train amazement

You might remember last week my train was amazing. This week it was also amazing in a different way. Two rail cars! Who needs that rubbish. I mean it was pretty comfortable and stuff but I still expected so much more. I thought it would be probably a special steam train or something.

Just to show the world is going to pot, no Six Feet Under last night. And I don't like the storyline about Stingray and the drink driving on Neighbours. I'm not sure why. It seems to make me nervous.

grant mclennan

I was shocked to hear of the death of Grant McLennan on the radio yesterday morning. Radio said he died in his sleep; Age this morning said he died of a heart attack 'after a house-warming party'. Of course there will be rumours which are in any case irrelevant. He was definitely an important individual in my life and may I say was always a generous and forthcoming person. He was a complex individual who I probably didn't really understand (though neither, I'm guessing, did most people around him). He wrote a lot of songs many of which were very good and made a huge positive impact on the popular music scene. The most recent Go-Betweens album suggests that Grant still had a lot of great work in him. He will be sorely missed.

(Later: funny moment on ABC news radio where they took a snippet of an old JJJ interview with Grant where he said he did not think his songs were particularly Australian, 'only the lyric content'. Good example of an incidence where for a second you think he's not joking). (And of course if you accused him of joking he'd argue the point forever.)

man of records

I spent a bit of time around town today, surprised I didn't see you. I first of all took Judy back to Jane's place; the floorboards having finally been done (don't frantically race back through previous postings and/or your crib notes for this blog - I hadn't mentioned it before - but Judy has been here since Easter sitting in the corner occasionally biting her feet or shitting but mainly sleeping). I then went down to a record shop in Fitzroy where I picked up a bunch of records I am borrowing from an interviewee for my book, his back catalogue being pretty darn hard to come across. I also bought a couple of records there, including an album by CCS who I remember Mark Louttit being very enthusiastic about a few years back. I had coffee with Greg in a shop he and Peta call (I think) the Secret Shop because it is one of those coffee shops with no name. I am reminded of the truly bizarre conversation I overheard in a Yarraville coffee shop 7 or 8 years ago in which the proprietor of the new shop expressed his ambition to have a shop like the shops in Europe with sick all over the tables. I'm telling you that's what he said and the person he was talking to couldn't believe it either. 'Sick?' 'Yeah, you know, sick!' Anyway I imagine some middle classer backpacked through Turin and saw some of the coffee shops didn't have names and came back to Fitzroy to do the same thing.

By this time I had got a message from Mia asking for minidiscs. The only place in Melbourne I know of for buying minidiscs is JB Hi Fi so I went down there on the tram and did the deed, also got her a vinyl version of Tonight's the Night (I might not have mentioned this previously but she's reading the copy of Shakey that Brad lent her so she's hoping to explore various Neil Young records that have hitherto been unknown to her). I also - this is getting embarrassing but you see I do have a little birthday money - bought a Split Enz DVD, a Cane Toad records compilation of 60s punk (a lot of Vince Meloney who intrigues me) and a $3 DVD of Francis Ford Coppola's first film The People. Then I came back to Fitzroy where the car was still parked in Gertrude Street and drove up to Dixon's, I forget why I wanted to go there although I was keen to sell a few CDs that had been sitting in the back of the car for a month. They only gave me $22 for 'em but this was adequately good swap for a Horslips album (my fourth), the Head Undone album (always liked that one), and a Crazy Horse album because I knew Mia was interested in Crazy Horse too. I have a Crazy Horse album with a beautiful cover but it's a bad record, but this one may be better.

Tomorrow night I am filling in for Alison on Two to the Valley on 3CR, so have a listen. I am still not entirely sure what my theme will be but I think it will be the weather. This will give me the chance to play:

Love is Like a Cloudy Day - Doug Parkinson
It's a Sunny Day - Johnny Young
Clouds - Mackenzie Theory

They're the only three I can think of, so it might just be those three over and over again. I will not be playing:

Rain - The Beatles
Raining in my Heart - whoever sings it

so finally I caved and bought the damn thing

Mia and I went to Ding Dong last night to see Marc, Batrider and the Tucker Bs. During an unnamed terrible band's set (not one of the above obviously) I nicked out to get an espresso at Pellegrini's, because I shouldn't even have been out of the house, I should have been in a foetal position on the couch, and I needed something to pep me up like the fake stamina afforded by a small espresso. And nobody does it better than the great guys at Pellegrini's. But there were a few too many people at the counter so I was hypnotically steered past P's to The Paperback where I instantly became acquainted with five books I wanted to own, including Rip it up and start again (no, actually, I don't want to own this, but I would like to read it) and a new book by Cassandra Pybus. Anyway I compromised with myself and bought Dead Europe. So far I have read two chapters. Anyone want it when I've finished with it?

