for a return ticket but in fact it was only 8 shekels and it only went one way… don’t ask).

Once in Herzliya I walked and walked and finally found the shop I was looking for. I had done some research on this previously, and a few days in Tel Aviv had convinced me this was what was required to get around between my sites without taxis or hire cars (in some cases, hire cars might be useful, but essentially you keep having to go back to the car and then drive on; a bike gives you a better sense of the place and makes the movement easier).

They spent a lot of time at the shop showing me how to fold and unfold the bike. It was really hard to get my head around it; I’ve always had this problem with a sequence of tasks, ever since textiles in the first year of primary school. There were three employees trying to show me, and me not really getting any of it. They gave me the instruction booklet and sent me on my way (in a taxi, unfortunately, because they couldn’t sell me a bag to put it on the plane with, so they gave me the cardboard box, which I will now have at least until Ireland if not longer).

8 September

In the morning I utilized my new bicycle purchase to make a quick trip to a ‘green’ of the original Geddes design which Neal Payton talks about in the article he wrote which first roused my interest in internal reserves in Tel Aviv. The square in question is not an internal reserve at all, it has small roads all around it and it is clearly very successful and well-used. There is also a kiosk in it which serves coffee and small biscuits. It has an air raid shelter and an electricity substation, too.

While I’m sure this will not be the last time I tend to think of 8 September as a bit of a write-off. I spent a long time trying to get my phone to work. The issue was this:

When I left Australia – in fact some months before I left – I took the advice of many and bought myself a ‘travel sim’ from Australia Post. This is a sim card for your phone that ostensibly allows cheaper phone calls across the world, particularly the US. I didn’t take it out of its package or do anything with it at all until I got to Tel Aviv, mainly because I wanted to have use of my phone in Australia up to the last minute, and also because I just never trust these things and put them to the back of my mind.

What a surprise I got when I found myself with a huge sim and a tiny place to put it in my iPhone. The iPhone takes what is called a ‘microsim’, that is, a bit of gold connector chip stuff on a piece of plastic about half the size of a regular sim. I went online straight away and found out that not only was the iPhone microsim the way of the future, there will never (this is what they say) be a prepaid microsim ever. However – I can’t remember how I got to this stage in my research – there was another way.

You could physically cut your maxisim down to microsim size.

I must say, once I had done it – going by the admittedly slightly vague instructions online which were for different-looking sims from different companies – I felt a glorious sense of achievement. I sat there at the table in the Dizengoff apartment whittling down this piece of plastic with my new swiss army knife (I knew that thing would come in handy, though I hadn’t for some reason considered this) and it worked perfectly. Except it didn’t: while I could see it was accepting the sim, there was another problem. It still didn’t work. I got online (how did travelers ever do anything before 1995?) and irately asked the folks at Travelsim what the hell was going on. Guess what: I had to contact my provider and get them to unlock my phone. This felt wrong, and what if they refused? After all, it’s still really their phone. I had to send instructions to Mia, who had to call Telstra, who said it would take 24 hours. Drag! In the meantime I figured something else out. I had wifi in the apartment, and I had skype on my computer, and I could at a pinch call people on their phones and talk to them. Well, I tried it once with an important contact who couldn’t hear me at all (that felt bad) but I later realized this was more to do with the strength of the signal than anything. It’s 2011, 150 years since the invention of the telephone, and long-distance communications abound everywhere, yet something as simple as making a phone call is a very, very complex thing because in the everyday sense we’re detached from the mechanicals of it.

Later in the evening when it was no longer so hot I did a quick survey of some of the reserves I’ve become interested in. I got disoriented, it got dark, I went back to Dizengoff.

9 September

This was the day I had to shift accommodation from Dizengoff to Nakhmani. That was fine; I had to get a taxi with my case and my bicycle box (I left the bicycle itself back at the apartment because I was planning to meet Nahoum Cohen, author of a new book on the Geddes plan, just near there). Adam advised me on how to get back to Dizengoff by bus, a process which worried me considerably until I was actually on the bus and I realized how incredibly simple and easy it was. So simple and easy in fact we were where we were meant to be before I knew it and I missed a stop, but that’s OK.

Nahoum was very interesting and gave me a copy of his book Urban Conservation as well as a promise to send the pdf of his new book, An Urban Miracle. We spoke for an hour or so and he showed me on the map where all of the Geddes ‘greens’ were in the original plan. He was dismissive of the street design outside the Geddes plan and I can see why; it loses the human scale outside the original plan.

I had some discussion with Adam about his Nakhmani apartment. I said I did not feel he should have to withdraw from the apartment altogether and if he wanted to stay he should. He decided to leave on the Friday night (he went to his parents’ place) but said he would come back on the Saturday.

September 10

Finally, I got in touch with one of my first Tel Aviv contacts, Irit Solzi, of the Movement for Israel Urbanism. My phone still not working, I was able to utilize Adam’s superior wifi to make a skype call. Her husband got on the call to tell me the best way to get to their home by bicycle, and it was quite a hike – he said it would take me about an hour, and they were expecting me in an hour, having invited me for what they were calling breakfast (at 11 am).

In fact, a lot of the route traversed was places I was fairly familiar with, though I did take a couple of wrong turns trying to fit together my comfort zones. I left a little later than I anticipated – probably 10.30 – but I got there at 11.30, and they were very impressed that I had made the trip so successfully (so was I). It didn’t hurt that it was a Saturday morning and therefore there were absolutely no people around (as Mia said, not having seen it, like Sunday in Australia in the 1950s, and she was right, though I would extend that up to at least the 1970s).

Irit and her husband Nakhman live in a beautiful two-storey apartment on the 7th or something like that floor of a high-rise building which, she said, until recently had a beautiful sea view until three more towers were built closer to the sea. They and their son Barak (I almost told him this was my dog’s name but it didn’t quite fit the conversation) who is a soldier, presumably a draftee, in a Simpsons t-shirt had put together a fine breakfast including an omelette with red peppers in it, some French cheese (Irit and Nakhman had just returned from Paris where they had been helping their daughter find a place to live) bread (including a small loaf which Barak told me was like eating a brick) and olives, and of course plenty of coffee. And what I wanted most by the time I got there, lots of iced water.

In the afternoon I hid from the heat again and, as is now the commonplace, fell asleep about 8 pm, waking at about 2, and dozing again till 4 or 5.

September 11

This was a day of great events and adventure, and I got to see a bunch of things it simply never would have occurred to me to seek out but which were really extraordinary. A long time ago my mother had suggested that if I was going to go to Israel I should seek out her friend Gail who lives in Jerusalem, and who might show me around. I had no special interest in Jerusalem (my only interest in Israel was Tel Aviv and Patrick Geddes’ plan for it, as it manifested on the ground today). But Jane assured me Gail was very nice and also it seemed silly to go so far and then not go a little further for the sake of experience so on Sunday I ventured to the bus station (my initial intention had been to go on the train by Gail, by email, warned me against it as being too slow and archaic – it takes 2 ½ hours by train, and an hour by bus). The Tel Aviv bus station is a pretty zany place – it’s floors and floors of a cross between a shopping mall and a flea market, and then on the 6th floor there are the buses – I’m still not sure how they achieved that. Somehow – who knows how, probably something to do with the fact that my computer still has Melbourne time on it and I’m perennially doing sums and I wake up every morning at about 4 – I contrived to get to the bus station an hour early. I saw that the bus was signed as leaving at 10, and I thought ‘can I really trust a bus company that thinks it’s an hour earlier than it is?’ and then I realized it was only an hour earlier than I thought it was, and I guess other questions needed to be asked then, but instead I just got on the bus. They had sold too many tickets, so I and about five others stood in the aisles. I noticed that there were a huge amount of soldiers on the bus (you barely think of them as soldiers, they’re all 19) and while I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to stand up for me, I would expect them to stand up for ladies, but no, ladies stood too.

So I was there at Jerusalem bus station not an hour early to meet Gail because for some reason it was late getting in – there was a traffic jam, if you want the consequence of the reason but I suppose not the real reason – but about ¾ of an hour early. I wish I had a rollicking adventure as a result but actually I just read a novel I had picked up as a 3 for $10 deal in Camberwell a few weeks before, it was actually quite good, Start from Here by Sean French. Then Gail showed up and took me to lunch where she works, at the Hebrew University. I must say that quite apart from Gail’s generosity in showing me around Jerusalem her perspective on the city where she lives and the problems it has was fascinating. She and her husband came to Israel (from the US) in the late 1970s and ended up in Jerusalem soon afterwards. Jerusalem has, of course, a violent recent history and a swathe of ethnic problems – why call them ethnic problems, what I really mean is religious problems, or I suppose problems caused by religious intolerance. Which really just boils down to: problems caused by religion. Gail talked to me of how there is one route within Jerusalem which she necessarily drives on a relatively regular basis, which takes her through an orthodox neighbourhood wherein she fears that, for instance, if her car broke down and she had to get out of it, she would be attacked by local people as immodest (for, for instance, having bare shoulders). This is just varieties of Judaism. There are also of course Arab neighbourhoods, etc, which are also on occasion sites of violence.

After we left the Hebrew University we visited the old city. In the last decade or so the southern (? I’ll have to check that, perhaps it was just my askew orienting of myself) section of the city, a slum area Gail says, was demolished and instead an upmarket mall built, including some rebuilt houses which – curiously and not unattractively – retain all the numbering on the bricks which was used to reassemble them. There are restaurants and car parking. From there you can enter the old city some of which has also been rebuilt – in various ways – and some of which is extremely authentic.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is quite something. Gail had a guide book which described it as dank and malodorous (or words to that effect) but in fact there was some 19th century skylights and other lighting, and it was bustling. It is however notoriously never cleaned or fixed up because so many religious groups lay claim to it that to fix a bit of it is to make a territorial move.

There are I think the four final stations of the cross within the church of the holy sepulchre, though to a nonbeliever like me it all seems a little too convenient – for instance, Christ was crucified on a hill just inside the door of the church – some hill – which you get to by some narrow stairs, at the foot of which is a stone replacing the stone which he ostensibly was anointed, after death. The ‘real’ stone was accidentally smashed and a new one bunged in a couple of centuries ago. People are slobbering all over it. They are kissing the thing and then wiping their saliva off as if they don’t know whether to get frisky with the stone or stay respectful; ‘I just want to make you happy, stone slab.’ Then there is his tomb, which is in the next room and has a big queue of people dying to get in there. I don’t think you could really call it his tomb if you don’t think he’s dead; it’s not like saying here’s his bed but he never slept in it; it’s like saying here’s his dinner but he never ate it, maybe not quite that either – how about this was his favourite book but he never read it?

A little way away is the Western Wall with all the notes in it. Even though the idea is that one must be reverent to the wall and no cameras, women must be covered etc (Gail actually put a note in the wall, and to do so she had to wear a shawl) I am sure some people have gone down there with one of those pincer-on-a-stick arrangements to put their notes in; there are notes higher than anyone is ever likely to be. I also saw men leaning, weeping into the wall which is I suppose understandable if you think it’s a hotline to the lord’s presence but at the same time, you would surely be mindful of getting on god’s nerves if, as is apparently suggested, things that happen at the WW are more profound than things that just happen in the day to day between humans and God.

Then we went to the Burnt House. This was a hoot. I read about the Burnt House somewhere – on a bit of handout literature or maybe a plaque – the site of an archelogical discovery, the foundations of a house probably burnt down by the romans and in which was found not only a bunch of kitchen items but also a spear and a young woman’s arm (well, the bones from it).

It cost 25 shekels to go to the Burnt House. I didn’t realise this would not only be the house, but also a multimedia extravaganza, one of those things you are glad you saw only because otherwise you’d wonder for a long time what it was. Then once you saw it you weren’t really likely to be glad you saw it because it was kind of stupid. It began with some footage on a television screen mainly about the calamities befalling people in Jerusalem a couple of thousand years ago, with visuals clearly taken from a 1960s sword n’ sandal. Then the most interesting bit – for less than 20 seconds – footage of the liberation of Jerusalem in ’67. Then a big screen came down and some dubbed (into English) actors played out a hypothetical about how the family who lived in the house might have died. The acting was poor, and the dubbing was too, and the subtext was why can’t we all just get along, and zealots are bad. As I said to Gail later one ludicrous element of the whole thing (there were tons) was that the playlet unfolded in a wide-screen backdrop of a large room, yet the room was apparently in the house whose foundations we were sitting in front of, and even if all those rooms were combined and the ‘room’ we were seeing was an upstairs room taking the width of the whole house, doesn’t matter, it was still way too big. Anyway, long story slightly shorter than it might be, the Burnt House thing was weird and silly.

Then we went along the Corta (?) the remains of a roman main road which has a number of intact columns along it and so forth. It was pretty decent.

