Kids, don't try this at home

Most of this weekend is taken up with the task of running the Red Pen Of Death over the second half of the Hughes Primary School 40th birthday multicultural cookbook, something I "volunteered" to do some months ago, and which appeared at our front door unannounced at dinner time last night, marked with the code name "urgent" and the regulation phrase "there's not much in it" (166 pages! At least my half comprises mostly desserts and other good things). Not having edited a recipe book before, I wasn't quite prepared for the additional factor of having to think about how each recipe works. It's amazing how many of the recipes I've checked thus far either have an ingredient mentioned in the main part of the recipe that doesn't appear in the list of ingredients, or vice versa. And the multicultural element is causing problems of its own: how, for example, am I supposed to ensure that the process of positioning paddy straws with banana leaf cones is adequately described when I've got no idea what either might look like; and then there is the vexed question of how obvious would it be that "there are no holes in the points". (My approach is that a complete novice is unlikely to attempt such a recipe, and if they did, they would be unlikely to blame their inevitable failure on inadequate editing.)

This type of job usually gives rise to one typo sufficiently rich as to make the process worthwhile. What can you say about a recipe that begins, "Measure the flour and sugar into a bowel"? The Health Department may have something to say about that.

Construction Site: Day 12

Nothing for a couple of days, and then yesterday the big concrete pour: three cement mixers, numerous workmen, our four-year-old, Julius, and two of the other kids from our street watching from as close as they could get without actually being in the trenches having concrete poured on top of them, running through and around the house from vantage point to vantage point. Naturally, today has, contrary to the forecast, been constant drizzle, and a maximum temperature in the low single figures: not ideal conditions for watching cement dry (rather listen to a Harold Budd record, isn't that what "they" say?). Meanwhile, I have been spending the last couple of days of my week "off" rearranging furniture in anticipation of losing what is now our main bedroom, so that soon we will be a family of four living in a cramped two-bedroom house - which can be seen in a positive light when contrasted with our likely situation of having neither a kitchen nor a laundry for three or four weeks. Now, that is really something to look forward to.

Music? We've got music

Okay, this ain't no MP3 blog. We leave that to those with their mouse buttons on the pulse. But we have unused bandwidth and we have friends with bands. You do the maths. Click on the "Send In The Cows" subtitle above, then find your way to the "Music Box". It's that simple.

Urgent news update: there is now a direct link to the Music Box over to the right. And it works!

Slates

We came, we saw, we borrowed, we listened, we returned:

Johnny Cash "The Essential Johnny Cash": one of the many two-cd retrospectives to hit the shelves recently. We have also had a go of the Sly Stone one, which reveals some juicy nuggets, early and late. As for the late Mr Cash: it may be illegal to say this, but his work from the early 70s onward isn't that good. There. Brief pause. I think I got away with it. There seems to be way to much patriotism, religion and dull sentimentality. Not only that, there is also the Highwaymen to think about; and U2. Oh dear. June Carter Cash as a singer is way too much of a belter for my liking, especially on the live recordings, e.g. "Jackson", where she comes across as, say, Dan Quayle in the wake of Cash's Bill Clinton, quiet, charismatic, understated yet in his own way extraordinarily powerful.

Boards of Canada "Geogaddi": it is when discs like this turn up in your local library that you realise that Canberra isn't too bad a place to be. Oh boy I love this. Its blend of childlike innocence, aching nostalgia, lurking sense of dread, and analog synth sounds hits me right where I like to be hit.

Various Artists "Poptopia": a curious release from the Rhino stable. I'm still scratching my greying hair to figure out the point of it. A collection of mostly fairly dull guitar-driven pop, predominantly from the mid-80s on: one indispensible classic in the Bangles' "Going Down To Liverpool", some passable songs by the dBs and Plimsouls (but far from their best work), "Tell That Girl to Shut Up" by Holly & The Italians, which I haven't heard for probably 15 years but which often drops into my mental jukebox nevertheless (but doesn't sound as good as I remember it; funny, that). The front cover mocks Lichtenstein; the back cover mocks Warhol. Neither of whom could really be said to be associated with the era.

Photek "Artificial Intelligence": drum'n'bass from about 1997. Leaving aside that my knowledge of the genre fits neatly on the back of a postage stamp, with room to spare for my discourse on, say, acid house, this record does everything that I always wanted d'n'b to do: the mathematical rhythm tracks and stabbing bass lines causing involuntary spasms not entirely unrelated to dancing but not that close to it, either. And when the upright bass kicks in about three-fourths of the way through the album, well, I suspect that is what the experts (links at right) call the "punctum".

Construction Site: Days 6/7 - crisis? what crisis?

Builders make me feel very inadequate and uncomfortable. They are everything in a man that I am not. I feel them looking at me and thinking, "Pathetic". So I am taking this week off, and feel like a prisoner inside my own home, as the place is crawling with all of these testaments to masculinity while I try to hide behind my laptop, the only power tool I feel at all comfortable being within 20 feet of.

The surveyor returned yesterday, day 6, to map out where the footings will go in the two places where we are extending the existing house. Naturally, we were curious to have a good look ourselves, and imagine what it will be like when the new rooms have been built. The clever thing about optical illusions is that they can even fool the experts. Looking at the lines mapping out the new family room, I was convinced that there must be some mistake, and that what had been mapped out may be big enough for a doll's house but not for a family of four actual living human beings. Adrienne was also convinced something had gone wrong. but, wielding a set of plans and a tape measure, she was able to prove that the space in the dirt is exactly the same width as our existing living room, which is big enough (just) to house two couches, a large dining table, a piano, a television, a computer desk, a Japanese dresser, Jules's ten thousand marbles, and more pieces of Lego than you thought existed in the world. I still don't believe my own eyes, but Adrienne's tape measure never lies, so I'll just be quiet now.

Yesterday also posed a significant test of my ability to meet Adrienne's iPod challenge (see earlier post in this series). We knew that the side fence sits about half a metre our side of the actual property boundary. We thought we were building the carport up to a whisker of the fence, but well in from the boundary. It turns out that the plans that were approved by Planning (and agreed to by the neighbours) have the carport going up to within a whisker, not of the fence, but of the title boundary, thus taking in one timber lattice fence, one steel fence and three of the neighbours' rose bushes. Did I panic? Only on the inside. But boy did I panic on the inside. Adrienne very bravely faced off against the neighbours last night, and it turns out that they seem not to care less, and even offered to take away the steel fence and relocate their precious roses themselves. Each crisis that has been thrown up at us thus far has (a) been more serious than the last; and (b) come to nothing. Will I learn a lesson from this? Wait until the next crisis to find out, but the likely answer is "No".

Moving to today, the Bobcat man returned to dig long deep channels around the back yard, where the footings will go. Today's crisis was not of our making, and in fact we wouldn't have known about it at all except we the water to the house had to be disconnected for a while. The Bobcat man had dug through the sewer outlet outside our kitchen. Twice. I didn't panic. Everyone is very proud of me. For now.

The Evil That Men Do

The world seems to be awash with Top 100 lists at the moment. First we had the London Observer’s Best 100 British Albums, compiled from the choices of a cast of thousands, and as such leeched of all elements of personal choice to become a kind of lowest-common-denominator consumer guide. Still, it is interesting to see what sits at the forefront of the “culture” at this moment of history: Beatles, Stones and Bowie everywhere, of course, but we like to see “London Calling” at number 3 and, especially, the so-called “Metal Box” at number 10.

Then there were, in rapid succession, the inevitable personal responses from Marcello Carlin and Mark Fisher (links at right). These lists are much more fun, and interesting, because they are highly idiosyncratic and revealing of the person behind them, in a way that something like the Observer list can never be. The thrill of going through a list like this lies in coming across records you would never have expected to see there. In this case, the biggest surprise was to see David Sylvian’s “Blemish” in both Carlin’s and Fisher’s lists. I have only recently acquired it and had been working through a few teething troubles until I now seem to be forming the view that it is going to become a rather important record: it’s nice to have support from persons whose judgment seems in many ways close to one’s own, and who have had more time to warm to a record whose own warmth has not been immediately apparent. (We must also give a wave of the hankie to Carlin, who manages, in his usual fashion, to push things to the level beyond which us mere mortals could reach, by compiling the corresponding list of a person who was the biggest part of his life. Without doubt the saddest list I’ve ever read.)

Then there was Pitchfork’s Best 100 Records of the 1970s, another group effort but in this case a group of like-minded individuals: this list tells you whence the current crop of hipsters are deriving at least a portion of their inspiration. And for someone who pulls many of his own favourites from that benighted decade, it is a joyful stroll through a thicket of personal high spots, criss-crossed by paths never travelled: 1970s Miles; Can; King Crimson. Oh the places you’ll go.

Then there’s Dave Keenan’s Best Records Ever ... Honest, which appeared in the Sunday Herald, and which is both a beautiful wind-up (many of the people featured exist on the far periphery of the known world: Robbie Basho? The Real Kids?) and an effective device for encouraging argument.

I could never put together such a list. For one thing, anything after the first 30 would be almost totally arbitrary. But the main problem is that my brain contains tiny holes through which important bits of information disappear randomly. Example: I forgot to invite Weary, my best friend in the whole world, to my tenth birthday party. Completely forgot. Didn’t even give him a thought, until his mum’s Holden Premier (white with black racing stripes - how envious was I?) appeared around the corner of our house, shortly after the party had started. I didn’t know whether to be excited or embarrassed. I realised that my mum must have seen the error of my ways and invited him herself, and sneakily not told me she had done so. Weary had slipped from my immediate consciousness because his parents had moved him to another school at the start of that year, on account of the radical new teaching methods that had swept through Fish Creek Primary School the year before (which is, and may yet become, another story), but that hardly explains having erased him from memory as if he had never existed. I am clearly going to be trouble in my old age.

Construction Site: Days 3/4

Yesterday a couple of guys with theodolites and little white posts came around and measured out the property boundaries. Not much to panic about there.

