Solidarity Starfish-style

STOP!

Splash Shield

Pods

An author's unacknowledged irony

Everybody's superior
To everybody
Til the tv celeb
Arrives

Ascendancy trades
Between floors
Between times
On one-way conveyances

Never down

But now
Clacking prams
And HIM

HIS people

Scrabbling to the rostrum
Low-heeled and gulping
Piped air
Confers all that HE
Intended

Vastness of place and
Order
The supremacy of Man

Something about the virute
Of humility

Satisfied?

The checkout attendant tightly scrunched the note she'd been handed then released it onto the counter.

There was a pause while she (and I) inspected the unsprung currency lying before us.

She lifted her eyes briefly to meet mine and then, satisfied?, completed the transaction.

Are you checking for counterfeits?

No, I don't know, the boss just tell me to.

But why? What are you checking for?

I don't know. If it's a hundred the boss ask.

Sorry, but what I mean is what is it you're aiming to find out by doing that?

I don't know.

But then there's no point in doing it, is there?, if you don't know what you're doing it for.

I know.

Bone Frame II

Bone Frame I

You can have all your power
If that's what you need;
I don't see the resemblances.

I've got all my power, yes,
Moulded in the melodrama of these
Miniature bedroom plasticines

'Your iconoclasm substitutes for
Orgasm,'
That is what you said.

And faithfully I was quoted
Out of pretext
Oh, let's just get our pants off!

Post-breakfast Footsteps

"I'm becoming a mug."
And so it seemed.
Each devotion, no matter how sweet,
Was ignored (like marmalade)
Or returned unreconstituted (like sour pulp).

"This silence is degrading."
And so it became.
My love, set forth for Infinity,
Rudely left unnamed in the echo
Of post-breakfast footsteps.

A Glass at Midnight

Time of the mongrel at my foot
Scraping for a coin that's born
In the carpet in a grave of hair.

Miles of the poles in the room's corners.
The eskimostars in an octagon. Worlds
Within this box.

I hold the cipher of the voided world,
Four fingers holding the sea in a glass,
Incumbent an arm on the ashtray table.

Time in the tughoot night stops
A religion that grows on the window.
I let the glass drop. A bridge falls.
Flatten the midnight on the fingered tightrope.
All the dumb days draw on.

Harold Pinter, 1951

Hand Tool

Kottke I

The virtuoso's Side One Suite

Inverts its name.
Such dexterity, such pluck
Easily assures this - and more;
It's almost a detraction.

Slightly German reflections

1. The flood myth: a mighty roe deer cull (with no evidence of surplus).

2. Decanting cant Kant can't turn your aunt into an ant (unless she's already an ant, in which case it's (debatably) fairly likely you are also an ant and so (arguably) incapable of decanting any variety of philosophy let alone that difficult metaphysical cross-stitch popular two centuries or so ago).

3. If it starts with "Mein" it's mine but if it ends with "Kampf" it's no one in particular's - and yet also everyone's, as SEEING through the mesmerising ORATORY of a man with well-groomed facial hair is a struggle (at the worst of times).

4. Your tuba is everything, it's how you find love, it's your airlift to the afterlife.

Look down

You're not going nowhere
Is not just.

A missatement.

You're past halfway
In this maelstrom.

What do you make of that?

South Melbourne Night (1962)

Source Unknown

A quote (from Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore):

Bennelong Point, where the Sydney Opera House now stands, was first named Limeburners' Point by the colonists because it was mantled in a deposit of mollusc shells, built up over thousands of years of uninterrupted gorging.

A footnote (from the same source):

Bennelong was an Iora tribesman, the first black to learn English, drink rum, wear clothes and eat the invaders' strange food. He was rewarded for his curiosity with the friendship of Governor Phillip - and a small brick hut, about 12 feet square, in which he lived on the end of what is now Bennelong Point. "Love and war," a colonial diarist noted, "were his favourite pursuits." He went to England with Phillip in 1792 and was much feted as an exotic Noble Savage, the first native Australian to be seen in London. But he lost most of his curiosity value after a year or two, and it was not until the end of 1795 that he returned to Sydney, with the newly appointed governor, John Hunter. By then he fitted neither his old tribal world nor the carceral microcosm of the whites, whose tolerance of the blacks had begun to disintegrate after Phillip's departure. Bennelong became increasingly sodden and pugnacious with rum, and died at the age of about 40 in 1813.

More detail (care of the Australian Electoral Commision's Origins of Electoral Division Names website):

Bennelong NSW Aboriginal man befriended by Governor Phillip in 1789.

An observation (source unknown):

Bennelong is our Prime Minister's electoral division.

The Human Donkey

The human donkey's snout tilts upwards,
Its dark occupant's eyes almost perceptibly moving
Beneath a square gauze chin patch,
Straining for prospective coin poppers or, at the least,
Some form of harbour-city husbandry.

But the passers-by, tired of seeing
So many such animals
Contorted and cut from their herd,
Veer and leer and bustle on to their next
Glitzy destination.

Look Up

(unless you're unable ...)

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