neighbours is back on

I taped it so have yet to watch it but oh boy.

p.s. I did a handbill

Also I drew a handbill last night. Should be a good show.

'Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry
In order to their stations leap,
And Music's power obey'

John Dryden 1687

culprit

'Who will bell the cat?' - William Langland, 1390

The paws look a little fake but he makes no apologies.

he's looking for you

Yesterday (I don't mean to write this in italic but something Bela has done to the keyboard - he's pressed an F button - has sent the whole system this way) I was at Gladstone Park SC where I seem to do most of my interacting with the human race these days and a diminutive bikie who saw people who weren't there was dancing, yelling at imaginary people, explaining things reasonably to imaginary people, etc. This was the exchange at the nut shop, where I was buying almonds and banana chips, between the proprietor and a middle-aged woman (by which I mean, she was probably about my age or younger). It started with them both talking together, him greeting her as senora and she saying of the bikie, 'poor bugger'. When the prop. realised she was talking about the bikie he said, 'he's looking for you'. I love this kind of inclusive, yet slightly cruel humour. But she misheard him and said 'he HATES me?' He laughed, seeing (I suppose) the lack of need to repeat the joke: it was of the moment. Then they talked about nuts. That's not funny in relation to the bikie guy as he was a bit disturbing as well as disturbed, because he was most definitely riding a bike, in fact he sped off on his hog while I was in the car park, leaving/leading me to wonder if, since he obviously saw people who weren't there when he was walking around, did he also see vehicles which weren't there when he was driving around?

TV at the moment is full of great new shows to fall asleep to. Last night I fell asleep to Bulworth. The way that Warren Beatty raps in that film is something to behold, I wish I had never ever seen it. It was just awful.

Kathryn Clarke, one of my heroes, sent me the most amazing present recently - a present for my birthday last year for some reason. I was very chuffed. It was firstly a book of all the New Yorker cartoons ever - most of them are on CDs but 2004 of them are in the book itself. Like anything (including everything I have done myself) I am pretty sure I could have done it better - like, for instance, some of the cartoons are the same joke published twenty years apart. But in the main it's a complete gem. And secondly I also got Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, which I think is going to be a source of great inspiration to me, and to you as I quote bits of it over and over again in this blog, over the years.

I have many wonderful friends and I am pretty sure (oh, I know how pat this sounds) I didn't do much to deserve them. Kathryn Clarke, who I usually refer to as Clarkus, Clackety or Kathryny, is in one sense one of my oldest friends - I met her in 1983 when I was 18 - but in another sense I've only known her for a few years, because we completely fell out of touch after '85 in what I suppose are still quite mysterious circumstances which I really should discuss with her someday. We met again at Melbourne University where she was working in the 90s when I saw her crossing a road somewhere. She had not changed a bit, whereas I was significantly older and more pathetic. This I now recall must have been 1998 because Millie was a puppy. I am very fond of Kathryn Clarke, and like to pretend she is fond of me. Kathryn Clarke now lives in another town far away conditionally referred to as 'the big smoke', so it's nice she remembers her old pals from long ago and sends them 1400 page collections of quotations. I have opened it at random to page 573 and offer unto all of you, Cezanne's immortal saying:

The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.

Kathryn Clarke tells me she cannot see the pictures on my blog. If anyone else has this problem please let me know, though I don't know what I can do about it, except remove them all perhaps, and a staid equality will return to the land.

'look what a boy did'

I was in Gladstone Park Safeway this morning and someone had stuck four plungers on the floor. A small boy (under 3) said to his father, 'Dad, look what a boy did.'

Speaking of boys my nephew Laurie was born this afternoon 9 lb 12 oz

well it's substantially into 2006 now and I continue to find myself interesting

I watched the Long Way to the Top Live spectactular which was on tv last night. I taped it for no special reason, and watched it too, also for no special reason. My favourite bits were Tamam Shud, Coloured Balls and Spectrum. These three really didn't fit the whole extravaganza very well which was perhaps why I liked them the best. We stopped getting shots of the crowd enjoying themselves when they were on (though Mike Rudd did get the crowd to sing a verse of 'I'll be gone'). I noted that a lot of the bands probably weren't really the bands at all and I would be interested to discover how it was decided what made something credible. How many Twilights were in the Twilights? How many Axioms were in Axiom? Presumably Don Mudie wasn't in 'em or something would have been made of it; on the other hand Glenn Wheatley was in the Masters Apprentices (wa-hey!) but nothing much was made of that. Of the two songs Axiom did, one was a Brian Cadd solo hit ('Ginger Man'). Of the one song Chain did, one song was a Matt Taylor solo hit. Well, there is a distinct possibility that out of 20 million Australians I am the only one who could give a loose root about these distinctions.

Then I started watching (this blog should be called What I Watched on the TV, either as a monitor for pre-recorded media, or direct from broadcast, Today) the late 90s rock film Dead Set but then I remembered there was that documentary on Andy Warhol so I thought... Mia might want to watch that (she's recording vocals in the music room at the moment - see, there's someone who actually does things, instead of just passively soaking up the fruits of western culture) so I am videorecording it. You know, Andy Warhol is one of those one million people who in one sense I feel I already know 50 times more about than I ever needed to, and I don't particularly love his work, but the split second of the program that I saw, which featured some ducklings swimming in a little patch of dirty water inside a pedal boat in a lake, seemed interesting. I mean if there were any more images like that in there I would feel it was an effective enough investment of time and electricity.

