Not the 16th anniversary of this blog

Don't ask me why but for some bizarre reason (they were not better or worse or any different from subsequent entries) I deleted the first few entries from Lorraine Crescent some years ago, or rather cut and pasted them into later entries. I can't explain why but you'd assume that people do things for a reason, right? So they're in the morass here somewhere, and possibly even with details about the dates they were originally posted. But just as I ridiculously started doing that, I also ridiculously stopped, and the first one I didn't do it to was 27 April 2005. I don't even know what I'm saying, except that anniversaries are fake anyway, well, they're real but they're meaningless. 

27 April 2011

I am writing on a balcony of a holiday house on the outskirts of Denmark, WA. It is heavily forested and the sun is just coming up (officially it came up 4 mins ago, at 6:15). I have been out here working on a book project for some time and my feet are cold but I do not sense mosquitoes, which makes a difference from last night. We are about 4 km from Denmark (Mia’s sister referred to this as the ‘city centre’ then corrected herself but everyone then seemed to pick up the habit) and on the gulf, rather than the river. There is a ton of wildlife and domesticated life out there – birds and dogs mainly. Also some cars periodically speeding around and I can hear the little boys are up and about inside the house too. I am sure I didn’t put it in these words but everyone assures me that I did, last night, promise Rohan that in the morning I would go for a run and he could accompany me on his bike. Why I would say ‘run’ I don’t know but I assume he won’t cavil if I don’t run. We will probably try and find our way to the water, which is easily seen through the trees and obviously quite close, but not apparently easily accessible (there is what looks like a track directly opposite the house but it has Private Property signs all over it). It rained quite heavily last night but I don’t believe that is what has been predicted for today. Denmark itself seems like a pretty enough town. As usual (I think this is my third visit) the south-west of WA reminds me more of exurban Tasmania than anything else, even though I daresay it’s its own place too, and it certainly has its own distinct look in terms of flora. Denmark is your standard country-town-gone-to-the-trendies, which is fine by me and probably by everyone who sold out to the trendies ten or fifteen years ago; there’s an organic co-op, for instance, and a bookshop I’m interested in exploring today if possible though it may just be overpriced copies of things you can get in any Perth bookstore… we’ll see. Eleven hours later: the bookshop was actually pretty decent (I think it was called Odyssey) but cash only, so any serious visit will have to be put off until tomorrow, payday. We did go to the two Denmark op shops and the amazing craft shop. What was most amazing is that Denmark does not appear to have a mail box or at least as far as I could tell the only mail box at the post office was one which catered for mail sent to Denmark and Walpole only! I can’t figure that one out. I am on the verandah yet again and there are people celebrating down the hill. I am totally outraged as I just discovered via my iPhone and facebook that Buckingham Palace have axed the Chaser’s royal wedding commentary, not that I would have been particularly up for watching it, but this is a grotesque and appalling piece of censorship. I am so averse to the royal wedding (if you can call it that – some people in the royal family are getting married apparently) I really, really want it all to be over and finished, it’s such a crock of shit, and a cynical crock of shit at that. You just have to forget that rubbish and concentrate instead on the pleasurable sounds of pink and greys cracking seeds on the verandah. Deep breaths.

i really just don't know (box of crap)

So you remember the big box of crap? I got to a certain level in it and I was like, OK that'll do (pig). But today I was a bit gripped by a checkout fever, for instance, I threw away a few jumpers that 'the cat' had clawed up (they were old anyway) and some shirts and shoes, etc, into the brotherhood bin. Then I thought I'd tackle the box of crap a bit more, and found a lot of (bizarre!) blank A4 paper, and a bunch of unopened mail (bank statements, etc) from about ten years ago, and old train tickets and receipts - all very throwawayable even if they hadn't been on that thermal paper that rendered them virtually unreadable. Anyway then I found the above - the complete layout of a comic book with two stories, one by me (done in, lol, MacPaint or something similar) and one by Gregory Mackay I am a bit blown away that I actually got Gregory to donate or create something especially for a comic book... it's very cool. But did I ever publish the fucking thing? Seriously did I? There must have been some copies but then what happened? This comic book has everything but a front cover. I must burrow down into the crap a little more and maybe a finished version will be there. I should print it up and make it the only thing available on a website. That would be hilarious. 

