The Museum of Vestigial Office Technology

Today I finished off a draft of a freelance job, did a phone interview for another and responded to an urgent call to edit an 80-page report by tomorrow morning.

Somewhere in there I also got to spend an hour with Cate Kennedy, doing an interview for Overland magazine. She is very genuine and friendly, and she's got some really great insights into writing and process. Her collection of shorts Dark Roots is out through Scribe. The stories deal with loss and grief and they have a quiet melancholy and suburban irony about them.

I also took delivery of some vinyl from Brant Bjork's new Low Desert Punk label.

I'm still working on that 80-pager, and I expect it will be a late night.

because too much andy macrae is never enough

• 12:04 Morning coffee in the afternoon.
• 17:49 Sunday evening freefall through supermarket semiotics.

because too much andy macrae is never enough

• 17:04 making a patchwork out of fragments of found writing in ink and tearstained paper.
• 17:16 Listening to The Verlaines.
• 17:32 Pipsqueak cider really isn't that good.
• 18:16 I am looking at the sparkly flecks in the non-slip floor of the tram.

The aforementioned Agents of Abhorrence are playing just down the road from my place on Monday 19 May at Catfood Press on Lygon Street, opposite the East Brunswick Club. Also on the bill is Ampere from the US, on their first Australian tour. I don't pretend to have much knowledge of this branch of music, but I came across Ampere a couple of years ago and really enjoy their stuff.

In the continuing tradition of nude typists of the 1960s, I present this self-portrait by Hunter S. Thompson.

Pinched from here.

I met the drummer from Cut Sick today! Turns out he works behind the bar at my local. I didn't realise anyone in the band was of drinking age, but the drummer is a couple years older than the other guys.

He told me he also plays in a grindcore band called Agents of Abhorrence. He likes playing with them because they are much faster than Cut Sick.

Awesum!

Leonard Cohen writing Beautiful Losers on his Olivetti, mid-60s.

I often type in the nude myself.

I like white music. I like Helmet and Shellac and Nirvana, Ramones and The Stooges. I like treble and mids and raw vocals. I like guitar freak-outs and angular drums and short songs. I like alienation and angst and feeling like a stranger in my own social class. I like beer and marijuana. I like Cut Sick, who played at the Arthouse last night.



photo stolen from Pete Hyde.

There's so much dust in here, a thin laminate on every surface. There's no getting rid of it. The best I can do is displace it. It gets into my clothes and my hair, follows me around. I open my mouth to speak and dust falls out. Every movement creates currents that push it around some more. The air is alive, motes of dust aloft in the lazy light. It used to be warm and now it's cold. I can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is imaginary.

The sound of military aircraft above the city jars my nerves. A thousand autumn leaves. Each moment a threshold to the next.

Check out this awesome punk rock turtle! ACF are running a campaign to save its habitat. It can breathe air as well as absorb oxygen through gill-like structures near its cloaca.

Who doesn't love the cloaca?

There's been a bit in the Melbourne media today about the collapse of Geelong-based funds manager Chartwell Enterprises.

Seems a couple hundred investors were promised returns of up to 70 per cent in a pyramid-like investment scheme set up by a flamboyant local multi-millionaire trading in high risk stocks.

Imagine their surprise when it all went wrong!

This story in the Herald Sun is fantastic:

Wedding dream turns to nightmare.

The human cost of this tragedy is truly staggering.

As it turns out I'm really glad I bought the 7-inch.

The sleeve folds out to this fantastic two-colour punk artwork!

( Read more... )

Here's their myspace. They are playing at the Arthouse on Saturday night.

When my grandfather was the same age as me, he was in a Japanese internment camp on Ambon in Indonesia.

When my father was the same age as me, he had three children and he was building a house with his own hands.

I have an extraordinary amount of freedom and privilege in my life. I'm not sure yet what I'm building.

Tonight I went to a tribute gig for DD Meanie, the late guitarist of Melbourne punk band the Meanies. I didn't mean to be there so late, nor mean to be so drunk, but nevertheless there I was as Link, Wally, Ringo and Julian Meanie ripped through Meanies classics like "Scum", "10% Weird", "Sorry 'Bout the Violence" and "Gangrenous".

The highlight for me was Cut Sick, one of the support bands. They all wore different Meanies t-shirts, looked about 16, and played like it was their last night on Earth. Their 20-minute set featured Vans sneakers, Marshall stacks and hair flying all over the place. At the end they dropped their guitars on the stage and walked off.

