sunday morning

I am about to go to the gym again (first time in two days - because Friday morning was my day off and Saturday I had too much whisky the night before and I thought I would be dehydrated or whatever). It is a great, excellent, autumn morning in Melbourne and I can very indistinctly hear the traffic or whatever that city ambience is in the distance though surely there's really barely any traffic out there in the world right now. I am drinking coffee from my large marimekko mug which is actually too large eg surface area means the coffee gets cold too quickly, I am sure that's true. 

It's still that transition period between summer-autumn. The night before last there was a mosquito in my room. Yesterday afternoon I let a big fat blowfly out the bathroom window, that mildly satisfying experience where it bangs at the window for a while but you know eventually it's going to go out and, while at this moment the two of you are existing in that space, very shortly you will part forever. Yesterday I gave Nancy some Aldi food, she will sometimes tolerate that stuff but in this instance she wasn't having it, and it stayed there for a few hours (rich dark red mince meat) then later I noticed some yellowy-white notches on it which were, of course, little maggots. So someone had seen their chance late in the warm weather to lay a few cheeky eggs in that processed corpse. But this morning, it's adequately chilly that you couldn't imagine a fly getting around naked to lay eggs or do anything else flies do. 

This morning I woke with Nancy at my feet and Helmi at my head - I can tell this is going to be more of a thing as time goes by - they even, somehow, occasionally contrive to get close through the blankets (i.e. Helmi under the doona, Nancy on top) though they would never admit it. 

OK off to the gym. I have discovered a new function that allows me to walk in a few more nice towns, like one in Germany with delightful old cobblestoned squares. It's worth it. 

my trip to wangerooge, february 2019

 Please excuse my google translate german: I came to Wangerooge on a whim from Australia - where we have just had the hottest January since records began! Wangerooge has given me the weather I wanted (cold but not too cold) and sun, snow, a little bit of rain. This apartment is (as everyone reading this knows) perfectly placed to access everything on the island (although almost every part of the island is perfectly placed for every other part of the island...) my advice to first-timers: don't miss the wooge keks! (My inscription in the Guest book for my airbnb apartment - only it was translated into german) 

When I step out onto the verandah of my apartment (number 20 of the Marina building, Strandpromenade) on a Saturday morning – Saturday being a day no quieter at all than any other in Wangerooge as far as I can tell – I wish I could bottle the fresh clean coldness coming straight off the North Sea, and I mean straight off, I can see it and hear it and if I had the notion I could race down there and in less than two minutes be in it. That’s not going to happen, it’s 1 degree. 

 

Decades ago a friend who had not previously travelled outside of Australia sent me a postcard from Amsterdam explaining it in terms related to Melbourne’s inner city. I didn’t need that explanation, I knew what the big cities of Western Europe were, generically speaking, ‘like’. However I recognize the compulsion to see a place in terms of its similarities to the familiar: you seize on those similarities. So, Wangerooge – coldness aside – reminds me a lot of Rottnest (admittedly a place I’ve only been once) because it has no cars, it’s easy to orient yourself to it, it has a contained history (albeit a veiled one) and glorious beaches. Similarly it reminds me of Venus Bay: those big, empty beaches once again, the sand dunes, the old people, the possibility of dark secrets but on the other hand, maybe nothing of note ever happened here and maybe it all comes out in the wash.

 

I came to Wangerooge on the most incredibly concerted whim you could imagine. My father gave me a book one Christmas – Christmas 2017, I suppose, or perhaps it was my birthday – about shortlived or imaginary (by a stretch of the imagination, i.e. they existed for short-term pragmatic purposes, most of the time – no Chechnya or anything controversial) nations. Helgoland was one of them, and it got me thinking, not about Helgoland much, but about the Frisian islands, which up to that point had meant nothing more to me than the Frisian language, which I had heard once on the radio and it sounded like English you couldn’t understand. Or perhaps that was Flemish. This is how vaguely uncommitted and disengaged I was from Frisian life and peoples. I imagine I thought there was something mildly self-righteous about not knowing about some happy white people, anyway (and maybe I still do think that, not sure). 

 

Yet somehow the Frisians seemed like a place to make good my ambition, avowed in January 2018, to spend at least some of each Australian summer in a cold place, taking advantage of the fact that no-one wanted to do that except the people who lived there, and getting a little respite from the horrors of extreme temperature, sweat, sleeplessness and fatigue. 