By the way those Fastidious Frog comics totally wrote themselves, which was a bit scary really.  
 

nogress

Welcome to a great new concept, nogress, which is of course not the opposite of progress (that would be regress I think) but just stasis. So maybe I should call it 'stasis'.

One is suspended in an extraordinary web of competing forces, for instance, Nancy always starts to agitate to be fed about an hour and a half before her afternoon mealtime (5pm) and half an hour before her morning mealtime (6am). Both agitations are super irritating, but the morning one, of jumping on the bed and running around and jumping off (and being very annoyed if caught, like, 'you don't get it, I'm hungry') is particularly fucked. Anyway, I have to always be pushing back on this and it drains psychic energy.

The Matrimony album Kitty Finger is about to be reissued in a remastered version on Kill Rock Stars again, I think sometime this year. I saw in I think today's Guardian or somewhere a piece on the origins of the label and some of its stars, Matrimony not mentioned, but it bodes well for the publicity/interest the album might get 32 years later. I am torn between wanting some involvement in the publicity as one of the album's facilitators and knowing that it's not my place to tell my perspective really (but the people in the band, as far as I'm aware, have not really told their stories at all. So...). 

When I said 'So...' I guess I was thinking along the lines of, 'So someone's got to'. But that's also not true. No-one's got to. Indeed, maybe the mystery is better. 

Also, since I am not a patriot, why do I care about one of the key taglines, eg 'Actually, both grunge and riot grrl have Australian precedents'. It's arcane anyway. I have to admit, I want some of the reflected glory from being lucky enough to help make the Matrimony album happen, purely by dint of channeling funds, and not my funds either. That said my part in it is a boring story really and I think I have probably told it here before. I'm more interested in the surviving members of the band telling their story and it becoming an amazing movie. 

Relatedly: as probably also mentioned here once before, Flame Fortune recorded a track to be included on the album, which was jettisoned late in the piece. The Flame story would be a great tragic aspect of the film, her relationship with Sybilla and also with Sean Keogh, it will all be so great. 

John Cusack (assuming he is still aged 25) can play me in 1988. It's OK it's only a cameo so he doesn't have to be his 25-year-old self for long.  

56

Today is my birthday and I am reminded of various things like some Kurt Vonnegut throwaway non-joke about a dying old woman who says 'how did I get so old' and my own grandmother's immortal line re: how she got so old viz 'I just didn't die'. In both instances I am reminded of these things while realising that I am not particularly old really and this is of course brought home by people I know, actual adults, aged 30something complaining/matter-of-factly proclaiming that they are now old. I don't feel particularly old anyway but that also reminds me of another grandmother (I had two) saying she still felt like a teenager, i.e. she felt the same way as she did when she was a teenager. 

That's all I have to say about this really. I am deeply immersed in writing my next book while planning the two subsequent ones, so this is how it goes at the moment. It's all good. 