Sorry about all these ‘then wes’ but then we went up to City Hall and I met Gail’s husband Brian, who showed me the new additions to City Hall and the way old buildings had been pressed into service and new buildings put alongside them. Most of Jerusalem – very few exceptions, I saw a couple – is built of the same stone; it’s amazing to think that there’s so much of this stone, still. The stone is the reason, I think, that the City Hall blends together pretty well despite being a number of buildings of so many different heritages and styles. Brian and Gail and I took the new tramline a few stops to visit the market (the building of the tram, aka the light rail, has apparently been a complete nuisance to every Jerusalemite for the last ten years – disruptive and annoying – now it’s massively popular. Perhaps people feel a sense of ownership after having been inconvenienced by it for so long. Also, at the moment there’s no ticket scheme in place, so it’s free.) The market we went to was very lively and colourful, though there was precisely nothing that I wanted. We had a coffee.

Gail took me back to the bus terminal in her car, and on the way she drove me past a small encampment where the parents of a kidnapped Israeli soldier were keeping a vigil outside the prime minister’s house. We also saw the legacy of some of the housing protest encampments and – Gail said this was a new thing and a novelty – manoeuvres being undertaken by orthodox soldiers.

I got back on the bus and came back to Tel Aviv. Jerusalem had been as hot as Tel Aviv but much more bearable for me because not as humid. As soon as I got back to Tel Aviv I knew it, it was sultry and I walked back to Nakhmani very weary but… I don’t know how to end this diary entry truthfully without sounding like a story from the early days of high school.

September 12

The last day of my Tel Aviv sojourn. I had big plans and they fell to dust when I got to Rothschild and then took a wrong turn, something I had been doing all week – it’s a mental block and something to do with my orientation or lack of it. I was planning on visiting Jaffa and the flea market. I was about 3 km in the other direction before I realized what I had done. I resolved to press on though and returned a different way, always assuming I was heading to Jaffa. By the time I was at a point at which I had to get back to Nakhmani and get ready to go to the airport, I finally found myself on the map – I was probably about ten minutes from Jaffa. But I wasn’t going to get there, I had to return.

I was, as usual, depressingly and oppressively hot.

Adam called me a taxi. We’d had a discussion the previous day about the possibility of me taking a taxi to the nearest railway station and then getting a train to the airport. The one thing that really decided me against this was a vision of having to put all my stuff through the metal detectors at the station, which would be such a drag. Also the strain of not knowing if I was at the right platform and so on. Also the heat. So there were three things.

And I was doubly glad I didn’t get the train because it would have reduced my time at the airport and I needed that time to be given all sorts of stupid runaround by security staff who kept us all waiting for too long in a long queue (except they would periodically go through the queue and pluck out the people who really had a plane to catch soon, and get them through the system; defeats the whole purpose really). I suppose if I hadn’t been waiting in a queue for over an hour to get my things x-rayed I would have found it more amusing the elderlyish American couple who were being given a hard time because when they were asked the standard questions – has anyone given you a gift – the woman had said yes. The gift in question was unlikely to be an explosive, as it was a necklace made out of bits of shell or perhaps teeth, but then what do I know about explosives. That they owned up to having accepted a gift was enough for them to get if not the full monty then a fair bit of monty, and the man made it worse by somehow getting one of their enormous bags – suitcase sized bags – past the x-ray machine without putting it through. How or why he did this are both mysteries to me. The fact that somehow he could do it is also, it just occurred to me, not a little problematic, too – how many people got their luggage through without it being x-rayed? Anyway, he was ordered in no uncertain terms by the teenage (they all were) security officer to take his bag and put it through the x-ray machine, and he did and came back with just his bag and none of the others, and junior sargeant said where is your bag sir, and the man said ‘you have it’ and then his wife said something like, ‘oh my goodness you’ve left it over there’ and the Unattended Luggage was just sitting over in some other part of the security area.

Look, if I was going to bomb a plane which I wouldn’t, I would find another way to do it; I guess that’s the main thing, it’s a deterrent. But it still seems a little ridiculous the way all this is run. I had my passport checked by two young women, one of whom was an Instructor (said her badge) and the other of which – much taller, though that’s irrelevant – the Instructee. They laughed over my passport in Hebrew and said something that sounded like either ‘good week’ or ‘good wig’. I wonder if they were just saying that in my 7 year old passport photo I looked like I was wearing a wig. Shorty actually apologised for speaking to her colleague in Hebrew (kind of showed a guilty conscience, I would say) I mean it is their language.

So, all in all I was very glad I got to the airport early, because I had a lot of crapola to endure before I got on the plane, which is where I am as I write these words. Actually being on the plane is crapola too, as it is packed and my feet are killing me. I usually take my shoes off on the plane in this case I couldn’t because I didn’t have anywhere to put them (or for that matter my carry-on luggage). I could be wrong but I think at least one maybe more of the toilets are broken (the aisle’s full of people) and it’s still really warm, for some reason, even though we are now flying over Germany (wish they’d open a window). I’m pretty sure that the minute I encounter some proper European September weather my hands will return to their normal size and I will lose this eczema which has been plaguing me for the last couple of days and got particularly worse today, probably because of the stress of the security and flying and not being able to find Jaffa and having swollen, throbbing feet. No wonder we all love to travel.

September 13

Dublin is most unusual, particularly O’Connell St, the huge long wide central street, which is filled constantly with people shuffling up and down. I don’t know what they are doing or where they are going…

18 September

Howth is a long way to come from Melbourne to be somewhere a lot like Williamstown. I am writing this istting at a street café called Il Panorama that boasts Australian and Italian maps on the windows. They serve lamingtons, but I have yet to try one, as they seem entirely unwilling to acknowledge that I am here. All day I have heard Australians chattering amongst themselves – there seems to be Australians everywhere. I suppose this is a good thing. I almost spoke with two women who were trying to glean some details of one of the staff at the Castle Hotel which I was checking out of this morning. I almost did that thing I hated people doing to me: asked them ‘where you from?’

This morning I picked up a car from Thrifty. So far today I have not gone anywhere I could not have gone by train or bus, so perhaps I made a mistake doing this, but it seemed empowering at the time. Well, the ¾ of an hour spent waiting in a queue (one of those Irish queues where anyone can but in at any time if they happen to) didn’t feel that empowering. It seems it was ‘one of those mornings’ where everything that could go wrong, did go wrong and so on, and indeed when I finally got to the counter I witnessed one of the staff bending double under the counter to briefly cry.

Actually, the reason I booked a car was that the plan initially was to go to Cork but Cork ultimately proved too difficult and I kept finding more places to visit in Dublin, so this was how it ended up. I had to move out of the Castle Hotel anyway and that suited me as the person in the next room was dying of lung cancer, or at least, if it was a hospital and not a hotel and someone had asked me ‘what’s the person in the next room got?’ that would be my prognosis. Instead apparently he was on holiday. The Castle Hotel was OK but a bit gloomy even though it was very clean. I still can’t quite work out how it worked – it seemed to be about four or five four-storey buildings joined together, and then behind that a whole extra array of rooms, joined together with corridors so twisty and turny that it was impossible to tell after a while which direction you’d gone in. I was still taking wrong turnings four days into my stay there. I have booked myself into a hotel in Dun Laoghaire, probably mainly because I know how to say it. This is for one night only because tomorrow I am going to Belfast, and then onto the ferry, to Liverpool. In Liverpool I will spend a day at Port Sunlight and a day in the archives looking at Charles Reilly’s stuff, i.e. I am not going to see much Liverpool. I don’t care too much about that I have to say. Then the following day (Wed) I am going to London.

18 September 2011

Greetings from the Kebab Klub, Marino where I am presently sheltering from rain en route to hand delivering some survey requests to houses around a site I am interested in. I have a strong feeling that I am very likely to get the place wrong entirely, because it is one of those formula pattern designs where the streets cross a circle and for all I know it is quite possible to have two corners of the same street. I have already come to understand that a street can surround a park in Marino as well as go through it, as well as not be called a street but a park. This does not bode well. I am of course as per Tel Aviv consistently heading off in the wrong direction to places with such blithe assurance I sometimes wonder if perhaps I am not a bee at heart. It would make sense. The sun is always in the wrong place for me.

(Soon after: this prediction was absolutely correct, and not helped by the fact that Brian Road, which was the marker I was hoping for, was the one road with no street sign). Now I am in Bram(‘?)s Café also in Marino just sheltering from the rain/filling in the time before I hit the road again with not much to do now until the evening and Belfast/Liverpool. Bram Stoker was, according to the menu at Bram(‘?)s, born across the road from the café, though there is no decore indication of any further acknowledgement of Stoker’s oeuvre. Instead, the walls are covered with scenic images of old Dublin and pictures of James Joyce, etc. And that I suppose is all fine.

It’s 2pm and the rain is pretty diagonal. I have a bag of things I need to get rid of, including the bag, by this evening. It mainly contains plums, but there is also an apple and a banana. And now it is completely, utterly bucketing down. I am shortly going to huddle in the doorway of the Marino library to see if they’ve left their wifi on, and whether perchance I can thereby discover whether there’s a gallery or a museum or something open where I can while away my time. It’s annoying to have to while away one’s time when there is so much more work that could be done, though I suppose I should be grateful I have managed alright to this point in Dublin with very little rain indeed, and I certainly was lucky to accidentally wander into this place, open on a Sunday which seems rare around the suburbs. I will even forgive them for the coffee which I suspect is instant, though they have a coffee machine. I am not sure what to make yet of the member of the waiting staff who just made a mobile phone call while seated at a table with her hand over her mouth deliberately distorting her voice presumably so no-one could understand what she was saying. Of course the loud voice distortion is what made me notice she was making a phone call.

A few hours later – by the way the doorway of the Marino library did work for wifi but then it started raining! Now I am in a café known for some reason as Lynams Hotel. I have to pick up my luggage and head to Connolly Station in a second.

My feelings then on Dublin: I find it depressing. It’s full of people yelling and pushing each other. I suppose much of my Dublin time has been spent in the centre of the city which is also full of European tourists whose guttural languages I can’t pick. There are little accidental bits I occasionally happened upon which were very attractive, but they are far between. I will admit to being a bit enthralled on discovering that part of the station platform I was on (Lansdowne St) actually went over a canal. What these canals are for (drainage?) is hard to fathom.

Later that evening was spent getting to Belfast and then getting a ferry to Liverpool. It was one of those things. I read and slept in the children’s play area (I was a ‘foot passenger’, a bit like a foot soldier maybe, it means I didn’t have a cabin because I didn’t see too much difference between sharing a cabin with three strangers and sharing some other kind of public open space with more strangers) as there were no children on board as far as I could see.

19 September 2010

The hotel I am checked into, at Edge Hill, I chose solely on the grounds that it was close to Port Sunlight (as its advertising stated). It is not. In fact, it is close to what looks like a total bombsite and a long main street of boarded up shops and miserable people. A lot of the husks of houses have for sale signs on them, which is about the only optimism I can see.

(big gap here to be filled shortly)

10-16 October

Nothing in a foreign land beats a family connection. For all I know there are lesser degrees of separation between myself and other Dutch people than is true of the De Wits, the Brouwers and the Peeks, but I am a distant speck on the horizon of familial relation to those people by dint of being married to a Schoen from Zijlen, a suburb of Utrecht, and I’m very happy about that, not just for itself, but in the last week because I had an opportunity to spend time with Jan and Jenny de Wit and their clan. Jan’s mother is Mia’s father’s cousin, and both the mothers in that equation are fortunately still alive and well. Jan and Jenny were ideal hosts to me – just as they were to Mia five or so years ago – and they not only made me feel at home from the moment I arrived from the Newcastle ferry, they were consistently generous and accommodating for the six days I was lucky enough to stay with them. If you think this sounds obsequious, you weren’t there, were you.

Knowing my interest in urban history, Jan was keen to make sure I saw a number of important elements of the region in which they live (they are in Loosdrecht, which is near Hilversum) and even indulged me to the extent of driving me to Nagele, the ‘most modern town in Europe’ circa 1950. He also made sure I saw some Dudok classics, such as the immense and immaculate 1931 Hilversum Town Hall: a sight to behold (I won’t bother describing it, just put in some pics)

as well as a Dudok school and even a delightful little kiosk which is now being used as a rather fancy billboard for a local real estate agent. He also took me to Ouderwater (check) where his and John Schoen’s mothers came from; I was weighed to make sure I wasn’t a witch (this is an Ouderwater specialty. Apparently, some important noble was so disgusted by the underhand weighing practices of surrounding towns he declared only Ouderwater was to be the official weighing station. I tried to toy with the official who quizzed me as to how I had arrived in the Netherlands – she presumably expected me to say that I ‘flew’ which was her cue to ask if it was on a broomstick – not that I was being a smartarse, I just didn’t know it was an inquisition. But anyway, I have the certificate to say I am not a witch. Jan and I also went to the rope museum: Ouderwater was a centre for ropery for centuries, with a family business half a millennium old still on the edge of town. Jan and I were there with two deaf people, so since his English is very good, and theirs irrelevant since they were deaf, we were able to watch explanatory videos in English. There was a very nice film from the 1950s about the process of hemp harvesting and preparation, and another more recent one about the current process. The woman in charge of the museum gave the game away somewhat by admitting (off her own bat) that 90% of the rope they made now was from plastic. But Jan and the deaf man were able to participate in the creation of their very own piece of rope from hemp on a 19th century (I think) machine. I was sort of amazed that rope could be so interesting. One of the things about Ouderwater was that it was at the heart of a network of waterways. Hemp is grown in water but that’s not really the point: the point is that you could ship your rope all over the place quickly from there, so manufacture could be efficiently and economically based there.

