roadkill

Somehow I managed to watch this 4-part BBC political thriller in completely the wrong order, with the first episode last. I am not even sure what happened then, whether I watched the 3rd or the 2nd episode next, but ultimately, when I started on the first episode I was like - well, I don't think I need to see this. 

Of course having watched it in entirely the wrong order I now can't know how good it is in the right order, but watching it in the wrong order was pretty interesting and engaging. Hugh Laurie is excellent as a prize prick with no scruples except that in his way he is largely true to himself. Rest of cast excellent. Lot of good lines, the woeful family dinner the best bit. 

So I went back and tried to watch the last fifteen minutes of the fourth episode to attempt to get a sense of how what I thought was the cliffhanger of the first episode was actually the end of the whole. I can't really see how the ending is satisfactory and there is a scene towards the end there that makes no sense to me at all but which is apparently meant to seal HL's character's doom... possibly something in episode one sets that up. I brought this on myself.

oh what a year

Hasn't it just been a rollercoaster ride? In truth, as I am writing this on 3 October, I don't really know how the ride 'ended', but I just thought I'd put in a note about my significant return to the blogosphere in 2020, after, um, a major slump last year, back to the glory days (if 'glory' means 'frequently posting') of this blog.  As I think I had previously mentioned (maybe I haven't) the problem was I had to go into my-old-gmail-address-mode to get to this blog; the main reason I am back in business with Lorraine Crescent is that Blogger has somehow made it easier to click through, so there's none of the gatekeeperishness of 'god, what's that password again?' although I suppose it's been a year of much more sittin' at home not talking to people and maybe writing here fills in the time. It takes on a life of its own though of course, a blog, and once you've got the first ten years down you are probably not going to give it up fully. 

One thing I have been considering is whether to go back and clean up previous posts particular as regards to dead links, etc. It wouldn't make sense if I just clipped them out, I'd have to put something in there a la the Simpsons picture of the drunk cameraman and a 'stand by', except no point standing by, that film clip of the Bee Gees doing 'Sweet Song of Summer' is never going to be there (it probably is somewhere on youtube though, just not on that link anymore). Well, I'll think about it. I assume that just by dint of the fact that the world is six billion buzzing browsers, those posts still get hits. I just checked a random 2009 post, because for a second I thought each post had a record of how many views it got on the 'reader' side of the blog but it doesn't, I have to go back into the works to see that; but what I did note, also arguably important, is that pictures on this blog in its early years were tiny. If I went back and enlarged them they'd probably be horrendously pixilated, don't know, but maybe there's a sweet spot where at least it doesn't look like an out of focus postage stamp. 

I mean considering most of the time this is just a low-key ramble, and I have about five loyal readers (thank you) and that's it, it's probably if not a waste of time, certainly time spent that I could be doing better things with, but also it keeps the (writing) muscle active, and that's not the worst thing. 

Anyway, greetings from October! Remember us? We were naive, we had no idea what the next three months was going to hold. We were optimistic for the outcome of a US presidential election. Yes, we had something to focus on. 

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)   

body found in litter trap

(written 28/12/2010) Some kids found a decomposed body in the litter trap down at the creek. I heard conversationally when I went down to have a look (creepy? I was interested) that it had no arms or legs and was perforated up the front. The Age online says it is not known whether it's male or female. Being in the litter trap suggests it may have floated downstream but who really knows. As I was leaving the crime scene (4 or 5 police vans, a few onlookers) I think I heard someone shout, 'I have evidence! Evidence!'

* Jan 2010 - the body has been identified as being of Concetta Leone, an elderly woman who went missing in September. The police say there are no suspicious circumstances, which leads me to assume the no arms and legs thing was untrue. As was the 'I have evidence!'

the catch

I can't remember why, over fifteen years ago, I purchased all three Dave McArtney and the Pink Flamingos albums from Alley Tunes at Glenferrie Road Station for probably a dollar each. They were all promo copies, so they had clearly come from The Collection Of Someone In The Record Industry Of The 1970s-80s. I had the dimmest awareness of DMcA but I loved Dragon and Paul Hewson was a member of the PFs for a couple of albums. Alley Tunes was mainly non-rock/pop, more dance oriented, but this was good because it meant they greatly undervalued some of the other junk that got mixed up in their second hand accumulations, and when I say undervalued, I don't mean they weren't aware, I don't know if they were or not, but I'm guessing they didn't care. So thus began a bit of a low-key love affair with the work of Dave McArtney, mainly via the second Pink Flamingoes ('Flamingo's' - ugh) album We Never Close although the first one, a little more transition-y from 70s rock into 80s pop, was a goody too. 

