yes yesterday

Yesterday we went to the yes rally, it was huge. 

saturday night 18 september 2018

I am writing to you from - well, actually, it just turned midnight so 19 September 2018. Tonight I spent a cold but comfortable night at Talmage St Albion doing creative things.  I had asked Alanna if she wanted to go and see Caroline No at Some Velvet Morning tonight but she had something else on.   But I turned it productive, I wrote a song called 'The Acolyte' about Nancy. Actually I wrote the words some months ago and just had them there, they fitted perfectly to the five chords I assembled, I was pretty happy with the result. I also finally got around to properly drawing the picture for Guy Morton's album cover. He'd asked me to do this ages ago and I kept feeling unable to. Part of the weirdness was it was supposed to represent a balloon, however, he wanted the balloon to look like a house. I am still confused about that. Anyway I made a decent start:

It should come together OK, in my opinion. I like the people I assembled, it will be fun colouring them too. 

Nancy is sitting here on the couch with me, she's been in and out all night, I have played some records when I wasn't doing my own music - I played the Touchdown compilation with the Higsons and the Farmers Boys and so on, and a Versus album, and earlier in the day I was playing Small World Experience... Not much else is happening. Got work things to do tomorrow I guess. A confirmation report to read, a report to write on a book proposal from the UK.  

marie russak

Oakland Tribune 18 June 1911 p.6

Well I don't have anything to say about Marie Russak except that I wish someone would write a book about her so I could read it. 

Wikipedia tells us she was born in 1865 in California, (another source says Russia in 1888) and was best known as a theosophist but also an opera singer and late in life, I guess, she started designing houses, though how that was possible and whether she was an actual qualified architect is unclear. 

Anyway, I'd like to know more but who has the time really to get involved. 

smoking ban

This is from the Age's Good Weekend magazine on 9 December 1989, in a kind of 'farewell to the 80s' article called 'Remembrance of things passed' (p. 126+) by Anthony Dennis and David Monaghan. I dug it up because I was having a think about when smoking began to be banned in earnest in public places in Victoria/Australia (ironically, within an hour or so of being interested in this, I saw a headline in today's paper which mentioned a Crown employee suing that organisation as he had contracted lung cancer, he alleges, from working in a part of the casino that allows smoking still). 

I was only reviewing the Age in the 70s and 80s searching on terms like 'smoking ban' and not getting that far, but marvelling at yet another example of the ways in which general attitude appears to have been 'this is how it has always been, people smoke everywhere and that is what we are used to, so there is clearly no way it can ever change'. 

What surprises me I guess is the way that a lot of the reportage is taking the side of smokers eg the piece above. Maybe it's because smokers are so bad tempered, notoriously. I remember complaining to a worker at the Gladstone Park Woolworths that smokers were always getting served ahead of everyone else at the 8 items or less counter and she said it was because they got shitty if they didn't get immediate attention. 

esp

I guess I just wanted to say that I got very temporarily interested in the Eastern Suburbs Permanent Building Society after seeing that Sunny Bear was at Boronia Mall in 1973 with his free giveaways and that the kids will love him and his free giveaways. I don't know what his free giveaways were but I would really like to know. But in the meantime I just wanted to mention that the ESPBS started in the mid-1950s and grew big and then in the early 80s merged with another BS to become merely The Permanent Building Society which might have helped with the embarrassment of having branches in other places, such as the western suburbs or Frankston for that matter where they were victims of a major fraud by an employee who the judge decided not to give a custodial sentence to as her life had been awful. This ad is from the Age 14 September 1976 p. 23
 

sydney #5

That's right I got a whole row to myself

sydney #4