You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2009.
Odd to end the year with pictures of a dead animal, but perhaps it’s not so odd at all – today 2009 comes to a close and something that was getting long in the tooth calls it quits to make way for something…completely unknowable, quite frankly. Yeah, not so cheery. But it is truthful and that’s what matters the most, so I’m working out as I continue to age at a rate of knots. I took the pics at the base of Mount Gillamatong, Braidwood, New South Wales, this part of the world being a favourite haunt of my father’s. I’m not really sure what the bones once held together, but I’m guessing a sheep that had lost its way. That happens.
But what makes them vivid is the force of James’s interest in them, his manner of pressing into their clay with his examining fingers: they are sites of human energy; they vibrate with James’s anxious concern for them.
– from How Fiction Works by James Wood
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination; and, third, their industry.
– John Ruskin
It’s banal to start a looking-back piece with ‘what a year it’s been’, because years can be nothing but themselves – years. So I’ll start somewhere else (although I haven’t started somewhere else, I’ve just started where I’ve begun) with a challenge: to think about the year ‘that’s been’ (I typed ‘bean’ just then, which is rather lovely), and to write about it, and see what learnings bubble to the surface. Because we’re about to head into the ridiculous fake-snow-in-summer season – or, as a colleague said to me yesterday, ‘Shitmass’. Which means the brain will turn off and then another year will get sprinting and before we know it we’ll all be two decades older, greyer, and probably not that much wiser.
So, to begin. Somewhere.
Learning No. 1 – Go away. Under the Counter (or UTC to those in the know i.e. just muggins here, though ‘UTC’ sounds like a university, or a type of farm vehicle; I should drop this over-use of brackets) is littered with references to Bundanon and its far-reaching artist-in-residence program. Still I can’t help remembering – for the umpteenth time – the Shoalhaven River and its happy leaping fish, the lantana-infested bush and the largest goanna I’ve ever seen (an easy six feet with a tongue the size of an arm), the mother roo and joey grazing nervously at the backdoor of the writer’s cottage, the sounds of busy things in the night that I’ve never heard before even though I’ve spent forty-one years in this part of the world. And I remember drinks on the verandah at the always-pink dusk and watching wombats emerge from their burrows, and the swallows darting gloriously through the air, catching whatever it is they catch, bugs, they catch bugs. And I remember working my arse off, so much so that on my fourth and last Thursday I had to have a lie down and listen to some Sigur Ros – yes, I’d over done it, but that’s my usual way, I’m afraid. Oh woe is me. The fact is I bring it on myself, it’s my choice, and, as I’ve counselled others, no one cares. So Learning No 1.1 – no one cares.
Learning No. 2 – I’m in love with the most complex thing EVER. ‘Work-in-progress’: that’s the not-very-inventive title of my, um, work-in-progress, a novel, a very long story. When people who know about these things say that novels are inherently complex, listen to them, believe them – novels are complex to write, they’re complex to read; they are the hardest thing to bring into the world. My one, my second, has been in the process of being born since 2006 (I mistakenly typed ‘1996’, probably because that’s how it feels; bugger it, these brackets are just so persistent). Needless to say, this project – is ‘project’ the right word? a novel isn’t a bridge, though they might be – has taken me here and there, like a wild river, and some of the waters have been fast and rough, some shallow and sublime, some tannin-black and utterly horrifying, and some murky and motionless, the froth of pollution at the edges. Enough: I’m getting the shakes writing this, though that could be the rum balls I had for morning tea.
Learning No. 3 – good people never stop doing good things. The middle of the year saw the extended family and passionate others come from all over to be present at the launch of the Dorothy Porter Studio at Bundanon (yes, yet another reference to that Boyd place). This meant taking He Who Originally Came From That Part of the World, Meaning Nowra, A Shit-Hole He Says back to the place from where he came, and also to the place I spent four weeks in a creative La-La Land. After three hours of driving – up the Hume Highway, down through Kangaroo Valley, with the last half an hour winding our way amongst tinder-dry coastal bush – there it suddenly was, a converted 19th-century barn. All shiny new, a red ribbon strung up for cutting, dancers dancing, the rainbow lorikeets watching on, as they will always be. And we knew that within days the Studio would be filled with artists dreaming, imagining, collaborating – and working bloody hard, there can be no doubt about that. Cuz, there was a tear in my eye when the ribbon was cut.