Jan is, frankly, obsessed by his own boat. He has been sailing for I think seven years and he clearly loves it deeply. So many places we went to in his Volvo he would say as an afterthought ‘we have been here in our boat’ I finally had to say, are there any places you haven’t been in your boat? And he laughed, so I guess the answer – in that particular region anyway – is no. But I saw his boat – at time of writing it is docked in a small harbour and won’t see much action until after winter – and it is something I can see someone getting a bit obsessed about.

After we went to the modern 1950s town of Nagele (it rhymes with the way an Australian would say ‘sparkler’) we went to Urk, which is 10km away. Nagele is a new town on the second of the big new lands that were (and I suppose are, constantly) drained and are below sea level; Urk, however, has the odd distinction of being an old town in the Nieuwe Ladnt (check) because it was a fishing island; now it’s just a point on the edge of a big land mass, but not ‘just’, because it’s also very beautiful and olde worlde, I know that’s a flippant way to describe something and I don’t mean it’s kitsch; it’s very pleasant, let’s leave it at that. At the sea edge there is a small square with a statue of a miserable waiting woman, and a list of all the names on plaques around the square of the men who died while fishing. Many of them were clearly intergenerational members of the same family. Jan told me – and we saw it to be true in the case of at least two people – that the men of Urk generally wore an earring in one ear, so they could be identified as Urk men if they were to drown. Quite extraordinary.

Another thing we did – this time it was Jan, Jenny and me – was go to the museum of mechanical musical instruments. This is in an old church in Utrecht, and it has an astonishing array of machines. Many of them were either home entertainment units with large metal discs which played tunes via punched holes which plucked a comb of wire teeth; some were even hand-cranked portables, which I suppose you could take out with you on a picnic and play tunes for fun much like you can now with an iPod and speakers, only the iPod has seventy million tunes and hand-cranky probably only had about seven. But just to put things in perspective, the version of Word I’m writing this in doesn’t recognize the word ‘iPod’ as a word.

The museum has two parts. Upstairs you can wander and look at various pieces. My gripe then – being, as usual, impatient and lacking the bigger picture – was that I wanted to know what the things sounded like. Well, the downstairs part did just that. This is where you get a 1-hour guided tour of various functional examples of the museum’s specialties. First, we got some wind-up machines – forerunners to the gramophone, really. Then we got some toys – these were excellent, particularly the little rabbit which came out of a cabbage (to a quiet tune), looked around, dropped its ears back and took fright and hid. I bought a postcard featuring this rabbit and a number of others which makes me assume they have more in the museum. It was so good!  The next thing if I remember rightly was player pianos. This reminded me of when I was a child and my grandparents lived next door to a couple of a similar age (to my grandparents) who had a player piano, which was great fun. Only these player pianos were mega and sick. One was a grand piano, with a piano roll that was not created mechanically by someone punching holes in paper like they were playing Battleships, but an actual ‘recording’ of a famed pianist, who played the tune on a recording instrument. The result was then more natural.

The second apparatus demonstrated was a 1910 marvel which was not only a piano but also an array of three violins which played mechanically on (I think) the same principal.

From this, we went to the mechanical organs. These were huge and powerful, and in fact some of the silly people there were putting their fingers in their ears, it was so long since they’d heard loud music. They were elaborately carved and magnificent.

I imagine the young man who took us on this tour did it all day long, but he still made it all seem very fresh and thrilling, like he was discovering stuff too, which I bet he wasn’t. That’s a talent in itself. But I was very pleased to have seen all this.

The upshot of it was (I know I sound like a travelogue) I could have spent another week in the Netherlands and still not seen half of what I wanted to see. As it was on the Friday I ‘had’ to meet with an academic contact, which entailed taking two trains to central Amsterdam and finding my way around – I was exceptionally proud of myself being able to do this – but it did also seem like a bit of a waste of a day, which I could otherwise have spent being driven around by Jan some more (!!!) and also riding bikes with Edwin. But you can’t have everything. And it’s good to leave wanting more. Probably.

Sweden

I had two action-packed days in Sweden, almost entirely in Gavle. The first thing about Gavle is knowing how to pronounce ‘Gavle’; most seem to favour ‘Yayful’ though some jokey shop names, etc in the place itself refer to ‘Gefle’, I have no idea what that’s about.

It is a town that in some ways reminds me a bit of Ballarat, except the buildings have a few more storeys. It’s a university town (so is Ballarat) though the university – a former army barracks – is closer to Gavle ‘centrum’ than the university in Ballarat is (to Ballarat).

I stayed in the Gavle Hotell (I spent too long wondering if a ‘Hotell’ was different from a hotel. I decided it wasn’t.) The Gavle Hotell has one serious flaw, which is that its wifi is terrible. Otherwise, it’s a great place, which does an amazing breakfast on a Sunday morning. On a Monday morning (i.e. this morning as I write this) it does the leftovers from the breakfast the day before, which at first I thought was a sign of bad things to come – i.e. it’s all downhill from Sunday – but then I decided Monday was just a dip, because Sunday in Gavle is pretty unhappening, with the shops open for almost no time at all and so on.

My Sunday in Gavle was happening because I visited Satra, which is the place I came a long way to see and it didn’t let me down. A marvelous 60s-70s suburb of greenery, road-pedestrial separation, green open space and so on. I had a long walk in there and really loved it. The next day, I had a brief meeting with relevant (and very, very pleasant) people at Gavle University who told me that some parts of Satra were perceived as ‘bad’, I don’t know why, they didn’t know why (I think because it’s rental) and some parts were perceived as good (bungalows, owner-occupiers). It’s good to see the same old crap replicates wherever you are in the world. Apart from the wifi I’d recommend Gavle to anyone.

Now something else I’d recommend to anyone: the Viking line ferry to Helsinki from Stockholm in mid-October.

[1] Admittedly I had the lowest of low expectations. I got the cheapest cabin (you have to get a cabin – unlike the ferry Belfast-Liverpool where you can sleep in the children’s play area) which I was (and perhaps in truth still am, though I haven’t seen them – if they do show up that’s a bad omen, they were too busy drinkin’ and yellin’ to even put bags in the cabin) to share with two others. But the two others, as indicated within those brackets, are nowhere to be seen, just like my Newcastle – Amsterdam ferry. And in addition (1) I made a wonderful music video for New Estate, which I am trying to upload to YouTube as I type but probably won’t be able to, but still it’s great – film of people, birds, land, buoys and water as the ferry sailed out of Stockholm and (2) the complimentary Viking Buffet – surely either a government requirement or a company precaution but otherwise created to make sure people don’t get stunningly drunk on the boat – is mega. The pickled cabbage, the spelt salad, the beetroot – even the kidney beans, which I suspect were/are just kidney beans out of a can, were grouse. The whole thing rocked! Well, the ‘starters’ particularly. When I got to the ‘warm dishes’ really the only thing I could/would eat were the potatoes, the rest was baby pig’s heads etc. So I just went back to the starters and got more salad. It was/is rad. And complimentary!!!

You know everyone in continental Europe (so, like, 8 or 9 people out of uberbazillion) have said that I came at the wrong time, ‘if you’d been here a few weeks earlier…’ I see their point, but the weather’s been great – if anything, a little too warm – things like the ferries have not been bonkers, and while I think I made little errors anyone could’ve – like, for instance, booking to fly to Stockholm on the first day of a week long school break – who could have known? – I’m nevertheless chuffed at how the Europe stuff has turned out. Sure, I wake up every night in a state of panic over money and so on, and the TV is dreadful, and I never get to go to anything touristy (that’s a plus and a minus) (and not entirely true – for instance, Jan and Jenny took me to the musical machine museum) but on the whole, I can’t complain. I will complain – if only to myself – yet, truthfully I can’t. I do, but I have no basis for it. Anyway, I shouldn’t speak/write too soon, as there are quite a few wretchedly drunk fools stumbling around and a few raised voices etc, amongst monstrously large people, so it could all go pear shaped as they already are, pretty soon. We shall see.

Four hours later: doing my typical ‘bit’ of waking at 1 am, I find that the place is a lot more like the hotel in The Shining and the sinking Titanic than any last days of Sodom. The pokies twinkle, crazy radio-styled blether goes on in empty café rooms, a few teens and middle aged men with insane hairstyles wander around (I am aware none of these things happened in the Shining hotel or on the Titanic, but that’s what it’s like when there are no people, trust me, and that’s most of the time).

A couple of days ago in Gävle I finally found a copy of Game of Thrones. This is a book I semi-planned to take away with me as an airplane time killer but as it came closer to the time to leave all I could find were its sequels. It is the absolute antithesis (??) of the kind of thing I would normally read but ‘everyone’ (i.e. the one or two podcasts I enjoy from the US) is saying the tv adaptation of the novel series of which this is the first is the best tv of 2011, and by implication the novels are extraordinary too. OK. So in this Gävle bookshop there was an English section and there was Game of Thrones. I’m about 40 pages in so far and I am (1) irritated by the blah conservative schlock of the imagery/setting/slightly misspelled names and words to make an ‘alternaverse’/forsoothery of the whole thing that I am set to give up. But overridingly I think the major problem is that I have no capacity to follow any of this huge range of characters, introduced in the first few pages. There must be forty of them already and I can’t remember any of their names (no, wait, one’s called Jon) let alone have the slightest idea who they are or why I should care. They are apparently being introduced in vignettes; I have no idea whether this is setting up a story or what. The main thing is, I just can’t follow it, and when you’re holding up a massive paperback which you have to pinch top and bottom or the cover will tear away from the spine, it just seems daunting. And I’ve never liked fantasy novels. Perhaps I didn’t know that as this might be the first I have read, outside Tolkien-Narnia stuff. (But you know, I wasn’t expecting fine lit, I was just expecting a gripping read with goodies and baddies, and so far it’s just dithery rubbish). Look, at the end of the day,[2] millions have loved this so I owe it to the people to stick with it.

Next morning (18 Oct)

I am up at 7ish then emerging from my cabin it suddenly becomes 8ish, which I take to mean Finland is in the next timezone along from Sweden but this information hadn’t penetrated my mobile phone (which I am presently using to tell the time as I dropped my watch on the floor of my room in the Hotell Gavle yesterday morning and the strap broke). News has filtered through from Melbourne that my publisher Martin has had a brain haemmorhage but that it was the ‘best haemmorhage ever’ and he is expected to make a full recovery in the next month. In a manner of speaking, this is news I didn’t need to have at this point, because by the time I get back it’ll all be back to normal, ‘how have you been’ ‘I had a brain haemmorhage but it’s ok now’. I don’t know, he told me a few months ago he had an all-day meeting or something and it turned out to be meditation to quit smoking, so maybe a ‘brain haemmorhage’ is something similar.

While I’m thinking about it I will not discuss in terms of a regional stereotype anything like the tendency of Scandinavians to barge into a lift without looking to see who’s coming out, to throw their weight around generally while walking etc. I don’t think it’s constructive. There were a number of uncouth individuals on this ferry though.

19 October

Have been in Helsinki two days now and it’s the first time in a long time I have been in a place that really does feel quite a bit like a place I could conceivably live in, for a period of time. I know what a dumb thing this might be to say but it really reminds me of Hobart. It begins with an H and it is on water, and it has trams, which Hobart used to have.

I have only seen a little of it so far (and I only will ever have time, on this trip, to see a little of it) but I am very impressed. On Tuesday, for instance, I had the pleasure of seeing an art piece performed in what I gather is called the Bärenpark, on the next block from where I’m staying. It entailed a man with a paper bag over his head wandering around the park and a group of probably 8 or 9 others running past him shouting noises. Yesterday, I went to the Post Office Museum (and also to the conference which is my reason for being here).

I always knew Finnish was an amazing looking language but I now realise I didn’t know the half of it. It is incredible. It is to my ears and eyes entirely incomprehensible. Whereas in Swedish you can look through some words and some sentences almost make sense to an English speaker, Finnish is just another world. It’s not a problem, because everybody in Finland can switch to apparently perfect English with ease.

What has amazed me in both the Netherlands and Sweden (it hasn’t happened in Finland yet but I know it could any minute) is when people have addressed me in their native language and I have had to say ‘I’m sorry, I only speak English’ and they have apologised for speaking to me in their own language. That is almost sad. But it is really more touching than anything. And while I suppose it is not a compliment for someone to say ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were Dutch’ nor is it an insult.

One more thing. I don’t understand the Finns’ attitude to the Swedes, either the Swedes in Sweden or the Swedes in their midst. I know there are two national languages: Finnish and Swedish. Every street sign is in both languages, and so on. I know the Swedes owned Finland for a considerable period and (I was told at dinner last night – all the Australians from the conference went out together) that period is not looked on fondly by Finns. I was also told at dinner last night, or actually shortly after it, that there is 5% of the population who only speak Swedish and refuse to speak Finnish. What’s that about? And why is it OK? Is it OK? I’m lost. It seems like some kind of nationalist politics of a century ago turned on its head. If someone had told me 5% of the population were shot a hundred years ago for only speaking Swedish, I’d have believed that. But not that there is this rump of recalcitrants who must cost a fortune every year being catered to in signage, education, publications and other areas where duplication of services and/or translation has to be undertaken. I’m flummoxed.