 

I settled on Spiekeroog, primariliy because it had something called the Kurioses Muschelmuseum. I thought a Muschelmuseum was a fun kind of museum, and then I had to go and do some research and discovered that in fact it was a museum relating to mussels. I don’t want to see that, I thought, and my eye strayed a little to the right, only to find Wangerooge. It was the easternmost of the inhabited German Frisians, and it had a ferry, a café called Café Pudding, and a curiously shaped tower which, somehow, had travelled by itself across the island or which, rather, had stayed still while the island travelled through it. Neither of these explanations made sense to me but both added up to something intriguing. 

 

Travelling to Wangerooge was a hell of a journey. I flew to Perth, where I was doing some research and meet ’n’ greet with people I had work situations with; then to Dubai airport; then to Hamburg, where I hung out with Steve, a man I still call ‘my publisher’ although I doubt he’ll publish anything by me ever again, being essentially retired (though to his credit he denies it). Thank god I had Steve there, who became Steve ‘my translator’ who took me to the appropriate travel authority and translated my wishes to travel hugging the earth’s surface to Wangerooge, from English into reality, for a nice woman who bashed out a ticket for me for the seven-hour trip. Essentially, two trains to Sande, wherever that is; a bus from Sande to Harlesiel, which is a place; and a ferry to Wangerooge ferry terminal, thence a train to Wangerooge the Village. Some of these lengths of the journey, you really just had to hang on and be confident you were going to be OK; in the case of the train from the ferry I suppose in hindsight, now I feel so comfortable in Wangerooge I’m basically saying Moin to every person, dog and bird I see, it was obvious you got off the ferry and got onto the train, but… no-one actually said that was what you were meant to do. I did it and I think I did the right thing. 

 

As it transpired, the train is cool (there are train tracks all over this island. Whoever decided that they’d put a train on here, really went to town, no joke. There is totally a railway presence, even though the only train I actually saw was just going from the ferry to the town; you will just be walking around and suddenly – tracks). There are no private cars on Wangerooge; like a lot of things (to the point that you almost think – is it none of my damn business?) it’s mysterious when and how this decision was made, though of course you only have to be here an hour and you realise how it’s a key thing that makes it what it is. The Wikipedia entry for the island says the no-cars rule was instituted to maintain amenity (it doesn’t say it in those words, by the way) but I also sort of wonder if it’s in recognition of the incredible fragility of the place. 

 

Until, I would say, the beginning of the last century Wangerooge was just basically blowing along like a purposeful slug with no-one doing anything about it except watch it go by. The best example of this is the curious case of what is now the jugendherberge (youth hostel) which was I think once known as the Westen tower, which is a most elegant building apparently (Wikipedia tells us) built in 1597 for no apparent purpose except possibly to gauge the craziness of the Wangerooge drift/slide/squirm to the east.  It’s around eight storeys high before you get to the roof (which has a few more storeys in it) and must have been a remarkable construction in 1597 when there weren’t many buildings that high. It has a role to play in Wangerooge society which seems a little like the Devils Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. More on that anon.

 

Meanwhile, the island’s terrain. Yesterday (Sunday) I decided I would take advantage of a sunny day and the warmest of all I’ve experienced here (4 degrees) to circumnavigate it, only on land, not in my sloop. I had already, it has to be said, walked a good part of the land so I was really just doing the neatness part of my colouring-in, not setting out boldly for parts unknown. The exciting and scary bit was, however, the eastern end of the island, a long thin peninsula known as… not having a name, from which one could see Minsener Oog, the most eastern (but essentially uninhabited) German Frisian island. 

 

Instantly after leaving, I realised I was an idiot, as I was walking straight into the sun. However, being an idiot, I kept walking on the assumption that once I turned the corner on the peninsula, I would be walking away from the sun anyway. The sun didn’t move. The village, which I was leaving behind and kept turning back to look at, didn’t seem to move either. I felt like I was moving but I apparently made no traction at all. It was remarkable. I pressed on. 