Learning No. 4 – reading completes me (like Blundstone boots and Arvo Part). 2009 was filled with great books and my favourites are listed elsewhere on this blog, but there are a few notables that aren’t on the list because they weren’t published this year, in fact they were published many years ago. Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave – for decades I’d put off reading this book because by and large, and despite my own personal sexuality (which is indeed my own and personal), I don’t read gay fiction, but this novel completely ripped me to shreds. So much so that, when after the last page was read, I had to go for the longest walk up the mountain (with The Old Lady of the House, obviously) until I felt ready to come back into the world. Holding the Man went straight onto my ‘Brilliant Books Live Here’ shelf in my work room. I also thoroughly enjoyed Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist, which was no doubt reissued because of our bomb-tastic times. And – embarrassingly – I finally read DJ Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye; see ‘Caught in an Edgy Trap’ in the First Word 2009 archive for more on this.
Learning No. 5 – there will always be great music. Like the book list, the year’s top albums can be found elsewhere on Under the Counter, but I do have a late entry for the best-of-2009 gang: ‘Hospice’ by The Antlers. Anyone who likes Jeff Buckley, Deerhunter and Arcade Fire really should check out this extraordinary album; there’s also a hint of Antony Hegarty in the overall aesthetic, which is both gentle and dramatic, always a great combination. Hospice is hardly a jovial ride – it wallops you in the head and heart, and everywhere else for that matter – but it’s certainly worth the purchase price. And great cover art, too.
Learning No. 6 – so writing conferences CAN be worthwhile! In October the National Library of Australia put on its Flight of the Mind – Writing and the Creative Imagination conference. Speakers included Geraldine Brooks, Steven Conte, Rodney Hall, Andrew Goldsmith, Kevin Brophy, Claire Thomas, Judy Horacek, James Bradley, Alex Miller, Peter Goldsworthy, Felicity Packard, Sophie Cunningham, Aviva Tuffield, and Peter Pierce; not a bad line-up, it has to be said. Topics covered creating fiction from fact, recreating other people’s stories, and writing across borders (a session chaired by yours truly; okay, the brackets win). As one of the more prominent speakers told me at the end of the weekend, ‘This conference was a beauty’. And good audiences too, in terms of both numbers and engagement. The other thing that impressed me was the amount of speakers who hung around for the entire weekend, their journals at the ready, pens poised to jot down another pearl of wisdom for safe-keeping. Yes, a beauty.
Learning No. 7 – posh experiences in poor countries don’t add up. In November He Who Likes A Cool Drink On A Warm Day and I jumped on a plane to attend a wedding in Vanuatu. Apart from me almost carking it (check out ‘The Trouble with Death’, which is also in the First Word 2009 archive), we did everything you’re meant to do when on a tropical island: ate way too much, drank way too much, got so sunburnt we looked like Iced VoVos, read heaps, in my case Geraldine Brook’s People of the Book, which I enjoyed, though it also wore me out. But resorts, big ones at least, aren’t my thing – they’re theme parks for the moderately rich and not-at-all-famous. Still, good times were had, and, most importantly, two friends got married the way they wanted, and sometimes that’s all that matters (says he who over-thinks everything, including the moral responsibility of my local supermarket to provide free trolleys – not everyone has a gold coin in their pockets, you bastards).