I’m sure if I actually spoke to a Finnish person about this I’d get the lowdown straight away, and I’d just be shown to be a complete dunderhead on this issue. I have certainly been critical enough of people who come to Australia and make wry assumptions about it without really taking the time to find out. I suppose I shall take the time to find out, somehow, today.

[1] Though I do give them a thumbs down for hiding away in their website the insistence that passengers show up 2 hours before departure. I only saw this a few hours before I ‘had’ to be there and I raced into Stockholm on a very expensive train that got there with time to spare, rather than a much cheaper one that got in 5 mins before the 2 hour mark. Of course – how predictable – at 2 hours before departure the check in windows weren’t even open.

[2] I may not be sincere with this statement as I hate this phrase. But as I type these words I am watching children have their picture taken hugging a massive smurf, and it is distracting and unpleasant. I saw a woman with a baby push some other children out of the way so her baby could slap the smurf’s nose. The person in the costume is a consummate professional. And what is amazing is the children totally love the smurf, I don’t know if they’ve seen one before, probably, but they hug it like it’s going to protect them from a murderous blade.

21 November

I haven’t diarised for about three weeks now, since shortly after Mia and I arrived in the USA from different directions but the same place and time, roughly. Fortunately (???) though I have done a lot of filming and photographing, so details of my activities will not be lost to posterity, except insofar as, posterity won’t give a loose root. I am writing this on the train from Philadelphia to New York; I have a crazy notion, to go to Ithaca for basically one day and then come back to NY en route to leaving the US altogether. So far it’s all working out well but surely something has to go terribly wrong, I just can’t imagine what it’s going to be.

This morning I traveled by train from Baltimore to Philadelphia, where I had my only really crucial event of the day, a 12 o’clock appointment which I arrived half an hour early for (thanks Amtrak) and so I amused myself by trying to photograph or film squirrels on my phone, I wasn’t very successful. There were squirrels everywhere. There was one amazing moment where three were chasing each other around on the surface of a tree, I didn’t get to film that of course. The thing with squirrels is that they aren’t scared of you if you’re moving, only if you stop and look at them. They are pretty frantic generally speaking. I enjoy them. I almost wonder if they play. I guess that’s anthropomorphism.

24 November

The above was written three days ago and as with so much of this trip it seems like about 3 months in itself. So many changing landscapes. I went from Philadelphia to NY, then got a taxi (disgruntled, I don’t know why, it wasn’t like he wasn’t getting a fair bit of money for going not very far) to the Port Authority Bus Terminal where the angriest bus company employee in the world sold me a round trip ticket to Ithaca. The bust to Ithaca was fine, got in around 9, the bus driver was even kind enough to drop me off outside the hotel (like so many of this stuff I thought there was a reasonable possibility he was hoping for a tip, but by this stage I was past caring about these unreadable situations, though on reflection I suppose no-one in America objects to being offered money particularly as a sugar coating on doing their actual job). (Has anyone in this country ever proposed just paying people in the service industries properly for doing their jobs? Would the employees themselves object to this notion because every time they kiss someone’s ass they are possibly going to get written into their wills?). Ithaca was delightful as everyone said (Ara’s flatmate Andy told me a joke, ‘Ithaca is gorges’, which I then saw on a sticker on the hotel cleaner’s trolley – it’s funny because, there’s like, this hill; in fact I heard someone refer to having been on ‘the hill’, that’s where the university is for some unfathomable reason). I was going to ride the Brompton up the hill and back, or at least probably push it up the hard bits and ride it down the easy bits, then I realized the easy bits are too easy, that is, steep and I’d probably end up crushed against some delightful wooden four storey college frat house. So I took the bus, driven by a friendly hillbilly, who even took the time to explain where it was I was going on campus (Olin library). The Olin library – Kroch wing, to be precise – was great, the librarian who signed me in exceptionally friendly and self-deprecating, as were the other staff members, I spent quite a bit of the afternoon with a little bald man who kept falling asleep at his table and waking up with a start when his snores got too loud. I had a lot of stuff to get through, and I got through about 70% of it which felt OK. You can’t do everything.

In the evening I went to the Moosewood Restaurant, which was a must-do in Ithaca I’d say. It was less exhiliarating or amazing than I had expected – the food was fine – I had two cocktails (bloody marys) which were very strong and pretty good. I ate a lot because I was looking for something special, even had dessert which might almost have been the first time I did so on this trip. Overall, pretty good. I also bought some kompucha (sp?) which smelt very scarey but actually tasted pretty good.

The next day I had to get up super early and return to NY, to do some work at Columbia held over from our earlier visit. I was anticipating disaster, eg for instance I figured there’d be trouble with getting into Columbia (the earlier attempt to gain access to the library was chronically ridiculous, with four different people giving me four different advices, all of them it turned out wrong. This time I managed to barge through somehow, getting a pass to enter the library by knowing the name of the muggins who had pulled my stuff from the archives, and got a pass, and then the security guard was on the phone anyway so I could easily have just walked through, but that’s always the way isn’t it – I suppose part of the reason you don’t call attention to yourself is that you carry yourself confidently). Once in, I got what I needed quickly and efficiently, then was left to fritter the remainder of my time away in any way I pleased, and in this case I pleased to visit Zabar’s and a comic shop (though the comic shop was a real let down). I also got swept up in the excitement of the Macy’s thanksgiving day parade balloon inflation, which was happening near the planetarium; thousands of people and kids were wandering around trying to guess what these stupid huge balloons were going to be when they were blown up (except a big goose who was already blown up, as was Spongebob). Spiderman was not only in a crazy sprawled position, he also had the Duracell bunny behind him so from a particular angle he seemed to have bunny ears. One item was unrecognizable but a man behind me with a voice just like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, but with an epic lisp, said ‘I think that’s Bob the Builder’s female friend, though I’m not certain, having only seen that program once.’ Then I went and got my bags from the only firm in NY that will hold luggage in storage (Schwartz’s; when someone else gets it together enough to offer competition, how low will their prices drop? Meanwhile, they must be coining it in – it cost me $18 for two bags). I could have gone to a movie or something but I figured I needed to sort out getting to my hotel (Days Inn, JFK) and taking it easy from hereon in.

The user reviews for the Days Inn were amazingly caustic but compared to the terrible one-star Days Inn experience I had in Manchester last month, this one was a palace, a palace with a school bus parking lot/snow plough storage space over the road, a carpark out the back, a freeway down the street and an airport in the other direction. The TV was hazy and nothing was on (once, American tv used to be interesting to me, but I don’t now recall how) but otherwise it was fine. I took a shuttle bus to JFK obscenely early this morning and now have about five hours to fill in before I leave. I had been anticipating major delays, security crapola, big queues, some hassle about checking two bags – all of these I have had in spades up till now. But so far – and of course I have to say so far – nothing.

There were about five of us in the queue to check in, behind me was a small (6?) child sitting on his/her bags (I thought it was a boy, but I think its mother referred to it as a girl at one stage) on a trolley. They were not long in the queue before the child said, ‘Mommy, I’m waiting!’ The mother – who had a patterned headscarf right round her head – used this as an entrée into a conversation about how much she loved the child, I was surprised given what I knew about the child that this was ‘very, very much’. The child (and, secretly, I) wanted to know why, to which the response was: ‘Because you’re so good, you’re so patient, and I love you very much.’

Quietly I had cause to reflect how tolerant and wise all this traveling has made me.

Grand Tour 2011 part two

2011-11-27T04:44:00.000+11:00

5 September 2011

Most of this day was spent either flying or getting to places from which to fly or fly further. I can’t really recommend it as a way to spend a day unless you are dead keen to get somewhere. I am writing from Frankfurt Airport. I find it unusual and interesting that I have walked a massive distance after getting off the plane from a 10 hour trip Hong Kong – Frankfurt. It was in one sense a good thing, as my feet were thoroughly swollen from all that sitting. In another sense it was a pain in the arse. But then again if the travel agent had said to me, ‘well, we can get you on a connecting flight but you’ll have to walk quite a way between aircraft and wait three hours on a funny row of seats facing a booth known as a “smoking zone” – so you probably won’t want to do that, will you?’ I’d say don’t be ridiculous it sounds great.

I have watched the following films today: Thor, Midnight in Paris, Source Code, and I think that’s all. There may have been more. I watched the first half hour of The Beaver but by then I was movied out. Thor was one of those films where you’re always waiting for the story to begin then you realise it is well under way and you won’t get much more. Midnight in Paris is dross. Source Code had me reaching back in my mind for the /Filmcast review of it, and in my memory they pointed out the resolution was incredibly illogical and if you thought about it at all you’d say that’s kind of unsatisfying too.

I was lucky enough to have a window seat but unlucky enough for it to be over the wing but fortunately it was really cloudy so I wouldn’t have seen anything anyway. I was also lucky enough to have an empty seat next to me. The passenger in the aisle seat was a friendly woman who seemed to work in China but live in Canada – I’m pretty sure that’s what she said, although maybe as she was Chinese and worked for a Chinese company I just assumed she lived in China. Or perhaps she said she lived in somewhere in China the name of which sounds like Canada, and I was confused. We had a stilted conversation late in the flight.

I can’t believe these smoking zones. They are like big telephone boxes, maybe the size of four conjoined telephone boxes, and people either go in there to stare gloomily out at the passers by while they suck up their cancer smoke or (it seems) sometimes spontaneous conversations develop. Community!

Grand Tour 2011 part one

2011-11-26T07:00:00.005+11:00

16 May 2011

I am not going anywhere for a while but you start your travel before you go don't you as they say (not really, made that up). I had a few instances of pre-trip thinking today, particularly during the Planning Theory and History field trip to Camberwell when one of the students, Hannah, found out i was going to be in Israel in September she was all like, I will be there then (with my boyfriend) you'll love it I'll send you an email telling you where to eat, and so on.
This inspired me to contact a woman called Gail my mother put me in touch with who had emailed last week with a suite of generous offers re accommodation, putting in touch with appropriate people, etc. I was pretty impressed by the generosity of this person who doesn't know me a bit. It made me definitively decide that I would spend more than a couple of days in Israel and that I would in fact go to Jerusalem and so on. I am all for it now.
I had a meeting with the financial person Roland and he told me about salary sacrifice which is when you get 50% tax-free income for the period you're away on the assumption that a huge amount of it would be tax deductible anyway, that works for me.
Then I did a lot of internet research to try and find Israel people who might be able to help me in my investigation into the Geddes plan for Tel Aviv and its perpetuation... drew a lot of blanks. A lot of computer freezes too.

I have to feed the dogs etc I can't really think about all this right now.

3 September

You think ‘it’s just a 9 hour flight’ but you have to get to the airport three hours before and us, living so close to the airport anyway, got there even earlier, anticipating something odd like checking in and then going back to Mickleham Road and eating pizza or bad salad or something anyway I was too nervous/stressed (pick the appropriate term) to really want to eat and Mia was not feeling well (she had been hungover all day) so instead we waited overly long at the appropriate check in place and there weren’t even any staff there until we noticed them accumulating behind a screen, and I went and asked when we could check in and there was some kind of disgruntled acquiescence that this might be a possibility in the very near future.

I asked some questions about boarding in a way that apparently conveyed to the nice lady that I was a dolt, and she responded in ways that in hindsight made me surprised she didn’t insist on safety pinning my name to the front of my jacket, but as it transpired I later discovered, she was so busy patronizing me she omitted to give me my boarding pass, so it was lucky I went in early, and found that out, though I still had a long wait at gate 4 but we took off in time and landed in time, so who’s complaining.

Sunday 4 September, Hong Kong

Thus far I have only seen HK airport I am in a Delifrance which I picked as as a good a place as any to transfer a few clothes to my backpack with a view to leaving my case at the airport somewhere and setting off for my one day in HK. Quite a nice apricot croissant (what many of us might call a ‘danish’) and Edith Piaf presumably blasting out the speakers 24 hours/day.

On the plane I fell asleep about 30 mins into Hall Pass, watched two episodes of the Simpsons, tried to watch Sleeping Beauty but couldn’t follow its sparse dialogue above the aircraft noise, watched the first 30-40 mins of Kung Fu Panda 2 which I decided was better seen in more comfortable circumstances and on a bigger screen, and then watched almost all of Jucy which was actually pretty good (right up to the bit where she has sex with Trevor; I suppose that’s not the end; it stopped because the plane landed).

OK. I have 3 or 4 hours to kill before I can reasonably go to my hotel, so I’m going to ditch the case, and go on an explore.

