Elliptic Evening

Monomen

Same thing 'cept more mod(al)ity

Sideshow to and fro

They swivelled without squeaking
Until someone took to one with a bat
Then it was on coz I mean he really took to it
With popped-out eyes and hissing and blasphemy
Trying to knock its big bloody mouth off its face

And just as, beneath the festooned globes, a crowd started to gather,
In one crazy decompression, the bat lost its air
And the man dropped to the dirt sobbing and pleading
For rain

Mornings

Saw a man eating a meat pie like a sandwich.

Wondered what he'd make of Assertiveness at Work: A Practical Guide to Handling Awkward Situations.

Heard a man articulate the word "Ar-Chi-Bald" before stepping off the bus.

Thought as he passed he'd laugh at my face, being as it is so undistinguished in Art, Letters, Science or Politics. (He didn't even look at me.)

Expected Lina the loquacious fifteen dollar hairstylist.

Got Leon the taciturn fifteen dollar barber. (But still enjoyed an excellent haircut.)

Speculated about what a Ukrainian soldier might require hairstyle-wise.

Didn't get far beyond my reflection.

Imagined myself at a deli raising my palm to refuse ten cents change before realising that that was the same palm into which a freshly ground coffee bean had just been poured. (Further imagined that it cost me ten cents to replace it.)

Imagined standing on a street corner waving hello to an old woman I'd never met or seen before. Imagined that her back was to me as she plodded and swayed towards a launderette, dragging behind her a long trail of knotted-together bed sheets.

Mornings.

Rage on the Cosmic Carriageway

(Click to enlarge ...)

Rolling Night

Stone Sea II

Over There

Stone Sea I

One of these things

Scenes I ought to have drawn #2

A man wearing tight bicycle shorts is stooping over a copy of Duchamp's wheel at an American art gallery. His lips are turned slightly upward and he is squinting. Behind the man is a woman, also in tight bicycle shorts, who is waving her arms above her head and shouting, "don't panic, he's a black belt".

Gum nut

True Stories

I've just finished reading Inga Clendinnen's Boyer Lectures (1999) -- collected in a book titled True Stories. The lectures are about the role history plays in shaping a national story. About how 'bad history' is the product of false or sanitised narratives designed to serve specific political or cultural purposes. Clendinnen cites the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up in post-apartheid South Africa, as an agency through which 'good history' was learnt and recorded. She explains that the commission's chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu,

wanted the new state to begin not with no history, not with false history, but with a true history forged out of its divided but shared past. And it worked. Vengeance, reparation, even justice, turned out to be less important than knowledge. From now on, no one in South Africa can deny the past or falsify it. South Africans, black and white, have their true stories. Some will still cry for justice, but the worst of the agony has been assuaged and rendered unavailable for disreputable use by that extraordinary collective enterprise in good history.

Reading about -- being reminded of -- the atrocities and injustices enacted upon Australian Aborigines by white frontiermen, missionaries and politicians has strengthened my belief that it's time we, for the sake of our national healing and so that we can all move forward, set down, in the style of the TRC, a deep store of good public history related to the contact-zone (in particular) and the "colonial question" (more generally).

Let's have it out so that none of this Black Armband cynicism can continue to eat away at our shared past and future.

They're Behind You III

(With apologies to Will Oldham.)

They're Behind You II

They're Behind You I

Miro Rip Off

(Though I didn't know it at the time ...)

A poem by Philip Larkin

Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Sky Pebbles

Mary Time

Starry Corner

Progressive Greyness

RGB: (0,0,0)+(255,255,255)+(50n,50n,50n)


n=1

n=1,2

n=1,2,3

n=1,2,3,4

Psychotherapeutic amoeba (on night shift)

'phernalia flog

Greetings from the Pacific island nation of Unaustralia. We at the Department of Citizenship have a flag we don't want anymore (it's been over-loved). Please make a bid for it on ebay.

Also for sale are:

1. A light on the hill (replica, papier mache)

2. Baggy green caps (times 12, beer-stained)

3. Lingiari sand (one grain, bleached)

4. Barbecue stoppers (set of four, inlaid)

5. Bee Gees @ Anzac Cove DVD

6. Big Kev's heart (plastinated)

8. Sting ray barb acupuncture kit

9. Barcaldine tree fertilizer (30 litres, chemical composition unknown)

10. Seditious Donald Horne quote: "What should we call someone who believes the government is above the law, that opinion should be standardised, that majorities are born to rule, that minorities endanger social cohesion?"