Anyway, I'm being too hard on myself because a lot of the time when I'm watching television I'm doing something else as well like drawing or typing. These last few days I have done three pages of the second instalment of my graphic novel, and they look great, especially one heading where I drew the vine from the front window of Heathcote behind some letters, and blacked in the rest of it, and I'm so pleased with the result I have to look at it every time I go past it on the table. Actually when I drove up to Gladstone Park to return a DVD today I was listening to the radio (Mia fixed the radio in the car, what a gem) and they were talking about people who do more than one thing at once to give themselves the false impression that they were busy, but getting stuff done. I agree I might fit that description but I would also have to say - is this acculturated? - that I could literally not imagine listening to the radio and not doing something else. And as I said, I tend not to really watch television without doing something else as well - unless it's got subtitles or a light plane with James Reyne in it which is about to explode.

I have five cassettes on the shelf to my right. They are: ABC's The Lexicon of Love which I believe I have blogged about sufficiently already; Men at Work's Business as Usual which I have never listened to but like to always have the option; Gilbert O'Sullivan's Southpaw, which I really should listen to sometime because I've always enjoyed G O'S. It features no hits (that I'm aware of) but it has a song called 'The Best Fun I Ever Had' which I am very keen to hear; that's the kind of song title that really thrills me. I imagine that's why I was keen on the Farmers Boys, they always had intriguing titles like 'Probably the Best Investment I Ever Made' (that might not actually be the correct title, I'll get my butler to fix it later). The other two tapes are Max Q's album Max Q and Janet Jackson's Control. I am not entirely sure why I have the Max Q album on cassette as I already have it on vinyl and as I said to someone only a couple of weeks ago (hell, why do I have these conversations!?!) I'd rather hear Orchestra of Skin and Bone anyday. I wonder where my copy of that LP got to, because I don't seem to have that anymore. And Janet Jackson is just a personal favourite of mine. I have that really great album of hers with 'Black Cat' on it, you know, 1812 Overture (I know that's not what it's called, but my butler can fix that when he does the Farmer's Boys thing) and I have her greatest hits, with that song about running away to a desert island that I always associate with my employment stacking shelves in the science library at the University of Sydney, because I think it was a hit then and I used to listen to Martin Molloy (why no 'and'?) on whatever gross commercial radio station they used to be on. During the fulfilment of that employ I also became very familiar with Neil Young's superb Everybody Knows This is Nowhere which I purchased on cassette at a garage sale around that time and listened to constantly. I was going out with Felicity at that time and she did not know where to place herself in regard to me owning a Neil Young tape. It was perplexing in the extreme for her, rather like I think as if she found that I had a suitcase full of magazines about hot rods or some other private interest that she didn't have a handle on. Why exactly my possession of a Neil Young cassette had this effect on her I frankly don't know, but I do know that she thought it very odd. She knew nothing at all about Neil Young, and for all I know she had never even heard of him before. It was one of those strange contretempses (I know, I know, that's not the plural of contretemps and I know, contretemps is probably not the right word, but luckily for me I've got the old butler who can just clean that stuff up anytime I say) that had no explanation then anymore than it does now, 12 years later. I still think Tony Martin is really funny and I thought Bad Eggs was a great film, I seem to fly in the face of a lot of hotly-held opinion there although I know Mia agrees with me.

I have booked myself to go to Wellington in mid-February for a conference. It's so funny how not only have I asked all the people I know who have NZ connections what they know about Wellington, and got no real information, but I have also forgotten that I've asked them, and asked them again. I am a total pain in the arse like that. Wellington this, Wellington that. The only thing I know about Wellington is it's named after a dance.

action packed

Last night nye and we were going to do some sociable things during the day but it was frankly too hot to leave the house, as wretched as that now sounds. Instead we stayed in and watched Return to Eden on DVD. The rough story behind this epic has become part of Australian pop culture lore but I am not sure if I ever watched it when it was on TV. The best bits were, of course, James Reyne and his best line - though only in context of so many others and you have to watch about 3 1/2 hours of the show to realise this is hilarious, is 'Eden? I'd rather not'. Soon after that there is a very special moment when Wendy Hughes' character, Jilly, gets bad news on the telephone but we only hear her hysterical drunken upper class voice obviously ditheringly unsure of what it's all about yelling down the phone. That's the other best 'line' but it's not really a line just great delivery.

When we did finally get out of the house it was around 8 and not quite dark yet but still very hot. Trains ran all night, which was excellent. We got to the Old Bar at about I don't know when. New Season played - a one-off reformation apparently (or two off? I think they played at a party a short while back) and they were splendid. And Panel of Judges played last just after 12 and were their usual excellent selves. There was a stage invasion for Panel and Shane even did some impromptu, though uninvited (perhaps even unwelcome) wordless vocal contributions through Alison's mike.

The pictures time's arrow-style are Panel before and after stage invasion and Southern Cross station at around 7 am with everyone looking very bleary and hideous and the sun coming up, though most of those things are only implied in the picture. And stated overtly in this explanatory text.

My brother is about to become a father within hours apparently, he and Nicola are at the hospital.