 

After a while, the sun had done nothing (I eventually left the built environment behind me however) and I had something else to worry about – I was being followed. An individual, probably a man (dressed ‘like a man’ or at least not dressed ‘like a woman’) was about five minutes behind me and keeping apace. It was blustery, but I was pretty sure s/he wasn’t yelling ‘Hey, du hast deine Brille verloren ‘ (‘hey, you’ve lost your glasses’) and anyway I hadn’t – they were in my pocket. S/he was just following me, same kind of pace, same kind of unhurriedness I’m-an-idiot-walking-into-the-sun kind of process. I fell to thinking, of course, about those Agatha Christie novels where Hercule Poirot assembles all 1,400 residents of a small island in the village hall and announces that the murderer is in the room, to general astonishment. But what if the murderer has a little sloop and is ready to hotfoot (hotrow, I suppose) it to Minsener Oog, there to wait until the (4 degree lol) heat has died down? I know.  But what could I do? So I pressed on and long story short they turned around directly we hit the peninsula point and started going west. 

 

I wanted instead to savour the triumph of my conquest of the eastern peninsula, and also to get a great shot of Minsener Oog. It didn’t help that the seagulls were everywhere in the most Hitchcockian manner imaginable, that the sun was beating down as only a 4 degree sun can, all was peach-coloured drama, and I couldn’t really even see what I was photographing. Soon I turned westwards, relieved to have the perilous sun at my back and to be progressing towards a perceivable goal: the Westen tower is actually visible from that far away, only because really it is not that far away.

 

I walked some minutes, probably about twenty, examining the various posts hammered into the shore at odd angles which do seem commensurate with an island that’s been slipping around for centuries, when I thought to look at something on my phone. Like everyone else in 2019 I do this constantly so I’m almost proud it took me a while to do it for the umpteenth time that day. This was when I discovered I had lost my glasses. Backtracking I saw that curiously there was a huge amount of different types of footprint on the ground, some of them probably mine but it was about 9 am and there had been heaps of people around here already. It was hard to pick my footprints out, and in fact I didn’t, and instead figured I’d just head for the easternmost point and try to find my tracks from there. Instead at that point I found my glasses (and some slow trombone music) in the surf that is, the tide was coming in and getting ready to wash them off to some desert island in the Canaries. If this is the narrowest escape I’ll have in 2019 then, well, I’m glad I’ve had it (but I guess I welcome narrower, if they are actually going to be escapes, who cares). 

 

So I set off again westwards. This time I found something that I hadn’t previously known about: there was at some point a structure on the south-eastern coast of Wangerooge known as the Ostbake. ‘Ostbake’ in Frisian means ‘cheese bake’ which anyone would have to admit makes fuck all sense, considering this was a wooden platform a short way out into the water. A sign nearby says, and I google translate:

 

The Ostbake was built in 1909 here in the east of the island Wangerooge as a cardinal Schiefffahrtszeichen (marking of Hindemissen or shoals). Official name: South Cardinal Place.

 

The original wooden beacon was 17.34m high and had a square footprint of about 900m2. The top mark was referred to as an hourglass or in Volksumnd "egg timer", because it was similar to an hourglass.

 

The originating beacon of 1865 in the east of the island Wangerooge served as an adjuster of the "Blue Balje" (Seegaatt between Wangerooge and Minsener Oog). In addition, the beacon was used by shipwrecked as a vanishing point. The beacon was damaged in the following years several times by storm surges and rebuilt. Their final location and their final form received the bake in 1909 as a wooden construction with accommodation barbs for hydraulic engineering work, the so-called "Schlengenarbeiten". During the two World Wars, soldiers were housed in the Hozbaracken. From 1947, the simple accommodations of the children's rest home of the Bünder Volks- und Mittelschule e. V. initially leased, later bought and modernized. In 1990, accommodations were dismantled. The Ostbake initially remained as a day sight and in 1999 placed under monument protection.

 

As part of a construction site inspection in 2012, the Water and Shipping Authority Wilhelmshaven found that a renovation of the 103-year-old structure was no longer possible. The weather left irreparable damage to the building fabric. Since the Tagessichtzeichen was no longer needed as a cardinal navigation sign, a new building was not justified. On 13 June 2013, the dismantling of the Ostbake took place.

 

I think I can make this relevant later, so bear with me or don’t. Let it be known that the wooden supports for the Ostbake are still visible in the water, and also that I claim the moral right to a throwbake (ha ha) later on. 