Learning No. 8 – there’s nothing freakier than politics. 2009 was also about climate change, Copenhagen (a disaster? no, a little foot-shuffle in the right direction, me-thinks), and…bloody Tony Abbott. Who’d have thought the Punch-Drunk Mad Monk would get the Leader of the Opposition gig? Despite being born and bred on Sydney’s North Shore and schooled entirely at private schools, combined with the fact that I can sound terribly, terribly posh went I want to (see?), I’m not one for the conservative side of politics, but at least Malcolm ‘John Howard Broke My Heart By Stuffing Up The Republic Campaign’ Turnbull was trying to move things forward, if only by a millimetre. Then, however, came the most public coup (of course, I just typed ‘pubic’, which isn’t something I usually associate with the Liberal Party) and Mr Malcolm went down the tube and Tony ‘Verbally Attacking Terminally People Is Such Fun’ Abbott came up trumps. You know, I was happy give him a go, only because that’s what we do in this part of the world (when it suits us), but then all he’s been saying since he got the job is ‘great big tax’ and I’ve found myself shouting at the radio/television/newspaper, just like I did when John Howard hung around for eleven long, long, LONG years.
Learning No. 9 – the machines may take over. I started the year without having an internet connection at home but have ended the year with a PC on my desk, a laptop in the cupboard, an email address, and a website and a blog. Next stop digital television and an i-Phone. Perhaps. Though probably not – a home is a home, not a computer-corporation outpost. But it’s nice to be in the blogosphere, or hanging around ‘the inter-webs’ as some like to say, though I do feel as if I’m wandering around a parallel universe stark naked with the CCTV cameras tracking my every movement. Now I just have to keep all this technology in check. It’s us human types who control the machines, don’t we?
What, the machines have taken over? How did I miss that?
Better go and pour myself a glass of crisp, dry Semillon and put on a record, yes, one of those Ye Olde spinning platter things that crackle and hiss like carpet on a hot day. It might be The XX’s album, or Peaches’ cheeky latest, or something really, really old, maybe even Peter Gabrielle’s So, because So reminds me of being seventeen and school was about to finish and I knew absolutely nothing about anything. Which, despite this list and all the words that go along with it, is still probably the case, because the sum total of what we know can only ever be a tear-drop in the deep blue ocean.
(Footnote: What’s with the opening quotes? you ask. Well, I’ve had those two pearlers Blu-tacked onto the side of my computer screen all year. They’ve hung there, just a little dog-eared and torn, fluttering each time I breathe or I type extra vigorously or the fan finds them; they tell me to work harder, to work deeper, to do good things. In time, in time.)
In May this year I returned to Canberra from a month as an artist-in-residence at Bundanon, Arthur and Yvonne Boyd’s gift to the Australian people on the Shoalhaven River near Nowra, and despite feeling like I was coming back from Mars, the first thing I did on arriving home was to go into my work room and write some words which within minutes would be stuck in the window of my wallet: Creating and the imagination are my natural habitats; creating is what I love doing, the imagination is where I am most alive. Being in and with a community of dedicated creative people makes me so happy I want to burst out of my skin.
How is it that someone who’d only recently turned forty had come to that point of wanting to burst out of their skin?
When I turn my increasingly unreliable brain to my childhood, I think of spending the first 18 years of my life wandering, rather aimlessly it must be said, around my home suburb of St Ives on Sydney’s Volvo-infested North Shore, catching the bus and train to the austere school I attended, Barker College. I think of the uniform – black shoes, grey trousers, white shirt, red-and-white striped tie, barber-shop blazer, and a Venetian boater.
I think of reaching adolescence, of girls joining us in Fifth and Sixth Form but somehow, for some reason, remaining only interested in the boys, of swimming carnivals, of trying to play rugby union, of homework, always that terrible homework.
Mostly, however, I remember writing: double creative writing classes and thousands of words – albeit dreadfully composed words – forming themselves on the exercise-book pages in the worst handwriting imaginable. I distinctly remember my Fourth Class teacher, a man who had flicks and a Freddie Mercury moustache, yelling ‘Shut up Featherstone, don’t be rude!’ as I demanded that it be me who read out his story to class. I remember writing in my bedroom, having a pseudonym, though thankfully I’ve forgotten the actual name – no doubt it was something like Roger T. Bartholomew the Third.
