The Long Play

In my teenage years in the 80's we had big, cumbersome storage devices.  The floppy discs I worked on as a typesetter were huge, but not as huge as the LPs we played on our turntables.  LPs were good; the cover art was big, lyrics were often supplied, so you could sing along as you sat, without computers, tablets and phones to distract you, and listened to an album in its entirety.  Sometimes it was hard to put the stylus on the record without scratching it, it was so small - especially if you just had to listen to a particular album after you'd been out drinking the two cans of UDL vodka and orange that got you drunk for the night. 

It wasn't too far past the 70's so apart from big storage devices we also had big pubic hair.  No one had yet told us that carrying our pubes around au naturale was a hideousness beyond belief, and so therefore when you looked at us side-on in our underwear, there were ever so slight bulges of soft and fluffy pubic hair.  Some of those pubes occasionally poked through your undies, if you ran your fingers over their outsides.   Pubes are horribly condemned.  They're just trying to protect us, after all.

But this is not about pubic hair.  This is about my record collection.   Or what's left of it.

I had more albums than this.  There were my Mum's old original Beatles albums, Please Please Me and Hard Day's Night.  There were others that were probably pretty good as well but I will never know because they have disappeared.  I like to presume they were stolen from the garage when I lived in Braybrook.  I don't want to cast nasturtiums on any one person, but my bias would like to say it was Dylan, who rented the house in front of the granny flat I rented at the back.

I tend to think it was Dylan because he was basically a bit of a prick, really.  When I moved out, broke as usual, and he still hadn't paid me the money he owed me for bills, he simply ignored my text messages asking, nay pleading, for the 300 bucks.  Some people are just quite simply arseholes with very little concern for other people.  Dylan indeed was one of them.  His girlfriend Jane drove around in a pink car with "Janey" numberplates and when I looked at them I saw future domestic violence written across her face.  I hope Jane has upgraded.

So yes, the missing albums.  I also can't find a large stack of singles I had.  Some of them were truly ghastly.  Others were daggy one-offs that I'm happy to lay claim to, like 5705 (but there's no reply!)  And who can go past the wonderful Ah! Leah! by the punctuation-loving Donnie Iris?  Never heard of it?  Well, where have you been?  Get onto this 3 minutes of pure pop/rock awesomeness with self-deprecating nerdy-wish-fulfillment right this second!  The bit at the end where he's sing-screaming to Leah makes all the chest feels go all chest feely for me, just like it did all the way through the 80's.

The singles could possibly be around somewhere because my organisational capacities are malformed, and with my drastic energy levels are quite chaotic.  I just got my 2009 tax return done three months ago.  It's possible also that I have some cassettes lying around, although surely not by now?  Surely, the once-a-decade clean-up that happened in the 2000s took care of the cassettes?  I would have seen them, known it was time, and felt horribly guilty throwing them in the rubbish bin.  I hate living in a world where we produce so much shit!  My cassettes are probably making up part of that giant plastic island that lives in the Specific Ocean.

I do have some cassettes still though.  They are from the time in the early 90's when I was penpalling a guy in Arizona State Prison from my rental house in Noble Park who had put an advert in one of the music mags.  He used to whisper quietly into his tape deck's microphone.  Occasionally I would hear an iron door close in the distance.  He paused the recording a lot.  He drew a picture of me once.  He used to say, "Mercy, girl," and in the end it kind of creeped me out a bit because it just felt ... I don't know, like suddenly it was a commitment to be writing to this guy.  One day I just never wrote back.

I'm sure he was a lovely guy in his way, even despite the fact that the internet shows me that he is still in jail, after being released for some time.  One day I will bring myself to listen to those cassettes, there luckily being several cassette decks lying around these here parts.  But I'm having to build up to listening to them.  I feel like listening to them will make me feel squishy, embarrassed. I don't really know why.  I wish I would hurry up and have built up to listen, because those tapes are going to be like a time capsule from 20 years ago.  I really only want to listen to them to hear what James from Arizona feeds back to me about what Sue from Noble Park was doing and thinking at that particular point in time.

So that photo above is all there is to hand of the pre-digital music that made up my teenage years in the 80's - if you don't count the videos.  VHS video tapes came in somewhere around 1987.  I still have a few of those lying around as well.  I don't really know why.  I suspect I had this idea of transferring the music clips I taped off the TV onto something more digital, little knowing that YouTube most likely has got there first.  Or has it?  I mean, what are the chances that YouTube is going to have something obscure that I might find on those tapes if I looked that I would be horrified at the thought of losing again, after our enforced separation through chancing mediums for 30 years?  Surely coming across an old, well-loved musical treasure that you'd forgotten clean about is ... oh, I don't know, it's like the ultimate in musical spirituality.  That kinda reclamation can transport me for days.

So these albums.  This small little Dylan-depleted bunch of stuff that, quite frankly, is hardly representational of the music I loved, and the music I would grow to love in the future.  I mean, I was a teenage girl, right?  Some of it will be actually quite embarrassing.  And it's for that reason that it is going to be a pleasure to trawl through them, one after the other, as little possibly feet-curling memory portals back to a time when my hair was as huge as my pubes, climate change wasn't a conscious thing, and I would have been disturbed to discover that as emotionally wrangled as I was then, I would still continue to be so when more collagen-depleted, writing an excessively long sentence to end a blog post on a medium that I knew absolutely nothing of.

Stay tuned.

On Being the Train Audience and the Studio Audience

The train is about to take off from Belgrave station and my bag bulges on the seat beside me.  If I was a baby, my mum would be accompanied by a hefty haversack full of nappies, wipes, a bib, a change of clothes, and whatever else is contained in nappy bags.  There are an astounding number of things that babies may need in a several-hour outing.  I'm unfortunately no different.  My burgeoning bag contains health-related d-ribose, progesterone cream, and coenzymated vitamin b6.  It also has a book, a 48 page green exercise book, various pens, a phone, tampons (grown-up nappies of a different variety) and a lot of crud on the bottom of a bag which hasn't been cleaned out in ages.

Girls from Mater Christi College, our local private Catholic school, are on the train too.  Two sit down across from me, and one begins to tell the other about some of the classes she had in school today - Maths, French, Orange House assembly and RE (Religious Education).  I wonder what RE looks like at Mater Christi.  Is it cutting edge and political, so that they get a glimpse of, say, a man overturning tables of people who are fucking around with charging interest on their money loans?  Or what about the version of Christianity that appears to emanate from the writings of Origen, in which a belief in reincarnation appears so commonly-held it's not even spelled out?  (At least I guess Catholicism had the decency to come up with a purgatory sandwiched in-between the eternal heaven and eternal hell, where you could work off your accrued karma until you're shiny enough for God to bear to look at you.  But that fear of never quite knowing if you've scored a one-way ticket to eternal hellfire is a wonderful touch when it comes to the minions.  Keeps them in line).

Do Mater Christi girls feel superior to the public school kids?  I would imagine so.  There's an inbuilt superiority/inferiority thing that automatically accrues when you spend more of our society's value symbol on one thing than another, so they must, even if it's unconscious.

A little way down the line, a massive amount of schoolkids get on at Upwey from the local high school, a rather cool-looking art deco brick building up on Burwood Highway that once housed Red Symons and then once housed Wendy Harmer.  One of the boys from Upwey High is yelling several times for Cassidy, but Cassidy, alas, does not appear.