Today a man in a white ute turned up to measure out the location of the footings for the new construction, but had to leave again because it was raining and his equipment, so he said, was likely to short circuit. He seemed disappointed not to be working, but exactly how sad could someone be about being stopped from doing outside work on a day where it was still minus 5 degrees Celsius at 9 am and the forecast was for a maximum of seven degrees and possible snow.

Construction Site: Day 2 - Bets Are On

As the result of various incidents of a domestic nature which cannot be gone into here (this being a family show), a challenge has been set: if I can, for the duration of the renovation, curb my natural tendency to panic whenever something unexpected occurs, I can have an iPod Mini. It is certainly a powerful incentive, but to be honest I'm not totally certain I am up to the task.

Meanwhile the Bobcat spent the morning cleaning up the balance of the stray foliage and digging a substantial hole where the new bedroom will be. I asked the driver if I should move the guinea pig cage, as it was right in the middle of where he was working. "No need, mate, I can work around them", he said. Which he did, although I'm glad I wasn't one of those guinea pigs. Not surprisingly, perhaps, they now seem to be off their food.

"The horror ... the horror"

The following is, for those wot haven't read it, the reappearance of what I wrote down in the immediate aftermath of the Canberra bushfires of January 18, 2003, and the following day. Mistakes abound, but, in the interests of not destroying any sense of immediacy the pieces may contain, I have not tampered with them. I sent this out to various people at the time, and it holds no further interest for those people, except to make them aware of the curious fact that my in-laws (bless 'em) sent a copy to friends and/or relatives in Scotland, who passed it on to someone else who passed it on etc etc and it ended up being read out (I hope they picked up and corrected the obvious typos) on something called Radio For The Print Handicapped or Radio For The Blind or some such, in Scotland. I post it here before it gets lost forever.

"Saturday 18 January 2003

We knew it was going to be hot. Julius was a bit below par so I
went to the market early and alone. Then Adrienne managed to source the last
unsold evaporative cooler in Canberra and made her own trip out to Fyshwick
to pick it up. So far so good. No mention of bushfires hitting Canberra. Our
plan was to hibernate for most of the day with a possible trip to the
library in the afternoon. Our friends Lyn and Rob from Lyons were coming
over in the late afternoon for a barbecue. At some point the wind sprang up.
The local ABC broke into the sports programme to say that fires were on the
outskirts of Canberra and some homes were threatened. About 3pm I rang Rob to
see what time they were coming over. We thought we would go to the library
around 3.30. Then all hell broke loose. The wind went crazy. The sky
darkened. The radio switched to disaster mode and tried in vain to keep
track of what was burning where. It seemed like the entire western fringe of
Canberra was under attack and fires were out of control. A dead cockatoo
fell from the sky into the neighbours' front yard. We abandoned the idea of
going anywhere. We filled the bath, the laundry sink, and both sides of the
clamshell sandpit with water, and untangled and connected the hoses.
Adrienne rang Lyn and Rob who seemed less concerned than us and said they
would still come over (which they did). Their son Jayden and our boys set to
playing together while I restlessly stuck my head out the door every few
minutes. Blackened leaves and bits of ash were being tossed into the yard
from wherever the fires were. The wind and heat were incredible. The
telephone had gone down. Likewise the internet. We decided to cook indoors.
The sky went as dark as night. And orange. It was 5pm. Lyn and Rob decided
to abandon dinner and took off towards home. Immediately they left the power
went off. We had only Jules's dinosaur torch for light and no batteries for
the radio. The car radio reported that three houses in the street next to
Lyn and Rob's were on fire. Presently it lightened up a bit. All around our
street people were up on roofs with hoses, blocking gutters and generally
dampening things down. Was this panic? No. To pack up and flee would have
been panic. On the other hand you could not have just ignored it. Fires were
spotting 12 kilometres from the main fire fronts, and Lyn and Rob's place is
only 2.5 ks from us. Things were seriously out of control. I borrowed a
ladder and, even though I am unable to climb more than three rungs before
someone has to come and get me down, I somehow got right up onto the roof,
with a hose in one hand and a wet towel in the other, and a trowel somewhere
else (I wish someone had filmed this). I cleaned out the gutters, blocked
the downpipes and filled the gutters. Then I somehow remounted the ladder
and got down. We went doorknocking in search of batteries or a battery
operated radio. Neighbours were running from house to house checking that
everyone was under control. It turned out that three of the men of the
street had by coincidence left Canberra on business that morning. It dawned
on me that the gas bottle from the barbie would be unhelpful on the back
deck in the event of fire, so I took it into the garage, along with the
table and chairs from out there and any number of plastic children's toys.
Adrienne got stuck into some piles of dead plant matter. We felt we were
well prepared. We were certainly exhausted. The kids had been given somewhat
short shrift. They kind of enjoyed the lack of power but it would also have
been an opportune time to throw on a video.

Then the sky lightened up and the power came back on (we later found out
that this was because we are on the same grid as the Canberra Hospital). The
radio told us that maybe 100 houses had burned. An easterly change came
through. Stuff was still falling from the sky but there was a sense that the
immediate threat was over (although we still didn't know where all the fires
were, and there is a large stretch of combustible bushland right behind us
to the east, which with the new wind direction made us all a bit nervous).
Exhausted we threw together some semblance of dinner, put the kids to bed,
and put our papers and a few spare clothes into the back of the car. Just in
case. That night around 8pm some of us discussed a plan for making sure
everyone became aware if something happened during the night. A couple of us
went for a walk up into the bushland behind us. People were still up on
roofs, either hosing down the house or just looking. It's weird to have a
conversation with someone who is standing on the roof of their house. From
up on the hill it was easy to see fires all around us, or so it seemed.
Hills were covered with red spots. There looked to be a large fire to the
east of us, and if you stood and looked at it the wind was blowing right
into your face.

Sunday 19 January

The sun came up. The world hadn't ended. Remarkably I slept
incredibly soundly. Adrienne's maternal instincts must have kicked in
because she was up a few times during the night looking out the windows and
checking the radio. What struck was how calm and still everything was. The
occasional helicopter flew overhead; the odd siren in the distance: but
aside from this, silence. Someone had removed the dead cockatoo during the
night. The radio now told us the magnitude of the disaster. And it was a
disaster. (And how grateful we are for the work of the local ABC radio
journalists.)

Our principal concern was Lyn and Rob. We still had no telephone, although
our mobile was now working again; but we couldn't get through. Thus I took a
drive across to Lyons around 9am to see how they had managed. The drive
itself was a weird experience. There were a small number of cars on the
road. None of the traffic lights were working. With the general stillness,
the overall effect was of the world having ended overnight but for a few
stray survivors driving round and round until the petrol ran out. But at
Lyons there were people out on the streets, standing around talking. The
hill that runs down to the edge of the suburb was burnt black. I was
grateful not to have driven past any burnt-down houses. Lyn, Rob and Jayden
were sitting around shaken but intact. When they got back to their house
everything was pitch black and incredibly hot; burning embers were flying
through the air and the wind was stinging their faces as they ran into the
house. Rob had then taken a drive around their street and had seen several
places burning, so he went straight back to defend their own place. They
still had no power or gas, so they were invited back to our place where they
could at least get a cup of coffee. An offer they couldn't refuse.

I continued to fortify our place, just in case. More water sources; less
combustible material around the house. By late afternoon we were all stir
crazy so we took the kids to Deakin playground for some semblance of "fun"
(although we knew we didn't really want to be there, and the kids probably
knew that, too). So we stayed for a while, checking the radio too
frequently, and then went home.

And that's about it, really."

Construction Site: Day 1

The contracts have been signed. Now for the serious business of watching half our house being pulled down and rebuilt, while we try to live here. Julius is very excited, he has a new pair of gumboots and his Bob the Builder tool box and hard hat (hard plastic, that is), and is ready to tell the workmen everything he knows, on any topic. A "misunderstanding" arose between us and the builders before the first sod had been turned, which is not necessarily the best start ever made to a building project. That seems to have sorted itself out, and while I was at work today a Bobcat removed every inch of foliage from around the house, along with the side fence, exposing us to our neighbours and to the street in ways we have never known before. (Canberra in winter is not the ideal place for nude sunbathing in the back yard so there should be no surprises for anybody.)

Stay tuned. Further updates will be provided when they are to hand.

Pal Joey

It says in Harper's Weekly Review (link at right) that Canberra residents are at risk of being attacked by mad starving kangaroos. It must be an election year. Next thing they'll be kissing babies.

Step Right Up

Forget Mark Latham's bucks party; forget the state of the US alliance. The real issue of substance rolling around the Canberra rumour mill is: have the faceless cabal behind the sinister JB Hi-Fi empire bought out Impact Records? Impact may not be the Best Record Shop In The World (Greville Records would still win any straw poll conducted at this house) but it has three advantages over almost every other record store in Canberra: it also sells comics; it has quite a good range, in terms of both quality and width (even David Sylvian's "Blemish" finally turned up there); and it isn't Sanity. So you can please excuse us for being a little bit anxious at present. We live in fear that next time we navigate the shady corners of Garema Place and head down the steps to Impact, we will be confronted with burly security guards at the door; wall-to-wall widescreen TVs and car stereos; boxes of empty CD cases and other useless junk crowding the entrance; the Satanic yellow-and-black colour scheme; the handwritten "sale/bargain" signs on every surface that hasn't been covered by individually painted facsimiles of the covers of recent hit records; and a range of CDs that defies explanation (you are likely to find that they will have multiple copies of something you've never heard of by some failed 80s band like, say, The Alarm, and nothing whatsoever by The Fall, while the only two Yo La Tengo discs will be "Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo" and the "Danelectro" ep).

Impact also has a quite reasonable Bargain Bin. Canberra readers are well advised to immediately head down there and pick up for a mere $15 a copy of Tom Waits' "Used Songs". Heck, I paid full price for mine, and I'm not complaining. What you get is not just another collection of "early" Waits material, but rather as near to definitive a compilation as you are likely to find. While you might still arguably be better served by going out and finding all of the records he released on the Asylum label, now you don't have to. The only thing I can think of that should be here but isn't is his version of "Somewhere", from "West Side Story". The novelty value is provided by a song off his first album, from circa 1973, which comes across as stock standard West Coast adult-orientated rock from the era, but which also gives a glimpse of Waits' voice at a time when is still carried in it some small vestige of the adjective "smooth".

