Impress me not

Two Johnny Cash songs that'll put a twist in your belly (well they did mine the first time I heard them)

Is this art that challenges you not to like it? Or am I missing something? Something (looking both ways) ... biblical? Maybe the prisoner in DELIA'S GONE has not killed anyone at all -- he's just fantasising about exorcising the 'devilish woman' that dwells in him. But then the Memphis brothel (?) action seems too real, as if it's suggesting a moral motive for the killing. I don't know.

It's hard not to connect these two songs, actually. But I won't comment on this further as I don't want to trample on any ambiguity they may possess (plus I don't really have much to say at the moment).

DELIA'S GONE

Delia, oh Delia, Delia all my life
If I hadn't-a shot poor Delia, I'd have had her for my wife
Delia's gone, one more round, Delia's gone

I went up to Memphis, and I met Delia there
Found her in her parlor, and I tied her to her chair
Delia's gone, one more round, Delia's gone

She was low-down and triffilin', and she was cold and mean
Kind of evil make me want to grab my sub-machine
Delia's gone, one more round, Delia's gone

First time I shot her, I shot her in the side
Hard to watch her suffer, but with the second shot she died
Delia's gone, one more round, Delia's gone

But jailer, oh jailer, jailer I can't sleep
'Cuz all around my bedside I hear the patter of Delia's feet
Delia's gone, one more round, Delia's gone

So if your woman's devilish, you can let her run
Or you can bring her down and do her like Delia got done

Delia's gone, one more round, Delia's gone

Delia's gone, one more round, Delia's gone



THE BEAST IN ME

The beast in me
Is caged by frail and fragile bars
Restless by day
And by night rants and rages at the stars
God help the beast in me

The beast in me
Has had to learn to live with pain
And how to shelter from the rain
And in the twinkling of an eye
Might have to be restrained
God help the beast in me

Sometimes it tries to kid me
That it's just a teddy bear
And even somehow manage to vanish in the air
And that is when I must beware
Of the beast in me that everybody knows
They've seen him out dressed in my clothes
Patently unclear if it's New York or New Year
God help the beast in me

The beast in me

Pock Crop

Original photograph by Rob Taggert

A poem by Philip Larkin (1951?)

'To put one brick upon another'

To put one brick upon another,
Add a third, and then a fourth,
Leaves no time to wonder whether
What you do has any worth.

But to sit with bricks around you
While the winds of heaven bawl
Weighing what you should or can do
Leaves no doubt of it at all.

The final flattening

Too much menial housework, not enough purpose. From the lovely agitator for a beautiful revolution

Spare shapes one and two (closely resembling someone else's pictures but I can't remember who)

A bit of nonsense on Mars's Day

Characters

Princess Anne's bull terrier Dotty
Queen Elizabeth II's corgi Pharos

Scene

Sandringham estate, rear lawn

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dotty: It's a bit grey today, isn't it?
Pharos: Yes.
Dotty: A bit dull.
Pharos: Oh, I wouldn't say dull.
Dotty: No?
Pharos: No.
Dotty: What would you say then?
Pharos: Well, it's clearly grey - as noted - but it's also bracing I would say. Mostly bracing.
Dotty: You would say?
Pharos: Yes, that is the dominant atmospheric phenomenon that is making itself apparent to me at this moment.
Dotty: Apparent?
Pharos: Indeed.
Dotty: dominant?
Pharos: Apparently.
Dotty (pause): I wouldn't say bracing.
Pharos: No?
Dotty: No.
Pharos: No, you wouldn't.
Dotty: What?
Pharos: You haven't.
Dotty: Yes. (pause) Oh, I'm so bored! It's so dull today. Pharos, let's play a game.
Pharos: All right. Will it be like the last one?
Dotty: Oh no, nothing like the last one. This one'll be much more fun.
Pharos: All right. How do we play?
Dotty: Simple. You run away like a cut* rabbit while I chase you screaming "when I catch you I'm going to rip your legs off and watch you bleed to death".
Pharos (chuckling): But of course you want actually do that.
Dotty (pause, then chuckling): Of course. So you want to get started? How about I count to five?


