So the shit is hitting the fan again in this part of Melbourne. I think it's the first time the shit has hit the fan again anywhere in Australia; assuredly the shit will hit the fan again in other places for many more agains to come, but for now, well, we're special. For the news part of this blog post I can report that while Lenny was still home from school (with his dad) with his cold having tested negative to covid, a child at his school tested positive so the school closed. Because of Len's negative test I knew he hadn't been exposed, and nor had I. The school is 800m from here. Since last week I haven't been in an enclosed space other than my workplace, where I went last night, and which I attended late enough in the evening that I saw no-one at all. So naturally I am doing again the deep dive, Coriolis effect-style, into my own head. I've been out and about quite a bit, on my bike or walking, and I've seen people and even spoken to some on the phone and on video calls, but like last time, they're not quite real.
That's the leitmotif of my easy, lucky pandemic so far - not terror, illness, pain, death - merely a queasy, horrified loneliness, a lost and rootless thinking which spirals though memories and ideas and insights and fantasies, and a smooth dark blank wall where there used to be something indistinct but detailed called 'the future'.
On the way home from work last night I got a puncture in Swanston St, so I walked the rest of the way. I didn't get home till half past two. It's not that far and I've walked home from work before, it never takes that long. How can I say this without it sounding maudlin? I felt I had no motive to go home. I felt a sort of mild detached interest in the absence of a purpose. I wasn't cold, hungry or very tired; home is lonely and boring but it wasn't a reluctance to face that (although it often is at other times) perhaps it was something about recognising that whatever was going on in me would continue wherever I happened to be. Anyway, I dawdled.
My headphones have finally packed up and only the right earpiece is producing sound. I've ordered a new set online but who knows when they'll arrive - those records I bought from America still haven't got here and now I don't expect that they ever will - so as I walked i listened through one ear to the silence of the night and through the other to Songs from the Big Chair, the Tears for Fears album which is possessing my imagination and curiosity these days in a way that brings me back to 1985, not at all as if I'm there again in my bedroom looking at the needle tracking across the record. I remember doing that all right, and listening intently, but in remembering I'm wondering now about that absorption. I've written about Tears For Fears on this blog before.
Last night around one I sat on a low brick fence in North Carlton and read a Pitchfork reassessment of Songs from the Big Chair. I wanted the distance of someone else's perspective on it. It was interesting, I don't have the technical knowledge to articulate how music works, so I learn from honest nuts and bolts music writing. I think the appeal of this record right now is exactly its push/pull effect, its openness and the way it stacks and sequences such a collection of disparate states, some repulsive and some so much more than seductive that it's like being played to by your own soul.
In 1985 I loved the track The Working Hour.
God, it sounds tinny on youtube. The Pitchfork thing explained a bit about the process of accretion of sounds on the tracks on this record and that gave me some things to listen to. It also said this track was at one stage going to give its name to the album, and also that the lyrics are in some manner 'about' labouring for a record company, which is actually really interesting, given that they sound like what they're about is an inner struggle externalised. I went out on my bike for a ride this evening and I was in the cemetery, listening to the hissing of my tyres on the wet asphalt with one ear and this track with the other. I wanted to ask someone whether the 1980s just killed saxophones in pop music in the same way that no children born now are ever called Trevor. The answer to this question must of course be No, but I was then (and am now) so steeped in this particular sound, repugnant and at the same time virtuosic, that I can't think of any other sound on my own. But the only people nearby who I could have asked such a question of were all dead.
I've been working for too long now on a drawing based in part on a photo I took a few weeks ago in the cemetery, where I should not have gone that day and would certainly not have gone if I'd known it would flood me with grief and make me feel that there was nothing left in my life worth bothering to go on living for. Honestly, who would imagine moping round in a cemetery could really actually have such a stupid, obvious, lame, cliched effect. When I was just a few years older than Lenny is now I lived for a few months with my family in a unit perched between the train line and the cemetery. One day as I looked out the window at it I saw a ghost walking between the headstones.
That's the drawing. I'd like to finish it tonight. It's well and truly overcooked. There are two things worth saying about it. One is that it's a drawing I probably in some sense needed to get out of my system, and the overcooking present in every square centimetre of surface is less a failure of technique than an accurate rendering of a long-standing feeling about cemeteries (which of course are actually very nice places, as long as you haven't just buried someone you love there). The other thing to say is that I have completely misjudged how much physical space can be represented on a piece of paper of this shape and size. It's too small.
There's plenty of awkwardness in the lines volumes and forms but I utterly don't care about that, I never have; I know exactly what I need to do to draw better bodies, and when life drawing is possible again I will go and do some. The only body I have access to at the moment is my own and I have to photograph it so it's only useful inasmuch as I know how it feels in those volumes. The black-haired woman is me, although I am not into the whole concept of wearing a surgical mask just for the comfort of it, which is really the only reason for wearing one in Melbourne streets and gardens. And when I see people wearing them pulled down on their chins, which I see, like, every hour of every day, I want to not slap them exactly, more like look at them a bit crossly and maybe roll my eyes a bit. I don't though because Jacinda Arden told New Zealanders it's not their job to police other people's stupidity rather it's their job to be kind. I'm a bit bloody suss on the old Jacinda in general, but that particular piece of advice seemed to me to have the strongly pragmatic value of being a practice that will keep you out of trouble so I have tried to apply it in my distant dealings with other people even though they definitely get unbelievably more stupid with each day that the pandemic drags on.When I came in this evening from riding around weeping whenever I saw people who appeared to be happy, the sun had just gone down and I had that fleeting sense that an evening is before me. I opened the big door to the balcony - any evening when it isn't raining there is a lot of mildly interesting activity down in the street which I really like to watch, I feel engaged in it - and I poured myself a glass of pernod and put The Working Hour on the stereo. I sat out there and drank and listened to the music fill this big room. I might have written this already but when the shit hit the fan the first time and I completely lost it, I thought the airlines were possibly going to go under and even if they didn't no going to other countries for many years, so I cashed in the couple of hundred thousand frequent flyer points I'd been saving for a journey to a distant snowy sandy spit of an archipelago island on the North Sea, a trip I thought about often when looking at planes ascending in the sky, and got a good sound system instead. I have travelled so little in my life. The last paragraph of this post from 2017 is a key example of why I continue to write this blog,(instead of writing something less available for free which would win me the fame, admiration and envy of my contemporaries that I so richly deserve not to mention renown long after my death) for that paragraph, which just came out of me at the end of a long post, like this one stimulated by a messy blurred day of overthinking and feels, explained to me what I've done with my life instead of going to actual places. I don't regret it. But I didn't expect it to be this way.
Anyway here's cats
*I could just find a bit of HHIS on youtube and post a comment under. That would work right. I understand Daryl Somers reads out all the comments people leave on youtube bits of HHIS, though I have no information about who he reads them out to.
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