a house i really liked the look of in richmond last week

 ...mainly because like what's with that upstairs window? But also just generally it's cool. I might steal it.

where leonard teale used to live

This, according to a few letters sent by Crawfords in the early 1970s (and the Sands and McDougall for 1974) is where Leonard Teale lived in the early 1970s. 

But that's basically all I have to say about it, except that there is mention of the home in the Age in October 1994 as having been sold (LT died in May of that year). I admit when I parked outside it this morning I half imagined Liz Harris still lived there but obviously she does not. 

I suppose it is odd/interesting that Alwyn Kurts and George Mallaby lived in comparatively humble circumstances. I don't know if Kurts was married* but Mallaby was, to Ruth Bass (he used to write scripts for Homicide under her name, I gather). 

Laura asked me the empathetic question which Homicide actor would I most like to visit at home, in the time he was alive, and I replied Norman Yemm. The addresses I gleaned of the other actors were from letters asking them to come to a launch for Yemm's replacement, so I suppose he wasn't invited, or at least, there's no letter to him. But the only N Yemm in the Sands and McDougall is at 401 Chesterfield Road East Bentleigh. I suppose I should pay it a visit sometime. 
 

*Update 27/12 I did some research. He was married twice. The first time was to a woman called Jean Pember (although one article refers to him in the same sentence as Jean Jember, so...?) but they divorced in 1939 after she supposedly found him sleeping with a vaudeville artist called Dulcie Kelly but the whole thing seems to have been something of a charade. He then married Eileen O'Hehir who was an athlete who worked in a shoe store. So it seems. Eileen outlived him. He appears to have had one child from his first marriage and two from the second, though his obit in 2000 only mentions two children. 

Perth Daily News 8 November 1939 p. 12

short memory lane

I had an hour of me time in Newtown etc this morning so I tried to remember some places I once knew better. For instance I have lived in both of these houses (unless it was the white one and the one to its right, but I don't think so):I have also lived here in the white house (no fond memories of this abode though I did get to meet my wonderful friend Fiona by dint of her living next door in the pink house):

and here (as I was taking this picture a man went past telling me that there were plenty of nicer spots for tourists to photograph).

I recall this mural when in its better days,

and this one too.

This is not a mural, I know. It is however new to me and I loved it:

how are megastars created?

Megastars are created by the people needing someone to argue over that everyone knows something about (or think they do). Last night at Suze's 36th I had two conversations/arguments about Hendrix and Dylan. It's almost embarrassing, actually, you know what? It is embarrassing. I have no interest in either of these figures. I felt like I was being untrue to myself anyway by pursuing the line that I prefer Donovan to Dylan (which I do, but that's fairly irrelevant; neither of them really thrill me) because it was such a hacky way to go. What I would really like to do is erase the whole debate (or wait until that increasingly unlikely event transpires: that I suddenly get why Dylan is a genius, on a visceral/emotional/immediate rather than a theoretical level). And then, for god's sake, Hendrix, a debate inspired by the fact that someone had played a 20+ minute version of Voodoo Chile on RRR as part of a series of 'classics' (yes, that's what we need public radio for - to play all the songs commercial FM has been flogging for the last quarter of a century but without ads). Not that commercial FM would have touched this Voodoo Chile, it was a National Lampoon comedy record of everything that was bloated and foul about the music of the late 1960s, and like all National Lampoon comedy records, not funny. (Unlike the National Lampoon horror records).

I suppose that everyone also has an opinion on Britney Spears I should have steered the conversation in that direction, because I would have liked to know what that opinion was, though frankly I couldn't give a loose root about her either.

Toby and Suze's house is excellent. A yellow brick 1930s-1950s (???!!!) bungalow on a strange shaped block of land, it has those beautiful deco ceilings and fireplaces. It costs them so much money to rent that the landlord will go straight to hell, but show me a landlord who won't, property being theft and so on.