Anyway sometimes I really am this dumb, or picky, or I don't know what you'd call it, but yes I had all three albums. Really, really liked the first one, loved the second one, and never played the third one, above, until yesterday. Now, I have no excuse for this, but somewhere in my mind I feel it had something to do with the notion that it wasn't as good as the others, that it was one of those contractual obligation records; the kindest I can be to myself is that possibly I feared it would be the key to the first two, and would make me realise they actually weren't as good as I thought they were (also it didn't have Paul Hewson on it; he was back with Dragon by that stage). You know where this is leading though, don't you.

Well, look, I've only played side one. But side one, while clearly not a 'band' - it's heavily synthesised, with either basic programmed drums or someone effectively playing drums like a basic drum program, very simple, almost eurodisco in various ways, is really fun. It's definitely of its time but amusingly if it was released now by someone currently young or at very least active (and not, for instance, dead like Dave McArtney) it would be celebrated for its upbeat tunefulness and inventiveness. Hey, maybe side two is absolutely the big one, and turns all the other stuff (including the excellent Hello Sailor - what a band) into dust and turds, so maybe I'll wait another 15 years to check that out. 

McArtney had almost completely nothing to say about this album, by the way. It is mentioned on p. 244 of his memoir Gutter Black as 'my solo album'. The rest of that paragraph is very non-fascinating detail about the licensing details regarding the album, but nothing about its content or creation. The facing page features a big picture of the album cover where it is captioned as 'the third Flamingos album'. I suppose it was the very tail end of McArtney's ambition to get to the big time outside NZ, using Australia as a stepping stone (though unlike Dragon, who he/the PFs might be seen to be following not least by having Hewson as a member, DMcA had already had a bizarre stint in LA with Hello Sailor, so he'd come close to the big time then failed). (That sentence probably doesn't make much sense but on the other hand who in the world will ever read this? No-one! So I think I should spend some time tidying up the spare room and listening to the amazing Joni Mitchell 1967 live record Laura gave me for Christmas). (That said, this is another sad example of my drivelling meander no doubt getting up there as one of the internet's most informative and valid discussions of a particular cultural product some people once slaved over and had great hopes for and put their passion into, and which no-one now cares about at all really, but if anyone does go searching for information on this record, they will find this, so I guess I'll just say: sorry). 

market this morning

Yeah I did go to the market this morning it was pretty empty and closed. It didn't open till 9 am and even then, it opened in a closed kind of way. I bought some spring onions, broccoli (such a staple of my diet that I feel fine about dinner if I have some in the fridge) a cauliflower and some oranges, in case of scurvy. Nothing happened and nothing was interesting about the experience overall. Oh, this wasn't interesting but I bought some rice, really expensive rice that was expensive for no reason. I'll probably go to Woolworths later so there was doubly no reason for me to buy that fucking rice.*

Update 24h later: worse. I went to Cheaper Buy Miles where they were selling the same quantity of rice, grown locally (which is of course a conundrum in environmental terms, but/and I don't know what the origin of the market rice was) for a dollar a bag. Lesson: always go to CBM first, fill in the gaps elsewhere thereafter.  

una dempster

I was quite tickled a few years ago when my father told me a story his mother had told him, about her friend Una Dempster who used to come and visit her (they both lived in Hawthorn) and would sing-song her own name as she came to the door, 'Una Dempster, Una Dempster'. Oddly enough although I liked the story I had a complete mental block on her last name, and when I dropped in on him this afternoon I got him to remind me and this time I wrote it down, deciding that - knowing absolutely nothing about Una Dempster except that she was my grandmother's childhood friend and she sang her own name - I would see if I could discover more. 

Una Ethelwyn Dempster b. 13 April 1906 only daughter of Arthur and Gertrude Dempster of Wellesley Road, Hawthorn. She had a brother, John. She married Harold Niewand in October 1928 and they went to live in Murtoa which is between Horsham and Minyip. Almost exactly a year later they had a daughter, Joan and a son (name unknown) some time later. Una Niewand died on the 24 April 1954 in Rupanyup. 

Strangely my father said today that maybe his mother had made the story up about Una Dempster singing her name but I said really out of the two people, Una Dempster and Mavis Heilman(n), one of them had to have been adequately imaginative to conceive of a girl who sang her own name so why not give the honour to Una. 

My father also said that if Una was still alive she'd be 114, good guess, but actually she died before she turned fifty.