recent canberra

So I am writing to you from a restaurant in Manuka called Bambusa, it is quite loud but I was basically pleased to find somewhere that was open, because looking around (online, before going outside) it seemed like heaps of things took Sunday and Monday off. As I said (were you paying attention it is quite loud i.e. there are tons of people here, all talking, not eating loudly fortunately, in fact I can't see too many people eating at all as it happens, but yes talking, about Canberran things I suppose. 

I have been here since Thursday night - I joined Laura and Lenny who had been here for a couple of days already - Laura came to Canberra to get an honour for her book, a triumph of a project that she picked up by its neck's scruff and took to its logical conclusion and made a magnificent success. Which I guess was capped by getting an award at a lo-o-ong but not horrible ceremony at the National Library, truly one of the great places of this nation. Proud doesn't cover it. Aside from that, we have done some sight seeing and wandering, and also went to the Liam Neeson Naked Gun, a project inspired (from my perspective at least) by hearing some goofs on the bus discussing it, in the case of one goof, dissing it thoroughly for no good reason. I'd heard it was good and I thought while clearly it is the kind of film one could not too horrendously see on tv or probably even on your phone without feeling you'd missed too much... ok quick switch it is now the next day and I am on the terrace at the National Library, one of my favourite places in the world (the library not the terrace though the terrace is not awful). I have been looking through a wide range of bizarre things (one of the librarians asked me what I was working on and I said everything which she might have interpreted as me saying 'shut up/mind your own business' or 'I'm just this amazing chameleon', depending on what kind of person she is, though also, she might just have not been that concerned either way and not really cared, and that is also pretty fine by me, though I will say I am usually (not always but usually) interested in what people are working on. 

 

It is a tepid day and sunny, not awful at all. When I went out this morning for a coffee to a fuck-off-bourgeois cafe a block away from the hotel, it was 0 degrees and I was definitely thinking, this is what I want more of. To be honest I am still thinking I may have to disappear to Finland this coming summer, partly because I just need to go there frequently and also, because, summer. I mean if there was somewhere closer that was cold where I could go in summer, yes I would but I don't think there really is. Perhaps NZ is at least more sensible, temperature-wise. Perhaps a NZ south island week might be in order. But knowing my luck it would end up in a heatwave. From where I sit I just saw a huge rabbit run across the manicured lawn and a big magpie just scrambled up onto the top of the glass barrier disturbing a little round tit or something similar, I am not good with bird names, I can hear people at other tables (quite a way off) talking about house prices or telling their children not to climb on things. You got to love Canberra. Canberra has everything and a little bit more. Off in the distance there are people cycling on the lakeside and pushing prams etc. It's all so nice. 

 

I am dead keen to get back to my research, I have a lot of good things ordered. Some of them are just silly bits and pieces perhaps to aid my wikipedia projects (like my aim to give Henry Clive a proper entry, he was the Melbourne magician who went to the USA and became a portrait artist and/or creator of pictures of possibly hypothetical beautiful women; he was also cast as the millionaire by Charlie Chaplin in City Lights then refused to jump in the water (as per the script) so was sacked - he had also been the art director on the film, I don't know if he was sacked from that job as well at the same time - ? Maybe there's a way to find out. I don't know if anyone's actually written a book about the making of CL that goes that far into the weeds. Anyway, the wikipedia entry said something idiotic like that Clive played the bad guy or something that ridiculous, and mentioned nothing about him being sacked. But if we're talking ridiculousness I do have to admit I got confused and instead of ordering press cuttings on Henry Clive I ordered press cuttings on Clive Henry - who was or is a sculptor of much later period, so that was dumb. 

 

I've been looking at other things too but now I'm 60 I've stopped trusting the internet because AI and I don't want to have my ideas (or rather my research) fed into the melange. To be clear, it's not that I don't trust you, it's bots I don't trust, and perhaps bots read blogs, I don't know. 

 

Here's something a bot won't care about. Since I have to read a whole lot of shizzle trying to sift out things I want from things I don't, I listen to music, and in this case I decided it was time to check my opinion previously expressed of The Twenty-Seven Points. I remembered absolutely none of it, and it's actually lamer than I thought it would be - just bad versions of lesser songs, in the main.* Then for some reason there's this stuff where MES is telling someone (he's reading this off a page!) to go back to Ireland. I really can't imagine what this is about, or who it's about, or why we should care at all. Did people have fewer things to worry about in the mid-90s? 

 

The one thing I will admit may have affected my re-appreciation of this album is the fact I had to listen to it quite quietly, because I was in a library (though there was no-one else really nearby). Perhaps if I blasted it that joke about the man with the spade in his head being called Doug would really cut through. 

 

Speaking of English music I had a hankering yesterday for hearing some song or other by the Experimental Pop Band, from the Discgrotesque album, but I was suprised (perhaps in some way pleased) to find I couldn't access it online. But I could access another of their albums which I'd never heard (or seen) and it's pretty good. If you're nice I'll tell you what it's called sometime. 

 

Now I'm going back to the trenches. Can you believe idiots like Elon Musk or Donald Trump or, I don't know, Vladimir Putin, who can afford to not work and could just spend their days looking through stuff in the National Library in Canberra but instead they just spend their days burrowing into big mounds of shit to the degree that no-one can tell where the big mounds of shit end and they begin. That does no-one any good. 

 

LATER: So in the afternoon I did listen to This Nation's Saving Grace as I had threatened to some weeks ago to everyone's amazement. It's not a terrible record although that 'I Am Damo Suzuki' is, like, a sort of lazy racial stereotype. I'm not imagining that. 

 

The version on spotify has a whole extra album's worth of versions and outtakes, some of them are pretty interesting. There are neat extra flourishes on some songs that were inexplicably taken off. What I assume is the 'proper' version of 'Paintwork' sounds pretty great without the fuckups. Anyway in the main I can live without it.

 

Got a lot of worthwhile stuff in the NLA, will take a while to process it. Both personally and IRL. 

* 'Free Range' is not a terrible song. 

canberra late may

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.

bega week

6 Feb
I am at Gus' in Canberra what a thrill for Sunday ... I am really just passing through but loving it thus far. Got into Canberra in the early afternoon - I am only here for a second en route to Cooma and thence Bega-Tathra-Bermagui, all worky things. Quick drop into the NLA to find out some things I should already have known (and to get a new library card because I lost my last one - where on earth is one supposed to keep these kinds of things, that are just never going to be useful except, like, once a year?)

I could not believe the dreary shell of a young lady i sat next to on the plane, she was reading a Peter Temple but soon fell asleep in her boyfriend's lap, so what do I care about her, well, I was just annoyed that after all that ostentatious uncaringness, when we landed she said to her boyfriend 'there they are!' whoever was dumb enough to pick them up at the airport I suppose and she stuck her skinny arm in front of my face to wave out the window. I wonder if, on arrival, she said to 'them', 'did you see me? I waved!' and I wonder if she was disappointed when they said, 'dub tf!?'

The airport at Canberra is new now and it's really hard to figure out the way the old airport used to be laid out, there are all kinds of twists and turns.

7 Feb
If I am not mistaken Cooma is where Pip Proud learnt to play guitar. He was an apprentice wireless technician in the mid-1960s (around the time I was born I suppose) and someone taught him a few chords. This was what Pip told me late in his life, though he also implied at an earlier time that he had actually learnt to play guitar a lot earlier in life, as a cure for what he suggested was spasticity of some sort. I was never entirely sure what he meant when he said he had been born spastic but he seemed to have no motor coordination problems when I first knew him (then he had a stroke, so that’s a different story obviously) and I have never heard of anyone training themselves out of being ‘spastic’, a word I think is possibly no longer used anyway. There are no plaques in Cooma that I have seen announcing that this was where Pip Proud learnt to play guitar but there should be one. I believe more in plaques these days. I think they are valid if they are used properly. I was in Gowrie in Canberra yesterday afternoon and I was impressed by the fact that the streets were all named after soldiers in I think WWII, not impressed by that particularly, but each street sign had a little information about them (rank and serial number, basically) which was good.

Well, I got into Cooma last night very tired after not sleeping much the previous night. I booked into a hotel where the bathroom – I am not sure if I know how to put this delicately but I’ll try – stunk of shit (though curiously by morning this was no longer the case, I imagine it was something to do with the drains) and I wandered wondering how so many Thai restaurants had thrived here till recently only to then close down. So last night I ate at the Alpine Hotel, in the small but swank dining room, which they positively ruined by playing all the music I have ever hated in my life apart from Meatloaf, presumably just so they could perpetuate the fear in me that they might at a certain point play Meatloaf. There was BULK U2. I wonder why with all their pretensions at the AH they didn’t think playing pop music (crummy or otherwise) spoilt the mood somewhat.

Cooma is quite a pretty town even without the thai restaurants, it has quite a lot of large art deco buildings such as the aforementioned Alpine Hotel which I am presently in sight of as I write this. I am having some fruit sourdough toast in a café/bakery called The Lott, which seems a happy little place, full of people who might well be treechangers. Worn wooden floorboards, rustic benches, hessian covering the facings of the high counter, a huge churn full of cushions – that kind of thing. It’s a cluttered schtick that might just be trying very slightly too hard, but is still fairly decent when it comes down to it.


Road out of Cooma
It was cold and misty this morning and I realized when I unpacked my bag that, when I repacked from a shopping bag (I only do carry on these days) I must have left my jumper out. Yesterday morning in Melbourne it took real intellect to conceive of the possibility of ever needing a jumper again, and I don’t have that plainly.

This morning I drive on to Bega, then Tathra, then Bermagui. Follow my adventures!

8 Feb


Yesterday was a good productive trip to Bermagui where we picked up two boxes of priceless documents I will be scanning furiously tomorrow (I mean today, sorry). It is 4:53 am as I write, I have been awake for a couple of hours as I went to bed following a small bbq with colleagues and students at this jammy 3-bedroom unit I have been put in (don't know why, but do know I was in a very similar situation last time I was here in Tathra) and then I woke up at 3 am convinced there was someone in the unit. I was not particularly scared of this notion but fairly certain of it (I suppose I was still partly asleep or something). After a while I roused myself sufficiently to go downstairs and check the four (!) doors leading into the place to discover two of them were unlocked, so if there had been someone in here I suppose there might have been a reason. For all I know there is a lot of burglary etc here because people are probably fairly lax about leaving doors open. I know I am/was.

So I was now properly woken up so I did all the things I had been intending to do when I woke up, like assess some ethics applications and start digitising tapes, and that meant I could reset the alarm for 7 rather than 6, though now it's perilously close to 7, I should try and sleep some more. 'Night.

The day: I felt pretty ill most of the day but I soldiered on for the greater good. This apartment is really great.

10 Feb

Just been scanning docs for two days, with occasional breaks for small journeys. Not much to say about them, I may put up some pics later when I get home, for instance of what I think is a seniors' village, a burnt out house, etc. Today I am returning circuitously Tathra-Canberra via Bermagui, which adds an hour to my journey but is possibly more interesting as it's a whole new route I have never travelled on. Southern NSW is one more place I would definitely like to see more of.

I have had this low-grade virusy cold thing for the last two days which seems to be in a holding pattern but unwilling to fully grab me, just taunt me, I don't know what that's about. Perhaps it's just some kind of Bega-Tathra-Bermagui thing and I will leave it behind when I go. Maybe I should 'visualise that' concept and 'make it happen'.

last friday

Canberra airport is undergoing some kind of massive overhaul which means that everything takes 9 times as long there at the moment. Particularly the important and useful act of getting out of there. It’s going to be so nice when it’s finished though. I was in the taxi queue when I saw a bus down the road which claimed to be going to the city. I ducked out of the taxi queue (the immortal words about changing horses in mid-stream echoing boomily through my head) and took the bus instead. This morning’s flight being something of a cost debacle (not to mention a punctuality debacle) I wanted to effect some degree of cost minimization.

So now I am on a bus with my shoulder pushed roughly against the window frame as I have to sit turned towards the centre aisle if I want to use the laptop to tell you that I am now on a bus with my shoulder pushed roughly against the window frame as I have to sit turned towards the centre aisle if I want to use the laptop to tell you that I am now on a bus with my (it will be a good day in blogging when the function is introduced so I can turn the central eternal continuity of this paragraph into some kind of merry-go-round of text indicating its eternal or at least continuous nature). It is going to take me another ¾ of an hour to get to the library where I had it all planned out I would unproblematically be at 9 am when it opens. Everything is late in this day and age. We all know that if you don’t catch your flight, you don’t get a refund and it doesn’t wait for you. What is the reasonable amount of time before which you can say to the airline (in this case, the always merry Virgin Blue), look I’ve been waiting at charming Tullamarine Airport for 1 ½ hours now, why don’t we just admit this isn’t going to work? Give me my money back and I will apologise to the Canberrans and not attend the meeting. As it happened I was planning to do that 1½ hours after and they started boarding 1 hour and 25 mins (that is, 1 and 5/12 minutes after.

Much much later. Can you believe I am now in Goulburn, jewel of the Goulburn area as it is often described. I am in the Paragon café, jewel of Goulburn cafes (the other one from what I can gather is a Gloria ‘Pissininyer’ Jean’s). I am drinking a glass of Paragon red and waiting for a greek salad and reading today’s Goulburnienest, or at least I was before you butted in.

I am gonna see a crappy movie (I must like them – otherwise I wouldn’t be letting myself in for another so soon after last weekend i.e. within one lifetime) at the Lilac City Cinemas, Goulburn. I have till 11:17 when the train comes to take me back to Melbourne or as some would have it ‘Melbs’. No-one ever says Melbvegas, I wonder why not.

Later so I went to see Bounty Hunter at the Lilac City Cinema, it was pretty OK on most fronts, I was particularly interested in what the audience might be like, they barely laughed. There was an audible reaction when the guy who looked like Shane Moritz got a big horse tranquiliser injection in his neck. I didn’t laugh at that or any other part of the film, but I enjoyed it. I thought Jennifer Aniston was actually pretty good in it. You see, I am part of the cool crowd who doesn’t like any mainstream performer, and cannot admit they may have talent to do what they do. That kind of approach was subversive at one point – before about 1980 I think. But now the only way anyone can be subversive is to reverse that and only like mainstream things, like everyone else. I don’t particularly want to be subversive or versive. And some people don’t want to be subversive – they just don’t like Jennifer Aniston. But I think she is OK after seeing this film. I never had a very high opinion of her before. I guess she was in that show Friends which I never really ‘got’ either. Now I am back in the Paragon. It’s not so bad.

Later imagine my surprise and awe when after paying my dues of waiting an hour plus at Goulburn station (there being nothing open in Goulburn as far as I can see after 10) we are informed that the train will be 25 minutes late and that Countrylink apologises for any inconvenience caused* and that they will be giving us regular updates. Imagine how impressive it is when we are then told in the next update that the train will be 50 minutes late, and then in the next update (delivered by a robot woman) that it will be an hour. Luckily there was no advance on the hour, but that hour did pass slowly. I thought I heard a ‘wah wah wah-wah’ trumpet at the moment a family of three set up camp close to my seat and all lit up together, inc. the late teens daughter. Just the cherry on top of irritations.