* I originally had 'shot rabbit' but then that didn't seem right cos a shot rabbit would probably not be running anywhere, or very far, or for very long, which would make the game not very fun. Oh god, my little dog play is going all schlock! The next change will see Dotty pouncing on Pharos with a five foot hedge trimmer in one paw and a rusty spanner in the other (both items stolen from Prince Philip's shed; Dotty's other paws being used for posture and stability).

Moustachioed monkey dreaming about an emaciated monkey with suction caps

I'm beginning to worry that every picture I draw from now on will appear to me as somehow resembling a monkey or monkeys. (For example: What's that lunarbrogue? (it'll be a house, say). That's a monkey made out of bricks. And the chimney? Its neck. So the monkey doesn't have a head? It's an abstract drawing for god's sake.)

Two melancholics (in the days before MA)

A snippet of John Keats's Ode to a Nightingale (vandalised by a juvenile faux-nihilist who thinks he's funny but who is actually not funny because he's shitting on a meisterwerk) and, below it, a complete poem by Edward Thomas. Both are taken from The New Oxford Book of English Verse. (Click to enlarge.)




* What, Tasmania?

** A sacred fountain on Mt Helicon that came into being care of a clumsy winged horse. Visited occasionally by a gaggle of water nymphs called the Muses. Pretty sure there was no shiatsu in those days, though must check this.



Somehow this is beyond flippancy.

Digital Monkeys

Monkeys

The albino was supposed to be deep

Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the midnight cowboys who scrawl on coasters and serviettes:

My poetics are totally different to something like the Ginsberg school, which is based on the idea of 'first thought, best thought' ... It is a solid concept to get the most direct transcription of your consciousness, especially if the person doing it has an original mind. Allen Ginsberg had a fascinating and genius mind and so the poetry is fascinating and genius. But when this method is laid on to thousands of students, many of whom don't have original minds, you get acres of boring poetry.

Oh god, don't anyone think that my effort a few days ago lurks in this acreage! The albino was supposed to be deep. (In a surreal sort of way, I'll admit. In fact, so unfathomably embedded in my subconscious was the pale-skinned observer that even I at the time of writing couldn't completely understand it. Still can't, actually! As I said: DEEP.) Anyway, maybe this picture'll distract the lawyers ...

Digital multisports

Multisports

Progressives, stand!

Having just re-read Clive Hamilton's Quarterly Essay What's Left? The Death of Social Democracy, I'm eager to make a comment or two. So here goes ...

First, the dramatic news: "The Australian Labor Party has served its historical purpose and will wither and die as the progressive force of Australian politics". Hamilton heaps a large portion of the blame for this on Labor's factional system. For while the factions "once served as a means of organising to promote ideas that were held passionately by their members ... [they] now divide only notionally along ideological lines. They have become vehicles for ambition and mutual support".

Hamilton makes this prediction on his way to proposing a new direction for progressive politics in Australia. Exit the ALP's traditional "deprivation model", characterised by values such as protection (of the working class) from exploitation and improved living conditions for the poor. Enter the counter-consumption model, where the destructive forces of consumer capitalism, fuelled by peoples' ever-increasing "material acquisitiveness", are kept under control by a more compassionate and forward-thinking government, lighting the way for a community-minded, family-friendly and cheerful populace.*

This sort of transformation would be a big ask for a party as bureaucratic and process driven (should I say Byzantine?) as the ALP. To begin with such a thorough re-evaluation of the party's foundations would have to be based on strong arguments, sound evidence and whatever the factional bovver boys thought was going to secure their power base. (A momentary lapse, I'm sorry.) Hamilton does not deny the existence of real deprivation and hardship in society. He just questions the extent to which it ought to motivate the social democratic agenda in a predominantly well off modern Australia.

Previously, when wealthy people made the decision to live beyond their means, their financial difficulties attracted little public sympathy. If they complained, it might be suggested that they consider living a little less grandly. Today, newspapers, commentators and political leaders depict the imagined financial difficulties of the wealthy as the result of hard times rather than inflated expectations. The problem thus becomes a matter of public concern. The real concerns of yesterday's poor have become the imagined concerns of today's rich.