Of course, one of popular music's great mysteries is how we get from these songs of the gravel-voiced troubador to the Tom Waits of "Swordfishtrombones", "Rain Dogs" and "Mule Variations". But maybe we don't have to. The time lost in arguing which is the real Tom Waits might be better spent just listening to the records - all of them, from both parts of his career. I don't know if they can be reconciled, but both (or neither, for that matter) may well turn out to be "real". With Waits, as with Beck, and (to pick a local example) Dave Graney, the divide between "person" and "persona" is so blurred and tangled as to be meaningless: may not, in fact, exist at all (cf, say, Nick Cave, or David Bowie, or maybe Robert Smith, all of whom, one imagines, melt away from the public to the private once the performance is over - which is not a criticism, just a comparison). Someone should do a thesis on this; me, I'm going to make a cup of tea.

Oblique Strategies

Marcello Carlin gives us a rather nice, concise (by his standards) case for Brian Eno's "Before And After Science". Which has caused me to think: as much and all as "Another Green World" is the keystone which supports almost my entire record collection, I might be forced to admit that in terms of which record of Eno's I would actually choose to sit down and listen to at a particular moment, that would most likely be "Before And After Science" (and in particular side two thereof).

They also served ...

Three more to add to the list of the fallen:

Robert Burchfield. Editor of "The New Fowler's", one of the most often consulted books on the shelf. Burchfield wielded a much smaller stick than the original Mr Fowler, and can be less entertaining for that, but he also tended to give more practical guidance, which, when you need to know how words work, and you need to know now, is rather attractive.

Saul Bass. This man did a job that would only have been possible since the middle of the last century: designing credit sequences for movies. If he is only remembered for the opening credits for "Age of Innocence", he will nevertheless be remembered for something much greater than anything most of us will ever do.

Syd Hoff. It's jarring to come across an obituary for someone you had assumed had died long ago. It seems to happen mostly with children's book illustrators, for some reason. Robert McCluskey ("Make Way For Ducklings" - has a better kids' book ever been made?) died a couple of years ago. Now Syd Hoff. Both produced books (and at least in the case of Hoff, New Yorker cartoons) in the 1940s and '50s that, visually at least, were of their time, so there is a tendency to carbon-date their creators accordingly. William Steig is the exception to this, mainly because he kept working well into his nineties, and his drawings, although they gradually became more minimal and shaky of line, continued to appear in the New Yorker with astonishing regularity right up to his death last year. Being the creator of "Shrek" no doubt helped him retain name recognition, even though the movie bears scant resemblance to the book on which it is based, a cause of some disappointment to at least one small child of my acquaintance.

This goes with that (slight return)

"The Carnival Is Over" (no, not that one) from Dead Can Dance's "Into the Labyrinth" album, and Doug Ashdown's "Winter In America". And no, I'm not particularly proud to have been able to make that connection. Some things are better left forgotten.

Papa's Got A Brand New Bag

My last most recent batch of library borrowings:

Lee Hazlewood "These Boots Are Made For Walkin': The Complete MGM Recordings": a voice that is part Johnny Cash, part Stephin Merritt; singing verging on not-singing-at-all; amazing arrangements, from a time when the producer could say, "hey, you want an orchestra?, let’s bring in an orchestra”. The title song is reclaimed by Hazlewood, in a post-modern (or maybe even proto-DJ) style, with "this is the part where ..." introducing various bits of the song. "Sand”, of course, is a timeless classic, although I question whether, at one point, "thy" should have been "thine". And, of course, "Summer Wine", inviting one to "put on your silver spurs". I had a pair of spurs once, borrowed from the farm (and unused for about half a century). I wore them to a fancy-dress 21st birthday a very long time ago. If we had gone on public transport I quite possibly would have been either arrested or beaten up. Roger Russell had on a leather skirt, and seemed just a little bit too comfortable therein. I can't now even remember whose birthday it was. Only the photos remain, awaiting the day when one of our number becomes famous.

The Sea And Cake "Oui": the only record I've heard from this, the melodic “pop” arm of the Chicago post-rock collective, featuring that man John McEntire on drums and quite a bit else besides, and Archer Prewitt, otherwise known as the author of the "Sof' Boy" comics. I have borrowed this a number of times, and am happy to keep coming back to it. It is very refreshing. I can't quite put a finger on what makes it not dull and tedious, but whatever it is, it works. They also have a cd-ep out somewhere that features a video directed by our hero Richard McGuire (links at right, the third of which seems not to be working at present but I'm keeping it up in the hope that it reappears; it is the hub of the McGuire enterprise).

Underworld "Beaucoup Fish": I am grateful to Underworld for implanting the suggestion that people over the age of 35 can still embrace the dance floor (if only in our heads). The whole family can bounce around the house to this, one foot to the other and back again, while twirling their hands in silly little circles as if scuffing up the seam on the new ball. Having failed in my desperate search for a copy of the 12-inch version of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love", I am happy to embrace "King of Snake" for the way it unleashes the fangs of Giorgio Moroder.

Dirty Three "She Has No Strings Apollo": I am not an authority on Dirty Three. I once queued up outside the Evelyn Hotel until the wee small hours to see one of their first gigs, only to ultimately give up hope that they were actually going to appear. I can admire what they are capable of, and often enjoy it, but I can't keep it up for the lengths of time they can. This, to my ears, is on a par with any of their other efforts, although it does contain one lovely piece, "Long way to go with no punch", with a recurring piano motif reminiscent of, say, Erik Satie, or Chris Abrahams in wistful mode, which proves they are no one-trick ponies.

Train In Vain

On account of it being the last day of term, we took the boys into “town” (Carl: “But it’s not town, it’s the big city”) on Friday night for a little bit of excitement. Having successfully negotiated a minor poo accident in the David Jones toy department, we went to one of the few Japanese restaurants in Canberra that has a sushi train. Julius loves anything that moves. At one point he took a bite out of something, put it back on the plate, neatly put the lid back on, and set it back in an empty space on the train. Some fancy footwork by Adrienne allowed us to retrieve the offending item moments before it travelled past some other, unsuspecting diners. It would also appear, or so the manager pointed out to us, that you are not supposed to put the lids of dishes back on the train. It had seemed like a reasonable idea to us. Somewhere else to add to the list of places we can never show our faces in again.

Who's Next

Tonight, at the dinner table. Carl: "Daddy, you're the world's ... you're one of the world's greatest dads." A fairly sensible qualification for a six-year-old: there are probably other good dads out there; some of them may even be as good as if not better than me. Maybe.

Working on the ground makes it easy up above

Dad would have been 78 today. So this one goes out to him.

This goes with that

Has anybody else noticed the similarities between:

1. "Wind on Water" from Fripp and Eno's "Evening Star" album, and "Beach Party Tonight", the opening track on Yo La Tengo's "Summer Sun".

2. "The Dark Is Rising" from Mercury Rev's "All Is Dream", and John Miles' "Music".

3. Nick Cave's singing on a few of the songs off "The Boatman's Call", and - gasp! - David Sylvian.

Believe it ... Or not!

Old Time Religion

So, Pitchfork is putting together its definitive list of the "best" 100 albums of the 1970s. This time there's no Beastie Boys or Pixies releases to unfairly skew(er) the proceedings, so it should be an unmitigated bucket of fun for anybody who cares to remember.

What will be Number One? That's easy: it has to be "Marquee Moon". If it isn't "Horses". Or "Another Green World". Or "Prehistoric Sounds". Or "Lodger". Or "The Ramones". Or "The Modern Dance". Or "London Calling". Or "King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown". Or "Clear Spot". Or "Blood On The Tracks". Or "For Your Pleasure". Or "There's A Riot Goin' On". Or any number of records that in spirit form part of the Sixties but didn't actually appear until after the pedantic, technical, "actual" end of that decade (if you accept that it has in fact ended).

Catholic Block

At a time when America seems determined to simultaneously lower the bar as to what is acceptable behaviour while raising the bar as to accountability for what little remains unacceptable, it is perhaps no surprise that those sneaky folk in the Vatican have taken this opportunity to announce that the Inquisition "wasn't really all that bad" (Harper's Weekly Review, link at right): which, even if it is in absolute terms a pretty unsupportable proposition, is, today, in relative terms probably about right. See? It isn't just the Russians and the Israelis (and quite a few others besides) who are using this "War on Terror" as a Trojan horse for their own dark deeds. Oh the times we live in.

TV Eye

Did anybody else watch "The Boosh" on SBS last night? More to the point, did anybody else think it was funny? What it reminded me of more than anything was the Goodies, albeit a more offensive Goodies. Although, on second thoughts, maybe the Goodies only seemed not to be offensive at the time because most of it went over our innocent heads: we borrowed a CD of Goodies songs from the library around Christmas time last year and, along with the Funky Gibbon and the cactus in the y-fronts, there was a song about a Bad Santa. There is something funny but also not funny at all about having a three- and a five-year-old (as they were then) running around the house singing "Father Christmas do not touch me" ...

I can hardly believe my eyes

Anybody still wondering why I have wasted a good deal of my spare cash over the last 20 years on overpriced comic books and "graphic novels", and paying good money for copies of the New Yorker that I could have borrowed from the local library, should read this piece and then immediately go out and buy their own copy of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Number 13. Mine should be parcelled up and posted by the good people at The Beguiling any day now. I will never say anything bad about David Eggers again. I promise.

Pollen Path

At the time of writing, one of the obligatory "sponsored links" at the top of the page is to the Seva Foundation, which has the web address "www.davidsylvian.info" and would appear to have a connection with David Sylvian's personal teacher/guru/trainer. I was thinking that this was kind of appropriate given my long-standing admiration for Sylvian; then it dawned on me that I haven't actually mentioned him here yet; I recently obtained a copy of "Blemish" and have been thinking about getting something down about that, but haven't sufficiently got my head around the album yet. So what is going in here? Is Blogger using algorithms that allow it to predict the thoughts of hacks? Is it a bit more "user friendly" than I would feel entirely comfortable with? I think we should be told.