About 90 minutes later

Random you have to love, even if you sprinkle chocolate chips of staid and very predictable throughout. So, yes, I am in a Starbucks. As we all know, HK set all the precedents for globalization so you can’t point the finger at HK for having Stabuckses in it and if you are going to point the finger at me for taking advantage of its airconditioning, powerpoint and chair, then point away. It is a Sunday morning and truthfully it was the only coffee shop I could find aside from another Delifrance which I wasn’t ready for. It has given me a place to sit, drink a tepid strong ‘espresso doppio’ (better than they do them at Starbucks in Chicago, that’s for sure) and charge up both my video camera and my laptop. You’d think I’d also be signing up for some wifi thing but I don’t trust any of them to not milk my credit card forever offering me premium service until I have to fly back to HK and join a queue for four hours to make them terminate it. Already I am paranoid.

What I did which was interesting though once I left HK airport express station was just walk. I walked in an inland direction, which meant going up a lot. It was amazingly steep, the buildings were distinctively ugly, but not otherwise all that distinctive. A lot of them seem to have half their infrastructure on the outside. Then there are sporadic sprays of dense woodland seemingly inaccessible except by the eye from strategic viewpoints.

I went to an ‘international’ supermarket and bought some almonds, water and today’s paper. What I really need which I keep forgetting is bandaids (the right of my new boots rubs against the back of my lower leg strangely). The other thing I keep forgetting is a HK$ is not worth much compared to an Australian dollar, so I have to stop flinching when I fork over $18 for a double espresso. I am going to keep stumbling

On the flight I read Robert Gott’s book Good Murder, which I really enjoyed – a genuinely incompetent detective but still a likeable and understandable one. I wonder if Gott has written any other William Power books, I hope so as this was a good one. I know about three people I’d lend it to, but I also know that I am not going to lug the fucker around the world with me, so I am going to jettison it ASAP. Sorry Robert Gott but I am going to find a place to leave the book where hopefully someone else will find & read it. Perhaps this Starbucks. These people fancy themselves as readers I would say.

OK, so so far so good, I am enjoying my HK experience. I have a few questions which I will probably never have answered, like for instance why when you come out of the HK station are there all those women lined up just standing there? I know from that sentence it sounds like I’m implying prostitution but they sure don’t seem like they are trying to be enticing or anything other than chatty women waiting for something unproblematic. It was probably a spontaneous congregation in a few places that meant precisely nothing.

Taking a random tram, I noticed a vegan restaurant called Loving Hut which is apparently in Hennessy Street although directly outside is a sign proclaiming it to be Johnston Road. Since I was only randomly taking the tram (which was filling up extensively) I decided I would alight and have some lunch, even though frankly I wasn’t that hungry. As I walked back a very long and vocal protest was taking place along the road – some kind of union march, I gathered from affiliations on parts of the banners being brandished, though it was definitely not for or by English speaking people.

Arriving I discovered a strangely clean and overstaffed restaurant with a huge screen on the wall broadcasting a bizarre fragmented series of bits and pieces from a cable channel with the name Supreme Leader TV. Since the staff often had little do they would stand around and watch this nonsense, which was often a tiny picture atop translations into 20 or so different languages (the resources which must go into that!). The food was really good (I didn’t realise I was that ready for a soup of fruit and beans) and they had wifi. They also had a group of pictures of Joaquin Phoenix, Tobey Mcaguire, Albert Einstein, Paul McCartney, Anne Hathaway, Ashley Judd etc around a silver plaque proclaiming ‘Vegetarian and vegan elites. These Smart, Beautiful, Talented People Are Vegetarian. Why Aren’t You?’

It was a lucky choice to have gone in there because while I was there it began to rain heavily, and had mainly laid off when I left. I had seen something else from the tram – the Hong Kong Planning and Infrastructure Exhibition Gallery, no less – and decided to try my luck there.

The Gallery is apparently moving to a permanent premises next year, and at the moment occupies a few rooms at ground level. When I went in there were about four staff who were very eager to make sure I understood and experienced every exhibit fully. I did not realise how passive I was as an exhibition attendee and this seemed to surprise one guard in particular who took pains to make me interact with everything (in my defense it often wasn’t clear that you had to put your hand on an arrow projected onto a table, for instance). It was simple stuff, and veered too close to propaganda in some cases (there was a lot of talk about ‘the government are committed to closer ties with the mainland’ etc) and some fantasy as well – all these new railway lines, etc. There was also a comprehensive outline of a new town that was being built, unfortunately by the time I got to that I had a bit of an information overload problem.

Following this it was finally late enough in the day (2 pm) that I could actually check into my hotel. Wellington Street is a bit of a crappy street, and I was amazed to discover that the Butterful on Wellington is actually superb. After dregging around HK in 30 degrees for about 8 hours with a heavy backpack I was delighted to be able to enter aircon comfort, shower etc. Then it was out to do my main task, looking at the nearby open spaces – I found four, one of which was entirely under construction, another of which was locked. Another was being used by about fifty people, and another was being used by three (one of whom was sleeping). It was pretty amazing though overall.

I ate at an organic restaurant about three blocks from the hotel (just near the incredible outdoor escalator) which was great even though I once again wasn’t really hungry. My feet hurt from all the traipsing and I was of course entirely weary. But Hong Kong has been a remarkable and wonderful beginning to the trip. I suppose I should say 'and it's not over yet' though it kind of is - I have to be out at the airport again in about five hours (it's 5 am on the 5th September as I write this)

where I'm at

2011-11-25T02:38:00.000+11:00

I am writing to you from rare books and manuscripts at the Kroch library, Cornell, Ithaca. I hope you are well. I am waiting for some boxes of stuff so I can race through them with my digital camera. Yesterday I travelled from Baltimore to Philadelphia (where I had a meeting) then Philadelphia to NY then NY to Ithaca. It wasn't easy but it happened. Soon I will publish my unexpurgated tour diary, at which point you will learn the truth of my extensive travels. I warn you: there are visits to archives even more extraordinary than these. Hold on to your collective hat.

happiness

2011-11-24T13:31:00.002+11:00

the savings we made in not proofreading our ads are passed on to you, the consumer!

2011-11-16T10:20:00.002+11:00

one day

2011-11-14T14:37:00.001+11:00

I picked up a copy of David Nicholls' novel One Day because I thought it would only be a matter of time before someone asked me if I had written it.* It's not that bad I suppose in a Mills & Boon kind of way. Some of the dialogue is very good and I am keen to know how it ends. I am certainly enjoying it a lot more than Game of Thrones.

* Stephen Cummings 'Don't give yourself airs David it's not that easy to write a novel.'

house in florida

2011-11-12T00:00:00.004+11:00

I didn't do it

canberra services club burnt

2011-11-08T08:06:00.001+11:00

video I made

2011-11-05T01:01:00.001+11:00

This is a video I made for my friend of 38 years, Guy Morton. It's a very catchy song and it was a pleasure to do.

2011-11-04T13:37:00.000+11:00

2011-10-28T03:07:00.000+11:00

what's it all about?

2011-10-22T16:49:00.005+11:00

Hello, I need advice.

What is so freakin' good about Game of Thrones? I mean the book, not the tv show, which I haven't seen, but I have read about 2/5 of the actual novel. It is testimony to my appreciation of critics I admire that I have stuck with it thus far as to my mind it's confusing (too many characters and why should I care?), badly written (every time he gets a bit stuck he just shoves in a whole bunch of rambles about what happened tens of thousands of years before, presumably this relates to the days of old when knights were bold and toilets weren't invented), meandering, and stylistically totes irritating (this parallel universe stuff where the names are slightly differently spelled, etc; actually this borders on a kind of racism in places; the gypsyesque warriors and so on; the distant savage tribes with all those Ks in their names). Anyway, I'm on the edge of my seat throughout, wondering whether the next page will be the one where I throw the whole thing down never to retterne to ytte.

Or maybe it'll suddenly get good, though the 300 pages I've read so far have not set a precendent.

oscillate wildly

2011-10-15T11:50:00.003+11:00

One thing I like about the campus where I work is the rather triste baggage of bygone discovery-learning-demonstration. I have no idea what this is but it looks like it once must have been pretty cool and everyone in the lab probably wanted a go.

my dream last night

2011-10-11T17:33:00.003+11:00

I dreamt I was talking to Sophie Cunningham about how I and the two other former members ofWham! were going to re-record 'Wham! Rap' to publicise National Depression Week. Instead of the 'D.H.S.S.' bit, we were going to sing 'D.E.P.P.R.E.S.S.I.O.N'. The joke about misspelling 'depression' was either a joke about how stupid Wham! were, how stupid their fans were, or how stupid people with depression are, but in the dream it was just left hanging as something sophisticated and subtle. Sorry.

why it is important to know how to spell

2011-10-10T11:31:00.001+11:00

Because you could spend a long time here and end up disappointed.

2011-10-09T14:23:00.001+11:00

happy sixth birthday lorraine

2011-10-06T19:00:00.004+11:00

Actually, this blog started a few months earlier than six years ago, closer to May 2006, I think, but I seem to have misplaced those earlier entries so this is as good a time as any to be the birthday. The laughs and cries we've had over that time! All the friends found and lost along the way. I'd particularly like to thank Danny, Marshall Stacks and Ann O'Dyne my three regular readers, though of course my particular partickler thanks go to Mia who has put up with all of this for so long. Also thank you to everyone who follows the 'birdshit-encrusted pub steps' label through blog posts, I don't know what it means either.

I imagine it is tremendously dull to read the meanderings of a 46 year old academic who finds himself so terribly fascinating for no obvious reason. I try to be funny but often of course this being the internet that is in itself no guarantee of nuthin'. Well, here's to another six - nay, sixty - years of this guff (how much longer will this blog go for? They have to stop sometime, apparently. I'm always amazed by people who do a few posts and then quit. I'm reminded of Sue Grigg, when she and I were about 20, marvelling at a couple about ten years older than us who had been together about ten years, who had broken up. 'I mean,' she said, 'why bother?')

watching in the line of fire

2011-10-04T16:53:00.002+11:00

This happened a few months ago you might have heard about it already.

a couple of details from the mirka mora mural at flinders st station

2011-10-03T23:13:00.001+11:00

nightmare scenario

2011-10-01T10:38:00.000+10:00

potato synonyms

2011-09-28T02:54:00.002+10:00

'The report of the Potato Synonym Committee of the National Institute of Agricultural Botany for 1937 shows that as a result of their activities the offering of synonyms in the largest seedsmen's catalogues has now been practically eliminated.

'Two synonyms, however, namely Cherub and Lord Allendale, which were found to be identical with Duke of York and King Edward (red type) respectively, when grown at Ormskirk last year, are again being offered for sale this year. Apart from these, Midlothian Early, Sir John Llewellyn and Factor as still found in some catalogues. It is hoped that seedsmen will make it clear that they are identical with Duke of York, Eclipse and Up-to-Date.

'Dr. Salaman and his Committee are to be congratulated on the outcome of their work which they have carried out so well for many years.'

National Allotments Journal: Official Organ of the National Allotments Society, Limited No. 35 Spring 1938 p. 23

grumpy brunswick

2011-09-27T18:46:00.001+10:00

praise or...?

2011-09-23T17:22:00.000+10:00

carrot whisky

2011-09-21T16:15:00.000+10:00

Ingredients:

6 lbs carrots

1 gallon water

4 lbs. sugar

A tablespoon raisins

1 lb. wheat

1 oz. yeast

2 lemons

2 oranges

Method:

1. Wash the carrots well, but do not peel. Put into the water and bring to the boil then simmer gently until the carrots are very tender. Use the carrots for food, and strain the water.

2. Into a bowl put the sugar, sliced oranges and lemons and pour over the hot liquid. Stir until the sugar is dissolved and then stand until lukewarm.

3. Then add the chopped raisins, wheat and sprinkle the yeast on top. Leave to ferment 15 days.

4. Then skim, strain and bottle. Keep almost a year.

parsnip sherry II

2011-09-20T17:21:00.001+10:00

parsnip sherry

2011-09-19T16:10:00.000+10:00

Ingredients:

4 lbs parsnips

1/2 oz. hops

1/2 lb malt

1 gallon water

4 lbs. Demerara sugar

1 oz. yeast; a large slice toast

Method:

1. Clean the parsnips but do not peel them (weigh after cleaning). Cut into slices and boil gently in half the water until parsnips are tender, then strain.

2. Put the hops in the remaining water and boil until all the goodness is extracted. Strain and add the liquids together.

3. Stir in it 1/2 lb. malt and all the sugar. Spread the yeast on toast and add to the bowl when lukewarm.

4. Let it ferment 14 days then skim and bottle, corking loosely.

daisy wine

2011-09-18T16:04:00.002+10:00

Ingredients:

4 quarts of small field daisy blossoms

1 gallon boiling water

2 lemons

2 oranges

2 lbs. brown sugar

1/2 lb. raisins

1 oz yeast

Method:

1. Put the daisies in a bowl and cover with the boiling water. Stand until next day, then squeeze the daisies out.

2. Then boil gently the liquid, sliced lemons, oranges and sugar together for 20 minutes. Allow to cool to lukewarm.

3. Add the chopped raisins and stir the yeast in (it should be first dissolved in a little warm water). Leave to ferment 14 days.