I bought their CD afterwards, went up and said, "Hi". They told me I should have bought the 7-inch, because their new drummer plays much faster.

I turned around and bought the 7-inch also.

much prefers drinking from the bathtub. As soon as I'm out of the shower, she's in there, lapping at the water pooled in the bottom of the tub. She has a water bowl, but clearly that is an inferior vessel. Or maybe she resents having to share it with the dog.

There's this thing called "the aulder kincher" in Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban's 1980 postapocalytpic novel. For years I've been fascinated by those words. They just sound so mysterious and sinister and I've often wondered what they meant. I even gave a song that title (7.6 MB MP3).

Actually, the aulder kincher is more of a symbol than a figure, since it's never described and it only appears twice in the whole book, once near the start and once near the end.

Here's the first mention of it, in the context of a story Riddley is telling about the old times, and the man and the woman who agree to kill their child for food and share it with Mr Clevver if he will teach them how to light a fire:

The man and the woman then eating ther chyld it wer black nite all roun them they made ther fire bigger and bigger trying to keap the black from moving in on them. They fel a sleap by ther fire and the fire biggering on it et them up they bernt to death. They ben the old 1s or you myt say the auld 1s and be come chard coal. Thats why theywl tel you the aulder tree is bes for charring coal. Some times youwl hear of a aulder kincher he carrys off childer. (4)

In this passage, the aulder kincher is something that carries off children, and thus it has a whiff of death about it.

The second time the aulder kincher is mentioned, about six pages from the end, Riddley is summing up his new life as a travelling 'show man', moving from village to village and telling stories with wooden puppets or 'figgers' and 'fit up', and how the events of his life appear in his shows:

If youre a show man then what ever happens is took in to your figgers and your fit up its took in to your show. If you dont know whats happent sooner youwl hear of it later youwl hear your figgers tel of it 1 way or a nother. That boar kickin on the end of my spear hewl be in my shows I dont know how but hewl be there. That crow what callit, 'Fall! Fall! Fall!' and my smasht father that greyling morning at Widders Dump and that old leader with his yeller eyes and woar down teef. Gransers head glimmering in the twean lite and Goodparley sitting qwyet in amongst the black and nekkit aulders loppt off pink and red in the hart of his wud with the stoan in his head and the twean lite holding its breaf and lissening. In amongst it all the thot of may be I wer the aulder kincher. May be the idear of it ben waiting all them years for me to come a long and be it. (202)

So, like I say, the aulder kincher is not so much a figure but a sign or a signfier pointing to... what, exactly? Certainly it has no referent in our world, although apparently "kinching" is an old word, or one might say an auld word, for thieving (urban dictionary).

The aulder wood is what the chard coal berners use to make charcoal for fuel. Granser is a chard coal berner who knows the recipe for gunpowder, the creation of which is one of the key elements of the narrative. Indeed, it's Riddley who supplies Granser and Goodparley with the 'salt 4', the sulpher, the main ingredient.

Riddley is a passive protagonist -- he literally makes no decisions at all in the novel, and whenever he starts to exert his own will, he is guided away from it by external events and the wills of others. Even by supplying the sulpher, he is simply a messenger doing the bidding of the more powerful actors in the story. He is passive and yet the events of the narrative coalesce around him.

In the second reference to the aulder kincher, Riddley muses that he might be the aulder kincher, and this links in to a series of questions or riddles that the novel poses:

• What is it that is inside us but is not us?
  
• What is it that is not us but looks out through our eye holes, and puts us on like a suit of clothes?
  
• What is the name of that thing which causes us to do things without us even being conscious of them, things that seem like they were always going to happen?
  
• And the closing words of the novel: why is Punch crooked? Why does he always kill the baby if he gets the chance?

I think the aulder kincher might be a part of the answer to the riddles. In some ways, the aulder kincher is the Freudian unconscious, that which is within us but not us; and in other ways it's the dark side of the human soul or spirit, the part around which events beyond our control coalesce, even though we don't will them. The aulder kincher represents unconscious desire, or rather, it's the thing that enacts that desire, with us as its agent.

In the end, Riddley thinks maybe he is the aulder kincher, that the empty signifier has been waiting there all along for him to inhabit it, to become the signified, since he is the one who, even acting unconsciously, brought together the ingredients of disaster.

Riddley's curse is a very human one, and familiar.