Headz

I am about half-way through David Mitchell's "number9dream". I am convinced now that Mitchell is the real thing. I am also finding that it is a lot easier to follow the threads with this book than with "Ghostwritten" (which might simply mean I am missing most of them). Last night I cringed my way through a thorougly nasty chapter involving a turf war between Japanese mobsters. Special mention must go to a particularly wicked few pages set in a private bowling alley. I'll never look at the "pins" in the same way again (hint: the title of this entry, ignoring the variant spelling, is not entirely arbitrary).

About the Weather

I've just been out for a walk. Crikey it's cold. I would be surprised if it was any more than five degrees Celsius out there. The backs of my hands are an attractive shade of deep purple with red blotches. A guy was out photographing the museum from across the lake. It might actually come out quite well, with the top of Black Mountain in the background shrouded in fog, but I don't know how he could operate the equipment.

Cold in Canberra usually signifies a biting wind coming in from the mountains, but today is almost still. It is one of those Canberra days when the fog doesn't lift until into the afternoon, and the sun struggles to gain any kind of foothold thereafter. I thought I saw a sliver of sunshine on the foothills of Mount Ainslie just as I was getting back to the office, but it could have been, as Saddam Hussein's Minister of Information (can't they find him a position in the new government?) was heard to say on global television during the so-called Second Gulf War, "an illusion".

It is going to be mighty cold at the boys' swimming lesson tonight. The lessons are held in a tin shed on the edge of town, adjacent to the sleaziest-looking motel I think I have ever seen: it makes the one in Robert Altman's film of Sam Shepard's "Fool for Love" look like the Ritz.

Library Records

Every few weeks a handful of CDs gets thrown into the Harrods bag alongside the several hundred children’s books we regularly take home from the local library. It’s a hit and miss exercise, you never know if the disks are even going to work, and the liner notes are often missing or destroyed, but at least it doesn’t cost anything.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds “Your Funeral ... My Trial”: a record I listen to less often than most “good” Cave records, mainly on account of it coming out as two 45-rpm 12” records, necessitating a leap from the couch after every second song and thus falling victim to my inherent laziness. At the time it seemed like a disappointment after “The First Born Is Dead”. But in retrospect, it is easy to see the record as a collection of either off-cuts from or prototypes for his novel; the scent of Southern gothic is all over it. It still has the faults I saw in it back then: mostly to do with Cave’s delivery; he sounded like he wasn’t sure which Nick Cave was supposed to be singing (and I still reckon he stumbles over one of the lines on the title track: quaint and “humanising” to leave it in, maybe (or perhaps too much of the recording budget had gone on "other things"), but after a couple of listens it becomes an annoying blemish). But what also comes through now is how alive the Bad Seeds sounded: what originally appeared to be an absence of Barry Adamson now sounds like an opening up; we might never have had “The Good Son” if this hadn’t explored the new territory first. And it is impossible to lightly dismiss a record containing “The Carny”, and in particular the moment when Blixa Bargeld, cast as Boss Bellini, delivers a couple of lines in worse-sounding English than Roberto Benigni in "Down By Law": “Bury zis lump off crow bait.” I will never come to terms with “Hard On For Love”, which I think is one of the few mis-steps in Cave’s career, but the CD makes up for this by offering us “Scum”, the flexidisc-only bile-a-thon directed at the NME’s Mat Snow, set to a steamrolliing rhythm track that recalls the last gasps of the Birthday Party.

Loose Fur “Loose Fur”: Jim O’Rourke and Jeff Tweedy toss off six songs that are neither a little bit country nor a little bit rock and roll, but somewhere off to one side. O’Rourke has been quietly working on his pop side for a while now, and this can be seen as the latest development. Nevertheless it is possibly the least likely record to turn up at a local library. If you didn’t look closely you wouldn’t even know who was behind it. It will most likely survive as nothing more than a footnote to each of their careers, but that’s no reason not to notice it at all.

Jay Farrar “Terroir Blues”: by strange coincidence, this appeared the same week as the Loose Fur disc; Farrar being the other arm, with Tweedy, of the Uncle Tupelo alt-country axis, a genre that passed me by at the time. Thus I have no context in which to place this, but even on its own it stands up as a quietly compelliing set of faintly country/folk songs. It actually comes across at times as if he was sitting in the same bedroom as Nick Drake (but who isn’t these days?).

John Coltrane Quartet “Live in Stockholm”: by another coincidence, this appeared the week of Elvin Jones’s death. There has been plenty written about Jones; I am sorry to say my acquaintance with him starts and ends with this quartet. Listen to something like “Africa/Brass” and you realise how Trane wasn’t the only elemental force in his music. This live recording is notable for the fact that the sound quality, while generally appalling throughout, improves as the record progresses. And it’s not just that your ears get used to it; go back to the first track, “Mr PC”, straight after listening to the record right through, and it still sounds awful. McCoy Tyner was either late for the set or is lost somewhere in the maelstrom. There is some overlap with the “Live at the Village Vanguard” set, and a smart guy would set the two up side by side to note the differences. Shame I’m not that guy. I’m still waiting to find the live version of “My Favourite Things” performed with a fifth player (Dolphy?) that I saw on a TV documentary a few Christmases ago.

Dead Can Dance “Into the Labyrinth”: the follow-up to “Aion”, which is still to my mind their masterpiece, but this is also extremely good, as you would expect. Someone at work overheard this and pointed out how much Brendan Perry sounds like Jim Morrison. And blow me if he isn’t right. Now I have “issues”.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold: "Waterfront" by Simple Minds

Would you rather have two dollars in your pocket or a Simple Minds greatest hits CD in your player? This is the dilemma that recently confronted me at the Fyshwick Market charity stall. My philanthropy got the better of me and I took home the Simple Minds. A lot of thoughts followed. This is the fourth attempt at getting them down. It’s no better than any of the others, but it is short. And it’s the one you’re getting.

1. Simple Minds started off by putting out a few fair to middling albums without ever really standing out during what was, admittedly, a pretty fertile period in UK music.

2. Against all expectations, they came out with the lush, polished, (ahem) glittering “New Gold Dream 81-82-83-84” album, which was, and would remain, their crowning achievement.

3. They released the single “Waterfront”.

4. It all went wrong.

It must be difficult to know how to deal with success if you have been striving for so long for it, but of all the directions they could have gone in, did they really have to turn into a bad imitation of U2? The prisoners at Abu Ghraib must have been grateful to have been spared the ultimate instrument of torture, an endless loop of “Belfast Child”.

But I keep coming back to “Waterfront”, a very strange attempt at a follow-up to a string of hit singles and critical success: more like a collection of unrelated ideas searching for a unifying theme or structure, and failing. A lot of the individual bits sound perfectly okay, but we also had to deal with the bombastic, overblown guitars, and the is-there-a-Bono-in-the-house vocal histrionics, enployed in the service of lyrics that were total nonsense, even by pop music standards. “Waterfront” always left me scratching my head. I’m really none the wiser now, listening to it in the context of the awfulness that followed, but what, I think, continues to fascinate me is how it pinpoints, in a way possibly no other song in rock history does, the precise moment when a band went off the rails.

And in that context, doesn’t it strike you as a rather odd choice as opening track for a greatest-hits collection?

The Sound of the Suburbs

The street fireworks went off with a somewhat damp "bang" last Monday night: you could have predicted that our planned bash would coincide with the first decent downpour Canberra has seen since the start of the year. Nevertheless we had a strong turnout, and Adrienne had helpfully whipped up a batch of mulled wine to lift the spirits of the adults in attendance. The promised cannon didn't materialise (we don't know if that was in deference to the neighbours' dogs, an inability to obtain gunpowder ingredients without being placed on a terror watch-list, or on account of the rain or the fact that our next-door neighbour is a member of the Australian Federal Police). The absence of things that went Bang was a bit disappointing to those of us conditioned to such things, but the kids didn't mind; each firework was greeted with a very satisfying "ooh" from the attentive row of children sitting in the rain along the side of the road. A rival display seemed to be emanating from a back-yard in the next street, and the kids entered into the spirit of things by derisively booing and chanting "Ours are better than yours" each time the other group sent up a skyrocket.

A very nice lady called Cathy looks after our boys once or twice a week to enable us to get on with "other things". Last Thursday night Julius proposed to her. Given that Cathy is in her mid-40s and Jules is four, it seems unlikely we will be seeing any grandchildren. But Cathy was suitably flattered.

While Jules was proposing to Cathy, we were sitting down to dinner at Timmy's Kitchen in Manuka, a reliable Chinese restaurant which is perhaps not unrelated to Sammy's Kitchen in Civic (their specials boards are remarkably similar). I had a roast duck laksa, a.k.a. "laksa jihad", from which I was still recovering 24 hours later. Then we headed off to the cinema to see Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" before it disappears from the screens. A lot has been said about the bogus science behind the film; I prefer to see that aspect as a science fiction device for telling what was for me a quite profound and moving story. It's a nice idea, to think that there is one particular person out there who you would be drawn to even if all traces of a previous relationship you had had with that person were erased from your memory; a kind of DNA soul-mate. (Although there must also lie behind this the possibility that each relationship would end badly, resulting in a kind of infinite loop of unfulfilled possibility). And the way the Jim Carrey character fights throughout the erasing procedure to retain those memories was, I thought, very true. I was also expecting the film to be less easy to follow that it was (maybe I was blissfully missing entire aspects of it). What I thought the film was most like was an extended episode of "The Twilight Zone", and there would be few higher compliments than that.

Do You Dream In Colour?

So, tonight's "Rage" on ABC TV is a theme night, featuring only songs with colours in the title. Might be fun. But I'll bet they don't play the Reels' "Black and Damp".

Odds 'n' Sods

I have been clearing out the backlog.

