plastic bag

These shopping bags, which before 2019 we would actually get FREE every time we shopped, so you could have three or four of them in your hands when you left the shops and you would not have to pay ANYTHING, are now a rare sight and I found one in my plastic bag collection (a stash of bags used for getting rid of stuff) yesterday. I had a moment's vacillation: could this be rare? Now or sometime? Should I just destroy it? Yeah, I don't know. It's rarer now because it's been filled with junk and thrown in the bin. 
 

dealing with stuff

I mean seriously I have always been this way, at least, since the early 70s. I accumulate stuff and I can't see how it is actually cumulatively detritus. Very probably my desire to accumulate stuff (which feels more like a desire to not get rid of stuff and/or to protect it) controlled my destiny eg I am a historian dedicated to physical (usually paper-based) sources and I comprehensively reject the idea that the whole story can come from digitised (mediated) materials. For me, even the extremely undeniable advantage of (for instance) streamed music in terms of storage is outweighed by the fact that I don't trust it to give me the full picture/experience/context. 

So, I am presently digging through some boxes retrieved from under-the-house at Lorraine. They are full of media (cassettes, videotapes, small print publications, letters etc) that go back up to 40 years, to my very early adulthood. A lot of things in here that at one stage formed major enthusiasms, things I pored over and adored, then stored. There are also a lot of things that I suppose I didn't process or value quite as much, so I filed them away ('filed' is too generous a word). Some examples: 

I have always loved the work of Al Larsen. His band Some Velvet Sidewalk are that most unusual beast, a group that just got better and better (from an excellent beginning) and then kind of blew up (OK I just looked at discogs, this tape/booklet combination has been sold once, for $30+. My booklet is a little water damaged so I suppose it's worth less. I don't want to sell it. All I then discovered was there's a whole other SVS album I didn't know about, from 1997. I could obtain a copy for $10 plus $40 postage, ha ha, funny but also true. Memo to self: the point here is not to continually add to my storage/acquisitions but to stop accumulating things, even records by bands I really like). 

Changing the subject entirely: in my last couple of years in Sydney so, early-to-mid 90s, I got to slightly know Robert Tilley. If I remember correctly, Robert was doing a PhD in Divinity? at the University of Sydney. Yes, I do remember correctly and here he is. I think we got on pretty well but I always got the sense he was on his own path and indeed he was. He had been a cartoonist in the upper-level alternative press (I'm thinking Nation Review but let's not push memory to its limits) and I am pretty sure, though I don't entirely recall, that I actually scored him $20 cartooning work in some dodgy teen magazine I was involved in in the 90s. His cartoons deserve more recognition than they get. I hope I find more of these Lord of the Cloudses.  

And then there are tons of this kind of thing. Like many up till - I don't know - 2005, 2006? I was in the habit of owning videotapes of 'keeper' stuff, and videotapes that were just on rotation as keep-until-watched-then-tape-over. This was one of those. There was no program called Nomad, I just made up titles for tapes because somehow it made it easier to remember what had what program on it. The tape inside this box at present is labelled 'Garry Shandling Show >March '99>'. I have quite a few videos of the Garry Shandling Show because it is of course one of my favourite shows of all time, but as I think I have observed previously hereabouts, I have the entire show on DVD now and haven't even watched it all lol. 

The one time I'm sort of pleased I did this was when I was living in London in 1986 and taped the debut of Neighbours. My glitchy tape has been on YouTube for ten years now and it's triply interesting firstly because it shows how intensely mind numbing British TV could be; it shows the original version of the debut of Neighbours with the extraordinary nightmare sequence part of which I gather has since become 'non-canon', if that makes sense; and thirdly it shows that there is a sub-sub-subset of geek who is just fascinated by whole sections of broadcast continuity (they have a word for it which I don't remember) of programs that are otherwise available in more pristine formats. That's crazy but I also get it.

But look I think it's time to bite the fucking bullet. It's too late to say I don't want to become a hoarder, I have been a hoarder of sorts for fortysomething years, and the extent of my hoarding is such that I don't even really recognise it as hoarding (and also, like extreme enablers of all kinds, I feel a stab to my heart when someone tells me they threw something arguably culturally valuable away, even worse if it's personally important*). I don't see the junk. I remember when moving to Lorraine Crescent however long ago I thought I can relax and just accumulate material, because I'll never have to move again.** And now here I am in another 'forever home' where I am arguably able to relax and just accumulate. It's a dangerous space to be in! I mean I'm not in whatever the 2020s version of the keeping-every-newspaper stage is, and I have absolutely no problem letting go of things like books which I know exist in libraries etc. 

I think what I need to do is find a way to communicate the pleasure I get from the randomness and potential richness of this stuff - videotapes of old tv shows with ads and news and stuff in them for instance, which is historically interesting because it conveys a time you hadn't thought about since you just generally accepted them in the understanding of 'this is now'. Does that make sense? I am thinking I might set up a website and just start to scan or digitise things and put them up there - then jettison them as I do so. It will be therapeutic I reckon. 

* Personally important to them. I mean, I should mind my own business. 

** Not the reason I wanted to buy a house, except I suppose its's part of having 'agency'. 

progress

Gladstone Park's Safeway is moving ahead with a redesigned/rebuilt checkout area.
At first I was worried that there would be a cluster of those horrendous self-serve checkouts, most recently experienced by me in Adelaide, though they also have them at Big W Broadmeadows. Then I realised that they weren't putting in self-serve checkouts and became a little offended (don't they trust me?). I am pretty unattracted to the self-serve checkouts on a few levels. Many of the staff at Gladstone Park Safeway are familiar to me (though a new one was there today - a boy called Hamish). There is a woman at GPS'way who always smiles when she sees me as if to say, you again, you schmuck. So of course I would hate to lose that personalised service such as might occur with the advent of self-serve.
Here is all the old junk they haven't carted away yet which made up the old racks and shelves of the preredesigned Safeway:



Update 25/10: They are putting in self service checkouts after all and very proud of it they are too. I was in there this morning waiting in the express queue with my garbage purchases and a young lady gestured to me to come over and join the self-service fun. I shook my head and she registered understanding, with the subtext, 'it's only a matter of time, shithead'.

where does the crap come from?

In the most irritating scene in one of the most irritating films I've seen, I'm talkin' bout American Beauty, you've seen it too, the weird fascist teen demonstrates he is a sensitive soul by screening the girl a video he made of a plastic bag blowin' in the wind. And I agree it is true. Plastic shopping bags blow in the wind. It's not actually that beautiful, however edgily you want to try perceiving it.

In my now-daily walk round the reserve, I have marvelled about the amount of packaging rubbish I see. Some of it is still the legacy of the February 06 (or was it 05?) floods, plastic bottles stuck between rocks, etc. Since there is always never anyone in the reserve - or, two or three at one time max - most of it, eg lolly wrappers, chip bags, bits of paper, the ubiquitous bags etc - must have blown there. Are big empty parks like ours kind of vacuum cleaners for the surrounding area? Or is it just that, being a big 'empty' space, this is the only place where you see the stuff that is otherwise hidden by houses, walls, etc? We never find old chip wrappers in our back yard.