 

Pressing on: birds, sand, an embankment to the left and water to the right. After a while, as much as you want to keep going coastally, it gets tougher: the side of Wangerooge that faces Germany proper is a lot more like the underside of a slug, and a chicken/logical person might start to wonder, particularly after getting stuck in that smoosh of sand-mud that has all the consistency of wet concrete, whether it’s altogether safe to be so close to the water which is, after all, real sea with a tide important enough to control, for instance, the efficacy of the ferry. So I finally started compromising, following the deich as it’s known (yes, so it’s a dyke, but it’s not like it holds back a huge body of water; it’s more like a major embankment, which I assume is the chief earthwork instituted to stop the island slipping round the globe; it usually has a smallish drainage canal on the inside). Most of the time, you can walk or ride your bike on the top of the dyke, but at this point in time the path up there on the eastern side was under construction – I already knew this because I had tried to walk eastwards on the south side of the airport a few days previously. What I found was it wasn’t impossible to walk alongside the drainage canal, where there was a kind of dirt path. By this time, I was on the south edge of the airport. 

 

The airport takes up a lot of space on Wangerooge, and also has a fair bit of attendant industry, a hotel for instance and a café. None of these were open when I was there (nothing much was. More on this later). As I went past, one plane landed and two took off; they’re tiny planes and for all the extensive space at the airport, they have very little room to become airborne, but they make up for all the smallness by making a massive amount of noise (maybe I’m just sensitive to noise now after a week on the quietest place on earth). Walking around the airport, and looking on my phone, and having learnt from my mistakes, I decided that while I would never, on my honour, give up my vow to walk the entire periphery of Wangerooge, I was also going to go back to my apartment and have the rest of the soup I’d made. It was minestrone. I did this and I also had a powernap and a coffee, in that order. 

 

There was another reason to take this break. I had neglected, through a lazy week of never-never, to visit the inselmuseum which is located in a big red lighthouse near the railway station. I knew it opened on a Sunday afternoon and never on a Monday and that if I didn’t see it on Sunday I never would; also that if I was off traversing the west of the island after 2 I wouldn’t get back in time and might be too buggered to do it anyway; and that… and so on, I don’t have to justify myself to you. So, that was how I played it.

 

The inselmuseum costs €3 and it’s really only the bottom of the lighthouse, because – I feel I hear the people of Wangerooge saying – there’s not much to say, it just is. Indeed, a la The Shining, there is a rather nasty sensation that for all its skittering around the actual population of the island haven’t changed a lot, and you can check out anytime etc… Café Pudding, for instance, seems to have always occupied the old Frisian burial mound at the t-section of Zedeliusstraße and Obere Strandpromenade. The phenomenon of weird little beach tenty-chairy things which appear a lot in pictures but must be stored in a huge bizarre bunker somewhere because I have no idea where they are, is also older than time. Similarly, the Westen tower is a kind of god to these people and features on all their artifacts. The Dorfplatz, a park between the Parkhotel New Hampshire (!) and the St Nikolai Kirche, has been there a l-o-o-ng time, the main change being it once had a tennis court in it. And so on. 

 

The most interesting thing in the museum, like all museums, is of course the bit they don’t want to discuss, which is the years 1933-1945. I gather that this bad shit is something German institutions everywhere, all the time, are forcing themselves to face and of course there’s no mystery why no-one wants to go there and yet everyone knows they have to. These years are dealt with in the Inselmusuem – a very non-linear (indeed, it’s circular) and hotch-potchy museum room – with two frames of pictures just as you blink and miss them going out the door, wherein otherwise context-less photographs of various officials and random people are bunged together captioned with their names. Personally, I feel that there is a lot more to this than meets the eye (i.e. it’s not just a bunch of people from the time; there are stories to be told, and the curation of those pictures means a lot to the very few people still alive and local; soon no-one will really know). 

 

I went up the tower, fighting mild claustrophobia as usual in such situations (and yes, someone was following me. I don’t know who he was, but at the fourth or fifth level I stopped to look out the window so he would go on up, which he did). Getting to the top made it OK, and I noted that luck was on my side as regards my decision to take this break from the traversing of Wangerooge, as rain hit just as I came out on the observation deck; had I been out in the wilds of west Wangerooge it would have been just enough to soak. By the time I came down again – feeling brave enough to proffer a confident ‘danke’ to the sour woman in the ticket booth – the sun was out again. I hit the road. 