Observations:

1. Robert Hughes would appear to have washed up at the Guardian. He has had at least a semi-regular gig there for a few months now, although it strikes me as somewhat odd, given that most of his reviews there (I think; the last one, on Modigliani, was, anyway) have been about American shows. I have always liked Hughes as an art critic. I know that his approach is not universally approved of amongst those who know about art; but I am not a person who knows much about art, and I like that Hughes speaks about paintings in very concrete terms, telling you what a painting looks like, why it looks like that, and what it looked like to the people who would have seen it when it was painted (as opposed to some other critics who bamboozle with theory in an attempt to one-up the next critic). One day I might even succumb to the pull of "The Fatal Shore".

2. Christopher Hitchens in Slate has somewhat redeemed himself for his frequent recent errors of judgment in this timely reminder of all that was bad about Reagan and his administration, and in this piece about the self-defeating nature of torture as a method of finding out things.

Meanwhile over at the New Yorker, a quick dash through the Critics section of the issue of 24 May (see how far behind I am?) revealed the following:

1. Architects and librarians would do well to either read Paul Goldberger's piece on the new Seattle library (by Rem Koolhaas) or get on a plane to Seattle.

2. Anthony Lane delivers a typically brilliant, withering put-down of "Van Helsing". Proof that a good negative review is much more fun to read (and write) than a positive one.

3. Sasha Frere-Jones has settled in nicely as the magazine's new "pop music" (seemingly anything that's not jazz or classical) critic. This piece is on Nellie McKay, whom I've never heard of. It doesn't matter. Like all of the best New Yorker writers past and present it is the quality of writing that gets you there, and SFJ has that to spare. Someone at the New Yorker must have a good eye: sashafrerejones.com is a particularly good use of the weblog form, but being able to write a good weblog doesn't necessarily equate to being able to write for the New Yorker. SFJ demonstrates a rare ability to be able to do both, and to compartmentalise himself so as to be able to do both well. And his knowledge of popular music, and ability to draw on that knowledge in surprising ways (eg, "Like Dylan, DJ Shadow and Jack White..." - like, now stop and think about that: are they thrown together at random and/or to show off? I think not), suggests he could be there for the duration. Which is more than could ever have been said of poor ol' Nick Hornby.

Funny Time of Year

Queen's Birthday long weekend in Canberra: each year, these four evenings are punctuated by sporadic and random explosions throughout the capital. No, it's not an attempted coup, it's fireworks. For a few weeks each year around this time, hitherto empty shopfronts become bastions of capitalism as shonky salespeople offload truckloads of legal explosives to willing parents. (Canberra's other main industry is XXX porn videos. And people say this is a dull place.)

Over the last couple of years, for reasons of public liability insurance, the more lethal fireworks have been banned, and apparently this year there will be no noise-making gear whatsoever. Which must not have got through to the people concerned, because even as I write, the inner south sounds not unlike Baghdad By Night. And anyway, our street (tomorrow is our night) has a secret weapon: somebody's father has what has been described to me as a "small cannon". Which uses home-made gunpowder. And which he only fires once. I have a horrible feeling I know why. Mulled wine will be served throughout. It also works as an anaesthetic. This could be the last post.

No Pay To Play

And now, after an inordinate and totally unacceptable delay, we bring you details of a purely hypothetical mix of music which might, if one had been that way inclined, have been picked up from various web sites in the first three months of this year, and which, sequenced in this way, might have been burned onto an audio CD - might have been, but, of course, weren’t. But we thought you might like to know. Think of it as a 90-minute radio show without the ads.

1. Lou Reed and John Cale “Waiting For The Man”: two people alone in a room. Well, not exactly alone. An audience was there, although you sense that it might as well not have been. Nico was there too, but not on this song. Mistakes are made, and Lou is already showing his ability to destroy his back catalogue by singing all around the song. But this is a fascinating document nevertheless.

2. Eno / Moebius / Roedelius “Broken Head”: the third crucial Eno and Cluster track, cruelly omitted from the two Enoboxes. Some days it feels like it is going to go on forever; some days you wish it would.

3. X-Wife “Eno”: What “King’s Lead Hat” would have sounded like if it had been on “Here Come the Warm Jets”. The singer sounds a bit like Pete Shelley or Tom Verlaine. I know nothing about this and if it hadn’t been called “Eno” I would never have found it. Now that’s what I call good marketing.

4. Lassigue Bendthaus “Jealous Guy (poeme syncope)": a song I never thought I wanted to hear again gets dehumanised, decentred, vocodered and beamed back from deep space. Brilliant.

5. Roxy Music “More Than This”: the original and the best. If you want to know what it felt like to be young and alive in the 1980s, look no further.

6. Lizzy Mercier Descloux “Funky Stuff”: Lizzy was just a name to me back in the day. Now I see the error of my ways. A slab of angular New York no wave / dance music with extra “attitude”. And I now hear that she has died. Damn.

7. Vanity 6 “Nasty Girl”: just like the last one only more so. Parental advisory required.

8. Vive La Fête “Nuit Blanche”: Peelie was floggiing another track by these people (Belgian I think) around Christmas time. Sounds like everything about music that you ever liked, rolled into one. I particularly like the blatant lift of the ascending synth note from Visage’s “Fade to Grey”, and the guitar line from the Cure’s “A Forest”. You see? You know it already. Can there really be an entire album like this? And, if so, where can I get it?

9. Electrelane “Windmill”: there will always be room for one more wistful, gentle pop song featuring breathy female vocals.

10. Air “Cherry Blossom Girl (Hope Sandoval version)”: ditto. (Note: this is not just the album version with a different singer; it's an entirely different song.)

11. Jonathan Richman “Give Paris One More Chance”: this one goes out to Carl, the six-year-old, who also likes Jonathan’s “My Jeans”. (And Skyhooks’ “Blue Jeans”. But that’s another story.)

12. Joe Crow “Compulsion”: cheap electronic pop. Irresistible if you ask me. Vintage unknown but could conceivably have been a contemporary of ...

13. The Fall “New Face In Hell (Peel Session 24 September 1980)”: no explanation necessary, surely. Flowers will wilt.

14. The Von Bondies “Cmon Cmon”: overexposed to the point of irrelevance now, but fun for a couple of minutes. Heck, they have even played Canberra since this playlist was put together.

15 Black Widow “Come to the Sabbat”: Satanic folk music from, allegedly, 1971 - was this one song responsible for the entire heavy metal genre? Or is it a recently put-together hoax along the lines of “A Mighty Wind”? Warning: contains flute.

16 Joacham Witt: “Tri Tra Trullala (Herbergsvater)”: even by my own standards I know very little about this. It sounds like it’s from the 80s but presumably isn’t. Sung in German so it could be about anything. Or nothing. “Borrows” a piercing single guitar note from Echo and the Bunnymen’s first album.

17. Alexander Robotnick “Sountrack”: at sub-two minutes it could have gone on for 10 times its length and not outstayed its welcome. I don’t know what you’d call it. I’d call it sublime. Possibly years old, but who’s to know? Isn’t random downloading fun!

18. “Smalltown Boy”: don’t even have the name of the artist for this one. It’s an updated, goddamn swish version of that song. The vocalist can’t get up as high as Jimmy Somerville, but who can?

19. Contriva “Stuck (Superpitcher mix)”: more stuff from the younger generation. If that’s you, I’d just like to say thanks a lot for contributing to an environment in which I can end a CD with seven minutes like these. A good comedown.

You can do this yourself, you know.

Big Ron Part 3

What really interests me, thinking about Ronald Reagan, is how closely his presidency bookended a particular time of my life. In January 1981 I was a frustrated and angry young farmboy about to embark upon the final year of secondary school. By the end of that year I had enrolled at University, all set to embark upon a time of independence, shared housing, bands, People for Nuclear Disarmament rallies, op shop clothing, bad cooking, and making friends for life. In other words, The Years When I Grew Up.

During the second part of the Reagan years I was working in Leongatha. There I fell in with the finest bunch of people you could ever wish to meet. Together we tormented the local community FM radio station, put together a fanzine, hung out with the Cannanes, and reinvigorated our letterboxes, receiving handmade cassettes from Randall Lee, Bruce Russell, Wayne Davidson and the Growling Porcupine collective, and parcels from K Records. Mention the words “Simon’s Lane” and watch me go all misty-eyed.

Reagan left office in January 1989. George H W Bush became president. A girl called Adrienne appeared on the scene. The various members of the Leongatha gang gradually succumbed to the inexorable pull of Melbourne. My father fell sick and died. The iron curtain crumbled. Things would never be the same.

Last Night

Adrienne was cleaning the oven. The least I could do was act as DJ for the evening. I had found a Lee Hazlewood CD at the local library, so we started off with a few tracks from that. Which took us to V Balsara and his Singing Sitars doing “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” (I would have gone straight into Einsturzende Neubauten’s cover of “Sand” but my copy is missing, presumed dead), which took us deeper into V Balsara and his version of “Tequila”; which, naturally, led us to the same song as done by Manuel and the Music of the Mountains, and then to Manuel doing “The Girl From Ipanema”, “Quando Quando Quando” and “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas”; from which we moved on to a bracket of Martin Denny in supper-club mode, performing various Bacharach numbers; and rounding out the session with a Klaus Wunderlich Hammond Organ medley including “Strangers In The Night” and the theme from “A Man And A Woman”.

Just another Saturday night in Canberra.

Big Ron Part 2

“I’m not too worried by the enemy / I know that Reagan will look after me”

Howard Devoto out front of Magazine, singing “Model Worker” at Festival Hall in Melbourne, 6 September 1980.

“I’m not too worried by the enemy / I know that Carter will look after me”

The same song as it appears on the band’s third album “The Correct Use of Soap”, released earlier in the same year.