Gloomy

9 April 2011 For the last week I have felt an illness coming on and also at the same time extreme dread over the impending publication of the bogan book. I have become exactly the person I have laughed about for decades, someone who has been desperate to be heard and be taken seriously on various levels and now the options are finally coming my way I am neurotic and terrified about them. I wonder if getting very close to turning 46 has anything to do with it as well. Probably the creeping illness has been the main problem. Also the necessity of applying for promotion, or rather, the decision made somewhat whimsically a few months ago to apply for promotion and the incredibly tortuous work that has gone into that process, which has essentially got me nowhere. I don’t often feel this way but for the last week and a half I definitely have felt this way, and it is highly irritating and self-defeating. I feel like I need something or other to get me out of this mindset I am very much uncertain about what might be good for that though. At least we are half-way through the semester. So I have been under the weather – people have been telling me I looked bad for a week or so – and then it finally went to a full-blown cold or flu or something yesterday afternoon. Mia has had something similar for the last few days too. I have been in bed most of the day reading a Nicholson Baker novel called The Anthologist which I think I bought at the discount book warehouse a few months ago unknowingly in preparation for a day such as this. I am not sure if I enjoy the novel or not – it certainly is not a page turner but I have returned to it five or six times and then drifted away from it, so maybe it is good. I have also read the paper, some music magazines, watched The General and To Kill a Mockingbird on my laptop, and I think that’s about it. I have a major conference paper to get done by the end of the week, this stupid promotion document,* and I was supposed to get another paper done in the next few days but plainly that’s not going to get done ahead of the major (Helsinki) conference paper. Also a lecture on Monday and another one on I think Tuesday or Wednesday or sometime. I’m not sure of the details I just feel ill.

* Some months later I looked at this again and that 'stupid promotion document' as you called it, Doofus, got you a freakin' promotion. You should get ill more often.

boresbservations on disco heat

 

I really love this Canadian double compilation from 1979 which as far as I can tell only contains one Canadian artist (shame) but is otherwise just a rip-roaring exploration of an art form that was peaking just as it was about to be shot down by all those anti-disco types who couldn’t handle how much they loved disco and how great it was. 

 

Side one: Musique’s ‘In the Bush’ kicks off the set in adroit fashion, with a categorically ridiculous set of catchphrases and a whole insanely not unlike ESG or Delta 5 but a little more (a) sanitised (b) crude (c) stupid (d) sly than those groups. Patrick Adams, the man behind Musique, has produced a thousand recordings (well, he’s been a producer for fifty years and he’s 70 – that almost seems a little lazy) but in typical Wikipedia style his entry includes a ‘discography’ of two albums credited to other people. ‘In the Bush’ is followed by Rick James’ ‘You and I’ virtually his first hit and one of those records where the baseness of the one musical idea is remedied by the power of the performance. After Rick we get the Saturday Night Band, and the question forms in our mind, where the fuck did someone get the great idea to compete for the least imaginative band name? Because Musique is bad enough, but fuckin’ Saturday Night Band? I mean they’re not serious, but are they serious?! ‘Come on Dance, Dance’… I love what they’re doing, but it’s like a ten year old’s first novel. Why not ‘Come come on on dance dance’? That’s what they mean. Laura Taylor’s ‘Dancin’ in my Feet’ is a lot more BeeGeesy pop, including a tasteful cocktail section and once again the thirties-ish swing feel to the main verse. She apparently used the Bee Gees’ backing band, whatever that specifically means (I got that from her website). 

 

Side two: T-Connection’s ‘On Fire’ is everything you’d want in a disco-rock-pop concoction. T’s full name is Theophilus which I also approve. Hi-Inergy’s ‘You can’t turn me off (in the middle of turning me on)’ is no doubt in danger of being cancelled by the PC police and quite right too. Hi-Inergy modelled themselves on the Supremes but obviously hornier (?). I would really like to hear this recited by John Laws over a Leon Berger-derived groove. Within a few years we’ll have the software to just program those in and get such a thing, which will be cool. Foxy’s ‘Get off’ is probably the best record ever made, but I never want to hear it or think about it again. Chanson’s ‘Don’t Hold Back’ is much better, seemingly effortless and yet so infectious, also refreshingly puts Frankie’s ‘Relax’ back in its box. 

