lunch today

 

It was one scoop of fig and pistachio (made with soy milk) and one scoop of coconut (made with coconut milk). It was exactly what I needed. Didn't make the Sydney Road traffic go any faster before or after though. 

So, what, that's my comment on the Ukraine situation? Well, yes and no.

old abp

A couple of pictures of the old Architecture, Building and Planning building, where I worked, in 2012. As you can see from the first picture it was pretty crowded. 

a glitch in the matrix

OK so explain this.

I am at the National Library listening to two CDs of interviews. One is with Don Gazzard from 1972, the other is with Tony Powell from 2005. I am given a CD drive and told to plug them into a computer and listen on speakers, which is all fine. When I put in the Don Gazzard interview, it comes up on the screen as being a CD of the Tony Powell interview. In the second picture above you can see me holding up the Powell CD while the Gazzard interview is playing. I suppose you have to take my word for it that there aren't two Powell CDs and I have both of them. But I don't.

These are two completely different things. Yes, they both discuss planning (so what) but Gazzard was essentially an architect, Powell an engineer who worked in planning. 

I completely fail to understand how this happened. 

verity

Don't ask me why but when Audible told me I had six unused credits on audiobooks I thought look, I had better get down to business and maybe I can use this to my own advantage. So I went searching for books 'about' (whatever that might mean, didn't care, didn't really investigate either) garden suburbs, which is something I have to make my business at the moment. Top of the list was this book called Verity which I am sure I am much more than half way through now and which is a piece of work. Nothing to do with the reason I 'bought' it, and ridiculous too. 

So it's told in the voice of a woman called I think Lowan, or Loene, or Loan - who knows! - who is a barely successful author, who is employed by the family of a successful author who's had a terrible (probably self-induced) car accident and is now more or less in a vegetative state, to complete the final three novels of a series. Not only has this author lost two children (dead within a few months of each other), leaving only one child, a boy with the impossible name Crew (perhaps Crüe - once again, I don't know) and a husband, Jeremy (Djerremeigh?). They live well but are of course sad and tragic, though Djerremeigh does get to show off his fabulous bod most of the day by doing chores around the yard that make him sweat. 

Lowan is meant to be putting together notes on how to complete these books, however, she instead gets bound up in watching Dierram-E do menial tasks and/or reading a manuscript placed within easy reach amongst the successful author (Verity)'s papers which is a sort of confessional so-called autobiography, though what no-one seems to realise is that most autobiographies do not start at the party where you meet your husband. But whatever. 

Things get slow from hereon and I am seriously considering stopping listening to this altogether as I find it so Jodie Picoult mixed with Rebecca mixed with Virginia Andrews and I suppose, yeah, I find it uncomfortable that so much of the story is about Verity's recounting of how she is constantly thinking about killing her children (which, presumably, she does at some point).

Of course, there has to be a twist here, and there are a lot of flags. Lowan constantly tells us, the reader, that she admires Verity's writing because she tells the story from the criminal's point of view. There are hints that Verity's only faking being a vegetable, but who knows. I could seriously happily stop listening to / 'reading' this book now and I probably will. 

* 7 Jan 2023 update - I did. But reading the wry synopsis above, I'm tempted to return to it. 

new book

Working feverishly on new book atm and made the first four chapters (substantially complete) into a spiral-bound printout to correct on the page. Wow, so many corrections! Picture taken in the new Carlton cafe/restaurant ('Italian Diner') with the crazy name of Ms Frankie which I wanted to check out largely because I gather it is open at 5:30 am. I mean, I was there at 2:55pm just before the kitchen closed and got a salad. Interior is (naturally) a far cry from the rustic 80s of the Thresherman's Bakehouse which had previously occupied those buildings (but closed long ago, I can't even recall how long ago). 

so close and yet so far

My computer really doesn't know me, despite the fact we spend probably about half of each day in close physical proximity. 

I bought its predecessor - or was it the one before its predecessor? Yes I think it was - at the airport en route to New Zealand, and I suppose I must have first turned it on in Auckland in 2011 or thereabouts. Since that time google maps on every computer I have owned thinks I want /need/deserve 'google.co.nz'. It doesn't really matter - it's just weird. But that said for some reason additionally the computer, or google maps I'm not sure, thinks I am in Adelaide. Sometimes it tells other functions on the computer that I am in Adelaide. So, if I search for instance on 'restaurants near me', this (above) is the kind of thing I get.

Additional complaint: remember 18 months or so ago everything went good because it was suddenly so easy to get to this blog despite it being associated with an old email account, after it being so hard for so long? Well, now it's really difficult again because the computer had an upgrade (I think this is what happened) which meant that it now thinks I only have one email address, and it has decided that's my work email address. Am I dreaming this? It seems like it always wants to default to the same email, and I have to jump through some hoops, including it telling me (always) that one option is not presently available but I can try some others (which turn out to be all the options). 