Hamilton adds an interesting qualification here, namely that overplayed hardship can cause middle class people to have a warped understanding of their own economic position.

Some will react to these observations by claiming that, in arguing that its incidence is not as extensive as is widely believed, I am trivialising the problem of poverty. In fact, my intention is to counter the opposite tendency, that of talking up the extent of poverty in order to emphasise it moral and social urgency as a problem to be addressed. Too many social democrats adopt this tactic in the mistaken belief that inflating the problem will stimulate greater public sympathy and more government action. But it has quite the opposite effect: if everyone is struggling, there is nothing unique about the poor. And a middle class convinced that it is living in straitened times is more likely to vote for middle-class welfare, such as family payments and private health insurance rebates, than for poverty alleviation.

The central question of the essay is: what lies behind the fact (confirmed by numerous studies and surveys -- read the essay if you want details about sources) that increased prosperity in Australia over the past couple of decades has not been matched by increased happiness/wellbeing? Hamilton's answer is alienation. In searching for a purpose in life and an identity through which to meaningfully pursue that purpose, people have been captured by consumer capitalism. Confusion reigns: the neo-liberal idea that only the free market can ensure a fair balance between the demands of capital and the lifestyle needs of the citizenry responsible for its production has proven to be wrong; the so-called Third Way has fizzled due to lack of philosophical substance; and the traditional mainstays of social democracy** have been in a steady state of stress, if not decline, since the 70's (Hamilton cites Nixon's "decision in 1972 to abandon the global system of fixed exchange rates" as a turning point). And amid all this consumer culture has flourished. Strangely. But it has done so by preying on individual anxieties (break the person, bag the sale ... or something). This has left many people feeling trapped and alienated.

The task of the advertising industry is to uncover the complex set of feelings associated with particular products and to design marketing campaigns to appeal to those feelings. This is a challenge: consumers, for the most part, do not consciously understand what they want or why they want it. Prodigious intellectual and creative effort is poured into marketing, driven by the imperative of consumer capitalism. All aspects of human psychology -- our fears, our sources of shame, our sexuality, our spiritual yearnings -- are a treasure-house to be plundered in the search for a commercial edge.

This is not a conspiracy theory, mind, as the logic is clear: any sense of identity that is gained principally through the symbolic mix-and-match manufactured by marketeers must be false (Hamilton refers to the notion of "authentic selfhood" in this context). If it were not, then consumers, satisfied with a finite set of acquisitions - enough to support their lifestyle goals, say - would go home, run a bath and quit the game, or at least significantly reduce their involvement in the game. But this can't happen while the force of perpetual newness, often branded as a cult, continues to propell people back into the shopping malls and DFOs to upgrade their identity and buy buy buy.

So according to Hamilton the main focus of modern progressive politics should be liberating people from alienation. An important but marginal focus should continue to be the broad pursuit of social justice, particularly as it applies to the exigencies of poverty and workplace exploitation and oppression.


* For some reason, I'm reminded of the square dance patter call: All join hands and circle to the south / Get a little moonshine in your mouth.

** Such as state ownership of "strategic sectors of the economy", "greater equality in the distribution of resources and ... a welfare system that ... protect[s] the populace when capitalism fail[s] to provide a decent standard of living".

Not included in the Ergonica Weed Poetry Contest

... and not because it's not a poem ...

Crap poetry that does nothing to change my belief that this blog is an elaborate form of [insert adjective, e.g. mental] masturbation

A half-bent albino
Glances through his nose
A red-crested angel
Turns inside and goes

A quick-eyed queen
Taps her feet to rhyme
A wise-cracking deliverer
Struggles to find - the - time

A slick-haired nitpicker
Stands to announce
"Here the rhyming ends
Henceforth not an ounce (any more)"

The spirited people
Now take their cue
And move slowly
Toward the door

(He said no more)

The grip losers, ace servers
The untelevised turkey slappers
Press forward
In a squabbling mass

Bedlam besieges everyone
And peace
What peace?
Lunacy enlivens everyone

But then a freshly shorn head
Swings though the air
And only then
Alights on a shoulder
Shirtless, black, bare(ish)

Is this forgiveness
I gasp
On the very day I don't have a camera?

Personified (echo echo)

(Not even in my phone - no echos)

Or is it just another detachment
When I don't have a friend to miracle-share with?

Docking (echo echo, and a bit of steam)

Bloody shame all that

I walked past a boy

I walked past a boy this morning who was in a very sad state. He was hunched up in the corner of a bus shelter outside a busy inner urban cafe. His hands were blue and his body was so limp he looked like a rag doll. He appeared to be unconscious, or at least seriously alcohol or drug affected. The stub of a cigarette was just coming away from the index and middle fingers of his left hand and on the left knee of his freyed black tracksuit pants lay a pathetic-looking piece of fried bacon. I could not see his chest moving so I went inside the cafe, from where this boy was in full view of several customers, and suggested that an ambulance be called. The cafe owner was dismissive: "he's just pissed, he's always there". It was only when I mentioned the colour of his hands that the owner went out and shook the boy -- whose body responded with a kind of floppy lifelessness.

Thankfully, an ambulance was called (if I'd had a mobile or if nothing was done by the cafe owner, I would have arranged for this myself). A MICA station wagon from the Royal Melbourne Hospital was flying up Swanston street within seconds. Relief.

This was a distressing experience for a whole heap of reasons, not least the fact that so many people seemed so content just to let this faceless black lump of humanity (can I say that?) occupy a highly-visible bus shelter corner without even raising the alarm. In fact, it seemed to me that two twenty-something men in the cafe who were sitting right in front of the boy were almost entertained by the spectacle! Certainly they didn't approve of my vocal and insistent calls for the cafe owner to deal with it.

Another day in the city, I suppose.

Kickin' dust (or daisies or footballs)

He Saw

Miraculously, my friend Adam has seen some strange animal behaviour too. Can it be that this sort of thing is actually happening all the time, everywhere around us, but we are just not seeing it because we can't make sense of it?

I wonder where Adam was, to have seen that many unsuited monkeys ... a zoo maybe, a university laboratory, a jungle, a bible transcription warehouse ... and is he obliged to report* this potentially harmful conglomeration of dreamy, yet defiant, primatial nakedness?

One last question: are these monkeys on AWA's? Judging by the tone of their employer, it sounds like if they're not now they will be soon, god save them.


I saw a hundred monkeys on typewriters today
And they weren’t wearing suits
Pointing out their nakedness I insisted
“Find yourselves some uniforms or else find yourselves new work!”
And the monkeys gave no hoots

Dreaming free-spirited hallucinations
Bred from their rebellious act
These nine-to-fivers made art, though their suits had not attended
“Off with you!” I screamed, ‘Before the CEO finds out!”

But the monkeys dreamed on, un-offended


* To Channel 9, say, or Opus Dei.

I Saw

I saw a sheep on a bike today
It wasn't wearing a coat
Pointing to its back I said
"you'll get muck on that"
And the sheep began to float

Buoyant, fleecy loftiness
Peddling its bike in the ether
The coat-free sheep ascended
"Come down" I cried "or you'll get a sniffle"

But the sheep's big grin was unbended

I saw a dog on a scooter today
It wasn't wearing a helmet
Pointing to its head I cried
"It'll smash like an egg"
And the dog began to melt

Draining, sticky liquid
Pawing down the roadside
The helmetless dog descended
"Get out" I shouted "or you'll stain people's shoes"

But the dog's tail's wagginess was unended

I saw two fish on a whipper snipper today
Neither was wearing boots
Pointing to their feet I said
"They'll get chopped up like meat"
And the fish began to sniggle

Snickering, snorting aquaticness
Falling all over themselves
The titilated fish somersaulted
"Stop that" I yelled "or you'll spread marine levity"

But the fishs' mirth was unaltered