 

That Westen tower is very prominent, because the island is very flat and the tower is very tall (and as previously mentioned, nothing is that far away). The museum shows some rather disturbing images of the tower’s original placement – on the east side of the island’s western promontory – disturbing because it is now on the west side (Wikipedia claims it has moved entirely across the island, which seems to be completely wrong and I will probably have changed that by the time you read this). The museum has a crazy image of the tower in the water, crazy because it is now fairly confidently surrounded by land. I have to stop thinking about land reclamation as crazy – it’s as sane as anything. So, the tower is your fixed point and you move towards it: simple. I walked along the top of the deich mainly. 

 

One of the things I have noted about Wangerooge is it’s heavily populated by dogs and people (every kind of dog imaginable; mainly the people are old and white, unless they’re about two, but then they are still white). (I noted earlier today by the way that when I struck a momentary wifi glitch that one of the nearby networks was called WLAN Allah, which felt refreshingly but probably deceptively multicultural). At one moment however walking along the top of the deich I saw what seemed to be a duck without a head swimming rapidly along the drainage canal. That wasn’t possible so I moved towards it and it disappeared into the water. It was, I’m fairly sure, an otter. It stayed underwater a preposterously long time then reappeared a little further away, now swimming with purpose. I could still keep pace by walking, so I did, and it disappeared again. This felt like harassment on my part so I let it go on. I can’t let go of the feeling I had, though, that it had been having a really nice stroll all by itself and enjoying the solitude and sun, and that I’d kind of ruined that, and also I had to tell myself that I think that if only an otter could talk it’d be a cheery, ruminative and humorous fellow, but in fact it could just as easily be a bore or a prick, and I have no right to take those options away from it. 

 

Getting to the tower was a blast, though oddly once you’re there you get no context or recognition that this is the Westen tower built in 1597. There’s a sign about the wildlife in the area, and there are a few other buildings nearby that are clearly there because the tower’s there (one is a café bar, closed in winter, which had a police car children’s ride out front apparently blown over in the wind; I put it up on its stand, half expecting someone to come out and yell at me because they laid it down on its side for the winter damn it; but there was actually no-one anywhere around). One of those buildings has a picture of the tower in its logo. 

 

Now at this point things get difficult. I had already walked the beach on the northern side of the island, and in this instance I couldn’t remember how I’d done it and every pathway seemed to be telling me it was forbidden to go over the dune. So either I’d done it illegally previously, or, I’d missed the right pathway. Instead I decided to walk on the inside of the dune on the special pedestrian path, and take the opportunity to see another lighthouse, a groovy seventies one. The glint in its light made it feel like it was warming up for action but I think it was just the reflection of the setting sun. 

 

The land on this western side is very flat and completely, it would seem, unused. I am not sure what it could be used for, but the point is, it’s currently sandy wastes with grass on it. That’s OK. As with much of Wangerooge, the roads are made of elegantly and simply but diligently placed bricks, and you feel like someone now dead has put a lot of work into making it easier to get around. After a while I found a path to the sea and started walking the rather tapered-off Strandpromenade. A quick stop into the Diggers bar for a celebratory brandy and back to my third-floor airbnb apartment with a view of the sea and a big bowl of pasta. Triumph! I was incredibly sore from the walk but of course unspeakably smug. 

 

The iconography of Wangerooge is pretty pervasive. It almost feels like teams: are you a lighthouse person or a Westen tower person? I have even come across, extraordinarily, an ostbake person (well, to be fair, they had models of both the ostbake and the Westen tower in their garden, so probably appeasing the spirits of both). A ruined and seemingly rat-inhabited (though perhaps it’s the island’s otter) Westen tower can be found in a garden close to the airport, alongside a suite of dilapidated windmills, and models of rabbits, sheep and something like a meerkat. 