4. Then skim, strain and bottle.

2011-09-17T17:20:00.000+10:00

can't sleep

2011-09-16T03:48:00.001+10:00

Do you ever have those times when you wake up at 3 am and you're just awake? I hate that. Although I would generally speaking rather be awake than asleep, because life is such an amazing rich cavalcade of thoughts and feelings. The reason I hate it is that I know I will 'pay for it' later. Probably at about 3 pm, when I feel sick with weariness (I nearly wrote 'exhaustion', but that would be an inaccurate term; exhaustion is when you've done something strenuous other than just sit/stand upright).

bike path face

2011-09-15T15:37:00.000+10:00

kenzie and barry watching me go to get pizza

2011-09-12T12:32:00.000+10:00

my ever increasing collection of errant apostrophes

2011-09-11T14:30:00.002+10:00

Me:

Thanks Achewood

farewell a&r

2011-09-06T15:54:00.001+10:00

The Angus and Robertson store in Camberwell, temprorarily still a bookshop (for Dirt Cheap Books) but basically the skeleton of what was a very long-lived and now like many others dead book retail outlet. The remnants (signs, etc) of a Borders branch is across the road.

2011-09-04T19:28:00.000+10:00

news on jordan

2011-08-31T15:52:00.001+10:00

2011-08-28T16:23:00.003+10:00

falling

Buy it here

2011-08-28T11:51:00.000+10:00

heathcote

2011-08-26T17:18:00.001+10:00

Spending the day at Graham and Tanya’s property at Heathcote. The weather by and large very pleasant. Barry had never spent a day away from his home before and was initially freaked out, though now struts around like this is how it’s always been (and for all he knows this is how it’ll always be, though little does he know we’re going back in a few hours): the whole thing has been a petit vacance for Mia, who works too hard.

The biggest moment of the day was probably catching three flies on three separate occasions in a drinking glass (now washed) and letting them free in the garden. They help to break down kangaroo shit on the property and thus solve global warming, you see. Also reading Early Melbourne Architecture 1840-1888, a nice little vol. Second edition from 1963. Sad book. So many of the buildings recently demolished in 63, now probably only 1/10 of them still standing.

Playing a lot of Bix Beiderbecke albums and similar. There was a label in the 70s called Joker which seemed to specialize in reissuing old jazzy recordings of a period long before. Fun.

Other things not Heathcote related, which need to be recorded:

Two days ago my niece Florence spoke to me for the first time. This was achieved by her not knowing who was on the phone. She said, ‘I’m having a babychino’.
The Mia Schoen Group’s EP is about to come out. If you want one let me know.
People who run conferences badly are the scourge of the Earth. You probably thought it was dictators or malaria but no, it’s people who run conferences badly.
The new Panel of Judges album is sensational.
If anyone tells you I have written another book, do not believe it. I have contributed three chapters to a new book and that’s all. They were written off the top of my head OK.

Craven Fops 2011

2011-08-19T11:16:00.000+10:00

island nights

2011-08-10T19:29:00.001+10:00

Man, New York has so much to be grateful for including this wondrous song, listing all the things I love, including tattooed leather gypsies.

Two to choose from, I love the dark one, but I also love the caligari mime one.

hare smell

2011-08-09T15:59:00.001+10:00

Charlie smells a hare that had recently passed by. Barry gets swept up in the mania. Music by the Enclosures from forthcoming EP

autoluminescent

2011-08-08T06:00:00.003+10:00

Almost none of this trailer is actually in the finished film, but it is very representative.

I really enjoyed the new documentary about Rowland S. Howard, Autoluminescent, which we saw at the Film Festival last night. Full house, seemingly. Probably made too soon after RSH's death (he died right at the end of 2009, just over 18 months ago) which might explain any element of hagiography: we were told in the q&a that RSH had hoped for a warts 'n' all account but that none of the interviewees were up for bagging him. There might have been too much Nick Cave (I am sure when the ABC edits it down to an hour for screening there it'll be pretty much all Nick Cave, it'll be the story of some guy who hung out with Nick Cave once with five minutes at the end of 'in 1985, he did not work with Nick Cave. In 1986, Nick Cave released this album, which RSH could not have failed to be familiar with...' etc.) but I disagreed in the main with the woman at the q&a who said NC came across as a dickhead.

There were some tremendous images and films of RSH in his early days and as I said to Mia I always enjoy a documentary that leaves you asking questions, so it was lucky for me that some penetrating lines of inquiry only penetrated a little way in, eg stuff about his early life which was barely mentioned; he just springs out fully formed and starts acting like a genius in a snappy suit and tie, until Mick Harvey tells him to come across with the creative goods or get off the pot and so he forms the Young Charlatans.

I recommend you see it, either at the movies in a couple of months or on DVD (I bet the DVD will be scintillating). I am not sure how much of a RSH lover you need to be to really get into it. The music is pretty amazing; possibly there's too much concentration on 'Shivers' but whatever, its ubiquity and applicability is discussed in depth and it's not presented as his lasting legacy to the world like 'Undercover Angel' will be for Alan O'Day when he dies (despite the fact that he also wrote 'Love at first night' and 'Skinny girls'). Also, it's put in an appropriate place in the chronology and not mentioned again, so that's all fine (I was hoping for a snippet of the Screaming Jets in there but that's OK).

Best interviewees were probably Genevieve McGucken and Harry Howard, though almost everyone came across really well, including the oldies and goldies like Mr Pierre and Ollie Olsen. Oh well. If it was too soon for them to make the film, and the q&a came too soon after the film itself last night, it's probably too soon for me to be formally reviewing the film, which I'm not, I'm just rambling it's early in the morning and I woke up an hour before I intended to.

fluffy aka butterball aka bumble

2011-08-07T09:32:00.004+10:00

We almost have another cat, inasmuch as we pay his vet bills, though he might be co-owned for all we know. We call him either Fluffy (his street name) or Butterball or a variation ie Bumble. Here is a short sideways video of him in which Asha proves (a) she exists (b) she hates him.

The music is (unless I've counted wrong) track 38 from DNE's More Songs Humans Shouldn't Sing. Perfect cat video music.

string em up

2011-08-03T17:59:00.000+10:00

money shot

2011-08-03T14:12:00.005+10:00

Hey, I don't want this to become either the blog of Angry of Broadmeadows or the blog of man who asks the inappropriate questions all the time however uncomfortable they make everyone else feel. I don't even think these images (from an animated online ad for ANZ) are intended to be pornographic, despite the sensational title I used for this post, which I will probably come to regret (not because anything bad will happen, just because I have never been any good at titles. Or endings. Great at the inbetween though you'll surely agree).

I just wonder why the pelvis of this cartoon troll girl is being thrust so undeniably and repeatedly at the viewer, and what the advertisers' psychological tactic is here. Are we supposed to think 'if I don't keep my financial affairs in order, my children will end up in some parents' worst nightmare of fear and degradation, including becoming in some way sexually exploited'? Or are we supposed to think, 'my daughter's procreative abilities are the future of my genetic line and must be kept comfortable until successful reproduction'? You tell me, I'm no good at answers, only at asking questions.

finally randy

2011-07-30T12:52:00.004+10:00

Last night we went to see Randy Newman play at the State Theatre. He was incredible. The grandeur of the setting and the accompaniments by the MSO highlighted the perfunctoriness of many of the songs but at the same time their perfection. If I were a musician, and I could write one song as good as any Randy Newman song, I would feel it was worthwhile. True.

He didn't do the theme from Cop Rock, by the way.

I drank a cocktail before and a cocktail afterwards. Decadent. We ate at a greek restaurant on Southbank where an older man than me didn't realise there was a big window between him and the interior and he walked straight into the glass and fell over. I didn't see it but I heard it.

stripey babies are the best babies

2011-07-27T18:02:00.002+10:00

Any obs?

2011-07-24T12:29:00.000+10:00

frank and ernie

2011-07-22T23:50:00.000+10:00

This was an American comic strip that appeared in the Age in the mid-1960s. It's pretty interesting. Nicely done, I think.

one corner of my favourite melbourne building

2011-07-21T23:27:00.000+10:00

That is my head showing appreciation on the left.

down near jacana station

2011-07-20T23:18:00.003+10:00

But on the eastern side of the line.

wa wa nee 1986

2011-07-20T08:21:00.000+10:00

late night movie

2011-07-17T02:16:00.012+10:00

I am staying up to try and get the dogs to sleep (I know that's pathetic... anyway it's only one dog, Charlie is not the problem, Barry is restless). There are two films on - Britannia Hospital, which I think was Lindsay Anderson's last film,* and a 2003 film called Dying on the Edge. Actually there's a third, also from 2003 (oddly), known as The King and Queen of Moonlight Bay.

Britannia Hospital was released in 1982, when I was 17, so it doesn't quite fit in with the stuff I'm generally speaking talking about, but I do recall staying up really late to watch it, and being kind of horrified, bored and disgusted all at once - it was so nihilistic and sickening. It's a satire of Britain using the metaphor of a hospital. I loved Lindsay Anderson's If... so I was dead keen to see this, but it repelled me. I tried to watch a bit of it to see if the more mature me could make more of a film that I know many find impressive, but no, it's the same still (for me).

But this did all remind me of my early teens when I would stay up all night - or to 4 am or whatever - simply to watch some film or another that I had heard of or which starred an actor I really liked. For instance, you got a lot of great Hollywood noir late at night (and not so great, of course) with actors like Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney. I had a Halliwell's and would check out the films in the book beforehand. There were times I just couldn't bear the thought of going through the subsequent day knowing I could have seen (for instance) Dark Passage but not having seen it! I would also supplement whatever I could see freely on tv in the middle of the night with trips to various revival cinemas around town eg the Valhalla (in Richmond) of course but also The Ritz (North Melbourne) and others may come back to me.

I didn't drink coffee then, so I don't recall how I'd keep awake at all other than by the sheer excitement that I would add a little piece of cinema knowledge-experience to my palette. Just as I wanted to own every canonic album, I wanted to have seen every canonic film which mainly meant every Hollywood and Australian film made, new and old. I now don't believe I will ever, or will ever want to, attain this goal.

The films were (have I told you this before?) often hosted by minor celebrities of earlier eras, such as Issi Dy and Ross D. Wylie, two men whose pop music work I have later come to appreciate but then I had no idea who they were. They were very comfortable in front of the camera and they would often pad the films out seemingly forever with quizzes and games (spinning the wheel, etc), also advertorial (Michael's Corner Store). It was infuriating at the time, I got the sense Issi Dy was high, but he was probably just pretending to be to engage what they thought of as their core audience.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, then my father got a VCR in about 1980 or 81, then my mother probably got one too, then came other ways of seeing films in your own time rather than when cinemas or tv dictated it, and that was the end of that, though also I got friends and figured out the pragmatic concept above i.e. I didn't need to see every Humphrey Bogart film just because Humphrey Bogart was in it, because most of them were terrible. That said, I am really glad I got to see Dark Passage, because it's a great film and I wish I could see it now.

PS: At first glance I appreciate this might seem like a sentimental reminiscence, with mention of old TV and things one did as a child, these are usually cast in sentimental light whatever they are, however, I have to say this was a pathetic thing for me to do - I could have spent my time far more wisely - and once ways of taping and/or watching films at home came along, it was much better.

*No, that was The Whales of August, 1987. I saw that in a cinema in Sydney, it stars Bette Davis and Lillian Gish. The beginning of the film is very quiet, and I remember a lady in the audience saying to her companion loudly, 'Is it a silent film?' the answer was no and she said 'Oh, I thought... because...' (Because what? Because Gish had been in silent films she infected any film she made with silence?)

five years and one day since syd barrett died

2011-07-13T19:26:00.002+10:00

I mentioned it then and got into a stir with a commenter in a really needless, frankly rude fashion (on my part). I even tracked that person down to a personal email and apologised but I am sure they never came by again.

I think some other person out of the Pink Floyd has died since, true?

Piper at the Gates of Dawn is pretty bad, but Saucer full of Secrets is ten times worse. In those days, record companies really invested in bands, and let them make mistakes. I wish they hadn't in the case of PF. Though I do quite like Obscured by Clouds.

What a meaningless post. Why did I do it.

the house where the castle was set

2011-07-12T12:28:00.002+10:00

My mother Jane and I walked past it on Sunday. They are building a bigger house in the back yard, sadly (in my opinion).

who'd be scratchmo

2011-07-12T08:55:00.001+10:00

Barry has had a lot of toys in his 11 month life but Scratchmo the giant flea has been his favourite. Or favourites, as he has gone through two already - you can see the state of #2 on the left. No wonder #3 looks worried.

monday morning

2011-07-11T08:57:00.002+10:00

We have to take the car to the mechanics as it is pumping burnt oil fumes into itself after one drives it for about five minutes. I am trying to write something for the Australian (not about that) wish me luck.

in my mother's street

2011-07-07T07:25:00.000+10:00

bizarre blue stuff at western ring road uberexpansion site

2011-07-06T06:48:00.002+10:00

what do men like

2011-07-02T19:18:00.002+10:00

So I am on the train and it’s a Saturday morning going to do a radio interview and at Jacana station a woman probably early 20s gets on she is wearing sneakers and jeans and one of those grey – I don’t know what you would call them – vesty things and she has a reasonably ample bosom, though this is probably accentuated by the fact that she’s unhealthily thin. What is remarkable though is the response of the young man – probably about her age – who is another row of seats down. He gives her a long, apparently entirely disinterested look (‘I happened to feel like gazing in that direction. SO some chick is there, so what?’) and then gets up, walks I suppose to the end of the carriage (not sure: I’m facing the other way) then comes back and sits opposite me, in the seats across from her, where he can look at her many, many times. She appears not to notice. He is wearing loose, old jeans, a smart new black jacket, those big puffy sneakers, and he is listening to music on his phone I think, with earbuds of course. What’s particularly funny is that he occasionally stops holding the phone to rest it on his knee while he plays air guitar – which he does with real attention to where his fingers are on the fretboard. – and a look of quiet concentration on his face. Really weird and sort of hilarious, crossed with sad.