An Upwey High girl in front of me is looking at her phone.  Her and her friend both have freshly brushed, long hair and a decent whack of makeup.  The phone shows what has the feel of a hastily snapped shot, of two boys in the schoolyard.  The way she's looking at it, pensively, cheek-chewing, I reckon she'll be looking at it a few more times this evening.

If Andrea and I had had phones and computers when we were teenagers, we would have filled up our hard drives with gigabytes of photos of Pas on hers, and Dale Cassar on mine.  I would have been quite happy to see the next round of photos Andrea had snapped that week, of Pas playing basketball, of Pas outside the maths room, of Pas saying hello as he walked past.  Pas looked like Stewart Copeland, which was pretty cool, seeing Andrea was in love with him too.  Plus, his name was Stuart too, so double bonus.  Andrea managed her love of Stewart Copeland and her love of Stuart Passingham quite well, I thought.

I apparently enjoyed being in love exclusively with unattainable people.  I was in Year 7, while Dale was in Year 11.  There is nothing now to remember him by except a few grainy memories of yearbook photos where he'd dressed up in makeup for a school play.  Dale left school at the end of that year, and I was mortified until I found Marc Ward to unattainably love the following year.  I would have filled another hard drive taking photos of Marc zooming out of school at lunchtime in his Holden Gemini, of Marc in his fluffy pink jumper, of Marc outside the maths room.  Marc's girlfriend, Suzie Szabo, was in the same year level as him.  I despised her with a warm fear and a cold despising that probably would have required a couple of photos of their own.

Marc was in Year 12.  I was in Year 8.  I liked my unattainable boys a little bit older.  That same year I would also full unattainably in love with Brian Mannix, the lead singer from Uncanny X-Men, for whom I would almost die running across Kings Way in order to reach as he got out of a taxi to go speak on 3XY.  It's not pretty, folks.  It's not pretty.  Several years after that, Andrea and I would go to see the X-Men play at The Village Green.  Andrea would ask for a kiss outside, and Brian would comply.  He would then say that it was the most amazing kiss he'd ever had.  Not that I'm chafing about that or anything.

It's so weird looking at these girls on the train with their phone and thinking about how different things were for us.  Yes, it's a common refrain held to by every generation that everything has changed, changed, changed (which is maybe more about time and memory and changes in ourselves than anything outside of ourselves).  But I think there's some validity in us reeling a little from all of the changes our lives have gone through.  It has been really different for each of the last three or four generations.  It's no wonder our heads spin so that we feel disorientated and need to go lie down and watch seven episodes in a row of Game of Thrones.

Things have changed in the ways teenagers interact.  It's so much more secondhand now.  Andrea and I would have been able to know way more about Pas and Dale and Marc than we could possibly have known back then, even with Marc's brother Carl to query.  We would have all known way more about each other.  And I wonder too if we would have known way less, maybe, in other ways.

Did we all look each other in the eye more back then?  Maybe.  We're definitely more in our own bubbles these days.  I miss the common sense of wider world community that was stronger when I was young.  Still, despite that yearning for the security of something shared, that doesn't mean that it didn't used to hurt to look people in the eye, with the shame I dragged around so intense at times, like a curtain.  It wasn't just the harsh paranoia that came from having an ever so slightly turned eye that people generally didn't notice unless I was drunk.  Looking people in the eye is such an intimate act.  I do understand the poetry of the eyes being the windows to the soul.  Sometimes it feels to me that with the onset of our awesome technology, we spend so much more time with our own eyes plastered to various screens, that looking at each other has grown scary by comparison.  Eek!  This thing I'm looking at ... is alive, and looking back at me!  Not in a box that I can switch off or delete!  This feels weird, man!  I wonder - has looking at each other become more like an invasion?

There are so many more ways to be alone while we're together now.  As a self-conscious, shame-struck teenager, I imagine that would have been better, that would have been worse.  But still, imagine, feeling like your friends were always in your pocket.  Friendships as teenagers are the best.  You need each other in a way you won't again.  Not like that.

The freshly-brushed pensive girl and her friend have got off, and another girl has sat in front of me now.  She has just sprayed a floral scent from her bag.  It's quite nice, actually, but it still causes my central nervous system to launch a weak panic stations alert that some incoming foreign body may possibly be trying to kill me.  I ignore this limbic panic, try to distract it like a child by noting how the high notes of the girl's fragrance don't screech like death metal in my nose the way a visit to the $2 shop would.

There are so many different schools on this train now.  But the uniforms are kind of all the same.  One girl wears dark and light purple and white check.  I would have been stoked to have that for Bentleigh High.  There are so many students that I wonder - are more of them catching trains to school now?  It felt like when I was at high school you went to one of the ones you were zoned to and that was it.  Are parents, in the quest to get their kids ahead, chucking their kids on trains so they can do the program that fits best?  Maybe.  I guess maybe some of these kids are on the way to their other parent's house.  It's all so scattered. And yet from what I can see, school curriculums are way more interesting than the dry, dusty crap served up to me in my high school years.

I talked to my mum about this.  She said she couldn't remember anyone from her high school catching the train, that everyone who accompanied her to classes in the late 50's and early 60's walked or rode.  There's something nice and nostalgic about that idea, that the friends you make at your school share the same space as you.

The David Jonecs ad on the platform at Box Hill has an Asian woman in a matching fuschia bra and undies set that would have earned her grandparents a pittance to make and mine much more to earn wheeling and dealing to get the lowest prices, the lowest prices, the lowest prices, which would then be marked up 400% or more to sell to us in the glorious land of globalisation.

I saw a woman on another train once, years ago, while I was on the way to work as an apprentice, vomit into the cardigan held on her lap.  She got out at the next stop.  As you would.

I get out at Richmond Station and catch the Sandringham train.  I have never been on this line before and it feels like people are doing quite well on it.  There are two men in business attire, separated by a sheet of perspex.   Both are wearing checked shirts on white backgrounds, with minor variations.  Are these shirts like the business version of school uniforms?  What's it with checks?  Do checks convey a sense of purposiveness, of industry, of concentration?

There are two separate phone conversations going on in this train carriage.  Both are about real estate, selling and renovating respectively.  There could possibly be three, but she's speaking Greek so I don't know, my Greek extending to kalimera, kalispera, kalinichta and baklava.  People on this line clean their shoes.  The woman next to me is wearing black and white leopard skin shoes and is reading the free train newspaper, MX, which once published an essay of mine that was a variation of this post here.  And so despite the fact that my shoes are ancient, I feel somewhat validated, until the the woman behind me says on her phone call that she is spending 5.5 grand on a mechanical door.  This once again makes me feel invalidated again until I realise that it's not her personal door, that organising the construction and installation of this door is a part of her job.

I do not like this relentless comparison.  It is particularly limiting.

The other woman has finished talking about her house that is up for sale and is now telling Kerry about how her husband is away at the moment and so life is fantastic.  Apparently they will take photos on the Tuesday.  Will that be enough time, given the opening is on the 7th?  It all sounds so important.  Important enough that those of us not wearing earbuds must be subjected to it.  But they're probably photos of, like, taps.  Or boxes of tampons.  Items for the next Aldi catalogue.

Although that doesn't really fit in with the opening, does it?  Still, never mind.  Thinking of this woman organising photos of something banal makes me feel better.  And really, the fact that I even bother going there with this stupid comparison, that makes me feel worse.

I reach Elsternwick, and here I alight to the ABC studios.  Anth is here to meet me.  We are being The Studio Audience this evening for the first episode of the new season of Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell.  As we enter into the studio, one of the people working there tells me this is exactly the same studio that the musical staple of my childhood, Countdown, was filmed in all those years ago.  I find it patently absurd that I never once went to a Countdown filming.  Brian Mannix was on it often enough, and Elsternwick was closer to where I lived than Richmond was, where we did go several times to see Blankety Blanks tapings.  It's an anomaly, a strangeness, a big chunk missing, something that should have happened in my teenage years but quite incomprehensibly didn't.

But I'm here now instead, at 44, and Shaun Micallef is a much more appropriate replacement, and a bit of a GILFIIHAL (GILF If I Had A Libido), and it's fun, but exhausting, to look at the making of a TV show.  It is tiring, being the ones responsible for laughing.   It is terrifying being the focus of the camera while an introductory skit is being filmed.  The camera, with it's enormous eye, pans from where it's pointed in our direction, where we have been asked to laugh, over to Mr Micallef, who makes some joke that I can't now remember because I was too fucking terrified having to juggle having a camera pointed at me and being required to laugh at the same time.

They didn't end up using the footage.  I was both relieved and disappointed in equal measure :)

But before I am allowed into the studio I must open my bag for inspection, the one bulging not with a gun but with progesterone and pens and b6 and so many wrappers, and old bits of cruddy paper that have been in there so long that they are caked with the unidentifiable crumbs that line the bottom of my bag.  It is terribly embarrassing.  And then some things fall out, and of course one of those things is a tampon.

I guess that's one thing that's changed from when I was a teenager.  I wouldn't have given a shit about how messy the bag was, but I would have been chastened, horrified, by the tampon.  Now, I don't much care that the man inspecting my bag knew for a fact that I insert wrapped cotton into my vagina.  But I did feel rather chastened that he also knows I'm a massive slob.

Dear Dear Enemy

Dear Dear Enemy,

Firstly, sorry about the double "dear" thing.  It's perhaps a bit confusing.  But this is one of a group of posts I have on here called Dear ... which are addressed to different musicians about different song lyrics, and so while it is a little clunky having "Dear Dear Enemy" it's sort of cool at the same time.

Because I like your weird name, Dear Enemy.  I don't know what it means but it sounds nice and kind and compassionate, and I'm quite fond of those sorts of things.

Just like I'm fond of your song Computer One.  International visitors probably won't know this song because I don't think it charted out of its native Australia in 1983 (they can see the bottom of this post for the YouTube clip, if they so desire.  What's a post, you ask from 1983.  What's a YouTube clip? You'll just have to wait and see, Dear Enemies).

I loved this song in 1983 and I love it now 31 years later, in 2014.  I even bought the album Ransom Note.  It was one of the albums I bought from that mail order music club whose name escapes me.  I remember the LPs coming in the mail - geez, giant things they were.  We had enormous storage mediums in the 1970's and 1980's.  They matched our enormous computer systems and our enormous pubic hair.  I remember when I first started working we stored our stuff on these bloody disks that were so big you had to almost hold them with both hands to slot them into the computer.  They stored a whopping one megabyte of data on them.

Anyway, where was I?  Yes, that's right.  I was complimenting you on your song Computer One.  I still love it. I still love so many songs from 1983.  I gotta say though, dudes, it sounds a bit dated - from the lyrics though, rather than the music.

The film clip features a modern, streamlined and rather steel-encrusted beginning, all cool blues and greys, signifying a brave new world of impersonality.  Hmm, guys, I don't want to scare you or anything, but it gets just a tad more impersonal after 1983. I guess the popularity of computers might have something to do with that, I hate to say.  Though I love them, they do seem to have taken over just a smidge.  Whereas in 1983, you, Ron Martini, are at work because none of us have computers at home yet, and because your work is some sort of top secret operation hidden behind steel doors.  Your workspace is surrounded by banks of computer-ish looking thingymies ... and a photocopier!  Dude, where on earth do you work?  I didn't think photocopiers were around in 1983?  And if they were, I'm pretty sure a toner cartridge cost, like, $983 each and you copying pictures of your girlfriend who has left you probably wouldn't have gone down all that well.

Oh, hang on.  Is it a printer?  It looks like a photocopier but I actually think it's a printer.  Sorry.  I don't mean to come across all laughy and sneery at your technology.  I hate that whole technological disdain thing.  It's why we have giant piles of ewaste because we're too easily beholden to the latest version that's really not all that much more awesome.  But looking at your printer, I see how amazingly far we've come.  You can print photo quality now, at home, in colour, for a fraction of the price, Dear Enemy.  So I'm sorry to laugh, but it just gets a bit better.

I'm very sorry your girlfriend left you.  You seem like a lovely bloke with a beautiful singing voice and you're a bit of a spunk too. 

I feel a great nostalgia for the colour of that green that is the text on your computer.  Green on a black background.  Ohhh, you have no idea how much better those computer screens are going to get.  Which might be a problem for you because I sort of get the feeling that Computer One has been the cause of your breakup.  It has come between you and your girlfriend.  And now she has gone with her suitcase of clothes.

:(

I like how you talk to your computer as if it's real.  You say, "Computer One, if you know all you say you do, why isn't the answer on the screen?  Do you sleep at night, when the program's through, or do you lie awake at night like me?" 

I'm really interested in knowing what program it is that Computer One is running through. Is it something governmental?  You just wait - a couple of decades down the track you will be amazed at what happens in terms of computers and top secret information.  The internet, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden - the internet will be a force for social change, just you wait and see.  What's the internet?  It's a collection of computers all joined together that can talk to each other!  I imagine you have something like that in your top secret governmental office, yeah?  Well, it goes mainstream, baby.  And then people like Assange hack into computers of big governments and tell the rest of us how they are spying on us and what bastards humans are when they're in power.  And people will take to the streets because we're all just fucking sick and tired of the way these top level people behave, and people will have these sort of hand-held computers that they can take photos on while they're out and about and send them to the internet.  This is a pretty cool force for democracy, but it gets messier before it gets better.  You'll see.

Plus, the hand-held computers are also phones.  You don't need a house phone anymore that's connected to a cable.  You can talk to someone across the world if you want, from your mobile phone.  They're wonderful.  Perhaps if you and your girlfriend had email and SMS it might have kept you together.  I can't be bothered explaining what those are.  But, as I'm sure you're starting to pick up, computers and mobile phones are a bit of a blight as well as being wonderful.  They've made us even more distrustful of each other in some ways.  Our public social skills, Dear Enemy, have decimated a little since 1983.  But I guess you're probably aware of the theme beginning to occur here about technology being awesome and having unforseen nasty underbites.

I think it's really sort of sweet that you are concerned about Computer One's psychological health.  You really love that computer, even though you can't look at any porn on it.  You probably can't play any game on it either, other than the types that I played in Grade Six at school the year before, called Worms I think, with that same green on blackness that was just different types of lines.  I thought it was so awesome!  Worms involved moving the cursor around which grew and grew as you went like a rampaging worm, and the object was for the worm not to touch any part of itself or the game was over.

That was cutting edge stuff that was exciting to me, even though it is very easy to laugh about it now.

There are a few things I wish to know, Dear Enemy, that have me curious.  The questions come into my head on occasions - like in the Aldi car park a few weeks ago, and now every time I think of Computer One the Aldi car park comes into my head.  We're weird creatures, are we not? But what I'm curious about is where Ron Martini says, "Computer One, you are the one I've been talking to.  Maybe that's where I went wrong.  All the secrets that I told to you I should have told to her all along."

I don't understand this bit - why are you telling your secrets to Computer One in the first place?  Do you mean you're writing a diary on it?  In work time, again?  Because I'm pretty sure there weren't any BBSs or anything like back then for you to be talking to anyone else on, and, well, Computer One doesn't really seem like it would have a program that would give you the impression that it's listening and cares about you.  It seems pretty limited.  If you are writing a diary that happens to be situated on Computer One, you can't really blame the computer that once you've written it out to yourself you didn't then go and talk to your girlfriend about it. I mean, if you were writing a diary in a paper notebook, the same thing could happen.  But then I guess if that was the case you'd be writing a song called Notebook 78.  And that would probably be a bit more naff than this techno-groovy 1983ness.

And I'm interested also in knowing why it's called Computer One.  I mean, is it the first computer in the country, or in your office, or what?

If any members of Dear Enemy would like to leave a comment I would really appreciate it.

Dear Enemy, you foresaw the alienation that computerisation could bring.  You don't know the extent of it.  And yet ~ ending this long post on a note of sunniness and cheeriness ~ it's also done amazing things.  I think, in the end, computerisation is a balancing force for democracy.  People could not uprise in quite the way they do now without it.  We just have to learn how to manage it all a bit more so it doesn't get quite so much in the way of our relating with each other face to face.

But I think you know enough about that.

Dear Jim Diamond

Dear Jim Diamond,

Your song I Should Have Known Better was a hit in 1985, when I was 14 and my passion for Brian Mannix, lead singer of local Melbourne band Uncanny X-Men, was burning bright.  That's why when I think of that song, the memory always comes in with him saying at the film clip's end, "So sad, isn't it?" presumably on one of the many nights he hosted the weekly music show Countdown (an Aussie institution).

It comes into my head sometimes, this song, and Brian's comment.  I don't know why.  I need neither of them, to be honest with you, but they stay nonetheless, relentlessly stained into the groove of my teenage years.

And so I found your song again in my head before, in the strange way of earworms.  A spin of a word sometimes is all it takes - I feel sad, I say the word "sad" in my head, and then before I know it my brain's flung open my head's filing cabinet and taken out the file marked "sad" and out spills Jim and Brian together.  I would like to refill the file with things that do not lead to annoying earworms, but I'm not quite sure how to do that yet.  It requires defragmenting abilities that I am able to do on my computer, but not yet in my brain.

I am feeling sad today, Jim, because Saffron Cottage in Tecoma is being demolished to make way for a McDonald's that many here do not want.  It has been an ongoing fight, which is not over, and will not be over, because this relentless march of expanding capitalism/corporatism/economics is a childish concept that, once you examine it, turns out to be something bordering on insane.  But I digress.

I do not wish to launch into discussions about economics.  Instead, I wish to take issue with one of the lines in your lyrics, if I may.

Your song is all about how awful you feel because you shagged some chick at the pub one night after a few too many Jimmies, and now you are remorseful because your relationship broke up as a result.  You wish for forgiveness.  Because as you say, you've never loved no one as much as her.  And you should have known better to lie to one as beautiful as her.  But surely ugly chicks don't deserve to be lied to either.  Which leads me to a question:  years later, after the wounds have healed from your relationship breakup, would you say in hindsight that it was only because she was beautiful that you felt awful lying to her?  You should have known better to lie to one as beautiful as her.  If she looked like Hatchetface, would you have felt bad for lying and betraying her confidence, or would that have been not as bad?  Were you feeling bad because you fucked up and now the beautiful girlfriend you punched above your weight to have (let's be honest, one plain person to another) dumped you on your bum?  Did she take you back?  I hope so, if that was the right thing for you both.  But if not, I hope the wounds have healed via the love of another woman, and that you resisted the urge to shag people-not-her.

It was rather poignant, your recounting of you seeing her walking by the other day, and knowing that she saw you but she turned away.  You were lost.  That is very sad.  But it brings me to the real thing that I take umbrage about in your song, your ode, your plea, Jim (may I call you Jim?)  And it's this.  You say:

You see, I've never loved no one as much as you
I fooled around, but tell me now
Just who is hurting who?

This is the bit I don't understand.  It seems obvious that your relationship was a conventional monogamous one. I could understand your confusion if you were in an open relationship, but it seems from your ex-girlfriend's response that you, my dear, went over a line that was unacceptable to go over.  And you broke something that was beautiful.  You broke her trust.

And so I ask you this:  why did you project your stuff onto her, Jim?  Tell me now just who is hurting who?  Why is she hurting you - because she broke up with you, because she turned away?  You know why she turned away?  Because you hurt her.  Her reaction, breaking up with you and then not speaking to you when she runs into you outside the supermarket, is not her hurting you.  It is the result of your actions, porking said chick in said pub. 

I hope that in the intervening years, if she didn't take you back, that you can at least concede that one. 

Yours sincerely,
Susie

Sugar Cubes and Lemons

So this, right:

For the sake of the populace, this song should carry a warning for your pancreas.  Like a truckload of cane sugar dumped right down your gullet and into your Diabetes Startup Centre, it is cloyingly sweet.  Even - dare I say it and risk the wrath of the females who adore these sorts of songs - evil.  Like aspartame.

I guess that makes me a not-girly-girl.  I just simply can't help it.  This sort of song to me is fluffery and frou frou and it has always madeth my toes to curl under.

I honestly didn't think this song could get any worse, ever.  That's until I saw a Family Guy episode a few nights ago.  Ever since then, Chris and that horrid pervert man singing it duet have been crowding my head in true earworm fashion and disturbing my peace.  I didn't think that song could ever get any worse.  But then it did.

I cannot insert the Family Guy video directly into this post because it makes me feel ill.  I have a love/hate relationship with that show.  When I'm feeling cold and fragile, it feels even more evil than Both for Each Other (Friends & Lovers).  And that's saying a lot, right?

And yet, on other days, when the beauty of life surrounds me and my body's current health level has climbed me a couple of flights up the stairwell, Family Guy can be damn funny.  Sure, it's acerbic and sorta (dare I say it?) male in its humour.  It regularly goes way overboard, far past the horizon of the bounds of convention.  But that's what it's there for, right?  That's the fun of it.  I get that.  Even though my getting is sometimes in small doses, and some days I could throw a brick through the TV when it feels nasty.  (But then really, everything feels nasty on those days and where I really need to be is in bed, or in the bathroom with a hose full of coffee enema up my bum.  But I guess you really didn't want to know that, right?)

Humour and music are both personal and come in lots of shapes and sizes, and have enough flavours to suit everyone's taste.  For some, what they do not like feels evil.  But most of the time it's not.  It's just not your bag.

But for me, if I have to choose, I would have to take Family Guy acidity over Both For Each Other AOR saccharine schmaltz.   The former is maybe not as officially sanctioned as the latter.  You're never going to be subjected to Family Guy-type humour at a public event as much as you will be harassed by Both For Each Other ear-torment.  Because it's romantic, right?

I don't see anything romantic about it at all.  If I had a choice, I would rather watch the entire history of Family Guy one episode after the other than listen to that song even once.

And even though that Family Guy clip seems so wrong in one way, it's one of the strange convolutions of life that this song in its wrongness feels more right to me than the original song in its horrid, sickening awful schmaltzyness.  Designed to appeal straight to the wallet of meringued-up brides, schmaltz is the unthinking woman's romance.  Straight from the bowels of the third ring of hell, there's very little about it that is romantic, as far as I'm concerned.

Speak to me reams of poetry, and I'll swoon.  I do have a romantic side.  But I do not wish to mistake schmaltz for romance.  In my heart, they are two rather different beats.

Sugar cube pic by Uwe Hermann under CC 2.5 licence (attribution and share-alike)

Earwormery

Earworms - they're those frequently irritating songs that get stuck in your head and won't leave.  Almost always daggy, and songs which I barely know so that it's often just the same bit going on and on in my head.  I suffer from this malady a lot. 

It's been said that the only way to dislodge an earworm is to consciously replace it with another song, and I believe that that is so.  666 Radio Susie's methods of dislodgment however tend to be to offer up an alternative which then becomes the next earworm. 

Because I am generous, and because you may have well forgotten this beautiful gem of a song, which was a  hit in the year that I was five going on six and the Dunder Cheep was my friend, I offer you the beautiful Una Paloma Blanco (White Dove).  I'm sure it was on high rotation on 3MP. 

Unchained Melody

This piece originally appeared in the inaugural issue of Tincture Journal :)



"Physicists tell us that the solidity of matter is an illusion. Even seemingly solid matter, including your physical body, is nearly 100 percent empty space – so vast are the distances between the atoms compared to their size. What is more, even inside every atom there is mostly empty space. What is left is more like a vibrational frequency than particles of solid matter, more like a musical note." – Eckhardt Tolle

In 1976, I was five. The Australian music institution Countdown had been running for two years every Sunday night at 6pm on the ABC. It was hosted by a passionate Molly Meldrum, with his enthusiastic recommendations to “do yourself a favour” and get onto the latest Supernaut or David Bowie offering. Once a fortnight we would visit Grandma and Grandpa’s place, and us kids would sit in front of the telly and indulge in a 70’s feast of rotating disco balls and men in satin shirts open to their waists. In stark contrast to the glitter that was fluffing up much of that year, AC/DC released “Dirty Deeds (Done Dirt Cheap)”. It’s a song about a hitman offering his services to a variety of people who could use his help – a teenage girl being forced to sleep with her high school principal, someone whose boyfriend is double dealin’ with her best friend, and a browbeaten bloke whose nagging wife is driving him nuts. A bargain-priced solution could be arranged using several different methods – concrete shoes, cyanide, and TNT amongst them.

Not for me. I was waking in fright in my bed at night and lying there crying, “Mummmmy, Mummmmy,” softly, softly, so no one else would hear except her, embarrassed already for my need, until she came and climbed into bed with me. Then, the depths of the dark night retreated, along with the monsters that peeped through the chink in the blind. I didn’t know anything about hitmen. For me, that song was about two characters – Dirty Deeds and the Dunder Cheep. Dirty Deeds looked something like Mario or Luigi from Mario Brothers. But he wasn’t the important one. He was only the sidekick to the real star of the show, the Dunder Cheep, who was a giant baby chicken.

That was the song I loved, and the memory of that causes a jolt of pure, unadulterated, bittersweet what-it-felt-to-be-fiveness to flood over me. The same way it feels when you hear again a song you once loved but have completely forgotten. When I was 25 I recorded Counting Crows’ “Recovering the Satellites” from my brother’s vinyl LP onto cassette. If I hadn’t lived through the technological changes of the past 30 years I would find it hard to believe that cassette recording occurred less than 20 years ago; I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t been there myself. Somewhere in-between then and the advent of CDs I lost that cassette, and forgot all about that album.

Twelve years later I bought that Counting Crows album again, one of a bulk lot of someone’s CDs they were getting rid of on eBay in favour of digitising their collection. Listening to those songs for the first time in 12 years, all of the lyrics of Angel of the Silences were coming back to me a split second before Adam Duritz wailed them out of the speakers and I loved that album twice as much as I had before, it grown more precious from the forgetting.

~ * ~

Last year I watched Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Universe twice. As quickly as he fed the second law of thermodynamics and string theory into my wondering and awe-inspired brain, just as quickly it flooded out again. I don’t think I will ever be able to explain physics; but I feel like maybe I could dance it. If no one was watching.

As is the irritating way of such things, when I was in high school I couldn’t have given a shit about science. I was more interested in being in love with unattainable people. In 1985 I cried myself to sleep more nights than I can remember yearning for a Brian Mannix I could never have. Of course, the fact that I could never have him provided the safety net to pour out all of my grief, my angst, my yearning into my pillow every night. If I could have had him, I would not have known what to do with him.

I traversed the suburbs of Melbourne following after Uncanny X-Men. I went underage to over-18s gigs; I saw them at the Nunawading Skate Ranch, at the Myer Music Bowl, at Festival Hall, where I once had to be taken, hysterical, out to the St John’s Ambulance, so overcome was I for my beloved. My cousin Andrea and I caught the train to Oak Park and walked the streets to the house where Brian still lived with his parents. “Brian is in Adelaide,” a sign said in the front window. I took leaves from his tree and some molting fur from his dog, for keepsakes.

The obsession with the lead singer aside, there was something about early Uncanny X-Men music that appealed to me. They wrote surfing parodies that made allusions to vibrators. They were politically incorrect. Before they were a squealy teenie band they were an irreverent pub band, a bunch of young guys from Melbourne. Before Brian was in the X-Men he worked in a tap factory. That was amazing to me. They were just normal blokes. And they were making music.

I was a suburban girl through and through and my musical tastes reflected that. I had fear running through my veins. There were so many bands going around then that would appeal so much more to me now – The Pixies, The Smiths, Cocteau Twins – that I had never heard of, or who flew over or under my radar. My brother was a relentless player of The Cure, but it was like they vibrated on a level too scary for me to contemplate at that time. The Sex Pistols were another story, but then they were safe by virtue of their distance in a way that, say, Nick Cave was not. That sort of music was too dark; far too close to my own barely understood feelings to contemplate.

I was now a teenager, and life had taken me light years away from the buffer of the innocence that had fostered the Dunder Cheep. I was screaming for a new story, to know where I fit into the new world. But there were no initiation rites, apart from the clumsy alcoholic ones we invented ourselves, and no songlines to map out the concrete earth I was living on.

~ * ~

I was that most irritating of high school students – the smart girl throwing away her education. I would go to school having not done my homework and give lip to my teachers, only to go to the library after school and borrow great swathes of books. I felt traumatised and tiny on the inside; the outside was all fear masked as cool rebellion, mistrust and sneering contempt. Some of that contempt was well-founded, when I consider the way science and history were presented to us. My high school had the stupendous ability to juice subjects and only hand us the skin. The facts without the narrative. Teenagers are blind to plenty of things. On the other hand, some things are more 20/20 then than they’ll ever be again: why do adults do the things they do – or don’t do the things that they should? Why is beauty so lacking, and why does everything feel so dense and stultifying and boring? Is this really the best we can do? I hadn’t come across Rousseau at 15, but his famous dictum that “Man [sic] is born free, but he is everywhere in chains” would have resonated. Not that I would have been able to articulate it.