 

The Westen tower is probably the winner, though it might be its distinctiveness that makes it jump out; there’s a local liqueur in the shape of the lighthouse for instance; perhaps the solidity and awkward roofline of the Westen tower makes it a difficult proposition for souvenir alcohol providers. The building I’ve been staying in, for instance, was built in 1986 but has a foundation stone (of sorts) declaring its date of construction and featuring the image of the Westen tower. You can buy tower fridge magnets and badges; of course, postcards; I came across a house with an adjoining arch revealing a frieze on the property’s back fence of a prancing horse – which distracted me for some seconds from the fact that the arch itself included an image of the Westen tower. Just as the Wangeroogeans’ habit of apparently not ascribing any purpose or function to the tower gives it an air of redundant mystery, so too shall I allow my discussion of it to peter out. I will say however that I feel one of its major problems – if problem be the right word – is that it is not in the town, but about as far from the town as you can be and still be on Wangerooge. Certainly if you take the train you go past it (though  you might not see it, as the train goes so close) but there is little chance to incorporate it into the general sphere of everyday Wangerooge life. Indeed, the tower has been trying to get away from the village since 1597, and they keep reconstituting Wangerooge to keep it on the island.

 

queerest railroad in the world

 

Detroit Free Press 17 March 1901 p. 14

a year ago - 'mittens'

this morning in tuscany

I didn't care for Tuscany much, it wasn't anywhere near as good as Tibet or the other place. It was featureless and dull. I couldn't get out without starting all over again though. 

When you get to the black frame in the road you are transported to somewhere else, in this instance it really did look like just going back to the beginning though. 

a tramp in tibet

This morning at the gym, a curtailed experience due to time (I had a meeting at 8) I went to Tibet. My companions were mainly Canadian. 

This is my best attempt at photographing the emergence of a head hole around a ponytail. I think you can just see it. But not really. 

By the way two things: sometimes people's profile pictures suggest they are black people (or a corgi, but forget that). But the avatars I have seen have all been white people. Just saying. Also, I noticed that in the examples in the opening screen for the program, May Pang's name came up. WTF!?

Here's the real world outside. Some prat was smoking a cigarette out there and more prats putting up signs telling you not to walk on the fucking pavement because they are building some new set of dog boxes. Poor dogs I say. 

brush with fame

So continuing my ginger reimmersion in the gym world, cautious because of danger of further back problem, I went to Anytime Fitness again this morning and was mildly active. They have new treadmills (or whatever those things are called) or at least different ones to what you got at Anytime Sunshine in 2019. These ones allow you to choose a walk through a pastoral scene during which slow vehicles pass you going in the opposite direction and people - apparently people from all over the world, christ only knows how this works or what it is meant to mean - are also walking with you, more or less. It is my tendency wherever possible to learn by doing rather than by trying to comprehend a manual or an instruction so I am just letting this wash over me taking baby steps in the first instance, I mean almost literally. Anyway you can choose a walking place, and I chose Ireland, because it was the first on the list. It looked a lot like, I don't know, the road between Coldstream and Healesville. The interesting thing was you walk behind people (some come towards you, there was even one weirdo just standing I guess on an embankment on the side of the road looking at the road and not moving) and when you get close to them...

They become transparent, and you see their arms, which are of course in front of them, through their bodies, then you kind of walk through them I guess. Actually the most disturbing example of this is people (women, presumably) with ponytails, whose ponytails become head holes. 

But this is still pretty creepy. Also, I was in Ireland with a celebrity! Alright, I wasn't in Ireland. And I am almost certain that this is not the celebrity but someone else with her name. Also, I am not even really sure May Pang is a celebrity. Though I did read about her on wikipedia last week. 

So, out of 10 I would say, 7 not a bad gymsperience this morning and I will go again soon. I would also mention that unsurprisingly I suppose the Travancore Anytime Fitness is less intimidating than the Sunshine one, where some man who might have been really into steroids or really into ice or both always seemed to suddenly appear out of nowhere from the back of the room (I would only ever go before 7am, and it often seemed empty when I got there). I walked back through Royal Park it was raining lightly and that was a pleasant experience. 

this post has nothing to do with my cats or any cats, but these days I feel the need to provide a picture of something just to lull you into forgetting how dumbed down everything is by pictures of for instance cats

Not that things aren't dumbed down, way down, enough here.