Marc played I think only four songs - relatively new ones which he has already recorded for his next EP apparently (he releases songs under the name Popolice). It continues to amaze me how, for someone whose own experience/taste in rock music of the past, he seemingly has no problem producing stuff that is so complementary to greats like T Rex, etc. It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder if there's something innate to rock music structure, you know, nature rather than nurture. I wonder what Richard Thompson thinks.

Batrider were their usual selves leading to a discussion afterwards with Mia about whether they are angry or funny or both. My jury is out on whether they are genuinely angry. They don't look angry. Tucker Bs as usual did not fail to amaze with their structuredness (B'rider are also very structured) (in both cases these bands can play something very repetitive for a few minutes and all stop together with no eye contact; all that really means I suppose is they've rehearsed, rehearsed and rehearsed, but I am still impressed, because I really do need eye contact just to confirm what I 99% already know - that it ends now.) Tucker Bs are a very funny band, and I think on some level they're meant to be. There were a number of girls in the audience I would typify as 'very Perth', doing their ironic dancing and working out hand movements to songs - kind of delightful and worryingly selfconscious at the same time. They may not have been from Perth (Mia is, and she'd never dance ironically) but they were being very Perth, sorry Perth if that seems rude, as you know I love Perth. More than many people who are very Perth do, I am sure.

Just to briefly elaborate I recall twenty years ago (so I guess I am talking about the parents of the people I saw last night) David McComb telling me that in Perth people used to take big bunches of flowers - gladioli? I can't remember - and dance with them and smash them on the ground at Triffids shows a la Morrissey in the early Smiths days. That's how I formulated my idea of 'very Perth', I guess, people who act out, or respond to, or comment on the latest cultural phenomena in a public forum. Rather than just be a passive audience member. I think they were doing, and possibly still do, the same kind of thing in Brisbane but there's a bit more cruelty to it in Brisbane mate.

I am still on my novel reading binge. Having finished Ornaments of Grace which I have to say was a bizarre experience I'm still getting over, I then started on Glen Tomasetti's third novel Man of Letters. I am almost precisely half way through and greatly enjoying it. Dorton Serry reminds me a lot of Dexter in Helen Garner's Children's Bach.

don't go to perth

...if you are worried that when you come back your scanner might be broken. That's what happened to us. So now we can't scan. What's wrong with it you ask? I don't know, it seems to be something to do with the power supply.

I am reading a freakout of a book, An Ornament of Grace by Jan Smith. I am up to page 80 and I am simultaneously fascinated and appalled. Presumably the full-on antisemitism of the protagonist is going to come to some kind of resolution but maybe not? Smith was apparently a Sydney journalist 'born in an infenitisemally small Queensland town' in 1935. The novel was published in 1966. Amusingly there is the occasional mention of the word 'cod' to denote 'penis' (or perhaps more specifically 'package' a la codpiece, though I am not entirely sure). I had never heard this before. Also I enjoy the idea of an intellectual publication called Current Thought.

I am reading this book because I went down to the library to get Dead Europe again and it is still not on the shelf, though it has been listed as available for some weeks now. I don't see the point in buying it. I already own too many books.

marshall station

Yesterday I spent a neither agreeable nor disagreeable 45 minutes at Marshall Station, a new station in Geelong in the middle of what seems to be a light industrial area on one side and a farm kind of thing on the other. Few people were around and I could hear schoolchildren in the distance. Nothing more to report about Marshall station.

the train to geelong is the best thing on earth

...when it works, which it did, today. And this morning I got an old-style (I think of it as old-style, for all I know it's the way of the future) self-contained six-seater compartment, all to myself for most of the journey (until Lara, when two ugly people got on and shared the space with me in sullen, ugly silence). How I hated them! What do they think this is, 'public' transport?