Scenes I ought to have drawn #1

A man is lying semi-conscious in a hospital bed. He is hooked up to a big machine that has many flashing lights and many brightly coloured levers and buttons.

A large woman in a floral nighty is leaning over him.

Her neck is in a brace.

A document marked "Will" is poking out from her handbag.

With one hand she is firmly gripping the thickest wire connecting the man to the machine. With the other she is cupping her mouth.

She is shouting: "Three nods for 'YES', four nods for 'NO'".

A second man, in pyjamas and wearing a grey fedora marked "Witness", is standing in the corner.

No relation to Jimmy Hendrix

I spent $1.83 per minute last night checking out a staged version of Samuel Beckett's very brief Eh Joe (originally written in 1965 for television). And it was worth every cent.

While the sole physically-realised character, Joe, sat motionless (and speechless) on the side of his bed centre stage, he was talked to by a disembodied female voice located somewhere in the microphone-mediated ether. An image of his face -- projected onto a scrim in front of the playing area and filling almost the entire height of the proscenium -- captured every wincing, flinching, squeezing, swimmy-eyed moment of his respone to her monologue.

She reminded him of -- and at times seemed to reproach or even condemn him for -- the transgressions and breaches of faith that marred his life. Also of the fact that his end was nigh and that his religious convictions would soon be put to the test. She was once his lover ("Yes, great love God knows why") but in the end "found better".

The play ended with a tormenting description of the sea-side suicide of another of his conquests:

Gets the tablets and back down the garden and under the viaduct .... Takes a few on the way .... Unconscionable hour by now .... Moon going off the shore behind the hill .... Stands a bit looking at the beaten silver .... Then starts along the edge to a place further down near the Rock .... Imagine what in her mind to make her do that .... Imagine .... Trailing her feet in the water like a child .... Takes a few more on the way .... Will I go on, Joe? ... Eh Joe? ... Lies down in the end with her face a few feet from the tide .... Clawing at the shingle now .... Has it all worked out this time .... Finishes the tube .... There's love for you .... Eh Joe? .... Scoops a little cup for her face in the stones .... The green one .... The narrow one .... Always pale .... The pale eyes .... The look they shed before .... The way they opened after .... Spirit made light .... Wasn't that your description, Joe? ... All right .... You've had the best .... Now imagine .... Before she goes .... Face in the cup .... Lips on a stone .... Taking Joe with her .... Light gone .... 'Joe Joe' .... No sound .... To the stones ....

I still made a purchase

I was in JB Hi-Fi's city store yesterday morning looking for a T-Bone Walker cd and I figured that while I was there I'd see if Goran Bregovic had anything new. So I'm floating around the World Music section, not really knowing if I'm in the right place, when I spot a guy kneeling on the floor racking cds. He was the long-ponytail-and-goatee-sprouting-white-sports-socks-with-
black-dunlop-volleys type of dude. I said "excuse me, do you know where I might find Goran Bregovic's music". He looked up, blank-faced. "Gypsy music", I added. Then he stood and eyeballed me. "We don't listen to much 'gypsy music' here in Sydney, Australia". Forgetting to thank him for the geography lesson, I said, "oh, well you should". He tilted his chin and moved a little closer. "Yeah, why's that?" And this is where I really could have nailed him. I said, "because it's good".

I was wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat.

A poem by Judith Beveridge

This is a tender, soulful and perversely uplifting poem. I read it first in the trashy-sounding-but-really-good book 80 Great Poems From Chaucer to Now and was delighted by the simplicity of character it conveyed, the playful, colourfully-present humanity it captured and, well, just its sheer elegance and vividness. A little boy not thinking of dislocation or injustice or of how to improve or correct his life, just enjoying a stolen moment each day with his kite: "equivalent now only to himself, a last spoke within the denominations of light". Wow.