When you spend a lot of time with dogs you get kind of used to their very base behaviours but you also recognize the same sort of behaviours in people too, when you see them. This guy was being so clearly interested in that woman, it almost was a situation where it was only a few thousand years of civiillisation (and its attendant conventions) that stopped him humping her leg there and then, though of course if she’d told him she didn’t mind he wouldn’t have thought twice. Some younger, hipper girls got on at Essendon and he got up to give them a seat, which I think was an opportunity for him to then stand in the doorway and look at the grey girl with even greater attention, though I can’t see him from where I’m sitting and I’m not going to turn around to see him, or do anything that might make him appreciate the possibility that I’m writing about him on my laptop.

Once again, I talk about this kind of stuff like I’m unaffected and I am at least twice this guy’s age, not that that is really so important, anyway the real thing is, I’m probably in some part motivated by competition or some other base instinct to belittle him and his ineffectual attempt to impress a woman with his air guitar and longing looks, mainly because I assume that wouldn’t work in a million years . I know a lot of you would probably think this is a dodgy subject for me to be writing on but you’re probably responding to some innate instinctual unease too, that’s my guess anyway.

jim carrey

2011-07-01T19:54:00.003+10:00

So I'm sitting here watching him in some film, and trying to remember his name. And I figure how interesting might or might it not be if I write about him for the time it takes me to remember his name, because I see it all the time, instant recognisability, but the only name my brain can come up with is Tom Hanks. Which is the wrong name. Then, 'Jerry...' something, which I know is also wrong. And I'm thinking, he is a talented actor who always ends up in crappy comedies, although I did really like Liar Liar... which this film that's on now is kind of like. I'm sort of enjoying it too because it has Rhys Flightoftheconchords in it, doing a very similar to Murray character, which works. I can't remember his name. I keep thinking 'Jerry Springer'. Now I'm going to have to go through the alphabet, which rarely works. B something, C something, D something, E something, F something... none of these are at all appropriate. Seems like a waste, I almost want to go backwards from Z instead. The film is Yes Man. Jim! Jim Carrey . Got it.

trois flaneurs

2011-07-01T14:48:00.003+10:00

Kenzie is staying at the moment. Charlie pissed on his head while he was sniffing a bush. I think he liked it. He then pissed on her front paws. She didn't seem to notice. Barry is happy to have Kenzie around as he is the best double-faceted friend: he is older and wiser than Barry but Barry is about twice his size now.

starlight in a puddle

2011-06-30T07:19:00.002+10:00

I took the dogs out at 6.30 this morning, much earlier than usual, and as we were crossing the bridge saw what I thought was an early cyclist heading to the city. Oddly at the end of the bridge it stopped and then went on, but I figured, just adjusting his or her apparatus. Its light went on ahead of us for some time then seemed to career off the road and into the grass, lying there. I thought the cyclist had fallen asleep at the bars... then (it was still pretty dark) I couldn't see anything but the light and a black patch. I thought I had imagined it all and I was just looking at starlight in a puddle.

Then it leapt up and ran off. It was a dog with a big light on. Charlie went crazy. It kept a distance of about 250 m ahead of us for the next 20 minutes then disappeared.

I don't know if that's an interesting story or not, but as my grandmother Mavis used to say, it was something that happened.

just a minute

2011-06-27T07:14:00.002+10:00

I can't stand listening to the news at the moment because it almost always seems to be something about Gillard's demise. Instead when possible I listen to a strange stream called The JAMmer which promises 'Decades of Just a Minute'. And that is what you get. A seemingly (but probably not) random selection of constant Just a Minutes over the last 44 years. If it is being compiled, it's by someone with a Kenneth Williams enthusiasm. I think I mentioned a few months back hearing the very first Just a Minute on Radio National. Yesterday I heard a notorious notable episode, from I think 1969, when Nicholas Parsons wasn't the chair but a contestant, and Clement Freud was the chair. No explanation and guess what, not very good. But some (most) eps are sterling. You can access it via the Just a Minute blog listed on the left, and then through one of its links.

It feels guilty, like I've given up on now and want to wallow in then, but that's not really true. It's just that the news right now is so shitty.

dog walks

2011-06-26T13:21:00.007+10:00

I can't stand people generally, but I'm still uncertain which of the following types I can't stand more: people who educate their children to be scared of dogs, or people who have never told their children not to run up to dogs and thrust themselves at them. Both are awful. That said, both our dogs have been stunningly good the last couple of days with all the people (tykes included) they have briefly 'met'.Today and yesterday, I have taken them on quite extensive walks. Yesterday we went through Hadfield (12 km round trip) with stops at the West St shops and the Silver Sage at Glenroy where as we were leaving Charlie got away from me and ran into the kitchen. Today we went to Strathmore in a train-walk situation, where we walked the equivalent of almost one way to Strathmore (7 km). On the way back Charlie drank deeply from a puddle.
Then she threw up and then drank a whole lot more from the same source.

not even funny

2011-06-19T13:43:00.001+10:00

Oops, someone mistyped. Sack them. I blame the education system.

bogan delusion

2011-06-08T08:36:00.004+10:00

The previous post has a whole lot of comments that might look a bit obscure without acknowledgement that my book The Bogan Delusion with pictures by Mia Schoen is out now in bookshops. Clever people have been tracking me online to this blog. I am recording a diary of my responses to the publicity whirlwind but not ready to publish just yet in case it queers the pitch! You might hear me on the radio or something in the next few weeks, enjoy, or not...!

One podcast of recent radio appearance here (Life Matters) another here (Jon Faine).

bus

2011-06-02T17:30:00.004+10:00

I got on a bus yesterday and the validator had an old ticket jammed in it with the back of the ticket facing out and someone (presumably the driver) had written on it, 'not working - sorry' only instead of 'sorry' it was 'sorr' with a smiley face where the 'y' should have been.

So, do we now pronounce smiley face 'ee' like someone says 'ee' when they have a fixed grin? That's my question for today.

* two and a half weeks later: another similar scenario but no smiley, just the words 'no working' and an asterisk

please enjoy my new film

2011-06-01T12:47:00.001+10:00

canberra late may

2011-05-26T15:02:00.005+10:00

I am writing this in the nearly empty restaurant of a high-class hotel having eaten a lot of stuff none of which I really enjoyed. Particularly as in this vast expanse of empty tables they decided to plop me between two other occupied tables, one with the saddest public servant in the world, and the other with two middle-aged lovers who continually made loud kissing noises in the way of kids sucking chupa chups. The public servant got a case of the sneezes, too, which was also bad.
Later: the next day I went to a choice cafe in Manuka which is one of the places I always like to go when in the Can, along with Academic Remainders and Gus'. Here I tuned in on a classic case of punny-style misunderstanding, the owner of the cafe was giving some kind of 2011 'women, can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em' spiel with overtones of 'I have some kind of ill-defined NESB background to me, so I can say what I like about particular ethnic groups', and it went like this:

'She's hispanic.'
'She's his what?'

I guess you had to be there, to wish you hadn't been (at least as far as that conversation was concerned). The mushrooms on toast were exo.

The book industry in England

2011-05-26T03:45:00.003+10:00

My guest blogger today is my late grandmother Marion Miller nee Hartfree who published the following in the Sydney Morning Herald 75 years ago today on the 26 May 1936 under the heading(s) 'The book industry in England: 17,000 published each year/ Impressions of Some Authors'.

The age of Bohemianism in London is dead, according to Miss Marion Hartfree, who is visiting Sydney after having been associated with a large publishing house in London for some years.

In the following article, Miss Hartfree says she was disappointed when she went into a publisher's office expecting to find that literary men had manes and roars like the literary men in novels.

She found that, with few exceptions, successful authors looked like successful business men. Authors were no longer expected to manifest eccentricities, and few of them did.

Unfortunately, one cannot repeat the best literary gossip of London. It concerns jealous authoresses who tear out each other's hair and novelists who spend their days evading bailiffs. But do not let me be misleading; it is generally just too dull to repeat.

The dullness of authors was my first great disillusion when I went from the country to work in the office of one of London's biggest publishers and found that the authors no longer had overgrown hair or drank their cheques away in brilliant orgies at the Cafe Royal. Neither were there, as a rule, wits like the Oscar Wilde of legends, enchanting old adventurers like Conrad, or booming wiseacres like Ruskin and Carlyle and other giants of the past.

Successful authors looked like successful business men (which they generally are), in bowler hats, hog skin gloves, and spats, and unsuccessful authors looked like - well, now I come to think of it, they looked like what I had always expected successful authors to be. As a rule, unsuccessful authors are the most pleasant kind of authors and very often the best.

The age of Bohemianism is dead in London. The writing and production of books are standardised like all other productions, and the most successful authors are those who, like Trollope, work at their job with a kind of office routine and produce their two books a year, one for each season, with the regularity of a nut puncher in a car factory.

NO ECCENTRICITIES

Authors are no longer expected to manifest eccentric personalities, and few of them do. Of course, there are exceptions. One famous lady novelist was found sitting outside our office one day on the edge of the gutter eating sandwiches. When we invited her to come inside she said that she did not want to bother anybody. She had thought of eating her lunch in the church opposite, but, unfortunately, she had found that her uncle was preaching a sermon there. "It doesn't seem fair to him," she said.

Literary parties in London are the dullest and most un-Bohemian affairs imaginable - at least to anybody who does not know all the little jealousies, vanities, scandals, love affairs etc., simmering below the surface. This might be said of a bankers' party, too, for the bankers also have little jealousies, vanities, scandals, love affairs, etc.

After six months in this disappointing atmosphere it was with relief that I idled through the office one day to see a cadaverous gentleman with longish hair and flowing bow tie and a Harris tweed coat - the paraphernalia of the real old timer of literature. Accustomed to seeing only gentlemen like stockbrokers around the office, it took me some time to realise that he was not a gas mechanic but an author. He was, in fact, Mr. Humbert Wolf, England's most successful poet, whose book "This Blind Rose" sold as well as a modest best seller in fiction.

Humbert Wolf is probably the only poet living, except in some remote backblocks town in America, who looks like a poet but his general air of careless untidiness has probably nothing to do with his poetry at all.

The only other author I ever met who looked the part was Naomi Mitchison, the late Professor Haldane's daughter, whose bright eccentric clothes and more or less eccentric ways are in the true style of romantic literary behaviour.

DOROTHY SAYERS

The apotheosis of the unliterary looking literary person is Dorothy L. Sayers, who is perhaps the most successful literary person in London to-day. She is as smart and brisk and bouncing and efficient as a business executive. She worked in an advertising office and there began writing detective stories which were so much out of the ordinary detective stories, so well written, so full of interesting information, that they made the detective story fashionable even for Bloomsbury intellectuals. Everybody who has read "Murder Must Advertise", or "The Nine Tailors", or "The Five Red Herrings", must have been impressed by the minutely careful background of her tales. Her scholarship is simply immense. Every detail about bell-ringing, or the internal economy of a West End Club, or the business methods of an advertising office, or the mechanism of publishing, is as precise as a life-time expert could make it.

Her specialty is poisons. She is sufficient of an expert on them to write a standard work if she ever wanted to. Miss Sayers was one of the first women to graduate from Oxford. She went to Somerville College, which has produced a large crop of writing women, including Vera Brittain, the late Winifred Holtby, and Sylvia Thompson who wrote the best seller, "Hounds of Spring".

The largest seller in the autumn season of last year was Dorothy Sayers' "Gaudy Night", of which 30 000 copies went before publication. That represents several thousand pounds in royalties. With all her books selling like hot cakes and motion picture producers pursuing her from two continents, her income must be very close to five figures. With "Gaudy Night", she was officially accepted into serious literature by the Book Society, which gave her the choice for the month. Like many emancipated women she has a home, a house, and a husband.