I remember writing in school holidays and writing when I was home sick – I always seemed to be getting bronchitis, particularly in winter. I remember one of these periods of sickness, somewhere around Third or Fourth Form when I spent weeks on end sitting on the couch, a garishly-coloured cashmere nana-rug over my legs and waist, and rewriting and rewriting a short story to the Brideshead Revisited soundtrack, which was on repeat on the record player.
But despite all this writing and reading I was at a loss as to what I wanted do when I finished school. Even though my family, particularly on my father’s side, is filled with writers and poets and painters and printmakers, some of whom have made significant names for themselves, the thought of seriously pursuing a career in the arts simply didn’t cross my mind. Perhaps I misunderstood what Oscar Wilde meant when he said All art is quite useless. For a short time I did consider becoming an audio engineer, because I loved music – and still do, very much. However, I’m glad I didn’t pursue this line of work, mainly because I’m the most impractical person you’ve ever come across – I have to get a man in to change the washers on my taps.
So I applied to do an undergraduate degree in landscape architecture.
But I didn’t get in. Being someone who gets volcanically stressed at the most inconsequential of things, like when my computer decides that it would like to download some update or other, I became so anxious in the days leading up to the HSC that my temperature soured and the family GP refused to let me sit the English exam, English being the one subject in which I regularly excelled, and I wasn’t well enough to sit through all of mathematics. The examining board guesstimated my English mark, which was unjustifiably low, and I failed maths outright, though somehow did remarkably well in economics, a subject I had no interest in whatsoever. Thank God for universities, which offer almost limitless opportunities to correct early education flunks and misdemeanours.
After being subjected to much begging and pleading, the University of Canberra, or the Canberra College of Advanced Education as it was known back then, generously let me in on one condition: that I pass all my first semester units. Not only did I pass, I did rather well, particularly in the design-related units, which I adored. I learnt about the importance of big ideas, of understanding context, of piecing together relationships (‘everything is connected’ I’d learn later when I augmented my landscape degree with a graduate diploma in social ecology), of knowing that the best things have the right fit. My love affair with the arts and design, as well as the humanities, was on its way.
More to the point, I fell in love with a classmate, a Christian boy, who loved me back but only as much as his religion would allow. I converted to his faith hoping he’d convert to my sexuality. He did not. So I rounded out these undergraduate years wearing only black, listening to The Cure, The Smiths and New Order, driving my beloved 1969 Volkswagen Fastback around the blue-sky streets of Belconnen; I ate too much coke and chocolate and meat pies, and became fat.
Thinking it appropriate to find someone else to love, I moved to Perth where I lived beneath the desiccating heat at Cottesloe Beach (on which I’d read Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet) and worked for a small design firm in Subiaco. Though I loved Perth, it’s fair to say that I was a lonely soul there – I knew no one and spent most of my evenings writing in a journal and reading down at the beach (with one eye surveying for deliciously suntanned things that would walk my way but then walk on by). Ultimately I decided that I needed to be in a place where there were mountains and I could wear jumpers, so after two years I returned to the south-east, where my family has lived for seven generations. Place, I discovered, can be etched into your DNA.
But I didn’t find myself back over east; the opposite happened: I became lost. I lived with my parents on Mount Gibraltar in the Southern Highlands, where they’d escaped Sydney to slide into retirement. Feeling sorry for me, a friend gave me a suitcase-load of music recording equipment and I wrote and recorded some songs, sent them to Triple J, but Triple J only sent a car-sticker in return. I scratched out some lyrics, one of which I quite liked, so, without having any idea whatsoever of what I was doing, I sent the ‘poem’ to an arts magazine in Canberra and then jumped onto a Jumbo jet to backpack around the world. Exactly one hundred days and nights later, I returned to Mount Gibraltar and was surprised to find in the mail a letter from the magazine – they’d published the poem.