 

Side three: Michael Stevens apparently got a demo of ‘Love is in the Air’ before JPY’s version had come out and did his own recording. Wikipedia is very keen to point out that this competed with JPY’s LIITA, and that’s why neither was a huge hit in Canada but I think there’s a counter argument, to whit: who gives a shit? This is a really decent version, actually, with a very slightly different syncopation to JPY’s rendition and a very very different kind of jam/rave-up section at the end which really elevates the whole. Peter Brown’s ‘Dance With Me’ is a great inspirational anthem which is bound to get the whole world dancing (any day now). I gather (I say this as though I deduced something cleverly; actually I read it on the internet) Brown and Robert Rans, who also wrote this song, wrote Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ which was a hit, although I find that if you try to think of how that song goes while you’re listening to ‘Dance With Me’ you get Sheila E.’s ‘Glamorous Life’. Michael Zager’s ‘Music Fever’ is yeah, sure, whatever, the kind of song that you are not surprised to find in its original appearance opens an album the second side of which is a Disney medley. I gather (there I go again) that Zager ‘discovered Whitney Houston at the age of 14’ but who exactly was 14? USA-European Connection is next with ‘Come into my Heart’. This three-piece vocal group with an extraordinarily utilitarian name was formed by producer Boris Midney, possibly not the name he was born with, but maybe it was. A very lush and creative foray. John Davis and the Monster Orchestra perform the slightly thirties-ish ‘Ain’t that Enough’, a very lively and exciting piece of work with a bass player called Sugar Bear. 

 

 Side four is to be honest the dud side, or at least, it’s still great but not as great as the others. ‘My claim to fame’ by James Wells is a punchy pop song. The Wonderland Disco Band’s ‘Wonder Woman Theme’ is a mystifyingly low-key version of a track that was almost glam as I remember it applied to the actual show. Macho’s ‘I’m a Man’ is solid enough but was it really necessary? And Dan Hartman’s ‘Instant Replay’ is, sure, fine, and I have a strong feeling that it Is What It Is. So I’m sort of guessing that while this album was most likely not really compiled, more just decided by where the chips lay i.e. what was available/what was categorizable as disco/what had sold or was selling, whoever sequenced it was less enthused about the material on this side and was kind of hiding it away from the more solidly disco other four sides, notwithstanding the Dan Hartman song was a great big hit record (well, top 20 in Canada anyway, higher than it got in the US, though it was top 10 in the UK and the only place in the world it got higher than Australia (no. 6) was New Zealand (no. 5). We are such happy-go-lucky people here in the antipodes).

 

That’s right. The album does not feature ‘Dance (Disco Heat)’ by Sylvester. Too damn bad if that’s what you were looking for here. It’s weird that it doesn’t though isn’t it. 

big list

Ho hum another week another big list of things I have to do, including I think complete some blog posts I have started and left hanging. THIS IS IMPORTANT. Today I am intending on going to Cheaper Buy Miles, to the State Library of Victoria, and to campus, just running errands. The weekend was nastily hot but word on the street - from the newsboys, and the oracles - is that today will be a decently reasonable one. I am going to go to the SLV to get some new images/material to spruce up lectures for the next few weeks. I think I will also dump a bit of old crap I don't need any more in some kind of brotherhood bin, though they always take me by surprise the bins, I can never remember where they are and then suddenly they leap out at me. I know there is one in North Melbourne and one near the market. I am finally going to rid myself of a pair of trousers that I bought at Dimmeys in about 2005, I actually bought two pairs (or as they used to say in the good old days, 'two pair') and oddly they were so cheap and weird that the pockets inside kind of hung there, but there was also a gap that meant you could reach straight inside your trousers while looking like you had your hands in your pockets. Yes, I know, this might well seem like something some people would pay extra for. But there they were, super cheap in Dimmeys. Anyway out they go. I have a perverse sentimentality about some items of clothing, but I have to kind of remind myself, there really are inanimate objects around that don't care what I think and indeed probably want to die with dignity. 

Other things for this week - three journal articles, two of which I am co-author for, one of which I am sole author, need to be completed; two of these are resubmissions so there's a good chance they will be publications, the third is so good it's unlikely to not lead to a publication. It's only April and already I would say I have hit well above my publication requirement for the year, and that's without assuming that my DeGaris book will be out sometime in 2021. 

The above is me trying to motivate myself. Ignore it. I am surprised you even read it, to be honest. 

rabbit rabbit (delayed)

Apologies for the delay, had to go and round up the rabbits