What a difference a few months make. When Devoto wrote those words he could only have been thinking ironically: poor old Jimmy Carter couldn’t even look after his wayward brother Billy, or the Tehran hostages, let alone the rest of the free world. With the emergence on the scene of candidate Reagan, the line becomes one of, what, desperation, wishful thinking, even greater irony? From some point in 1980 and on to the end of the decade, the world was perched rather too close to the brink. The Soviet army was in Afghanistan; Iran and Iraq were fighting the war between the USA and the USSR by proxy, the CIA was throwing money at all kinds of bad people not just in the Middle East but also in Central America, on the theory that the enemy of my enemy must be my friend - as another song from the era says, “what a catalyst you turned out to be” - and the threat of nuclear annihilation kept too many of us awake at night, with the cold sweat of fear. (A lot of Magazine songs are about fear; this is what made them such an important band, and probably why they failed to ignite in an era that was turning to music in order to get away from all of that: “I’m the dandy highwayman”, anyone?)

Over it all loomed the iconic figure of Ronald Reagan, the former Hollywood actor and governor of California wth the tough-guy swagger (no, not you, Arnie; you’ll get your turn). Did he stare down the Soviet Union in the last great battle of the Cold War? Or did he just happen to be at the helm during a time when the termites that had been working away under the surface to destroy the Soviet empire from within, just began to break through to the surface, soon to reveal the rottenness that lay within? What we do know is that if Reagan had lost in 1984 there wouldn’t be the hoopla we have been seeing this past week. Nor would we, I should think, if the Communists had managed to stagger on in power for another 10 years. He was certainly the right man at the right time; what can’t be known is whether he drove the times or they drove him.

I always thought that Reagan was essentially a simple-minded man who had the good sense to surround himself with people he knew he could count on to make the decisions that mattered, and the good fortune to be president at a time when the tide of world affairs was moving overwhelmingly in America’s direction. When George W Bush became president I thought that his success, like Reagan’s, would depend on whom he surrounded himself with. What I didn’t know then was how important those choices would be for the rest of us.

Funky Days Are Back Again

Yesterday Adrienne made me buy a pair of brown cords. They are exactly the same as the ones Greg Hanratty wore back in first form. Have we really gone this far in the last 28 years? (Mind you, they are quite nice trousers. And if the music of the 1970s can suddenly start to feel quite good, why not the clothes?)

Incoming

Blogger alert: a phalanx of posts about to land. Duck, you sucker.

What I Like

What do I like best of all? What I like best of all is listening to Roger Angell talking about growing up around the New Yorker, editing William Maxwell (and being edited by him), writing about baseball, and William Shawn's love of facts. How articulate can an 82-year-old be?

Blank Generation

At the risk of turning this thing into a perpetual obituary column, I must note that we fell off our chair when our eyes fell upon the New York Times* obituary for guitarist Robert Quine. Described therein as "punk" but not really all that punk at all, as a listen to the duet album he did with drummer Fred Maher would demonstrate. Whilst I don't actually own any Material albums, I do have Quine scattered throughout my collection, from Tom Waits to Zorn to Matthew Sweet. And I know someone who owns the 3-cd set of Velvet Underground "bootlegs'" that came out not long ago.

* What I like most of all about the nytimes is the formality: where else would Richard Hell find himself referred to as "Mr Hell"?

Big Ron

The first thing that came into my head upon hearing of the death of Ronald Reagan was that old "can of poisoned meat" cut-up, released as a flexidisk with an early issue of Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly's Raw magazine. As a penniless university student I drooled over a copy of it that sat for some time behind the counter at a record or book shop in Melbourne the name and location of which has got lost somewhere between the back of my mind and the front. It might have been Gaumont Book Co, Glen Terry's wonderful outpost of the London punk scene, in Little Collins Street, although I don't think the chronology quite works out, and the shop counter I have in my mind doesn't match. Damn.

Gone!

The roar goes up around the ground as "Farmer in the City" claims its first scalp with the resignation of Professor David Flint from the position of chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Authority. And not before time. We note the clever timing of the announcement on a Monday afternoon in an attempt to avoid any mention of it on tonight's "Media Watch" (where the real credit lies for getting rid of this man).

Read it in books

After the film yesterday we had a hot chocolate at Charmers, an oasis of faded but authentic glamour amongst the posing of the Manuka "scene", followed by a good look around in Paperchain bookshop. At long long last William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" is out in paperback, which I reckon is something worth getting excited about. Also out in that form is Martin Amis's "Yellow Dog". Notwithstanding the barrage of bad reviews and my own mixed feelings about Amis aired here recently, I've got a bit of a good feeling about this novel. The length looks about right for an Amis novel (which is plainly a ridiculous thing to say). At this stage the new David Mitchell is only out in one of those big-format paperbacks where the spine collapses on the first read and you pay well upwards of 30 dollars for the privilege, so we'll cool our heels for a while on that score (we are also waiting for someone to return "Number9Dream" to Woden library so we can get stuck into that first; best to read a writer's books in sequence if you can).

You would also do well to give thanks to Michael Heyward's Text Publishing for putting out in book form the stunning Alessandro Baricco short story "Without Blood" which ran in the New Yorker 18 months ago. If you didn't read it there you really should get this book. Short stories in book form are inevitably expensive but only the really special ones ever get this treatment (someone did it to an Annie Proulx short story which ran in the Atlantic Monthly seven or eight years ago about a couple of randy cowboys, which was equally worthy of becoming a book) so you are paying for quality rather than quantity. Like, so what if Contrane's "My Favourite Things" barely clocks in beyond half an hour; would you really be happier with 80 minutes of Kenny G? Feel the width, feel the width ...

A Study In Scarlett

Yesterday morning we left the boys with Cathy for a few hours and went off to the movies. This is only the second time we've done this in 2004, which normally could be seen as a sad indictment on how children destroy your life, but this year there really hasn't been much to lure us out to Canberra's meagre cinematic choices. Times for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" didn't suit, so we had to choose between "Girl With A Pearl Earring" and "The Triplets of Belleville". Notwithstanding the obvious therapeutic benefits of watching what is effectively a 100-minute close-up of Scarlett Johansson, I suspect we made the wrong choice. The best parts of "Girl With A Pearl Earring" were the scenes of street life in mid-17th-century Delft, and the woman who played the matriarch of Vermeer's wife's household. But, while I could never say a bad word about Johansson, there was something about her character that didn't quite gel: I don't think it was her fault, but something failed to connect between those "knowing" looks and her apparent status as a naive, innocent servant girl. And whoever decided to cast Colin Firth as Vermeer shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a film set ever again. It is difficult to imagine anyone demonstrating less of the qualities you would expect to see in a singular, driven "artist". They would have been much better off giving that part to the butcher boy who plays Johansson's "love interest". He at least seemed to have something going on behind his eyes.

It had been minus six overnight and even by 11am the cinema hadn't warmed up and I spent most of the time shivering. I haven't warmed up yet.

Art of the New Yorker

The cover of the May 17 issue of the New Yorker, by Marc Rosenthal, is one of the good ones. Its washed-out colouring recalls the tones of the magazine's covers from the 1950s, but with something of a Spiegelman / Mouly sensibility to it that sent me to the shelves to see if his work might have appeared elsewhere under their imprimatur. And there he is: not in any issue of Raw in my possession, but in the second of Spiegelman's Little Lit anthologies (the one with the Charles Burns cover), doing a single page of "jokes". This often happens to me: I find something I love, and then discover that Spiegelman has already been there before: Ben Katchor is one case in point; Richard McGuire another. Even Chris Ware was in Raw way before he became a megastar.

You can say what you like about Art Spiegelman (or, in the case of Ted Rall in the Village Voice a while back, what you don't like about him), but where would we be without him? No Raw; no Little Lit; no Maus (still the standard bearer, in the English-speaking world, of what the humble comic book is capable of). Thanks to Tina Brown's inspired appointment of both Speigelman and his wife, Francoise Mouly, to the New Yorker in the early 90s, a vast array of otherwise marginalised comic-book writers, illustrators, and graphic designers have had access to the kind of broad, mainstream exposure a magazine like the New Yorker can provide, at no real cost to themselves in terms of reputation, degree of street credibility, "selling out" accusations and the like. This is a rare example of something that might justify that appalling expression "a win-win situation".

I know that September 11 was a terrible event; I wasn't in New York that day. Spiegelman was. So it's hard for me to criticise him either for the trauma he clearly suffered or for his subsequent anger (both of which come over, a little too clearly, in "In the Shadow of No Towers"); but walking out on the New Yorker in the face of what he perceived to be that magazine's pandering to the "agenda" of the Bush administration, well, I think that is a pretty tough argument to sustain, particularly if one considers the magazine's coverage of the state of the world in the almost three years since the planes hit, and its hardly flattering portrait of the President over the same time, more so in recent months as various chickens have come home to roost. Now, more than ever, the New Yorker needs Spiegelman. It is having its moment in the sun, thanks to Seymour M Hersh's goal-scoring ability. There is nobody else that I can think of at the magazine whose covers are capable of combining such superb artistic skills with an uncanny knack (partly, I assume, owing to name recognition, which is something few illustrators carry) for creating controversy.

But maybe, too, he needs the magazine. "In the Shadow of No Towers", at least those episodes that have appeared in the London Review of Books, which I assume not to be the whole story, is just too angry, and too unfocussed and unrestrained in its anger and its bitterness; the edge which is usually apparent in Spiegelman's more "political" covers for the New Yorker seems to have been blunted.

Hey, kids, terror alert!

It would appear that while I was looking the other way it became a crime in this country to "incite terrorism". Has Australia become an outpost of John Ashcroft Enterprises, Inc?

I wonder what would happen if I put onto this weblog (estimated readership - on a good day - three and possibly someone who came here by mistake looking for agriculture gossip) information, based on personal observation, about possible security weaknesses at my place of work (itself not an implausible terrorist target) and suggestions as to how one might breach same. Oh. I'd better not, then.

How German Is It

I haven't been across to the National Gallery of Australia much lately. My mistake.

On Friday I had a wander through the international galleries. In the middle of one room is a book. A very large book. Imagine a book, standing on the floor, about as tall as you and me, opened back against the spine so that the pages fan out in a circle. You can walk around this book and peer in at the pages. But the book is a dark, kind of bronze colour, and the detail is quite hard to make out. And, of course, it is not a real book. It is a recent piece by Anselm Keifer. It's not exactly a sculpture and not exactly a painting. It's called "The Secret Lives of Plants". I will be coming over to look at it quite a bit. I have always been drawn to Keifer's work. I don't have any idea why. It requires work. It's also very bleak. The Gallery has for a long time had another one of his pieces, a large monochrome painting with a big piece of industrial machinery embedded in the centre; there are train tracks heading away from you at the bottom of the painting. There's not much doubt as to what the subject matter is (and if there was any doubt, it is usually hung near a large Sigmar Polke painting of a guard tower). And yet when our niece came to stay with us for her 10th birthday a year or two ago, this is a girl who is very fond of horses, she picked that out as her favourite painting in the Gallery.

And in the next room, which at present is laid out as a large, cavernous space filled with abstract expressionist and minimalist works, with no sculptures or anything else on the floor to get in the way of the majestic paintings (here is the Gallery's Motherwell; here's its Rothko; over there's "Blue Poles" (which completely astounds me every time I see it)). And on the wall opposite Blue Poles there's another new acqisition: a 1984 Gerhard Richter oil painting, abstract, like nothing I've seen of his before (I'm more used to the more photo realist - if that's the right term - work, like the Gallery's portrait of Gilbert + George) but completely gorgeous, such vivid greens and yellows. It works well opposite the Pollock, offering a possibly calming, possibly malevalent contrast to Blue Poles' sheer joy.

So, two recently acquired German works. I would like to think that this means that somewhere there might lurk some of those stunning, large-scale photographic works of, say, Thomas Struth or Andreas Gursky, which, given the Gallery's lack of a permanent photography gallery, are just waiting for an opportunity to be shown. Or then again, maybe not.

This week's Media Watch

We are grateful to "Media Watch" for informing us of the title of Professor David Flint's book: "Twilight of the Elites".

We can see it now: "Johnno" Howard and "Flints" Flint, sitting out on the front verandah at Kiribilli, gazing wistfully at the darkness descending over their spiritual home, the western suburbs of Sydney, relaxed and comfortable in their King Gee work shorts and blue truck-driver singlets, barefoot, stubby holders in hand (Johnno's commemorates the life of Sir Donald Bradman, while Flints's bears a humorous portrait of his idol, Alan Jones, and the caption "Your behaviour disgusts me, Kamahl"), while Jeanette Howard and Mrs Flint (assuming there is a Mrs Flint) share a flagon of spumante in the kitchen. You'll recognise Jeanette: she's the one wearing the "I'm With Stupid" t-shirt.

Love Is In The Air

Re Eurovision 2004:

How could you not vote for the country whose entrant has an album called "I Am The Wind Of Love"?

Organ grinder

I have been laid low by the lurgi for a couple of days. Observations:

1. There may not ever have been a better sound committed to tape than Wayne Horvitz's Fender Rhodes on Zony Mash's reworking of Zorn's "Tekufah", appearing on the 2-cd set Voices In The Wilderness, a conglomeration of the Downtown hipsterati all providing their own takes on Masada pieces. A mixed bag, of course, and given one's unfamiliarity with most of the performers (readable signposts are medeski, martin & wood and Kramer (no, not that one, the one from Bongwater)) it will take a while to absorb, but if you are as mesmerised by Zorn's Masada compositions as I am there are a lot of revelations and surprises here. But for now, at least, Horvitz's fat, falling-into-distortion keyboard wins the prize. Guaranteed to rid your house of termites.

2. The thing I like about Air, well one of the things anyway, is that you might have listened to "Mike Mills", a seemingly harmless instrumental from their new album, Talkie Walkie, a hundred times, and yet in an unguarded moment the strings that kick in around the half way mark can reach out, open up your chest and tear out you heart, leaving you completely shattered, as if you had never heard them before. Which, obviously, you hadn't.

3. I had never realised how closely the first song on side two of the self-titled ep by Stephen, from 1988 (and, I think, the only record they ever did) - "Thinkin' About You" - charts the course that David Kilgour's solo career was going to take. I don't know how long it would be since I have listened to this. Sometimes it pays to brush off the dust - you might learn something.

Pot Luck

Isn't it funny how things come in threes.

I had not previously been conscious of having been in any way aware of the concept of the "potluck" dinner or supper. I still have no idea what it is, but my blissful ignorance about its existence was knocked out from under me by the following:

A reference to a "potluck supper" in the Jim Harrison short story "Father Daughter" in the March 29, 2004 issue of the New Yorker.

The very next week, same magazine, in Jonathan Lethem's completely brilliant "Super Goat Man" (which you should read), a reference to "potluck dinners".

One week later, you know where, in the same part of the magazine as that week's short story, a cartoon bearing the punchline "Thanks for the potluck."

This is not unlike the consecutive references in the same magazine a few months earlier to "coaling stations" (see an earlier post of mine). Has the "potluck" been making regular appearances in the New Yorker (or anywhere else) that I have failed to pick up on until now, or is something a bit strange going on here?

This Is Not A Test

Well it is, actually.

Here's something I wrote a long time ago and never got around to really finishing.

Here's a song we like by people we know. We haven't sought their permission and we hope they don't mind.

Underpants

Most lunchtimes I go out for a walk beside the lake. For some months now there has been a pair of grey underpants (size and gender not determined; I haven't been carrying a stick to poke them with) lying beneath a weepin' willow just past Commonwealth Avenue bridge.

On Saturday afternoon on our way to the National Library I noticed that a car was parked beside the tree. I said to Adrienne, "Looks like they've come to collect their undies".

And, lo and behold!, yesterday the underpants had gone.

I love a happy ending.

Nighthawks

Annie Proulx on Edward Hopper.

I would probably want to read that.

G.I. Blues

Looking at those terrible photographs of the mistreatment of Iraqi "prisoners". Don't get me started. But:

A good rule of thumb is that, if you can't explain it to the kids, you probably shouldn't be doing it. And we've been having to keep the newspapers well away from the curious eyes of those boys of ours for the last week or so.

One also wonders whether this is why America has been so aggressive in keeping itself beyond the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

The best of all possible Worlds

Random comments generated by Jon Dale's April '04 Worlds of Possibility archive:

1. Particularly good piece on Galaxie 500.

2. Dif Juz w/ Lee Perry: My own take on Scratch is that his work since setting fire to the Black Ark has been patchy at best, so maybe Jon shouldn't get too excited about the existence of some (possibly mythical) Perry/4AD cross-pollination. What I would like to hear is the stuff Perry supposedly did with Robert Palmer (late 70s?), which I recall reading about in a Palmer obit.

3. Archie and Jughead's American Records? Rings a serious bell. Either I've got a record somebody once bought from there and left the price tag on, or it used to advertise somewhere like "Roadrunner", or I went there on my only trip to Adelaide in 1983. Or it's not even in Adelaide. Or anywhere else in Australia. Or it's not even a record shop. My mind must be failing. Help!

4. Traces of a record's previous ownership: I bought my copy of the Heptones' Party Time in an opportunity shop in Clunes, a tiny, un-rediscovered (at least it was then) Victorian goldmining town. It still bore the price tag, which revealed that it had originally been bought from a record store in Key West, Florida. There may be a great short story buried in there somewhere, I wouldn't think that's a road well travelled. (At the same op shop I found a copy of Richard Thompson's Rock On, which I should have kept for myself but which instead, in a well-meaning act of patronage, I gave to my friend Darren, who is a major Fairport Convention fan but who had somehow managed not to know much at all about Thompson's career post-Fairports. Darren would probably have been more taken by its companion album Morris On, but that's another story.) I also have, in a box somewhere, an Iain Sinclair paperback (either "Downriver" or "Radon Daughters" I think) in which Rowland S Howard has signed his name. Go figure.

This Ain't Casablanca(s)

Thanks to the lovely Carmen at the High Court Cafe I have spent the last few days buried deep in the Franz Ferdinand album. There's lots to like: I like their sense of humour; I like the way the second song goes from a snakey Pere Ubu guitar line into a chorus that could be from a sixties garage pop band - say, the Easybeats; I like the Gang of Four references (note the melodica that sneaks in during "40'"). But most of all I like the way all of the "retro" stylings are deployed in the service of such a strong collection of stick-in-your-head pop songs.

Which is the essential difference between Franz Ferdinand and The Strokes: the Strokes (says me) are/were nothing more than a novelty act - a fairly obscure novelty act, admittedly, but a novelty act nonetheless. The instant response to hearing "Is This It" was: my god, these kids have somehow channeled the sound of New York circa 1978. The later, measured response was: where's the meat? Like junk food, the contents of "Is This It" dissipated to nothing immediately after consumption, unable to be recalled. (Okay, you could always hum the line "New York city cops / They ain't that smart", but that was most likely as a result of the publicity surrounding the song rather than the song itself.)

Then for an encore they showed that they could also "do" the Cars. Not much future in that, is there? Whereas Franz have produced eleven songs for the long haul.

Play for Today

Listening habits: today we have gone from Dawn Upshaw singing Bach and Purcell to Franz Ferdinand, a bit of a disjunction even by my standards. Now our regular trawl across the Net has revealed that Sir Coxsone Dodd, founder of Studio One, has rolled his last spliff, so we are scratching around the office for something sympathetic to play. All we can turn up (not really "all", it's pretty damn good in its own right but not exactly "Studio One") is Upsetter in Dub, a collection of Lee Perry dubs from the 70s. Well, we rarely need much excuse around these parts to get the dubs happening.

And now a word from our sponsor

Tomorrow I turn 40. I have spent most of the past few months pondering how I reached this point in my life without really noticing it. I find it impossible to reconcile the age I feel that I am (about 28) with the age I clearly am in fact. I suppose that to the untrained eye I am indeed in mid-life - kids, house, Subaru, garden, greying hair. But I just can't see myself as falling within that category. I panic about this fairly often. The ticking clock haunts me like the one swallowed by the crocodile in "Peter Pan". Well, I suppose now it's upon me I will just have to get used to it. Or maybe it's best if I don't. I figure as long as I keep listening to new music I won't get too stale.

I hope to get an iPod for my birthday, but I don't really expect to. It would be nice if someone gave me David Sedaris's "Me Talk Pretty One Day" or the DVD of Michel Gondry's music videos. Which I've never even seen. (The DVD or the videos. Except the White Stripes Lego one.) But that's not likely to happen either. I'm nursing a fairly severe headcold at present, so all celebrations are off. At least I know there'll be a cake. It's just come out of the oven.

And Melbourne has just taken Carlton to the cleaners in the AFL, so that's a nice present too.

Last Week's Media Watch

The story so far:

Professor David Flint is head of the Australian Broadcasting Authority. It is his job to oversee the regulation of the behaviour (including financial) of those involved in radio in Australia.

Professor Flint was appointed by the government.

John Laws is a prominent Sydney radio talkback announcer who was pinged by the ABA a few years back for accepting large sums of money from Telstra in return for talking up Telstra’s good works on his programme. This was presented as editorial comment, not advertising, a deception which is not allowed under the broadcasting legislation.

Alan Jones is another prominent Sydney radio talkback announcer. He was for some time a critic of Telstra (while accepting money from Telstra’s rival, Optus). He has since become a big advocate of Telstra, by essentially the same route as that taken by Laws. There are two differences of note:

1. Jones was able to avoid incurring the wrath of the ABA. This was notwithstanding preliminary findings of clear wrongdoing (according to documents produced to Media Watch). The reason for the different findings in relation to Jones and Laws can only lie in the application of form over substance, a.k.a. sleight of hand. Laws was paid by Telstra; in the case of Jones, he (Jones) was given part ownership of the radio station and Telstra then paid the money to the station. No contract therefore needed to exist between Jones and Telstra. This is what is known in the trade as a “loophole”. Presumably the fact the Jones went overnight from being Telstra’s biggest critic to its newest champion was just a happy coincidence.

2. Professor Flint, it would now appear, is one of Alan Jones’ biggest fans. So much so that he has now been exposed as having sent at least one gushing letter of praise to Jones, on ABA letterhead, and without the knowledge or consent of the ABA (of which he presumably would understand that he is only the head, not the body).

All of this you know already. What I am interested in is another possible conspiracy theory which can be found behind it all. It goes like this.

Telstra is a publicly listed company.

If documents obtained by Media Watch can be believed, Laws is being paid $300,000 per year for his “editorial” services to Telstra whereas Jones is being paid $1.2 million. This is quite a significant difference. And $1.2 million is actually a rather large sum of money. Say it slowly. At least, it looks like a lot of money to pay to one man, to whom 85 per cent of the population of Sydney does not listen, to have him parrot your company's PR in ways that, even in the absence of a specific disclaimer of the kind Laws is now obliged to provide, sound more like advertising than like a man voicing his own firmly held beliefs. Minds could differ as to whether a payment of this magnitude for such a "service" is a rational business decision for a public corporation to make. Minds could also differ as to whether the huge variance in worth between Laws’ opinion and Jones’ opinion could be put down to Laws’ no longer being able to hide from his listeners the fact that he is being paid for his views. Maybe it could have another source.

Remember this: Flint is appointed by the government. It is certainly possible to read into his fan letter to Jones a suggestion that Jones has nothing to fear from the ABA. (After all, the letter was on ABA letterhead.) Now, why might that be?

Well, remember this, too: there is an election due later this year. Jones, whatever you may think about him, does have an undoubtedly large influence for one man. In a close election his endorsement could make the difference between winning and losing. Clearly the government couldn’t give its own, i.e. yours and my, money to Jones to buy his support. But there are a couple of other things it could do: ensure that the person at the top of the ABA is the person most likely to look after the interests of Alan Jones; this it seems to have done. Or the government could use, not its own money, but someone else’s. Who owns Telstra? Well, what do you know - the government owns just over half of it. In some circles, ownership of in excess of 50 percent of an organisation conveys notions of “control”. Maybe a different sort of equation is at work here. Maybe Telstra’s “owners” can find “value for money” from that $1.2 million dollars after all. Maybe we should listen even more closely that usual to the honestly held opinions of Alan Jones come election time. Maybe we will get the goverment we deserve: will we also be getting the government that we paid for? Don’t forget who owns the 49 percent of Telstra not owned by the government: its shareholders, in other words you and me.

Unfinished Business

I am at the time of life when I no longer want anything whatsoever to do with Lou Reed except for the Third Velvet Underground Album. That aside, he is henceforth banished from the house, along with Sting and Bono, both of whom were expelled some time ago*.

So I wish that "Unfinished Business", the last song on the Go-Betweens' second post-reformation record, Bright Yellow Bright Orange, didn't remind me faintly of Lou's "Satellite of Love". But it does. As the saying goes, "We shall overcome".

I hope you all haven't lumped the return of the Go-Betweens in with countless other tawdry "reunions" (yes, Lou Reed, this too is all your fault; you will never be forgiven for your wilful destruction of Venus in Furs on the VU reunion/Sterling Morrison valediction tour). This is the real thing: two equally talented songwriters go their separate ways for a few years, then find reasons to start working together again. The "comeback" album, The Friends of Rachel Worth, had its seams showing (it could almost have been a compilation of their respective solo work) but on Bright Yellow Bright Orange the chemistry is back. It may not have the emotional heft of the best of their earlier work (me alone in a room w/ "Part Company" = great waves of tears) but it nevertheless is able to reach places deep within you that others can't. Listen to the intertwining of the guitars at the end of "Mrs Morgan". The gorgeously simple guitar line that closes "Poison in the Walls". The fact of Forster/McLennan taking in turns the singing of "Too Much of One Thing". It is all very simple and understated. And there is a sense that at this stage of their careers they can just kick back and have a little fun.

In the car on the way back from the coast we had on 16 Lovers Lane. Carl, our resident six-year-old music critic, is a big fan**. The new Go-Betweens may not reach those kind of heights, but the mere existence of the two latest discs is something which few of us could even bring ourselves to wish for; the fact that they are both bloody good, well, maybe you need to pinch me ...


*David Byrne was similarly banned around the time of True Stories, but has made a surprising reappearance owing to the listenability of Feelings and Look into the Eyeball, so take heart, Lou, remove the mullet and who knows?


**Carl's current faves apart from the Go-Betweens include Abba, the REM of Automatic for the People, Jonathan Richman, Manu Chao, Pet Sounds, "I Am The Walrus", Beck, Cornershop, Elvis' "A Little Less Conversation", and the soundtrack of Monsoon Wedding. The boy's got taste.

Dying to go there

We spent the Anzac Day long weekend, as Canberrans say, "down the coast", helping the kids explore rock pools and do jigsaw puzzles.

Adrienne saw, in the in-house literature at the place we were staying, possibly our favourite spelling mistake ever (beating out of first place the Yellow Pages ad for Murrays Travel that offered, amongst its services, "school executions"): a write-up of a local restaurant described said establishment as having an "interment setting". We think we know what they meant but, just in case we are wrong, we hope not to be going there for a few years yet.

The Moving Show

What? This feels like a death in the family. Or at least a pet. It's almost as devastating as John Flaus leaving Film Buffs' Forecast. For as long as I can remember, wherever you were or whatever you were doing, Wednesday night was Movie Show night. Now David and Margaret are moving to the ABC. I hope they know what they are doing. At least they're not lost to the commercials, like so many others before them.

We would like to express our gratitude to them for their many years of service and we wish them well.

Coal

There I was, living my life totally oblivious of the concept of a "coaling station", when - lo and behold - coaling stations appear in consecutive issues of the New Yorker, first in a very enlightening piece by Joshua Micah Marshall (apologies if I got that wrong, he's not a NYer regular) on the American Empire, and then in a piece about the poor buggers held captive in Guantanamo Bay. It just goes to show, no matter how far in the past you think you're living, there's always someone even further back than yourself.

And this from the magazine that now brings you Sasha Frere-Jones on Madvillain.

F***ing Martin

What are we to do with Martin Amis? The jury is still out; Experience was a fine book, but Amis is (or so I had always assumed) primarily a novelist, and The Information and Night Train were hard work; and the almost universal hostility and derision that has greeted Yellow Dog makes it difficult, given the length of time it takes me to read a novel these days, to justify any kind of commitment to it (unfair, I know, but decisions to read / not read have to be based on something). Meanwhile I would appear to have moved on to David Mitchell – maybe a changing of the guard?

Well anyway, I have just been reading "In the Palace of the End", Amis's most recent New Yorker short story. How can someone who is capable of such wonderful images as "the room was ... an aviary of mobile phones" follow it a paragraph or two later with something as clunky as "the tendency to the tender"? And the story itself, while based on a very Martin Amis kind of idea (taking the notion of Saddam Hussein's body doubles and pushing that notion to extremes beyond which it would only be possible to look away), could hardly be said to warrant inclusion ahead of any other recent piece of New Yorker fiction (and suffers – as would anybody – from the unhappy chronology of appearing the week before Alice Munro), and I can think of at least three in the past 18 months that stand head and shoulders above it – and all by hitherto unknown (to me) writers.

Okay, almost nobody is better at words than Martin Amis, but words need to be employed in the service of something bigger, lest they become a dictionary. I have invested a lot of emotional energy in the past in my dedication to Amis's work, and I am not yet inclined to throw all of that away. But the tea leaves don't read well.

There is a light that never goes out

I have been a bit slow in reading this piece on perennial topic du jour Morrissey/"Morrissey".

The last couple of paragraphs are particularly good. O'Hagan needs to be careful, though, not to toss out the baby with the bathwater. Tipping a bucket over John Lydon may well be (a) fair game and (b) a good spectator sport, but what self-respecting home would be without its copy of Metal Box?

Pharmacological alert

Signs have been posted along Lake Burley Griffin, just down from the National Library, advising of the appearance thereabouts of death cap mushrooms.

Not sure if this is a warning or an invitation. The ducks down there have been looking a bit lethargic of late.

Look what fear's done to my body

I take it you have all read this.

I have taken to sleeping under the bed.