R. C. SHERRIFF

Almost as successful as Miss Sayers, very pleasant, unspoiled by success, is R. C. Sherriff, author of "Journey's End", who was a comparatively poor man when his play began to break records. He had always nurtured a longing to go to Oxford and when he found that he could afford to go to Monte Carlo or anywhere else in the world he did not change his ambition. He spent three years as a humble undergraduate at Oxford where he achieved a new and, apparently to him much more precious, fame int he rowing club, where he became a coach. He does not seem to be nearly so interested in writing as rowing, but his plays continue to be big draws, and just before I left London, "St. Helena", which he wrote with Jeanne de Casalis, was booked out in its first weeks in the West End, after a triumphant season at the Old Vic. He is a charming man, unspoiled by his enormous success.

it is a pity one cannot say this about more authors, but perhaps they earn the right to be a little severe after the hard struggle for success which all authors have on the crowded literary market to-day. Every year the publishers of England send forth 17,000 books to try their luck. In the days of Dickens and Thackeray, Shelley, Byron and Keats, who were young men when they enjoyed fame, less than a tenth of that number of books appeared each year. Besides, there were no circulating libraries. The author sold more books, if he sold at all. To-day there are few authors in England who make more than a bare living wage out of their novels alone. Three to five thousand copies is considered a good sale and five thousand copies means about £300 in royalties. Hence the rush to turn out a novel a year and the decline in the number of authors who are authors only.

Many authors have some other job, in the professions or as journalists, school-teachers, bank clerks, etc. A. J. Cronin, the author of "Hatter's Castle," is a doctor, for example; Bernard Newman, author of "Spy", is in the Office of Works; J. L. Hodson is a newspaperman. Which explains why the picturesqueness of London literary life has waned and why I was disappointed when I went into a publisher's office expecting to find that literary men had manes and roars like the literary men in novels.

my stories

2011-05-21T16:35:00.003+10:00

I can’t remember quite when it started but my week sometime in the last couple of years has become structured around weekly podcasts. Most of them are actually just podded radio shows from the BBC and NPR, though a couple are pod-only. Through the week I listen to The News Quiz (or the Now Show), In Our Time and Thinking Allowed (all BBC Radio 4), Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and This American Life (both NPR), and Boxcutters and The /filmcast (which is released in two separate programs, both created at the same time – the main one and the ‘after dark’). I am well aware that there are many others I could be listening to and that in the pod world this is a pretty conservative collection, though it certainly strikes a good balance between the trivial and the groundbreaking.

The News Quiz is a long-running Radio 4 panel game (apparently this is a genre) which in its present incarnation is hosted by Sandi Toksvig. It is presumably fairly tightly scripted although some guests might need that more than others. I am not entirely sure when it’s on in the UK but the podcast is almost always available on Saturday morning which is great if one is going to make pancakes or something similar (and also I generally find Radio National on a Saturday morning is patchy). They say young Americans these days learn all about the news from Jon Stewart, well, I learn about the news from the newspaper and the radio, but I learn about the English news/ the way the English understand the news, from the News Quiz. It also has very funny people on it, like Jeremy Hardy (today’s one has Armando Ianucci on it, who is one of my favourite comedic performers-writers, but he’s not very funny in it, indeed the whole of today’s program is a bit of a dud). The News Quiz rotates with the Now Show, which is a more outright satirical (but still topical) show with comedy songs, impressions etc. I suppose on a general basis I enjoy the News Quiz more because it allows for flights of fancy and is arguably less conservative in the way satire is often, unfortunately, quite conservative. But good Now Show is better than mediocre News Quiz. I do enjoy the ebb and flow of both shows: each always starts strongly, and peters out over its run, so that by the last one you are hanging out for the next one to start because they dry up.

In Our Time is Melvyn Bragg’s panel discussion on diverse topics. Each show is dedicated to one subject and he has three experts to explain it. You can hear the sound of their teaspoons in china cups as they talk – it’s true. Some topics grab me more than others, and being one who feels there is too much science science in the world and not enough social science, I find the shows on ‘imaginary numbers’ etc a bit grueling, though I can usually get through (how much I retain is another matter, but it’s ok, there’s no test). The historical ones are often scintillating. Bragg has a very abrupt approach, gets straight into things and doesn’t mess around with summing-up, praise of guests, he just wants to get to the heart of shit. I like that.

Thinking Allowed is hosted by sociologist Laurie Taylor, of whom I know little. Well, that’s not true. I know a massive amount about him because he introduces every show with a bit of reminiscence from his professional or personal life. Taylor likes to joke around at the beginning, middle and end of TA, and he comes off jolly uncle more than anything, but the topics chosen for each show (there are usually two) jam together two phenomena that otherwise don’t belong together. Taylor draws his guests from people who have recently given conference papers or written books on, for instance, Russian juvenile detention or the stigma of death. It’s great stuff.

I occasionally listen to things on BBC iPlayer too, shows you’re not allowed to download but have to listen to straight from the computer. But the above are my essentials (also the BBC Film Program, I forgot about that, once again, some good interviews and historical material, not always overall so relevant to me).

From the US, I do enjoy the /filmcast. This is an hour-plus-long discussion by three youngish men (some might say, film geeks) living in three different parts of the US, talking about new films and film news, and then discussing a film. These guys are presumably half my age and I have to say there are times when their ignorance of things I think of as important films stuns me (similarly when they talk about mainstream films I think of as tossed-off trash as significant cinema seemingly often because they saw it at the age of 12) but by the same token, most of the time they are streets ahead of me in what they know which is great. Although a lot of it, particularly recently, is junk about superhero films which is less great. But the interplay between them is really good (if occasionally, to use a term they themselves often use, sophomoric) and while I probably only end up seeing about 10% of the films they review, there’s still a huge amount to enjoy about this show.

NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me is a much more structured, longer version of the News Quiz (in fact they subtitle it, ‘the NPR News Quiz’). It’s a lot more showbiz and listeners call in. The panelists are drawn from a small pool of writers and performers who I have otherwise never heard of, except P J O’Rourke, but who in the main are very amusing people with sharp wits. What always surprises me about WWDTM is that all the segments are quite easy but one, where a caller has to guess which of three bizarre stories is true. I always get this wrong and I can’t imagine how anyone could consider this a fair fight, particularly considering most of the others – such as the limerick where you have to guess the last word of the last line – are piss easy. Never mind. Always a funny and enjoyable show and, like the News Quiz, you learn a little fact, and a lot more about how Americans get their news.

This American Life is a gem, of course, though I will say this about it: it is a good example of Americans’ bad habit of assuming that America is the world, because the stories in This American Life can come from anywhere in the world, mind you, they almost always come from the USA. The show is divided up into ‘acts’ that relate to a central theme, and can go from outright radio journalism of the highest calibre, to stand up comedy bits, or personal stories/interviews. It’s always very well done, and fascinating.

Boxcutters is the only regular podcast in my regimen which is Australian. That’s because I augment all of the above with Radio National programs at regular times, or even sometimes podcasted too. Boxcutters is much more ramshackle and off the cuff; at its weakest, it’s the weakest of all of these shows (I’m thinking particularly of the rather lazy humour) but it’s also pertinent to me as a consumer and gives me a lot of great information about the media. It has two permanent hosts – Josh Kinnal and Brett Cropley – and at present is rotating part-time permanent hosts on a confusing occasional basis, but they are all very fine (that said, I feel particularly pleased when Courtney Hocking is guest host; I know nothing about her except that she is funny). Josh Kinnal has the peculiar (but spreading?) habit of pronouncing his ‘r’s American style, even though he is not American. Is this the Australian International accent?

It’s hard to get into the habit of podcasts, particularly as they don’t just show up on your ipod with a little icon of toast popping out of a toaster or the sun coming up or a butler bringing them to you on a tray, to say, your new podcasts have arrived: you have to refresh your iTunes and make them happen, then administer to cleaning out your old podcasts and putting in new ones, it’s a hassle and as arduous as working on a farm milking cows and mucking out stables. I suppose it would be fatuous to say the above (as part of a proper diet including healthy slabs of Radio National) keep me informed and in touch, because I’m really not, particularly. But I do feel I am more informed than I would otherwise be. Well done PC Pod.

western ring road widening

2011-05-20T16:19:00.003+10:00

kids at station

2011-05-20T16:17:00.000+10:00

dragon, dentist, rain

2011-05-14T13:09:00.005+10:00

I am not kidding I have been in situations in the last 3 days where each day I have heard commercial radio playing a classic 70s Dragon song - April Sun, Still in Love with You, Get that Jive if I remember rightly. Strange. I love Dragon as you may know.

I went to the dentist on Thursday am and had three fillings. It was entirely painless and barely uncomfortable, except for the itchiness. They put something on my face which got itchy underneath, and then later in probably unrelated news, when my face was still numb it got very itchy but I was unable to scratch it because it was numb.

It is raining I want to walk the dogs but I don't want to get wet. Aside from anything else I still have 5% of the cold I had a week ago.

go team

2011-05-11T10:15:00.001+10:00

We saw the Go-Team last night at the Corner and they were exceptional.
The months leading up to last night, as far as a G-T show was concerned, was like an angsty dream, as I kept forgetting to buy tickets and then, once I had bought tickets, I kept forgetting the show was on and didn’t remember until midway through the day yesterday. Tuesday night is actually a better night for me than most – I am generally a spent force by Friday, even Thursday – but for some reason it just never stuck in my mind or I couldn’t take it seriously. Then I remembered properly and factored it in.

Once it was factored, I realized I was actually really looking forward to seeing something different from the usual kind of thing I saw when it came to bands, which is almost always friends’ bands, friends of friends’ bands, or ‘who they fuck do they think they are’. I don’t know anyone aside from me who likes the Go Team (Mia would concede the songs were catchy, so she is more in that ballpark than anyone else I know, but she was not really a fan). I had no idea who would be there. That was fine, I was relishing the unknownness.

It comes in the context which I probably spend too much time railing against, most recent manifestation of which was a work drinks where talk unfortunately turned to music, at which I had a little rant re: the recent Gang of Four tour and the more recent use, which I had only just seen a day or so before, of a Gang of Four tune in a TV ad, from an album which I had bought 30 years ago along with, I guess, about 3 or 400 other Australians. It’s a great album and everyone should hear it who likes that kind of thing, but the time, as far as I’m concerned, to revel in that stuff and the people who recorded that album is not now. Musical sentimentality is a crock. No two ways about it. The thing that made bands of 30 years ago good is now gone.

On the way to the Corner we had dinner at Raffles (note to self and you: don’t get the vegetable curry if you are hoping to experiment away from the usual laksa, because it’s just the laksa without noodles) and then a beer at the Great Britain. At that point I said to Mia I thought there was every chance the night could even be inspiring (I was really jinxing everything let’s face it). I was about as pumped as I could be, though fortunately no-one noticed (and that is not very pumped).

Once there waiting for the G-T to come on, I asked Mia what the best show she ever saw at the Corner was. She mentioned Bailter Space, Pere Ubu and Palace. I don’t think I was there for the first of these (but I think I saw BS at the Punters - ?) and I agree PU were brilliant and Palace was just an incredible show. I also mentioned Love (which was sadly a reunion show, and I despise those, but still pretty fine), Sleater Kinney, Low, and Operator Please. I mentioned Low but in truth I don’t rate them at all – I never understood the appeal, sorry Low, why should you care. I am sure we’ve seen a hundred other acts at the Corner but that was what we could remember off the cuff. Also, I saw Ian Moss at the Corner once and that was an amazing show, it has to be said.

Anyway with the G-T I was really uncertain of what to expect. I knew that their records were kind of made to the auteur model, a la Tame Impala or… Pet Sounds Beach Boys? I also ‘knew’ because I read it online that their live shows were kind of like a separate strand to what they did, not an attempt to replicate the records. I was very fine with that. But while I had long enjoyed those records, whatever else I’d read about them online or wherever it had been very difficult to make that information stick. So I was contentedly in the dark.

The curtains parted and there were six people onstage, two drummers, two guitars-bass and keyboards no-one was playing, and it just went into an onslaught. The whole thing was a barrage. (I didn’t realise how loud it was, at all, until it was over, and all I could hear sounded like it was being transmitted on a dodgy shortwave radio inside a copper box. I think it’s getting better…). The instant they started playing, I realized, I love this band – they have amazing songs and now I appreciate they are really stylish and great fun! They swapped instruments constantly – I don’t think they played one song in the same configuration, certainly not consecutively. Three of them (only the women) sang. There was clearly something (mainly keyboard lines I guess) being triggered, probably by a drum machine/click track, but everyone was totally in synch and tight in the messiest way imaginable.

I don’t know. Maybe there are a lot of bands like this, and I’m just stuck in the ghetto of the kind of worthy dross I mentioned above. I never really expect a band to put on a visual show, and in fact barring the jumping around of Ninja, who sang most of the G-T’s songs (she was the only one not on stage all the time, though, oddly) the G-T were concentrating on playing like a rock band, but it gelled extremely well, it sounded amazing, and it was that rare, rare occasion where a show ended and I was like, already? Because most of the time, shows end and I’m like, at last!!! Recently I was at a show where the band, who I will not name but they had one, ended their set with a monotonous dirge wherein I am sure they took pleasure in the unrelenting appalling extreme attenuatedness of the song, that always seemed about to stop and then went into another cycle of torpor. It was the musical equivalent of a taunt: you have to endure this not because it’s our art or we like it either but just because you know us or know people who know us and you’re stuck here out of obligation and there’s nothing you can do about it, you have to hear this ghastly racket specifically calculated to distress you.

So after the G-T I said to Mia, that was actually probably quite inspiring. If nothing else, it inspired me to walk out on the next glum, dull, ponderous piece of crap indie nonsense I am exposed to, and the rest thereafter if I have any gumption. That’s a revelation.