*Apologies for any inconvenience caused is a double insult. Firstly, it is too broad. It’s not ‘apologies for the lateness of the train service’, it’s kind of like the polite version of what are you rebelling against, Johnny? It’s like, we’ll apologise for anything, absolutely anything, because apologies are cheap and easy and we actually have no obligation to give you anything at all. And then it’s also offensive because it’s so unwilling to admit there is by definition an inconvenience. I suppose there is a possibility, a very minor one, that you really didn’t want the train to come, because you were going to meet someone who was going to punch you in the head, or you struck up a conversation with someone hot because you were both eating chocquitos or something. But let’s face it on the whole a train being late is by definition an inconvenience in itself, apart from the follow-on effect, having to reschedule appointments or having to rearrange your day to get everything done, when you waste an hour (f’rinstance) at Goulburn station. In my case I suppose I won’t have to rearrange my day too much, it’s a Saturday, going to Bendigo, but I guess there are other aggravations around it and despite the fact I came up with some good examples of why you might be like ‘wow, I’m so glad that train was late!’ you’ll still most likely consider it inconvenient in some way. My preferred announcement would be, Countrylink apologises for the lateness of this train. Countrylink (or Metro or Virgin Blue or whatever) doesn’t have to do more than that, I would say, in terms of social obligation. Of course the extra obligation which they would be doing, since this is actually a financial undertaking/contract, is that they pay you money on an hourly rate to compensate you for the time wasted. So people would be saying to me today, wow you’re so lucky that so many of the transport services you paid money to use were late, and I’d be like yes I struck the jackpot they were all significantly late and I got half my money back! I mean while this financially makes no sense at all (and the cost of transport would just go up, because the companies would all have to cover themselves and would pass on the cost to the consumer anyway) it is certainly very much the right thing to do.

And that reminds me. Metro still haven’t called me back with a lame reason for why my train was late on Thursday morning. I do love it when they do that because they always give a reason, and it’s always ‘the delay was caused by faulty brakes at Craigieburn’ or whatever, i.e. trying to blind you with pragmatic truth, but fuck ‘em, it’s not really the point, the point is, I want that time back and not to have been spent waiting around in places that are really not even nice places to wait. Maybe that’s the solution. Make these places nice places to wait. Because at the moment Goulburn railway station hasn’t got much, well, it does have a signals museum but that was closed when I was there.



Actually the cherry had a cherry on top which was: on arrival at Southern Cross I went to the information counter to discover how I could get my two hours’ free travel in Melbourne having come in on a country train. I got chapter and verse on how it works then had to present my ticket for a stamp. Imagine my surprise when I was told that actually since it was a Countrylink trip I did not qualify.

As it happened the Countrylink train had passed right through the station I wanted to get off at, but did not stop. I can’t gripe about that because it is of course a minority interest, getting off at Broadmeadows. Nevertheless one has to show intestinal fortitude at the various whammies of being an hour late to your destination, part of that hour being the excruciatingly wasteful time spent traveling Broadmeadows-Southern Cross (an interesting route, I have to admit, going through Brooklyn) and then having to pay for the privilege of returning to Broadmeadows. If I may count that as an hour and a half wasted on top of the hour wasted waiting for the train yesterday and the hour and a half wasted waiting for the plane yesterday, that’s 4 ½ hours of wasted time. I would like also if I may add another half an hour of time wasted trying to get out of Canberra airport which means my trip overall would have been 20% more effective if everything had been more punctual. I suppose I should then translate that into some kind of ‘man-hours’ calculation by which my hourly wage multiplied by 5 becomes the wastage gauge.

But you know I had plenty of contingency material at my fingertips like the laptop and ipod and books and blah and some more blah blah, so it’s not as though I was sitting there staring into space. I honestly can’t understand how people sit and stare into space. When I was in the Paragon there was a girl waiting for something takeaway (something chicken, I don’t know what) and they seemed to keep her waiting well over half an hour, during which time she simply sat and stared ahead of her. God I would not be able to cope with that. She was American, short and had a red and white striped top so if you see her round Goulburn please buy her a book. I am sure the red and white striped top is her iconic item of clothing by which everyone recognizes her, her name is probably Ditzy Mitzy and her catchphrase is, ‘I can switch off LIKE THAT!’

Hey Ditzy Mitzi
Wassup
Oh god don’t ask! I have been so delayed in my journeys over the last day! It has been one big hassle. First my plane was late to Canberra blah blah blah
(Mitzi shown staring into space with a thoughts bubble above here head showing elipses, or perhaps a ‘back in 5 minutes’ sign, or some other iconography suggesting absence).

happy first day of winter

It has been rainy the last few days. The last hour I was in Canberra it was fine and suddenly a gale ripped through, there were even branches on the road etc. It was all pretty good. Canberra, by the way, was fantastic but when isn't it.