Archive for melbourne
July 25, 2008 at 7:40 am · tag/s : blog, death, melbourne, money, people
we live here - the tree on the left is gone now. so is the old weird guy in the flat underneath us. i saw what must have been his body lying on the couch through his window as i walked past one day.
he had just built an elaborate construction for growing tomatoes in the tiny square of green outside his window with much banging and smoking. he smoked like a trooper. you never saw him without a cigarette in his mouth. the smell that came from the flat was incredible. we called him mr.stinky.
one day they came along and delivered two large skips and started throwing all his stuff into them. now the place has been renovated and they want $320 a week for it. this is the real estate agent’s photograph which shows the front of the building. mr.stinky’s flat is at the back. some good looking tomatoes gradually ripened, but no one was game to pick them.
July 7, 2008 at 8:09 pm · tag/s : blog, doubt, life, melbourne, money, people
it is exactly the sort of day when you have every right to be miserable and/or worried. what with the petrol prices and the drought and the interest rates and the cost of housing and drug queen roberta williams turns cover girl.
my appointment with the dental hygienist in outer western mongolia is actually with the aptly named dr.goldberg who’s talent is not cleaning teeth but wearing a worried expression after he has looked in your mouth and poked around a bit. he tries to sell me thirty thousand dollars worth of dental work.
all of a sudden it is a bad day. not that i wasn’t expecting it, nor was i fooled by its auspicious beginning.
it starts raining. i have a bad coffee in a cafe. for no apparent reason they prop the door open with a brick and the cold air streams in. an old, old lady is munching on a sandwich. she looks worried too. she hides the uneaten half of her sandwich in a serviette.
but it is the meaninglessness of my activities and their inconsequential nature which is the cause of my misery today.
April 9, 2008 at 8:21 am · tag/s : australia, blog, blogs, melbourne, reading
letter to the editor
I love clocks, in fact I have 17 of them. But what a bore, having to get up at 2am to put them all back an hour. I mean, couldn’t they let us put them back at 10pm as we go to bed.
- Doug Jacques,
Nambucca Heads.
ha ha ha … doug : you are a genius. marieke hardy thought you were serious.
but then she is not very smart.
and she is annoying.
and she has a stupid haircut.
and her blog sucks.
February 6, 2008 at 9:58 am · tag/s : computers, melbourne, software, writing
and so we write and that is all we do. and there is nothing on the screen except our writing. in fact the only pixels that are switched on are the ones necessary to show the writing and as i type, more pixels switch on to show the new words and they’re green and that is kinda cute, and somehow it is much more relaxing to see just the words on the screen and none of the other distractions.*
and so write is all we do. that is the default position. and none of it is of any interest to any one else. at least not yet. or maybe it never will be. and maybe this doesn’t matter.
essentially i have bought a year to write. there is just a little bit of this and that, here and there. but minimal. so a miracle : i have time. to write, two more things are needed : a method and a rhythm. oh and rain helps. thank you. but it is not essential. and if the greek next door would shut the fuck up as well and people would stop slamming their doors and cuntface upstairs would stop dropping marbles on the floor that would help. but it is not essential. all i need is time, method and rhythm. and it seems i have them. now and now and now and now.
and now it is raining too. bucketing down as it happens. at last. and cuntface has gone out. and the rain is masking the sound of the greek next door.
it seems in this new life that i go to bed grumpy when the feature creature is away, except this morning i have woken up grumpy too and after an hour or two of grumping around i realize/decide that i have a headache and that a pain killer is appropriate, and some toasted grain bread from dench (have you tried their donuts?!) with peanut butter and some of that nice french cherry jam and a big pot of strong tea.
oh yeah.
and so i can write. and that is all i need to do. and the second cup of tea is nice and strong. that’s the advantage of a smaller cup : by the time you get to the second cup it is nice and strong.
ss officer to the jew : i will release you if you can guess which one of my eyes is made of glass.
jew : it is the left one.
ss officer : correct. how did you know?
jew : it looks more human than the other one.
renowned holocaust historian yehuda bauer told a version of this story in his speech to the german parliament on 27 january 1998. one of the roles of the historian he says, is to tell true stories. (i had been wondering about the use of fiction.) but he prefaces the glass eye story by saying that he doesn’t know if it is true or not. it is worth telling anyway, no? one wonders where it came from. is it at all possible that it is a joke? told by one jew to another? in the lager?
* ok. so i am a slut. after i wrote my daily 500 words today i discovered that jesse, the ceo of
hogbay software and the developer of
writeroom which i am testing and which gives me the clutter-free screen described above, will give
a free licence to people who post a review on their blog. so i thought why not post them? but since i didn’t write these words
in order to get the free licence and he may well have judged this post to be too crude and rude, and too vague to qualify as a review, i was well prepared to be unsuccessful. so i may be a slut but i am not a whore. :p anyway i did get the free licence. thanks jesse. if you want to
try writeroom gentle reader you can use it free for 30 days. if you want to keep using it after that you’ll have to
pay $25… oh. you’ll need a mac. is it even necessary to say that?
January 8, 2008 at 9:55 am · tag/s : film, melbourne, strange
one of the joys of melbourne on a monday : until 4pm the nova cinema in carlton only charges $5.50 admission. of course you are not the only person who knows this and the 4pm session of todd haynes‘ i’m not there is completely sold out. haynes is a seriously film literate director and he knows a thing or two about bob dylan too. although whilst his songs are the backbone of the film, of course it is not a film about bob dylan. it is an anti-biopic : a crazy ramshackle assemblage of references. dylan’s name is never mentioned, and there are six different actors playing the bizarro not- dylan. only one of them tries (too hard) to look like him : cate blanchett, who apparently used a sock down her pants to make her walk like a man. should have used a rolled up towel. does not convince. but doesn’t matter. only her attempts at amphetaminized not-dylan irritate. film half succeeds. which means it half fails. unfortunately it is the second half. and that means you leave the cinema with a bad taste in your mouth. and it is too long. that means you spend the last third of the film wishing that he would please just shut the fuck up and you leave the cinema with a full bladder. the film is so laden with signifiers it ultimately collapses under its own weight and you leave the cinema dazed. but then haynes has a degree in semiotics so i guess he is allowed. is it a masterpiece? no - but if you know and love (or hate) dylan you should see it anyway. why? this review by larry gross explains it better than i ever could. three and a half stars.
November 3, 2007 at 11:11 am · tag/s : australia, melbourne, music
oh great! sonic youth performing daydream nation in its entirety at the metro as part of the don’t look back series on the same night that pj harvey plays melbourne’s hamer hall on her australian tour. that’s sensible planning. don’t concert promoters talk to each other?
but polly jean will win. why? because she is not a boring old has-been just going through the motions for money. don’t look back indeed.
on the other hand low playing everything we lost in the fire in east brunswick will be very tempting…