Also, airdrop doesn't work anymore. I always thought airdrop was a bit dodgy, or that dodgy people could do dodgy things with it, but it was really useful for transferring pictures from my phone onto my laptop. No more. 

So the whole of computerworld is predicated on making computer functions kind of second nature so you're as likely to think 'I'm an idiot' as you are to think 'my computer has become an idiot'. Or, you don't quite know what's changed. It's ridiculous.

derani scarr

When Derani Scarr appeared as 'Woman' in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales in 2017, everyone was wondering where this actress had been since 1967 and You Can't See Around Corners. Obviously I'm being sarcastic and an idiot. I am sure she had a career. She is in the episode of Homicide called 'Witch Hunt', however, (alongside Sheila Florance and David Spurling) playing the ostensibly foxy Helen Hopgood. At one point Bronson asks her why she wasn't at home getting her beauty sleep and she says 'do you think I need it?' and he says something approving. 

They make so much of her, it's surprising that even though this was a recurring role (she was to be in six episodes between 1965-6), she wasn't even more of a regular. 

jimmy carr is a prat

Carr said: “When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of 6 million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis.

“No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives.”

The statement prompted laughter and clapping from the audience.

If only for my own mental alertness I’m going to try and write a few thoughts about Jimmy Carr’s joke about Romani dying in concentration camps. 

 

Jimmy Carr recently made a joke in a Netflix special which was, apparently, dedicated to pushing the envelope and getting himself cancelled (or striking a blow for free speech, whatever). I haven’t seen the whole special and maybe I should (I will) but I have seen the excerpted joke. It’s not good, but Carr is that kind of comedian, hit-and-miss and really hateable a lot of the time, with his weird 1930s face and affected donkey laugh* like some kind of pre-Ealing very unfunny British comedy extra. I have watched him compere UK game shows where he demonstrates a reasonable amount of skill reading jokes (eg trademark insults) off cards but more commonly just keeping the show together.

 

The gas chamber joke is one of those ones a comedian can do because it appears to edgily divide and conquer its audience: those who actually believe that ‘gypsies’ deserve(d) to die are hoist on their own petards (or at least: who cares what those people think) and those who appreciate the possibility that there is some way in which the joke can be seen to be a joke about racist hate, have to then concede that it’s a contribution to the discussion (about what can and can’t be said, about the ridiculousness of racism, etc). 

 

Of course it’s still a shit joke. Mainly it’s shit because it’s so lazy – the old ‘punching down’ to a marginalised group. It’s not brave to joke about ‘gypsies’ on any front, and this is proven simply by inserting any of the other groups who were murdered in the death camps – Jewish people obviously but also gays and disabled people. If Jimmy Carr had joked that it was terrible that Jewish people had been murdered but gays had also been murdered so that was a plus, then he would be beyond cancelled. I’m not saying that LGBTQI people per se have power to effect that, but actually in my opinion that sector of society has adequate support – by dint of family and social connections throughout mainstream society – that there would be outraged resistance. Clearly, had it occurred to Carr to make a joke that thousands of homosexuals dying in gas chambers or by other means of torture/systematised elimination would be a good thing, he would have abandoned that as an idea because there would have been gay people in the immediate audience when he made the joke, or friends of gay people, many would indeed not even really have understood a joke predicated on the idea that a government would hate gay people enough to want to kill them. But Romani people are still far enough on the outer that he can make the joke. It’s just an outright bullying piece of shit joke by a privileged prick to a bunch of privileged pricks, and for most of those privileged pricks the idea of a gypsy/Romani person is a piece of cartoon fun, like something out of Enid Blyton. 

 

I wish I could say something more sophisticated about it than that, because I wanted to assist with my own mental alertness, but it seems that simple to me. I do recognise that the whole special, which I will say once again I have not watched but will, was about pushing the envelope. Obviously when you set out to do something like that you are going to necessarily mess shit up occasionally and that’s OK. But I guess the bottom line really is Jimmy Carr doesn’t have the capacity or credibility to handle big issues. His joke doesn’t make anyone think seriously about the issues it raises, it just makes (reasonable) people think Jimmy Carr is trying to operate outside his abilities and it’s kind of blown up in his face. Not, sadly, in terms of getting him obliterated from his day job (would he really care? I would if I was him because what kind of supporters would you end up in bed with if that did happen) although I’m sure he never needs to work again as it is. But definitely in terms of him making the world a little bit worse and decent people despair a little more, he’s had a cracking success. Fuckwit. 