So I have interlinked dichotomies re: health, pain, fitness, weightloss etc which form a kind of ker-plunk situation probably not uncommon in the almost-56-year-old-men demographic. I have the pain, which I have whinged about previously; I finally made it to the doctor’s on Wednesday unless it was Thursday and she figured I had a slightly (maybe she didn’t say slightly) inflamed (or similar term) vertebrae. The trick, she says, is to strengthen the muscles around it so as to keep it in place and not sticking out hurting me. She recommends physio and that is I suppose something I have to do. But in the meantime, I just joined the gym again after a year away and no bull, I hate it but I am really keen to start going there again on a very regular basis. But I don’t want to, you know, hear a pinging sound and see that disc bouncing out onto the wall. As mentioned previously (thanks for caring) yes I can maintain 10 000 steps a day and my daily average for 2021 is in fact slightly over and I aim to keep that going. Sorry to bring it up but I know that is what diaries are for, and if you want to read my diary, well gee whiz you get what you get because, news just in, it is what it is.

 

Speaking of which in the last week or so I have had password hell with two media orgs I subscribe to, Slate Plus (longtime member) and Crikey (recent convert). Slate Plus has always been a bit iffy with proper labelling of its podcasts on its site, so you kind of take a stab in the dark whether you get the ‘Plus’ version (longer with a coda) or the regular version which has ads. I can’t stand the ads. Of course, being in Australia they almost never have anything at all to do with me, things I couldn’t buy even if I was inclined. So it is galling to have to listen to them. But now when I try to access the ‘Plus’ version of the podcasts (or ‘Dear Prudence’, the text advice column, which frankly I am addicted to) I have to go through a rigmarole of logging in and then the humiliation of being admitted to something I should not have log in for but at the same time being told that I could not, at this point, make the transaction. UGH.

 

Crikey has just been sending me on a change-your-password-thanks-your-password-change-is-successful-oh-who-are-you-change-your-password trek which sucks and also as some would say blows. OK I managed this one by complaining to them (sorry, I would have complained to you first but I’ve been busy) and they sent me what I assume is a generic password for Crikey which I’m just going to keep using until I can’t anymore. 

 

If you know anything about the two above you’ll know that they are left-leaning online journalism sites from the US and Australia respectively. I have been a Slate adherent for 8 or 9 years. I bit the bullet and took on Crikey a few months ago and while at first I was doubtful (perhaps, I now think, not much was happening over summer) it is paying off in terms of in-depth actual news, political news, which I enjoy. My leftist world view was created by my parents being intelligent from the mid-1960s and exposing me to the appropriate views, proof, rhetoric. I was leftwing before I knew what it meant, like supporting a football team, but when I found out what it meant I realised it was appropriate to what I actually believed, lol. I remember a long series of arguments with my Auburn South Primary School friend John Parncutt about Liberal vs Labor at a time when I could barely often recall (those two words do seem kind of similar – was that deliberate on the part of the Liberals?) which word stood for my alignment. John would ask me why I thought Labor was the best party to lead the nation and fuck it, I was ten, I had no idea of anything at all, of course, except that Enid Blyton was exciting and ABBA were grand. Looking back I now suspect that had I actually posited anything like a reasonable response he would have shat and died, because he certainly (in my memory anyway, maybe blocked it out) didn’t have a policy position on anything except that the Liberal Party was his family’s football team. In any case, I have always essentially voted Labor (yeah, I have actually often voted Greens, particularly in Broadmeadows where it feels like Labor’s so rusted on anything that puts a bit of a sad old damp firework under it might be useful) and, unimaginative as it might seem, I kind of like them. I have no special idealism and I don’t even, really, care about people above everything (I care about people I care about, but I also care about animals I care about, I also, I am sure I’ve mentioned this, question the whole notion of a world-view concocted as though what you/I care for really matters). 

 

Last night I recorded two hours of lecture to my computer to be released unto students on Tuesday. By the end I was very croaky and in that weird state – I have to say it is almost pleasurable – of feeling like I’d run out of vocabulary, just a general exhaustion of verbality. My lectures, by the way, are not written so much as commentary to a series of assembled slides. I try to have a summary at the beginning, but I tend not to have a summing up, and usually that’s because I like to keep things open-ended. I don’t believe there is a neat ending, and to imagine one is to cut yourself off intellectually. Everything bleeds into everything else. I spend hours telling students that mid-century modernism* is still heavily affected by some of the concerns of the late 19^th century, and then I say ‘so to wrap that up, no-one is prey to their formative influences anymore, year zero came along and the reset was entirely successful’ - ?!

