not remembering things

Who knows what I do and don't remember. I was sitting here and remembered that I had done an emergency fill on RRR on Monday for the show Local and/or General. I put a lot of work into that - I mean as much as one could between agreeing to do it at around 5pm and actually doing it at 8 - and made it work I think. Then by the next day I had completely forgotten about it, at least, had anyone reminded me I would have had no problem recalling it, I just put it out of my mind entirely and did not reflect on it. I remember that doing the program, my voice was quite husky and last night I think Laura mentioned this, and I agreed because I recalled having slight trouble with it, but I didn't go to the place, in my memory, where this happened. This morning in a meeting I was talking to a colleague who had recently had covid whose voice was a bit croaky and recounted my own recent issues with same, but couldn't remember when it had happened, but didn't strain myself too much over trying to recall the details. It is only now, sitting on the couch two days after the original voice-losing program, that I am putting it all together and also, recalling that I put a lot into that program, and then completely forgot about it almost immediately. Isn't that odd. 

I have an appointment tomorrow morning that I had completely forgotten for some days until I was reading a New Yorker article in which someone with the same name as the person I had the appointment with was mentioned, and with a start I suddenly had to try piecing together the details of when that appointment was. It's at 11:30 tomorrow. So I don't think I'll forget that but who really knows.

I have a long list of things to do this week. Of course not all of them are getting done but some are perilously close, and others are absolutely completed. That feels good, to strike stuff off the list. The most satisfying was giving both the cats flea treatment. Nancy absolutely despises it (whether it actually causes a physical sensation to have that apparently quite toxic fluid on her skin I am not sure. She might just hate the noise of it. I don't know) but Helmi, who up until now has been completely agnostic about it, has suddenly also come to fear and hate being treated for fleas and worms. 

This is what I played on Monday night. 'A' stands for 'Australian' and 'L' for local. 

Blue Divers - Kitchen Light On (A)

Lucy Roleff and Lehmann B. Smith - Offering/ Not for Long (A/L)

Mess Esque - Sweet Spot (A/L)

Julia Jacklin - Lydia Wears as Cross (A/L)

Punko - Painted by the Moon (A)

Blueprints - Spring Prep (A/L)

Eggy - FIll in the Blanks (A/L)

Diana Ross feat. Tame Impala - Turn up the Sunshine (A)

Ron Peno and the Superstitions - Just a Little (A/L)

The Sports - Reckless (A/L)

Doroth - Take it Easier (A/L)

Shrapnel - Son of Choice / Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory (A)

Modal Melodies - Disco Hotel (A/L)

Frollen Music LIbrary - Heart of a Crab (A/L)

Ancient Air - Always Begun Again (A/L)

Tenements - Kitchen Sink (A/L)

The Stroppies - Caveats (A/L)

Summer Flake - You're a Star (A/L)

Eggy - Magic 8 Ball (A/L)

Some things I saw today:

big week so far

Yeah it will be a big week, it already is one, with my monthly RRR appearance this morning (I stepped outside myself for a moment during that and thought 'you're not cracking jokes like you usually do') then meetings then a lecture in the afternoon, but it's all fine I guess. 

***

I had lunch in a cafe I often frequent (vegan bibimbap, the first time they brought it with a fried egg on top I thought that's not yo' mama's vegan bibimbap and also we're totez not in Kanzas anymore Toto) and the girl who served me, she was masked but I'm going to call it - girl, had to deal with me paying in cash, she was required to give me four dollar coins in the change (or at least $4 in change) and she had to look at each coin in the face, it was strange.

***

I got this totally boring email from the gym with a deceptively interesting title:

(I say it's totally boring but actually I didn't read it)

***

I got a flu shot and now I feel a bit poorly. 

continuing adventures of covid brain

I don't know if there's a point at which I have to say it's not covid brain it's just my regular brain, but who knows. On Tuesday we saw the Love in Bright Landscapes film and I saw someone I knew, who happened to have a double-barrelled last name. And I know I was weird talking to him (I apologised later and he didn't deny it!) but it was entirely because I started wondering which order the names came in. It was kind of floating in the air like the words on silk or whatever it is in Breakfast of Champions where I think the words say Goodbye Blue Monday but my experience was more like, 'is it Goodbye Monday Blue or Goodbye Blue Monday'? 