So, buoyed by this completely unexpected literary success, I wrote another poem, and this too was published, this time in Tasmania. Then, realising that I didn’t actually know anything about poetry, I wrote a short story and this was also favourable received. I was hooked – again – by words and ideas. Since then, 1994, I’ve been writing fiction and creative journalism five days a week, augmenting a meagre writing income with landscape architecture work before, at the age of 36, jumping ship to work as the manager of arts development for the ACT Chief Minister’s Department, a job I believe in very much.
Despite the odds firmly stacked against the publication of fiction – according to the literary journal Overland, there is currently a one-in-a-thousand chance of having a novel published in Australia – writing is what I love doing. Whether it is fifty-word micro-fiction, short stories, a novel, or creative journalism, writing is my greatest achievement – apart from, of course, maintaining a relationship, which, even though it has had to weather a few internal hurdles, some family dramas, and the meretricious scorn of recent federal governments, has lasted thirteen years.
Yes, I love writing. Yes, I’m in love with writing. But quite regularly, like the best lovers, he doesn’t always love me back, at least not in the way I want. Writing is reticent, he is painful, unpredictable, mercurial; he can fill my blood with heat, he can make my heart race like the best of drugs; writing can be everything, and then, like an ocean tide, he can recede, leaving me sore and hollow and exposed.
In 2000, I commenced what would end up being one of the most wonderful experiences of my life: a masters in creative arts/creative writing. I did feel like an impostor – what was someone who’d only barely passed the HSC and didn’t originally get in to his first degree doing at university for the third time? And a masters of all things! But every Thursday for two years I connected with other writers, thinkers, academics; I read more than I’d read in my life. I finished with a manuscript for what would become my first novel, Remnants, which was published in 2005. Out of the nine Australian reviews and one international review that humble little story received, only one hated it and that was The Age. Despite others making conclusions like ‘a beautifully written book’ and ‘deserving of a wide audience’, The Age described Remnants as ‘a noble failure’, as if I’d gallantly tried to fight a wild dragon but had ultimately lost.
But what does all this reminiscing actually mean?
It means the importance of ongoing education. Writing – creativity – in itself is an education, but sometimes it’s worth taking the exit off the nine-to-five freeway and spending time back in the academy, to think, to learn, to explore, to be wild again.
It means the importance of blind faith, though by faith I don’t mean what my old landscape architecture paramour meant by faith. Ex-Canberra writer and artist Judy Horacek, co-author of the phenomenally successful children’s book Where is the Green Sheep?, talks about the need to charge ahead no matter what the odds. What makes someone spend up to ten years writing a novel, when it appears that the readership of literary prose is diminishing and new technologies may change the publishing landscape forever? It’s the desire for adventure. And adventure is risk. And risk is living.
It means the importance of relentless persistence. I’m by no means a fan of sport, but recently I heard Carrie Graf, the unstoppable coach of the Canberra Capitals, talk about the notion of relentless persistence. There’s something in this: the unyielding, the unremitting, the inexorable; the perseverance, the determination, the doggedness, the diligence, even the pushiness. These are the inescapable qualities of the artist, and, dare I say it, the qualities of anyone who wants to wring every drop of life from their days.
But to finish up. And to end quoting an artist, not a sportsperson.
In October this year, the twice Miles Franklin Prize-winning Australian novelist Alex Miller gave the closing address at a conference on writing and creativity at the National Library of Australia. Miller delivered his point by expanding on the often-quoted writing aphorism: he turned ‘Write what you know’ into ‘Write what you love’. But, right here, right now, let’s expand this a little further, to broader out its application: LIVE what you love.
LIVE what you love. How good is that!
(This is an edited version of a speech presented as an Occasional Address at the University of Canberra’s Conferring of Awards ceremony, held in the Great Hall, Parliament House, 17 December, 2009.)