Update: OK I watched it, sort of, I listened to it while I was searching for an image, which made me realise how long I can spend searching for a simple image, although I guess it seemed longer. Yes, he tells the joke framing it in all these cowardly ways about how (for instance) it raises awareness of the murder of 'gypsies' and then goes on to talk about how Jehovah's Witnesses were also murdered, with a few jokes about how that might come about. Then he goes on about how if you can't laugh at terrible things, you aren't equipped to handle them when they 'really' happen. He boasts about how edgy he is, etc and how he's going to be cancelled sometime anyway so he might as well get it out of the way or something. Almost all of the show is set-ups for a really sad, wretched view of the world, which I guess is understandable, what hope would you have if you lived in England? Fuck! 

* 'asthmatic donkey fucking a seal', he says in the show

asemakaavaoppi

In the world of ridiculous purchases, I have made a ridiculous purchase: Otto-Iivari Meurman's Asemakaava-Oppi, a 1982 reprint of a 1942 town planning text by a prominent Finnish planner. I wanted it for a book I'm writing, and in fact I wanted it badly, so I paid a lot, and irritatingly the copy I got though the binding is OK etc, has been extensively highlighted by a previous owner - with highlighter pens, with underlining, sometimes both. But I guess I will live. It has already divulged a couple of really interesting skerricks of information. Google translate has been my friend. Also, there are a couple of clippings about Meurman late in life, pasted into the front of the book, which are interesting but google translate - which as I mentioned is usually my friend - is having a lot of trouble working out one of them. Go figure.

samuel hatty's sister's husband william fraser livingstone

2 Eades Place in 2021

So you may remember last December I mentioned Samuel Hatty and his turning the red bit of a union jack into a red flag and getting put in prison for a month for that. Well, when Samuel Hatty went to war in 1915 he gave his sister's address, 2 Eades Place, West Melbourne as his residence which presumably it wasn't (it might have been - he was orphaned when his mother died in 1906 when he was 15-16, but he was 25 in 1915) but it was the closest thing he had to one. 

I don't know anything more about this sister, Margaret, except that she died in Geelong in 1975 but I tell you who I wouldn't want to be and that's William Fraser Livingstone, who was Margaret's husband. Three awful things at least happened to him, which you probably want to hear about. 

On 9 am on the 7 February 1913 (yes that's right, exactly 109 years ago - look, be fair, all anniversaries are tenuous/meaningless) William Livingstone and two other labourers in his 'stacking gang' were instructed to stack cargo from the Australind at No. 19 shed at Victoria Dock and, while he was lifting a girder, it slipped and fell on his feet. One of them was crushed and the other fractured. He was in hospital until the 15 March and was permanently disabled. He sued the Victorian Stevedoring and General Contracting Co., and received £351 compensation (Age 20 August 1913, p. 12). 

I'm guessing this is the Australind in question, but can't be certain

On 19 November 1916 he was sufficiently recovered to undertake a public service almost no-one on earth would have wanted to do, which was retrieve the bodies of two brothers who drowned in West Melbourne Swamp. There's been a little fad lately for romanticising the West Melbourne Swamp but like most things that's a little simplistic, at least, we like to think if we had the beautiful West Melbourne Swamp AKA Blue Lake still today we'd treat it right and wouldn't let young boys drown in it, but then, we also like our creature comforts etc - you know the argument. In 1916 apparently there was still 8 ft of water somewhere there, more than enough for Frederick (14) and Edmund (11) to drown in (along with their two other brothers, they'd been looking for bullfrogs). Livingstone was described in the Weekly Times' account of the coroner hearing as a 'labourer'. ('Coroner's Inquests: Brothers Die in Swamp' Weekly Times 2 December 1916 p. 34). 

One of the many famed Oswald Barnett images from the 1930s. I am not sure in what sense the swamp was 'made from [a] rubbish tip' but I bet it was often used as one. It was all very close to North Melbourne.

He then had bad luck around 3pm on the 24 April 1926 when he was on a tram turning from Elizabeth St into Lonsdale St when the grip 'suddenly flew back' hitting the tramway grip man, William Jones, in the chest and knocked him to the floor. Jones had fractured ribs; Conrad Bates, 72, of Abbotsford St North Melbourne received facial abrasions and William Livingston bruised his leg, which incidentally (so the newspaper says) he had broken a year earlier. ('Cable Tram Jolted', Melbourne Argus 26 April 1926 p. 10). 

Cable tram in Lonsdale St near Elizabeth in the mid-1930s. 