This morning I was supposed to go on RRR with Carmelina in a crossover where she would start at 2, I would get there at 3, we would do two hours together and she would leave at 5. Instead, I 'set' my alarm but I didn't - I changed the time to 2am but I didn't turn it on. So I woke up at 4. 

On the way to RRR I was like shit! I forgot my glasses. I remembered I had some reading glasses in the car for just such an eventuality and I used those. Later, I discovered I hadn't forgotten my glasses. They were on the passenger seat. 

What next!? Oh, and I might be getting a dog. Will decide tomorrow.*

* Update. I decided yes but the universe said no (the owner, who was reluctant to part with the dog but had health issues, got an offer that would allow her more of a guarantee to maintain access. I think it's a better outcome. They were pretty bonded). 

trophy for trying

I suppose there are two kinds of people in the world, those who can get satisfaction and those who can't get no satisfaction. I must have decided sometime in my teens (?) (or earlier?) that the only way to live was to be suspended somewhere between not being lowest common denominator and striving for what is actually entirely attainable at least 'on paper' or in theory, and yet which dumb shit / self-thwarting would always make impossible. I am sure there are people who get up in the morning deciding they will get something done and then go to bed at night having done it. I can't imagine that life, although of course, every day I imagine doing just that. I presently have to write a complicated, fact-packed, eloquent chapter and I have about two weeks to do it in to show that I can do such a thing in a timely fashion. I also have to write other chapters for another book (and there are other things on my plate). After vowing to write the first mentioned thing day after day and only really scratching the research surface, I achieved 200 words (of a projected 4500) yesterday. The prep - not just the research prep but the clearing a workspace in the spare room prep - was extensive, though you'd barely notice much of a difference, as you aren't me. In the last 12 hours since I stopped working on that paragraph I have come to the appreciation that the central premise of the chapter is unsustainable, or at least, it can only be one element of the whole, not its backbone. (Without wishing to go too much into detail this is because the original premise came to look, in part like a justification for urban segregation on ethnic or class lines, which of course it was not: it was acknowledgment merely that this has been at the core of a lot of human history. However, consciously or otherwise, I had framed the whole work, for purposes beyond or extra to the purposes of historical argument, in terms of 'progress'.) 

But my point is I embrace this kind of wayward, directionless, unrealisable striving, and have done for as long as I can remember having adult thoughts, really. Nothing can be perfect and everything is a melange if not a morass. I realise that I never really thought about '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' but of course it's more of a boast than a gripe (I admit that the 'girl reaction' bit, if that's really what he sings, is potentially a little gripey, but in the main it's saying 'I'm better than all of you shit', and 'you are a vapid pack of satisfaction-getters', than anything else.) To be honest, I'm not usually down with Mick Jagger, but in this case I probably am. 

Tonight between 7-9 I am doing a one-hour fill on RRR, and for the first time possibly ever I have actually gone some way towards planning what music I am going to play. I have produced a chart with timings and I haven't done this yet but I will sequence them and - this is the bit that really freaks me out - I am going to note some things I might make comment on between the songs. Crazy!!! I am crazy. I have always sought spontaneity in my radio shizzle. It was never a great formula but when it worked, which it rarely did, I got a buzz from it, just enjoying my thoughts. A structure might be liberating in one sense, but all it will most likely do is give me more time to fret about potential mistakes. As if they matter. 

Update next day: The fill was OK but just OK. Having a plan and sticking to it was not the revelatory cure-all I thought it could be. 

A propos of something above, I came across this in an old Mayo Thompson interview (from 1996). I don't know whether I am in sync with Mayo or he has just been too much of an influence on me:

I never read a self-help book, and I won't.  I just don't give a damn about that stuff.  I just think that the world is a set of fairly consistent problems, because we have certain functional things which have to be satisfied--gotta eat, gotta sleep, blah blah.  Comes to entertainment, maybe people want things they can go back in and feel at home with, and comfortable, and sort of things like that… I don't mind a bit of insecurity.  I don't mind a little of instability, don't mind a little quicksand.  I like it.  More fire, more danger, please.  Because otherwise I get bored to death…I can't imagine what people like.  I don't even know what I like.  I hate what I like every day.  I think to myself, why in the world do you like these tiny stupid pleasures for?  Life's supposed to be hard and edgy and all those kind of things.  This is a stupid romanticism, of course… It's also a challenge to find out, am I irrelevant?  Has history passed me by?  I don't think so.  I think I'm still ahead of the fucking curve! (laughs)   

a year ago today: publicity for the bogan delusion

Hot on the publicity trail for my book. This is actually the second book with my name on it in the last six months, but it is so much of a different ball game it might as well not be a book but a… saucepan. The previous book Community which I co-edited and co-wrote much of, is a broad and deep account of the establishment, creation, form, style and fate of community buildings in Australia since the beginning of the last century. It is huge and I am very proud of it. The current one, The Bogan Delusion is a ‘ranty tract’ (I described it as such in most drafts of the book itself, and perhaps that description has sustained, I don’t remember).

Yesterday morning I had 15 mins on RRR and it was really fun, I felt very comfortable. Last night in a related (but unacknowledged – I don’t think the book came up at all) event I was on a panel talking about music journalism, at the Tote as part of the Emerging Writers Festival. This morning I was on Life Matters with Richard Adey.

This radio coverage is all still a bit novel to me so I don’t quite know how well I do. Like a dufus this morning I had to ring first my wife then my mother immediately after the show to make sure I hadn’t fucked it up! They were very nice about it (but maybe they have to be?) I think they would have told me in nice ways if I screwed something up.

It didn’t help that left to my own devices for the first 10 minutes of the hour I was flipping through the book and found that I had made a huge error about the location of one of the estates planned by the Griffins in early 20^th century Melbourne. This would have been annoying enough, except that I am the author of a journal article about huge errors made about the location of estates planned by the Griffins! (I got the names ‘Avondale Heights’ and ‘Ascot Vale’ mixed up, as I continually do in real life). Oh well, I covered myself in that article by saying everyone makes mistakes… so it’s just sort of proving my own point isn’t it. Maybe I could even pass it off as an ironic reference (get real).

Anyway, Adey was interesting. I had been prepped in a minor way about where the i/v might go, in a discussion with his producer who is very nice and very engaged (so was Richard Adey). So there was nothing out of the blue, though the producer had not pumped me for what my answers might be. The set up at the beginning was that my premise was that the bogan ‘didn’t exist’, which is a good hook (indeed, the whole ‘bogan delusion’ idea is a hook really – if the book was called Society Should Be Inclusive it might not be so hot this June) and that there were so many definitions of the bogan that it rendered the notion unusable. Then there were about 8 or 9 callers who proceeded to explain why the bogan did exist and give it various different definitions, many of which contradicted each other. I then was able to conclude by saying all this diversity of opinion really proved my point, and I felt good about that. I did notice about myself (and I will have to keep this in check from now on) that my voice went up in pitch as I became more exasperated about putting this conclusion across, and there was a bit of triumphalism about that, in a manner of speaking, which possibly didn’t do the showbiz aspect to Life Matters any favours. I also feel that, in a way, there is a danger that this is the diametric opposite of preaching to the converted, with a negative effect i.e RN listeners are exactly the sort of people who don’t want to hear what I have to say, and may not buy a book about it. On the other hand the only reason I care about whether they buy a book about it is that I don’t want the publisher to lose money, because I certainly don’t stand to gain from it, and wouldn’t really get much from it even if I hadn’t agreed to take a royalty of nothing so as to keep the price down.

As I was doing Life Matters I kept notes in case anything came up that I needed to refer to, though in fact ultimately I think I did only refer specifically back to one caller, because I was interested in his comment ‘I’m not racist’ and his discussion of ‘trailer trash’. Another caller who I really wanted to discuss, but didn’t get a chance, was the one who spoke about identifying bogans by their ‘sudden body movements’, which I think is one of the strangest things anyone could say about anyone. But I had to let it go as I was being guided by RA.

All in all, I feel fairly positive about the whole thing, and I reckon I can handle this media train. The downside will be in a couple of weeks when I’m going to be fatigued and lacking in interest about the whole schtick (there are already, it has to be said, signs of that happening and it’s hard to be new, over and over again, about something I am already very well acquainted with).