In the days before we left, it shifted from being a statement (this will happen) to a question (how will it happen?) and a statement again (there’s no escaping it). Even the fact that we were travelling to Vanuatu for a keenly anticipated wedding of two good friends couldn’t dissuade me from believing that on this trip I would die. I was so convinced that I printed out my two main projects, putting the manuscripts in perfectly neat piles on the desk. I made sure the ring-binders in which I keep copies of my short stories were up to date. I even dusted my bookshelves.
We drove to Sydney – no problems there. The plane took off and flew over the water and landed on Efate; all fine. On the way to the resort, the mini-van didn’t have an accident, even though the Ni-Vanuatu drive on the right-hand side of the road. When we found our friends, most having arrived days earlier, we discovered that some in the wedding party had been struck down with a stomach bug so dreadful that doctors had been called in and morphine shots administered – could that be what would take me?
We snorkelled (did sharks patrol these waters?), we kayaked (a heart attack?), and we soaked in the swim-up bar before deciding that it was like drinking in a large public bath and best avoided. The wedding was everything the bride wanted – she ‘arrived’ by canoe, greeted on-shore by a string band – and no one died, even though some were now so sick they probably wished they had.
The next day, an ex-pat friend took He Who Enjoys Good Nosh and I out to Port Villa for kava and then dinner. I avoided the kava – I didn’t want a bucket of dirty water to be the thing that did me in. We sat down at a harbour-side restaurant’s outside tables, the waitress greeting us with ‘Bonsoi!’ We drank the local beer, Tusker it’s called, and then became transfixed by the strangest sight: a shifting black cloud in the water, an inky swirl going this way and that; it looked like the effect filmmakers use to show that a demon is rushing out of some poor sod’s mouth. Apparently this was just a school of fish, though it seemed so menacing.
Our food arrived. I’d ordered the T-bone steak. And then it happened: a piece of the meat became stuck in my throat. I tried swallowing, but that only made things worse. I took a drink of water; no good. I was in trouble – I was going to choke to death while holidaying on a tropical island. I stood up. The partner asked me what was wrong. I couldn’t reply. He asked what I needed. I began to panic; this could end in only one of two ways. He stood up and thumped me on the chest and back. Out shot the water (over his meal) and my throat cleared. I sat down, my hands shaking. Embarrassed for the scene I’d just caused, I looked back to the harbour’s edge. The shifty black cloud was gone.
It was W. Somerset Maugham who said, Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
I wish.
(First published in Panorama, Canberra Times, 5 December, 2009)
Following on from his other autobiographical explorations, Boyhood and Youth, Coetzee continues to bugger around with the whole prose caper, mixing up fiction and non-fiction in Summertime (Knopf). There’s something about this writer that really gets me going (Disgrace is a favourite novel of mine, and it was great to see the Australian-produced film version living up to expectations). Whilst Coetzee can undoubtedly be a self-absorbed misery guts – the narrator, a researcher writing about a ‘John Coetzee’ who is dead, describes his sexual modus operandi as having ‘autistic’ qualities – there’s a palpable sense of playfulness in this book. I was only half a dozen pages into this when I decided that it would be placed on my shelf marked ‘If the house is burning down, risk life and limb to rescue these books’.
Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy (Text) is a tale of a Moscow boy’s relationship with a pack of wild dogs. Grim for sure, but what an extraordinary piece of imaginative prose. I can’t look at The Old Lady of the House without recalling Hornung’s story, and I can’t walk the peaceful, beautiful streets of Canberra without feeling thankful for being born an Australian and not a Muscovite. The last few lines completely knocked my bloody socks off, but I won’t quote them here as it would suck the life out of this work, and piss you off, dear reader. So go on, don’t be scared – give this book a whirl. You might have nightmares for days afterwards, but the warmth and tenderness in the prose (it is there, it’s just not lashed on like honey spread across toast) will linger with you for a very long time.
Reunion by Andrea Goldsmith (4th Estate) has so much in it: an exploration of relationships, how they can shift deliciously though painfully between love and in love; and a thirst for knowledge and purpose, particularly in a global world that doesn’t really know where it’s going. And that’s just for starters. This is a slow-burner of a novel, but ever so subtly it gets under your skin and before long you find yourself caring about these people, which, of course, is the real test of a piece of fiction. Ultimately, Reunion is a novel about friendship, and I’ll read great prose about friendship until the cows come home.