WFL died just after the second world war and is buried in St Arnaud. He didn't make 60. 

collector scum

Ten years ago I bought a copy of the Coloured Balls' Ball Power from an op shop in Heathcote, and gave it to a friend who I don't speak to anymore because his wife doesn't like me. Yesterday, I saw the LP in question (obviously I don't know whether it was the same copy) at Greville records for $400. To be fair to my friend, he told me a short time after I'd given him the LP that he'd discovered it was worth a lot of money, and he offered to give it back to me on that basis. I declined, essentially because if you give someone something you don't take it back under any circumstances. I know this seems like some kind of weird, I don't know, humble brag? But I actually think it's a shitty album, it has one good song ('Flash') and the rest is banal, like a lot of music (note I am not saying Australian music - a lot of music) from that period. And actually, now I think about it, like a lot of music, no qualifications. In the same Greville visit I bought Neil Young's Everyone Knows this is Nowhere, on the basis that it is by far my favourite NY album, and maybe (I also have the excellent Carnegie Hall 1970 live album) the only one I really need. It cost $55, a new LP. It just makes me wonder what records are worth. The market doesn't seem to make any sense on this. I also bought the LP pictured above, which is definitely the kind of cheesy crap I like (I haven't played it yet - when will I? Well, I bought The Faust Tapes about twenty years ago and cannot remember playing it ever, until yesterday). Play Eurovision Bestsellers was 50c. My question to you is, is Everyone Knows this is Nowhere 110 times better than Play Eurovision Bestsellers? Admittedly, EKTIN is new, and PEB is second hand, so that's something to consider, but that's the only other element I can take into account. 

I also bought two albums for ten dollars each. A Nigel Olsson LP for ten dollars (I really like the other one of his I have, but this one is from a bit later, 1980) and Squeeze's East Side Story. ESS has my (and everyone else's, surely) favourite Squeeze song, 'Tempted', surely about as close to a perfect pop song as you're likely to get from white english men. (As an aside, I note on youtube that there are two videos for 'Tempted', one really drab 'live on stage' style mime where the main focus of the cameraman's interest is shots up the fronts of the backing singers who don't have microphones because if they did it would make it hard to film up their fronts and also they're miming so who cares; and one which someone on yt has labelled the 'original video' when clearly it's the version they did in the 90s. What I was looking for was one I very definitely remember where the group are performing to a whole lot of mops waving before them like the heads of an audience, but I am prepared to concede that I was wrong and this wasn't the video for 'Tempted' but some other song. Or, this video has been suppressed). 

I will have more to say on the topic of record collecting shortly but right now I have actual work to do. I will say just this: going by side one alone (I wish I'd bought this LP in 1981 when it came out not only just yesterday) East Side Story is not five and a half times lesser than Everyone Knows this is Nowhere, which is incidentally, though, a very good record.* Maybe I should just average out the prices. I bought four records (and I picked up a free 12" of Streisand/Summer doing 'No more tears', from the Greville chuck-out pile) so I could say, I paid an average of $15.50 per thing. That actually feels pretty good. Counting free things in the pile really helps. 

*Additionally I have fond memories of listening to it while shelving books at the agriculture library at the University of Sydney about thirty years ago, that and Jona Lewie's album On the Other Hand... both cassettes I bought at a street stall for negligible moneys at the time. 

art bum comic

Drawn at the NGA Victoria 2012. 
 

completely apropos of nothing - he's not dead as far as I know though glenn wheatley is, as of yesterday

I don't know why but I was just moved to play Alice Cooper's 'I Never Cry', the last song on the first side of ...Goes to Hell. I was mainly thinking of how it is a massively superior song to its closest relation in the Cooper canon, 'Only Women Bleed', which to my mind sucks a big turd. 'Only Women Bleed' is Meatloaf-y; 'I Never Cry' is like 'Without You' or, lyrically of course, it's a little bit of a ref to 'I'm not in Love'. Bizarre to think that a mere four years later he was doing Flush the Fashion. I assume that 'I Never Cry' isn't a record he thinks about much, and that Flush the Fashion is a record he would like to have erased from everyone else's memory but not his own just in case he decided, having forgotten it, that it would be a good idea. 

I give kudos, I suppose, to 'Only Women Bleed' re: all the people who thought it was about menstruation which I think it pretty categorically isn't though of course Cooper and whoever his minions/masters were all knew that it would be considered to be referencing that. Is that worth kudos? I don't know. It is apparently about domestic violence. It seems to me to be so soap-operatic. I think it is a shitty song musically. 

I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure John Farnham used to do 'Only Women Bleed' live. I have to say I pretty much disagree with every song choice he made, since 'Things to Do', anyway. 

flook for february 1952 (tw: one brutal stabbing, off-stage)

Are you ready for a journey into shitty printing? Good 

These got too awful so I switched to another newspaper, the Pasadena Independent which looks better but the strips get completely out of sync date wise, just in case you care. The Independent wasn't published on Saturday and Monday, or something bizarre like that. 

rabbit rabbit

7 July 2012