 

Today I have to write another lecture, almost completely from scratch (there will be some callbacks to the first week of lectures – this is for undergraduate students who are not dumb but I think do need a little bit of hand-holding, JUST NO SPOONFEEDING, early on). It will be great, I have good material, but the composition of it will be arduous. Fortunately, as I always tell everyone in my usual smug way, I really enjoy my job. 

 

*By the way it occurred to me while I was talking about that that the mid-21^st century is looming on the horizon; a book I was reading for review this week which claimed to be about ‘mid-century’ began its narrative in the 19-teens. 

oh, and... 'rabbit rabbit'

 

apparently i interviewed richard thompson in march 2006

Richard Thompson

Richard Thompson is on a level where he can pretty much do what he wants, within the bounds of logic. As an early, invaluable member of the folk rock legends Fairport Convention, who left after a few years for a thoroughly successful solo career (a bit of which was not really solo as in the 70s and 80s it was as part of a duo with Linda Thompson, who was his wife), and being a gentleman whose guitar prowess has always been admired and adored around the world, he has pretty much got it made. And – don’t you hate it when you read this kind of thing? If I’d achieved what he’d achieved I’d be a mean freak – he is still a very down-to-earth and amiable fellow.

The Thompson oeuvre is often nicely pommy and he has a social commentator nature that’s often quite Ray Davies-ish: have a listen to the great ‘Let it Blow’ on his current album Front Parlour Ballads to see what I’m on about. In fact Front Parlour Ballads is highly recommended a tremendous introduction to Richard Thompson and a reminder that he’s one sixties artist who still retains a swag of credibility and has all his wits about him, and can crank out a bunch of catchy tunes to boot.

‘I’m aware that you don’t write or play music in a vacuum,’ he says, when I ask him about how he introduces his audience to his new stuff. ‘The only way you can really find out if something works is to sit down and play it for an audience. If they get it, fine, if they don’t – back to the drawing board.’ But at the same time, ‘Audiences are by their nature a conservative body – you have to pull them along a bit, drag ‘em forward, play something new then something familiar. Sometimes you fail, but I think that should be part of the live performance – the element of failure, that you try something and you don’t always succeed.’

Like Bjorn and Benny from Abba used to be, he’s a nine-to-five songwriter. ‘I like to do office hours. The more you work at it the more spontaneous it becomes… you open your mind to great ideas on a regular basis, more possibilities flow through you. You just get more tuned in.’

He’s also stayed a catchy and relevant songwriter, surely, by examining the popular song in depth with his Thousand Years of Popular Song project. ‘It started with, I suppose, Playboy magazine. Playboy were asking musicians in 1999 to submit what they thought were the ten greatest songs of the millennium. I thought, ‘They’re being very pretentious about this – they don’t mean millennium, they mean the last twenty years’ so I thought, I’ll tease them a bit and I’ll start with 1000 AD. I don’t think they printed my list – a little bit too obscure. But then I was asked to do a show at the Getty museum in Los Angeles, so I thought this would be an interesting idea, if a little ambitious, so I put together a small group, three of us, to perform it… it’s become an occasional thing, we’ll do a few shows every year, it’s great fun. The music is really all over the place, every conceivable style of music, most in the English language, I suppose it’s Anglocentric more than anything else, but we do a song in Mediaeval Italian, there’s a song in 12^th century French, right up to Fats Waller, Abba, Britney Spears and whatever.’

So having examined the medium up close, and written a few greats himself, can Richard tell us the essential element of pop music, so we can put it in a bottle? ‘It’s hard to say what that is, I think it does vary. You can say that there are consistent things that run through popular music, three chords will get you a long way, that hasn’t really changed. Love is the big theme that runs through everything – love and a bit of politics. A drone was popular in dance music in the 1300s and was still popular in Tamla Motown in the 60s and 70s. There are consistent things that continually reappear... But then, there are always exceptions to the rules.’

Know the rules and break them – that’s the key. There is one rule Richard knows not to break – he’s emphatic about how much he loves Australia, which he’s been coming to for a couple of decades now and which he’s touring this week. ‘It’s always a fantastic country. Because I’m a wildlife fan, the wildlife is the first thing that really struck me. Just seeing rainbow lorikeets flying around and sulphur-crested cockatoos in the parks, galahs – that still amazes me! It’s a great country, the people, the cities…’

He’s a gentleman!