A Small Free Kiss in the Dark by Glenda Millard (Allen and Unwin). Reading young-adult fiction is a guilty pleasure of mine, usually because these books can be gobbled up in one sitting, and, perhaps more importantly, there’s often a lack of over-complication and pretension that can exist in adult fiction (I wanted to write ‘grown-up’ there…which, it seems, I’ve now done). Like Reunion, Millard’s novel is a book about friendship, this time between a young boy and an old man within the context of an Australian city – Melbourne – that’s experiencing war (it’s a difficult conceit to pull off but Millard does it very well here). These two unlikely people gather others to their lives, and soon find themselves forming the strangest though most intimate of families. A surprisingly complex book filled with the deepest of love for its characters.
The Bee Hut by Dorothy Porter (Black Inc.) This isn’t a novel, but as Dorothy Porter made the verse novel her own, and she completely and utterly rocked in every possible way, I’m including her final collection, The Bee Hut, in this list. Everyone talks about Dorothy’s high-octane writing, the sensuality, the cheeky wit, and the jaw-dropping intelligence, and it’s all on show here. From the first line, ‘The most powerful presence/is absence’ (‘Egypt’), to the last, from ‘View from 417’, the final poem she would write, ‘Something in me/despite everything/can’t believe my luck’, I can only shake my head at the depth, the skill, and the sheer power of these poems. If you buy one book of poetry this year… (Disclosure: I have other reasons for including The Bee Hut in this list, but I’m not discussing them here.)
It’s a Tuesday night and after seventeen days of temperatures above 30 degrees (so someone told me today, and they sounded like they knew what they were talking about), the weather, as it does in this south-east Australian city, has turned on itself and the winter blankets are back on the bed. To celebrate the fact that, quite frankly, none of us really know what’s going to happen from day to day (just ask Australia’s Liberal Party, who are in opposition, and from what they’ve done today, put a man whose beliefs hark back to the 1950s, along with his mentor’s, the veritably evil John Howard, they should stay in opposition for quite some time…with any luck), here’s a mix of songs that just popped out of my head and into this nifty MixPod.com caper.
It’s a Tuesday night and after seventeen days of temperatures above 30 degrees (so someone told me today, and they sounded like they knew what they were talking about), the weather, as it does in this south-east Australian city, has turned on itself and the winter blankets are back on the bed. To celebrate the fact that, quite frankly, none of us really know what’s going to happen from day to day (just ask Australia’s Liberal Party, who are in opposition, and from what they’ve done today, put a man whose beliefs hark back to the 1950s, along with his mentor’s, the veritably evil John Howard, they should stay in opposition for quite some time…with any luck), here’s a mix of songs that just popped out of my head and into this nifty Along with a whole heap of great (though admittedly mostly maudlin) stuff, there are these gems: ‘Two’ by The Antlers, who are a band I’m only now discovering and on the evidence here I’ll probably be adoring within days; an alternate version of ‘Have You Forgotten’ by the often brilliant but now defunct Red House Painters; ‘Carry Me Ohio’ from a later reincarnation of RHP’s, Sun Kil Moon (surely that’s a guitar melody that would melt Johnny Marr’s heart); ‘Re: Stacks’ off Bon Iver’s extraordinary For Emma, For Ever Ago album, which is a collection best enjoyed on vinyl with a glass of your favourite alcoholic spirit in hand; and live takes of ‘Nantes’ by Beirut (from the TakeAway shows site), and ‘Slow Show’ by The National.
The songs are posted here for your listening pleasure, whether or not your weather’s all over the place, no matter how many blankets you need on your bed tonight. If you like the music, go buy the records.
[Sorry, the MP3s have now been removed, but do buy these bands’ records, because they’re great records from great bands!]
Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecote 