i am the cliche

I seem to recall that my first blog entry on Lorraine Crescent was about coffee, probably about my attempts to give up coffee which was an obsession of sorts in the first decade of the twenty-first century (why? Partly I think because someone had told me that coffee increased one's desire for carbs, and I wanted to lose weight without doing anything icky like exercising; also, living with an addict as I was, I wanted to prove that I could get by without any addiction to anything, and that was my one addiction) (and is). But I bet it wasn't long before my blog entry on cats. Also, dogs. So, coffee and pets, coffee and pets, and pop music, these are the things that move me. Oh, and shitty old television. It's sick, and worse, it's a sickness so many people of my generation/class have, maybe less so my gender but there's plenty of men who have this. Just not as many as nice middle class ladies. 

Coffee entered my life with my first girlfriend, Rachel. I was 15. She drank coffee, I am guessing probably instant, a lot, and so did I therefore. Her family also ate a lot of chinese cabbage, they relished it, but only one of those things have stayed with me (now I think about it, maybe I should try chinese cabbage again, just to see if it evokes anything e.g. the first time I ever saw/heard Duran Duran on Countdown, doing 'Planet Earth'). Coffee has been with me pretty much ever since and probably always will be, though I did successfully give it up for a couple of months some time - I forget when, it's been a long life, but I think I switched to decaf for a time either late 90s or early 00s, but of course like heroin you crave the rush. 

Pets were always there it's silly to even discuss. I have had times in my life with no pets, it's true, but seriously, why would you.

Pop music was always there, but I specifically remember a long drive with a family my family were close friend with, where they as a family sang 'Let it Be' in the car (now, obviously, that could have happened last year or ten years after 'Let it Be' came out, and if I was five I wouldn't have known whether 'Let it Be' was released in 1970 or 1850, but it was almost definitely before 1972, because we moved away from Kew at the beginning of '73 and I wouldn't have gone on a long drive with that family after that time). So that marks for me an early memory, my earliest memory, of contemporary pop music. By the mid-70s I was actually Beatles obsessed, when at school the divisions were clear: Beatles vs Abba. I switched to, or accommodated, Abba in 1976, via two sources: visiting my father in hospital I think when he was having a back operation, and seeing 'Mama Mia' on tv (extra interest because 'mama mia' was a thing kids - Italian kids? - said at school that was exotic enough to almost be swearing) but I was still not ready to be swept up in anything, but then a schoolfriend, John, described 'Fernando' to me on a school excursion, as being about the Swedish-Mexican war, and that made it stick in my mind. He also raved about it and I guess his taste had currency for me. However, I also vaguely remember mentioning it to him again a few months (a few days? who knows) later and he was entirely uninterested. I might be extrapolating false memories with that last bit. So by 1976 it was Abba vs Bay City Rollers, although some girls were still uncertain whether they were aligned with BCR or 'horses'. After the Abba thing crashed (1977?) I went into abeyance with pop music interest until around 1980 when I became heavily engaged. Rachel broke up with me and I had been saving money to buy her a nice impressive birthday present, so since I didn't have to do that anymore, I bought myself some albums (I already had the first Pretenders and B-52s albums, and I added The Undertones' Hypnotised, which I'd read about in the NME, the first Dexy's Midnight Runners album, Devo's Freedom of Choice and John Foxx's Metamatic: I actually still own copies of all of these). 

Bad TV was always good. If I am grateful to my parents for anything it is the way they encouraged me, leading by example, to regard mass media as always potentially idiotic, venal, etc. I recall at a very young age my father explaining to me that Reg Ansett misled the Australian public/government by claiming that if he was allowed his own television channel, he would produce high-quality local content, which of course he never did. I don't remember my father saying that Ansett had pals in high places who probably didn't care either way what happened, although if he had that might have gone over my head. I recall (as I have probably bored you in years past on this blog) holding uncritical attitudes to cartoons,* though on reflection, maybe having cartoons like Road Runner, or Secret Squirrel, was a chance to have something that was mine, and where my parents' hypercritical attitude didn't matter. Ditto Adventure Island. But at the same time, we would happily ridicule all stupid, obvious, mainstream television but in some instances also enjoy it because we could ridicule it. So, my sarcastic, unproductive, casual arsehole attitude was cultivated from an early age through my parents' own responses cultivated I suppose in the case of my mother, from her parents' highbrow attitude to popular culture and in the case of my father, his university arts degree removing him from his parents' lower middle class attitudes. It shocked me, as I got older and saw other people's lives, how uncritically they accepted mass media, though for all that, I am aware that my own response of trusting nothing mediated by (for instance) commercial television was/is as much a learned reaction. I wasn't taught to think critically, I was taught to always find a way to be critical. I had to unlearn that and enjoy (to pluck something from my brain's offering up of an immediate example, without thinking hard about it) 'Into the Heat' by The Angels, without wondering about who the fucking Angels thought they were or were trying to be or who they thought they were appealing to or what Doc Neeson's theatricality was supposed to indicate. I realise that's a weird example, it's just the first example I thought of, and so I went with it on the assumption that that would be more 'pure'. To problematise this, I guess we all liked older things better in our family on the understanding/assumption that artisans were more involved in the old days, and skill was more prevalent, there was some kind of talent recognition mechanism, whereas the 'present' (eg the 1970s) was more about trickery and faddishness - though if I had challenged my father, for instance, on this assumption I am pretty sure he would have happily reeled off 20 names of actors, artists, writers who were as shit as anything currently popular, and as popular in their day if not more so.  

Hence, by the way, the character of Elyse in Persiflage, who has an uncritical, base, positive response to a tv sitcom which she is too naive to even understand and on which she imprints other emotional ideals, but from which she filters through everything else in her waking life. Sorry to bring it back to my silly graphic novel but of course that's what that shit's about. I'm fascinated by the reality behind fiction/drama/play-acting and I'm fascinated by popular culture tropes and what they really 'mean' to an audience. I am also of course fascinated by the perceived background or underpinning or context to music, or to celebrity. 

To go back to Abba: they fascinated us as 12 year olds at Auburn South Primary. Two girls and two boys in our class (one of the girls was an absolute crush of mine at the time, and I was not alone) were allowed to use the classroom during lunch time to workshop a play they were formulating about the lives of Abba members. I think in hindsight probably more likely they were learning how to kiss, but what do I know (one of the boys later told me and other boys he had fucked the girl I had a crush on, which I accepted uncritically. The story went like this: 'she came to my house with her parents for a party, and I said do you want to come up to my room and she said yeah, and we fucked'. About twenty years later I thought - hey wait a minute - that actually is really, really unlikely, not least because I'm pretty sure the girl in question only had a mother not a father but also for class reasons - those people would never socialise, ever). Another Abba story, from a girl in I'm guessing grade 6: 'Abba all went into a sauna together naked, and the boys went out to roll in the snow and the girls locked them out of the sauna, naked'. This is actually much more likely than the local fucking story, but still that it was told at all shows how exotic and exciting Abba's lives were to us, as we modelled our understanding of what it was to be physically perfect and sexually active super-white adults. Boy were they a cultural manifestation as Australia got over White Australia. They were with us at exactly the same time as the first Vietnamese refugees started to be accepted (or not) as Australians. 

I don't know how to end this but it's not like I'm writing for The Monthly or something** so I don't have to have a neat ending, I can just end. 

*Also comics, which were however a very different beast to me, as different as novels are from films - of course. 

** They wouldn't have me

babysitting

As I write I am sitting across from April, who is watching a Madeline dvd on a laptop. We have had one of those evenings for which there should be a new word, to describe something that was superficially boring but broadly interesting.

My memories of childhood are of shattering misunderstandings for both me and adults. I felt these things hard and of course this has had a big impact on the way I treat children. I don’t want to give them bad memories! Which has meant I have found it very hard, for instance, to exercise any kind of authority. Actually I know April well enough to not really worry overly about this (I’d probably be more concerned about telling Laurie off, something incidentally I have never done). Anyway this evening she was extremely interesting, while at the same time much of what she said was awfully repetitive to a weird degree. I mean weird for my experience of being talked to, not weird I am sure for 3½ year olds. Tonight the main repetition surrounded a joke regarding the Wizard of Oz, which we had as a viewing option for the evening if we wanted it. I expressed surprise to April’s parents that she was allowed to watch it as my mother did not let me watch that film until I was relatively old (I can’t remember how old; 12?). There were two films I wasn’t allowed to watch because they might have disturbed me: that one and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which incidentally I have still never seen. Is it any good?). Anyway, Nicole made some remark to April along the lines of how I might be scared by the witch in Wizard of Oz. This set off a response in April which had her saying probably up to 30 times – I am totally not exaggerating – the same sentence, ‘If you see the witch and you’re scared, (pause), that’s OK’. I suppose the pause spoke the most, because the reality was if I saw the witch and I was scared, we were both screwed, but of course what she was really saying was, ‘If I see the witch and I’m scared…’ though I am still not sure that sentence had an end. When the witch first showed up, April got under the blanket (she has a blanket on the couch) with a big mouse doll dressed like a bride for comfort. After the wicked witch of the west disappeared in a cloud of red smoke, April lost interest (and nb did something to the television, as only small children can in the presence of babysitters, which has rendered it unusable). After this time we spent probably an hour and a half, perhaps longer, in a series of breathless and short-attention-span dramas in which she explored every role under the sun, well, within her range of known roles. The most important thing was not rolling out the play-acted story (though there were a few unusual scenarios) but who she was in the story (and to a lesser extent who I was). ‘I’m the nurse’, ‘I’m the doctor’, ‘I’m the sister’, etc. The bad one (I hate it when young children do this, though I know they have to) was ‘I’m the baby’, though I admit ‘I’m the baby jellyfish’ had a special something to it, unfortunately baby jellyfish are about as irritating as regular babies, they talk baby talk and crawl etc. Luckily April was not particularly beholden to this or indeed any of these play roles, and would change them again and again in the space of a minute. The scenarios had a lot of dolls as well, who were the sister, the baby, etc. and who had to see the doctor, the nurse etc and get a needle. I would always ask her what the illness was, and they revolved around chocolate and footballs, though I am not quite sure now whether this evolved with any input from me. There was a lot of the baby or the girl or boy hurt their leg or their tummy playing football, somewhere along the way this sometimes became they swallowed a football or they got food stuck in their teeth. There was a bit of back and forth about whether the patient needed a needle and I assumed this is what I would as a child have called an injection but oddly the needle then had to be removed at a later date. There was also some discussion about whether the stethoscope was needed though April sees this as therapeutic rather than diagnostic (she had some small cardboard books in a box which served as a ‘stethoscope’). The doctor’s room was at the far end of the couch, and the hospital was in the kitchen (two chairs put together). There was also a child’s car seat, which was the jail where bad children were put (my innovation was to insist they be put in upside down; April’s innovation was that we should put the hospital chairs in front of the jail to watch the bad children suffer).

I forgot (probably because it bored me the most) to mention the ballet. At certain points I had to play at ballet teacher, which was crap because I don’t know what the various ballet moves are called and I don’t think she knows either. All I really knew to say – and it certainly got results – was that she should go round and round, which I already knew she really knows how to do. She had her ballet dress on (still does) and informed me that boys had boy’s dresses, that they were blue, and was clearly unable to finish that sentence satisfactorily, since her ballet dress is blue but is not a boy’s dress.

So as I said she is presently watching Madeline and the Gypsies, a fairly faithful adaptation of a book I know for a fact she has already read, and she’s watching it for the second time or perhaps the third. If I was romany, or in fact even though I’m not, I would feel pretty uneasy about this story, in which ‘gypsies’ are irresponsible child-stealers (well, in a rather benign way; Madeline is allowed to be in the gypsy circus as long as she sends a postcard to Miss Clavelle) and don’t clean their teeth or go to bed at night. I mean it hardly sends April a very realistic message about this maligned ethnic group. I guess a lot of children’s literature casually uses the ‘other’ and what can you do? Though having seen April’s play activities (or at least the ones she thought were adaptable for my involvement) as of September 09, they seem very much based in the here and now.

chiz

I got on the bus this evening and the radio was playing ‘Cheap Wine’ (I was expecting it to be playing the last number one in the world, so there you go). I was once again reminded of so many interesting but not necessarily wonderful things about the Chiz, eg the good tune/ bad singing/ good and bad guitar coming out of the one amazing guitarist/ the line about rocket fuel… you know, all the things. I was surprised to see on facebook a few weeks ago some people full-on having a go at the Chiz when they failed to realise that what they were having a go at was that turkey Barnesy, but the Chiz are one of those muslim constructions indicating nothing is greater than god by having an imperfection, and that imperfection is the Barnestoermer himself. There was a moment, I don’t know if you know, when Barnesy quit the Chiz – this is before they had a record deal – and Mossy took over. Mossy is not only a guitarist’s guitarist, he’s a grouse singer. And so Chiz played with Mossy as singer for quite a few months, I think Barnesy had replaced Bon Scott in some band or other the name of which will return to me and I will put it in here when it does. And then he quit that and went back to the Chiz. Awful. But the worst thing is that tosserama Gudinski saying he wished he’d signed Chiz but when he heard their demo tape, Barnesy wasn’t singing (like, that’s a reason not to like them). Remember that joke from the Simpsons, I got Paul McCartney out of Wings? Well if only someone had got Barnesy out of Chiz forever… Don Walker’s (and the others’) amazing songs, and the incredible band, and Mossy up front. They would have been the greatest band in the world, instead of what they were, the greatest band in the world with a little pus-filled gutbucket up front belting out a kind of modified robot baby scream.


Whatever. Gudinski then signed Mossy and Mossy had a number one hit, so what was his problem with Mossy? Don Walker’s last album Cutting Back continues, for my money, to be a complete work of absolute genius, which keeps producing new greatnesses, so I am right into that, and I think Walker is in some ways a great bush balladeer whose music isn’t quite up to his lyrics (like a lot of great lyricists, think of Bob Dylan, if you like Bob Dylan), but it certainly has room for great musicians to work within, as ‘Cheap Whinge’ (as any song with Barnesy singing it could be called) shows.



I recently witnessed a quite good conference paper about oz rock and western Sydney in the 80s. I was up for it. I still think that oz rock is a misnomer; there’s no such thing in terms of sound (Icehouse was ‘oz rock’ as much as Chiz or anything else you care to name of a guitar-power chord persuasion; and for that matter, to take a random example and as much as they’re – or because they’re so – despised, the Angels were often as post-punk as anything else; think of the similarities, for there are so many, between the Gang of Four and ‘Take a Long Line’). I think the Angels are unfairly despised in many quarters. I admit I agree the later 80s saw them get a bit too hair-metal at least for my taste or the 21st century’s, the earlier stuff was very hardy. I advise you to reassess at the earliest opportunity.