Bahadour

The sun stamps shadows against the wall
and he's left one wheel of his bicycle
spinning. It is dusk, there are a few minutes

before he will be pedalling his wares
through the streets again. But now, nothing
is more important than this kite working

its way into the wobbly winter sky.
For the time he can live at the summit
of his head without a ticket, he is following

the kite through pastures of snow where
his father calls into the mountains for him,
where his mother weeps his farewell into

the carriages of a five-day train. You can
see so many boys out on the rooftops this
time of day, surrendering diamonds to the

thin blue air, putting their arms up, neither
in answer nor apprehension, but because
the day tenders them these coupons of release.

He does not think about the failing light,
nor of how his legs must mint so many steel
suns from a bicycle's wheels each day,

nor of how his life must drop like a token
through its appropriate slot; not even
of erecting whatever angles would break

the deal that transacted away his childhood -
not even of taking some fairness back
to Nepal, but only of how he can find

purchase in whatever minutes of dusk are left
to raise a diamond, to claim some share of
hope, some acre of sky within a hard-fisted

budget; and of how happy he is, yielding;
his arms up, equivalent now only to himself,
a last spoke within the denominations of light.

Sharp-blade shoulder

Her hands widen over his back
Then stall, tighten.
Her neck, thinned with musk,
Pulls out,
Jolts, glides, then eases again
Into his sharp-blade shoulder.

The Mincing Amoeba

"Oh, so I'm not 'perfectly' round? Well EXCUUUUUUUUUSE me for, like, world war th-a-ree! I mean, what is this anyway, OBSESSIVE FREAK WEEK! HELLLLLLLLLO ... I'm, like, a primitive organism. I PRE-DATE roundness."

Sky Orchestra

Here's the preview in the Sydney Festival brochure:

Seven hot air balloons, each with speakers attached, take off at sunrise to fly across the West of the city creating a sky borne symphony. Each balloon plays a different element of the musical score to produce a massive audio performance that many hundreds of sleepy people experience subconsciously as the balloons fly over their homes.

I live in the West of Sydney and I can tell you, yes, yes, yes, inner peace in waves. That much is true ...

I was the sound artists' lab monkey, alone, fixed to a chair, bristling with wires, a big needle in my brain, holding a phone number but no phone due to budgetry limitations. (So minimal medical support.) I was nervous, trying to sleep, trying to drink camomile tea through a straw, trying not to get distracted and wreck the experiment by drifting into thoughts about the crossword and malt biscuits. But then ... could it be La Grange? Without the words, clearly, but oh the words, the words ... 'Well, I hear it's fine if you got the time / And the ten to get yourself in'.

Kirribilli Tragedy

Draft A

"I'm a flawed genius," said John, dabbing his eye with a hankie.

"Oh, I wouldn't go that far," said Janette, placing a hand on his shoulder. "I'd say you're just flawed".

Draft B

"I'm a flawed genius," said John, drying his eyes with an applique tea cosy.

"Oh, I wouldn't go that far," said Janette, tapping him smartly on the head three times before skipping through to the kitchen. "I'd say you're just flawed".

Draft C

"I'm a flawed genius," said John, plunging his face into a towel.

"Oh, I wouldn't go that far," said Janette, taking his banana puree from the microwave. "I'd say you're just flawed".

My little triangle

They have their place
To preen and talk

I have my little triangle
To feel the dark
And listen

Birds

The Drive Out

One of the houses has a
Terracotta roof

Another, then a cluster
Jagging the horizon
Like a saw

This is no temple I think
This is no holy ground

Yet my memory of the place
Is captive somehow
Somehow
Still-budding entanglements,
A brother, a son,
Hold out against concrete reminders
Of how things have changed

I straighten my gaze
And turn on the radio
I've lost the undulating patchwork
That used to brick and tile the drive out

But no harm for now
My bearings, or sadnesses,
Are reclaimed
I'm beetling north among the baked grass

My family's fringe

Penguins and Sharks

(Click to enlarge ...)

The Dream by Harmony Dashut

This image was given an honourable mention in The Everyman Photo Contest (2006).


(Click to enlarge ...)

I hope this man was swimming between the flags, else Harmony's vision would almost certainly be a nightmare.

Thumb-stained smile

when

one
thumb-stained smile

stilled

two
ink-filled eyes

three
o'clock mornings

were lost

and when

four
empty fridge trays

and

five
tv stations

left

six
fur-mouthed soup cans

for toast

seven
arm-chair movements

seven
anguished moments

seven
mobile phone calls

were cost

My submission to the Switkowski Review

... and the form letter of acknowledgement ...