Perhaps I would have been better off trying to dance my angst, instead. But I couldn’t dance without fiery self-consciousness. Not like the other girls I would go to the Bluelight disco with, and join them to dance in a circle with our handbags in the middle. For some it was fun, but dancing was excruciating for me. I didn’t even know I secretly yearned to do it – and other things like drama and music. Those things were for people who weren’t genetic mutations. I wasn’t free to dance; my feet felt frozen to the floor.

When a river gets a blockage upstream, everything congeals, and what is meant to flow becomes stagnant.

~ * ~

Every recess and lunch break of my high school years I sat with a big group of friends up the back of the oval, as far away from the school buildings as possible, and smoked cigarettes. Generally Peter Jackson Super Mild. Smoking was banned at our school. Out of all of my friends, I was the only one ever to be caught and to suffer the indignity of picking up rubbish with Mr Walsh, the grumpy janitor, after school. It didn’t stop me smoking, though. When I first began the habit I’d later struggle to quit, a packet of Alpine Lights was $1.78. My friend Karen and I would go halvies in a packet, go to the park halfway up her street and sit on the swings and the seesaw and smoke one cigarette after another.

The only memory that survives almost 30 years after the interminably boring hours that made up my science education (apart from the time we had to cut up a squirting cow’s eye) was the luminous day a volunteer was required. They were to take a long metal stick and move it through a metal contraption while touching the sides as little as possible. Then they were to go outside and smoke a cigarette and then redo the test to measure the effects nicotine had on the body.

I was deliriously happy to be that volunteer. It felt delicious to lawfully practise my self-destructive habit. It felt like it did when I would read a book and come upon a word or phrase I hadn’t met before. One of those good phrases, where the concept suddenly puffs out in front of you like a giant airbag that gives you not only a piece of the jigsaw puzzle that explains Why Things Are, but a buffer space between you and the world, in the same way that cigarettes create a smokescreen. With a new phrase or concept I could see a new horizon, sometimes an entire city that I could not see before. This was the way I felt standing outside having a fag, under authorisation from a teacher to do so. I wished for the principal and the janitor to come past and see me. Unfortunately, as is the way of these things, nobody did.

~ * ~

Several years ago someone on the radio was talking about the evolutionary history of octopusses. He kept referring to the evolutionary process as if it was something outside of the octopus, something imposed upon it. “Evolution has done X, Y and Z”, he’d say.
It was probably simply a shorthanded way for him to convey what he wanted to say, but the way he said it hit a nerve. Did the octopus have no say in its own unfolding – the world stomping down on its tentacles with its boots like late Western capitalism on the earth, insisting on it being this way? This version of evolution felt like simply another version of the dualistic god who lived far away in the skies, leaving his creation to rot. I prefer to think of the evolutionary dance of a million possible variations not only coming into the octopus, but also coming out of it, the way it came out of the stars, out of the Big Bang. Not like some boring, mechanical one-way sort of thing, but as Life dancing with itself. A myriad of possibilities that the octopus could have become, but now that it’s unfolded the way it has, it seems so solid that we can’t readily believe it could have turned out any other way than it did.

Of course, the octopus is a product of its environment. Its environmental homes over millions of years have shaped the way it has turned out. No octopus is an island, after all, any more than any one of us are.

Geez. Everything is so vulnerable; it’s a wonder anything is here at all.

And in a way it isn’t. At one level, the octopus is more not here than it is here. But yet it is, as solid as any other creature. This thought is somehow comforting to me, like a cup of warm Milo at 2 am.

I wonder – if the best science teacher in the world had been able to convey to me the poetry of string theory, would I have had the ears to hear it back then? I fielded a don’t-give-a-shit exterior, but I was desperate for someone to tell me a story, that there was a perfectly full void running through it all like a golden thread, and that it ran through me, too. This was the story that I was looking for. I still am. A story that includes everything. A space that opens up wonder and beauty and where people belong rihgt in the centre of it.

That kind of space would surely, given a couple of millennia, start unfreezing stuck feet. Because not only are we made of barely nothing. We are also, after all, made of stars.

Jump ... Screech!

I experience terrible internal torment when it comes to music I don't like.  Terrible.  Truly, nobody really understands just how close 666 Radio Susie is at times to throwing me under a bus.  And so I groaned last night watching a show about the making of one of Deep Purple's albums when I realised it was the one containing Smoke on the Water.  Radio Susie loves Smoke on the Water.  As soon as that guitar riff starts up - surely one of the most well-worn for aspiring guitar players - I want to stick long forks in my ears, or head off to bed and feign a migraine, because I know that that bugger is now gonna be buzzing round in my head for the next few days like bees from the depths of Rupert Murdoch's dirty soul.

And I don't know hardly any of the lyrics (or at least I didn't), so the loop in my head consists of that stupid boww-boww-boww boww-boww-ba-boww boww-boww-boww-bahh-boww riff, followed by a sort of muffled humming sound that makes up the first two lines of the lyrics (because I don't know the words - or I didn't), followed by the chorus:

Smoke on the water
Fire in the sky.

That's the loop.  It's really small.   Radio Susie likes it like that.  You can fit it in more times in an hour that way.  At the end of the loop my mind is blissfully silent for about four seconds before it goes back to the beginning again, back into the guitar riff.

It's terribly tiresome.

My partner, God rot his brain, underestimates my torment.  He thinks it's funny.  He lay in bed last night singing those first two lines for my musical education.  And then this morning I received a text at 10:39 which read in its entirety:

We all came out to Montereax

followed up at 11:54 by:

On the Lake Geneva shoreline.

And so now I know the first two lines to Smoke on the Water.  Perhaps I should thank him for the opportunity of spicing up the loop.

And now, thanks to the lovely folk at SongMeanings I have learned this afternoon (in lieu of doing uni homework or cleaning up the house) that this song is about what happened to the band when they were making their last album.  It was in Montereax, Switzerland, but some dolt got there first and burnt the place down before they could begin recording.  So instead they had to stay at the cold and gooberly Grand Hotel and record using a portable van (which, to its credit, the Rolling Stones had previously used but which, to its discredit, was positioined down on the road and they had to wend their way through a labyrinthe every time they wanted to go down and chat with the engineers about anything).

So there you go.  That's an interesting story.  Perhaps this is a form of aversion therapy I could use in my quest to rid Smoke on the Water from Radio Susie's playing list.  Sexing it up by giving it a narrative.  And I must say, now I know a bit more about the song, I do feel more amenable to it.  I like its story (even if the soundtrack to the story still remains shit).

So maybe this part of the plan will foil Radio Susie.  To find something I like about Smoke on the Water so it's not my enemy anymore.  I don't know if it will work.  Because I still HATE that guitar riff.  It reminds me of drunk bogans in tight t-shirts with packs of cigarettes stuck in one shoulder from my teenage years.

I don't know what this propensity to high-rotate songs I dislike comes from.  But then it's not always songs I dislike.  Sometimes high-rotation is fun.  Like in that awesome newly-in-love phase with a new album when you've done the hard yards of the first tedious four listens, and now the songs have begun to separate themselves, and the refrains of certain parts of them come to visit you throughout the day, enticing you back for another listen (at the moment it's Snowflake and Misty from Kate Bush's 50 Words for Snow).

But then at other times the high rotation backfires.  If the song is a more familiar one that you have loved long time, so that it's like a comfortable pair of jeans, high-rotation can sometimes end in divorce if it goes on long enough.  And that is terrible and traumatic when you divorce a song and you only have yourself to blame.

And Radio Susie cleans out her teeth with a toothpick, and begins searching for her next victim.

Radio Susie's particular love for songs I hate (perhaps I should call her Mrs Muscle) is the reason why, when I saw that the theme for this month's NaBloPoMo is Jump, the screeching started straight away.  That awful screeching that's been stuck in my head since 1992 that makes me want to keen and dribble and slash.  It comes from that song called Jump by those young 'uns called Kriss Kross that topped the charts here in Australia 20 years ago.  Again, this is a perfect song for Radio Susie's most demonic torturings because I don't know any more of it other than the chorus, a repetition of the song's title accompanied by that noise.  That screeching noise.  Ohh, Radio Susie loveses it.  The whore that she is.

Perhaps I should try learning all the lyrics to this song too, or at least the story behind it (though I seriously doubt there is one).  Find something to hang the aversion therapy hat on.  Maybe actually learning all of the lyrics of that pustulent song would reconfigure the calibrations within Radio Susie so it would lose its lustre for her, and she would chuck it and Smoke on the Water onto the enormous pile of Songs I Don't Like Very Much But Nevertheless Don't Torment Myself With on a Semi-Regular Basis.  Songs like ...

Ahh.  I see what you're up to Radio Susie.  Let's move along.

Or perhaps another tactic I could try is to simply have another song to put in their place when those earworms turn up to torment me.  I could do a direct replace, jump for jump, so to speak.  And so I rack my brains with my sievelike memory to find what songs I know with the word "jump" in them. But all I can think of is Jump by Van Halen.  And to be honest and sacreligious,  I find that song boring as batshit.

Oh, that's right.  There's Jump by the Pointer Sisters, but that's really frying pan into the fire sort of stuff, isn't it.  Not helpful at all.

And so I head back to where I just was, to SongMeanings and begin searching for songs with jump in the title.  And from my searchings I have come up with a song I would like to get to know better.  It's called Jump Up by Elvis Costello.

Hmm.  This has been a creative brainstorming regarding an irritating problem.  This could be the start of a whole lot of new album purchases :)




~ ~ ~

This is my first post for NaBloPoMo.  It entails a commitment to blog every day through the month of June.   The theme for this month is Jump, which I may or may not deviate from at times.  If you want to participate yourself you can jump in up till 5 June.  The blogroll is here, you can get a snazzy badge for your blog here, and the writing prompts, should you choose to use them, are here.

Song Jigsaw Puzzle Pieces

You know those songs that rattle around inside your head - the ones where you only know a tiny portion of them?  And you don't know who sang them or when or what the song is called, so you can't go and listen to the song and therefore get to exorcise your brain its cruddy fragment.  You just have to put up with it playing over and over hundreds of times an hour because it's a soundbyte of five seconds' duration.

No?  Okay, then, must just be me :)

I've been trying to work out a particular song for years.  My internal radio station, Radio Susie, loves these song fragments because Radio Susie likes to try to drive me a bit batty, and these songs are particularly effective at being sung over and over inside your own head for days on end until I'm willing to gouge them out via my ear canal with a cordless drill.

One of those songs I talked about it in this post way back in May 2008.  I put out the call to try and see if anyone knew what the song was, but nobody did.  Well, finally, thanks to Rage putting tonight's playlist online, there it is:  Show Me Some Discipline by the Sunnyboys.

Ahh.  There is something very satisfying about finding a pointless piece to a pointless jigsaw puzzle that's been sitting on the edges of your mind for years.  There is a part of me that believes that solving this particular puzzle will enable the few bytes of brainspace involved to somehow magically defragment itself into becoming greater memory capability or somehow contribute to lessening my brain's tendency to jump from one thing to another and forget where I ...

How Embarrassment

I was listening to my local radio station yesterday and the presenter played a song of great dagginess.  Surpassed in dagginess only by other John Denver songs like Annie's Song*, Take Me Home Country Roads has the cheese falling off it in big, long, pathetic shreds like drool out of the side of a dog.

My abysmal attention span focussed on that song for its entirety, because it's so cute and so sweet and so other things you put in italics.  It is embarrassing to admit that I like such cheesiness and such sweetness, in such an age of cynicism and abject suicidal despair.  And cheesy and sweet are yukky combinations, so by rights I should not like this song.

But I do.  He is yearning to go home where he beloowwwngs.  West Virginia, mountain mama.  And anyway, I just thought of cheesecake, so there goes my theory.

(PS:  Don't you think John Denver looks like Kevin Rudd's  Muppet lovechild?)

*I also like Annie's Song.  So shoot me.

Pic:  Douglas Brown

Freecycle

Anyone here use Freecycle?  It's a Yahoogroup where people list their unwanted items to give away or items that they want.  No money is allowed to change hands in the transaction.  It's a pretty cool thing.  There are all sorts of different things that change hands:  unwanted mobile phone chargers, furniture, computer parts, kitchen items.  I've got quite a few things off Freecycle and given a few away as well.

My inner musical Nazi laughed judgmentally when I saw someone's wanted listing yesterday:  a copy of Kenny Rogers' You Decorated My Life.

Now, it's just me, but that song sort of makes me feel funny, a little bit Sunday afternoonish, a little bit sort of headachey and queasy.

But hey, to each their own, right?  Variety, spice of life, all that :)

++++

In other non-related news, my little bout of feeling like God is maybe not there has just ... well, gone, and I am back to where I was before.  How strange is that?  Still, I would much rather follow these paths down even into dark spaces than to stay in the safety of not testing what I believe.  Because now I feel safer than I did before ...

How Did I Live Without YouTube???

Today at the tennis with my mum, we sat in front of these two German guys who just would not shut up for anything longer than five seconds at a time.  Three hours of incessant talking when everyone else around them was respectfully whispering and I was starting to get a little pissed off, I must say, and turning around and glaring etc etc.

It got me a musical craving though.  Berlin.  Dancing in Berlin.  How did I ever itch these scratches before except by coming home and fast-forwarding through all my music videos to find the film clip ... which I never had? But now - so easy!!  Easy peasy Japanesey.  Come home, click on YouTube, type in the request, and voila.

This was a cool song.  They were a good band.  Except for that naughty song.

Mullet alert.  Moustache alert.  Dual coloured hair alert (how cool was her hair???)  Creepy Thompson Twins-style haircut alert.  Bad eighties fashion alert (white jumpsuits.  Goodness me)  Terri Nunn flashing her undies alert (like, as if that never happened).

I think that's the alerts covered :)

Song to the Siren

I just came across this beautiful song (I am up waaaaaaay too late watching Rage). Never heard it before and oh.

This is one of those songs that is a better version than the original (written and performed by the brilliant-but-as-yet-relatively-unexplored-by-me Mr Tim Buckley. How much talent in one family, goodnesss me).

Love Will Find a Way

I was quite enamoured with West Coast America hard rock in my early twenties. Used to gel my hair up and go to the Cathouse in my black velour leggings with my black floppy foreskin boots. Lufferly. But Geez Louise, what a sexist culture. Seriously, give a bunch of young blokes a culture where it's almost required to behave like sexist pigs, and they will.

Still, the music lives on beyond the godawful clothes and this song is still a favourite of mine.

Plummetted Back to 1987

I have been soaking some bedding in the laundry trough. The plug is the right size for the sink, but still the water slowly leaches out the plughole, leaving only enough water to kick up a stink if I do not attend to it within the required couple of days. Which I do not. Instead I go to Horsham for a few days and when I return, the smell has stunk out my bathroom, that funny mouldy musty smell that takes me right back to 1987.

I was 16 impossibly young years old. Me and Jacqui had moved into a flat together. I cannot remember if there was a particular incident of mouldy wet washing that impaled the take-back into my brain. Maybe we had a continuous round of wet towels going on in our flat's bathroom. That flat is probably called an apartment now and asking 300 bucks a week rent, but back then it was just a run of the mill flat whose owner saw fit to rent it out to a couple of kids.

Obviously our parents must have co-signed. A photo of the time has my mother standing in the doorway on her first visit. She is wearing a green sleeveless cotton summer dress and looking pretty. She was the same age then as I am now, 38. She is thin-lipped, unsmiling. She must have lay awake worrying about her wayward, impetuous, wilful 16 year old daughter.

I was only a year older than my friend's daughter. Mein Gott, the horror doesn't really hit you until afterwards, how young you were. Of course, I was as independent then as I am now. More fearless. Reckless even. I look from my position of more calculated risk-taking and shudder. I shudder but I am envious too of the freshness, the fearlessness. Although necessarily accompanied by the rampant stupidity of a know-it-all who would not be told (hence my mother's thin-lippedness) there is a certain sort of a fondness for the me that was then. She was in a lot of pain, that girl. Dealing with some big stuff. Just a big kid, really, wanting to be loved, the way all sullen wounded teenagers want to be loved but do not have the words to ask, their pride standing between them and wiser adults like a giant rock. But geez, for all of that pain and youth, I can see even then the desire to know, to understand, myself and the world.

When our boyfriends came to stay (which was often) they would sit with us on the round plastic tub chairs that had been gifted to me by Auntie Dawn and Uncle Alec. Born to be my Baby by Bon Jovi is playing in my head as I write this. We must have been playing Slippery When Wet on high rotation on the stereo that crackled so badly when you turned up the volume. Bon Jovi and mouldy smells all mixed together today as I think about the time I lived with Jacqui, not even lasting the six month lease before I returned home once again. Such little fragments remembered of the whole time, but still, the feel of the whole time all coming back to me in a rush with that yukky bathroom smell.

Music Head ... Part 1

Grrrr. This thing'll be the death of me!

I spent about 15 hours on this the week before last. Built it up, collapsed it down, built it up, collapsed it down before I could work out how to put the music notes inside the head without it looking too shabby or collapsing.

Finally I sort of worked it out, but then unfortunately decided at the end that I would bend the head back, as in ecstasy, you know? Now, there's a certain sort of charm in handmade lack of uniformity (luckily for me). Unfortunately, the other end of that spectrum is ... well, wobbly gooberliness. Already teetering on the edges of wobbly gooberliness, tilting back the head just stuffed it all, really.

So it's back to the drawing board once again for me and my mate, Music Head :)

There's No Time Like the Right Time (And That's Now)

Ooh, don't you love it when a musical bubble bursts? You've been going along in your life swimming in the bubbles that have already burst previously (is not a much-listened album something that mellows into your heart like a thousand dollar bottle of good red? Something that becomes to you a friend?)

And then suddenly, here appears a new bubble. Or a new old bubble. One that's swum past you eleventy four times before but you've watched it pass with less than mild disinterest.

Then one day. Suddenly. It bursts. You're ready to be able to hear it. It's the right time.

The Tori Amos bubble has burst into my lounge room this evening. I have fallen in love on first listen to Little Earthquakes. Her first album. Surely it will prove to be her best.

Oh, I feel rich. I feel rich. Think how many more experiences there are like this! How many as-yet unexplored albums that lie waiting for me to open them. Who needs sex? :)

Is it not an anomaly that there exists atheist music lovers? Or that late Western Christianity with its small stupid egotistical god came after Bach?

:D

~ End lyrical wax ~

Newfangled Technology

I can feel it beginning. The tiny tear between me and technology which in 20 years time will have evolved to a chasm that will have me flung up on a cultural rock, in exile :)

The tear is beginning with this newfangled digital technology where people's music collections exist not in CD towers but on their hard drives. And so some people are actually replacing their CD collections, taking them digital and virtual. Which is sort of cool in one way - transportable music, music of the spheres existing ... well, sort of more in the spheres, inhabiting only a tiny little file on your computer or your iPod. Spiritual, mon.

Me, I'm still recovering from albums. I need the tangibility, you know? I miss sitting down with that cool sized album, the liner notes, the lyrics, the artwork. I have to make concessions with CDs as it is, those tiny little things that make my eyes fall out trying to read the 6 point lyric type. Bah!! And so here I am sitting down and staying fast. I'm not going into greater intangibility. Me and CDs are where I part ways with the prevailing.

The benefit to me out of all of this is that the people who are selling their CD collections are doing it for cheap. This week so far I have purchased or am in the process of purchasing albums by Tori Amos, Sinead O'Connor, Ben Harper, Counting Crows & Clannad. Most of which are, like, a dollar. Whee!

I'm getting old. There's no two ways about it, hmmph.

If songs were wearable part 2

Okay, that question I asked was a bit too abstract. I couldn't come up with an answer. How about this one:

What song would you put on to get the housework done when you really don't want to do it?

I would maybe put on The Load Out/Stay by Jackson Browne. I love the story of that song. And it's sort of about what goes on behind the scenes, which is sort of like what housework is :)

I am so bored at the moment. This cold is still hanging around the edges, snipping my interest. It is very frustrating to me that my health continues to give me grief, even if it is just a common cold. I want to get out there and have some sort of a life, not sit inside all weekend writing 300 blog posts :) Maybe I would wear a Regina Spektor song, in that case, to help my immune system. I like that girl's quirk. Or maybe something Kate Bush-ey or Tori Amos-ey. A crazy swirling woman song. That's what I'd wear. A song that is turquoise.

If songs were wearable

Question:

Imagine that songs are 3D things that you put on, sort of like a spiritual/emotional superhero costume, and when you do you take on the characteristics of that song.

What song would you wear if you were, say, going for a job interview for a job that you really really wanted, and were just about qualified for, but that you knew you could perform out of your own abilities and personality and personal experience, but you wanted to demonstrate this to your boss?

Good question. I shall have to ponder my own question and get back to you :)

I like this sort of right-brained thinking. Whether I come up with anything is another story but it's sort of fun thinking about it.

I keep wanting to listen to two songs over and over again. One is The Wind by Amos Lee, and the other is Glycerine by Bush. Not for the lyrical content so much as the music. What is it about certain notes, played at certain frequencies, that just enter straight into the middle of your heart? This is what prompted my thoughts here, and my question that I don't know my answer to yet :)

Pic: automania