First day of spring and it has rained all day.
It’s wet, cold and very, very welcome.
First day of spring and it has rained all day.
It’s wet, cold and very, very welcome.
Orright, so I’ve gone from Earworm of the Week back to Friday Earworm. My blog, my rules.
You have to admit, the psychedelic-mushroom munching-hillbilly-slightly creepy and scary but hilarious vid for this song goes really well with the events of the week just gone.
And I love this quote from an old interview:
“When my relatives ask, ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’, and I tell them I’ve been playing in a country band, a grimace comes over their faces,” he says, “and they pretend to be supportive.”
It’s Sunday! Let’s NOT write about the election! What about something less depressing and more relaxing?
One of my favourite things to do is to visit my brother in Tinytown, where he bought a Country Seat a while back. Not a bush block, a house in a quiet part of the town (if you don’t count an occasional milk tanker roaring past in the night.) He sold his house in Footscray and visits his place in Tinytown every weekend to dig the garden – a variety of potatoes, garlic, and every other kind of veg – chop wood, explore the surroundings on a little Postie bike, and drink red wine by the wood stove with his GF and any visitors and dogs who might be there.
Brother’s veg garden is not like my veg garden. Bro’s garden is some serious shit.
My brother's vegie garden in Tinytown, featuring a honking great trench. For potatoes? Or murdered neighbours?
Victorians will easily be able to work out Tinytown’s real identity, but I’m keen not to raise the profile on Google in case it becomes the next Fitzroy. There have been upmarket cafe sightings.
One of the many things I love about Tinytown is the murals. They’re everywhere – on the supermarket, the servo, the side of every shop. When the people there get up in the morning and there’s not much to do, they paint a mural.
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Everlasting is the second solo CD from Rebecca Barnard, formerly of Rebecca’s Empire and Yarraville local treasure.
My first impression: quiet and restrained, occupying a very adult space between pop and cool jazz. The dove-grey cover art maybe sets up that expectation. Yes, it’ll seem soft and unassuming at first listen, but it’s a mighty album.
Everlasting is like a gemstone which might look soft and grey on the ground, but on closer inspection it’s covered all over with tiny multicoloured facets, and once you see one you discover more and more of these facets and refracted colours, all different.
Barnard, who is a foodie and radio/TV cooking personality in her other life, has another description for it.
“It’s a bit like one of those Chinese stocks that’s been simmering away for years and years,” she says of her new-found musical potency.
“The longer you let it go, the stronger it gets until it’s got all these elements that you’ve been striving for.”
I’ve been tasting this stock for a week and I keep finding more unexpected flavours. The pop sensibility of Rebecca’s Empire is still there in more uptempo songs like Give Way and Fall and Walk. The signature buzzy lead guitar still pops out on occasion (she plays all guitars on this disc) joined by clarinet, cello and other textures.
Everlasting was recorded in a few weeks in New York. Barnard deliberately took herself out of her everyday world to travel to a distant place, but to record with Barney McAll, who she had known since childhood. Other musicians are Dan Reiser (drums), Jonaton Maron (bass), Rufus Cappadocia (cello), Matt Darriau (Clarinet).
Take some time, got to move from there
All that’s left is what you bear
(Give Way)
This isn’t a CD for rushing around with a child clinging to your leg, or on the car stereo in noisy traffic. It’s a melodic meditation, with Rebecca’s sweet and husky voice telling you stories in between bursts of her signature sweet harmonies. The ingredients in the stock are the shifts and shocks of adult life, and the flavours are subtle sweet-sour-salty tastes and spices blended by a masterchef. I first listened to the title track, Everlasting, in the kitchen with distractions all around me, and it sounded unexciting, almost filler. Then I listened to it properly and now it makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Barnard invites the listener into something deeply precious and personal, hugely generous, a gift.
Unfortunately, I don’t understand poetry, but I do enjoy it sometimes. I stumbled on some Found Poetry at Ron Sullivan’s blog (she’s a faultline.org blogger, so you know she’s worth a look.) This is from Home Kinks: Popular Mechanics Home-Owners’ Guide, 1945.
To simplify the task of lifting a meat loaf from the pan,
one housewife places a strip of waxed paper in the pan
so that both ends extend over the edges.The annoyance of having her silk stockings dry
with streaks in them led
one housewife to hang them between damp towels.
I thought I’d try it for myself. The subject is confronting.
It’s a thought provoking contrast with a pretty palomino, something little girls dream about. Of course, the title was taken straight from the found text.
This is from the February 27, 2010 Auction Report, Tofield, Alberta, Canada.
Pretty Palomino
Black Quarter Horse two year old no white
Run in scared but pretty, good weight
Two-fifty meat buyer
Chestnut Quarter Horse two year filly
Run in star marking good weight pretty
Two-sixty meat buyer
Standardbred four year old no papers
Not fast enough to race but broke. Led around
9DN3E brand on neck three hundred meat buyer
Sorrel grade stud with halter
Chased around three fifty
Meat buyer Walter
Straight to slaughter
Cremello tobiano yearling
Filly application there yearling
Ok weight ninety, meat buyer
Palomino mare Quarter Horse papers promised
Nice looking, run around yelling
For foal selling
As grade pretty good weight
385 meat buyer
Cremello yearling
Same as earlier one
A little heavier meat buyer Les
Cremello tobiano mare registered seven
Chased around with rope halter ok weight
Three hundred meat buyer Walter…straight
Cremello mare reg papers good weight
Two eighty-five meat buyer
Palomino six year old paint mare registered
Run around friendly and petted
Led a bit two seventy meat buyer
Straight to slaughter again
Paint mare palomino pretty
Four year old Quarter Horse cut on knee
Not bad registered a little thin
Two seventy meat buyer straight to slaughter
Pretty palomino yearling filly
Run through one forty meat buyer
The found text didn’t have anything which made a good ending, so my “found poem” just stops abruptly.
The text is from Fugly Horse of the Day, a legendary blog which has done a lot to showcase the problems of continuing to breed companion animals which end up surplus to human needs and wants. Something we all need to think about in these financially shaky times.
And that’s probably as close to poetry writing as I will ever get.
This is My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style by the Dream Warriors, from Canada. I love Acid Jazz and I think this is one of my favourite things ever.
The Head tune is from Quincy Jones’ Soul Bossa Nova (Roland Kirk is the flautist).
Here’s a thought experiment: What do you think the Dream Warriors’ homage to / quotation of Soul Bossa Nova would have done for this recording’s sales, given that it’s obscure back catalogue which previously would have to have been hunted down by afictionados who knew of its existence in the first place (barring the odd brilliant remainder bin accident, and we’ve all had ‘em.)
Probably the bump would have been small, but it would have advanced the original artists a bit among a demographic which wouldn’t have discovered them otherwise. Even if in a small way. Discuss.
Let’s hope the Dream Warriors avoid the notice of rent seeking parasites.
Last Saturday I nearly killed Ollie.
I’ll tell this story all arse about, otherwise it might scare you if you’re one of the people who read here and love the Ollmeister. So, ending first: Ollie is here, alive and undamaged, with his cheery, rather bumptious personality intact. We’ve just been snuggling on the couch with a DVD, after he’s circled the park at normal warp speed, played bitey-face with Maggie and scoffed his dinner.
First post for Cast Iron Balcony 2010, and the first since I took a break from it. I missed it.
Towards the end of last year, it was just getting a bit too hard. In some ways, CIB was becoming the victim of its success. I’d had requests for interviews from journos and invitations to post on prominent group blogs (haven’t been doing anything there, either.) Most people would be ecstatically happy, but because I’m a neurotic over-thinker, my response was to begin to obsess over the quality of every post and my lack of a PhD in every subject I blogged about. One of the group blogs I’m a part of is mainly composed of academics and other professionals, which made me think… well… What right do I really have about to write about stuff, anyway? And what right do I have to occupy a position as a “feminist blogger” in the Ozblogosphere without ever having taken a tertiary course in gender studies?
Of course, the answer to that that Miranda Devine, Catherine Deveny, Andrew Bolt, the De Britos and hundreds of other bloviators don’t have the slightest hesitation about hitting their keyboards about any topic whatsoever, and they get paid for it, too. So I should revive this blog and keep on doing what I started it for: writing about whatever’s interesting or angsting me at any given moment.
I think that as the readership of CIB increased my sense of responsibility increased to the point where every post on something I care about became a 10,000 word essay which had to be researched for three weeks before I wrote a word. I just made it into very hard work. Plenty of political blogs are an intelligent articulation of how the writer reacts to events or other writings, rather than a pseudo-academic or pseudo-journalistic exercise.
In other words, I needed to get over myself a bit.
Also, 2009 was a hell of a year. How was yours? I had one kid finishing grade six and starting high school, and another one doing VCE and wanting to start Uni straight away, no gap year. So we had the quadruple-whammy of: Grade 6 end-of-year stuff; Supporting VCE student through exams (like being the person in a little van who putters along after the endurance cyclist or long distance runner who is near the finish line) plus VCE end-of-year stuff, including a major formal Graduation party; Choosing, applying for, and doing orientation things for younger kid’s high school; Choosing, applying for, and doing Open Day things for eldest kid’s University.
As well, we had VCE Graduation night, Schoolies week (shudder), and various other bits and pieces to do with schools. Girlchild passed VCE with elan and has been accepted into Arts at Melbourne university.
Life has also changed a little since my Dad had a fall and broke his femur in September. He’s 89, so he’s doing bloody well considering, but he gave us a scare and spent time in Rehab (No, no, no!) and now has a wheelie walker and a community worker who comes to give him a shower. He still has reading, writing and cricket, but he’s lost bushwalking and overseas travel forever, I think. I’m going to check out disabled-friendly bush tracks for the cooler weather, but harder stuff will be out.
My mum, who’s 88, has had the boundaries of her life shrunk radically overnight. As she can’t leave Dad for very long, she’s had to give up a lot of her activities (Labor party membership, Quaker vigils; you can see where I get it from, can’t you?)
Then, also, we went to New Zealand for the summer holidays, so it’s only now that I’ve got the time to show my blog some love. I’ve had help from this talented web wrangler, who you might recognise.
Image notes: Last summer I posted a photo of our garden taken from the balcony, which is actually a deck and not a balcony at all. The apricot tree behind the perching dove is gone. A few days after I took the photo, there was a terrible heatwave which cooked every leaf on the tree. I waited to see whether it would regenerate after winter, but it was definitely dead; it was a sad job pruning it back, then back again, and finding only dead wood.
In case this becomes like a sad metaphor for this blog, I plan to plant a couple of trees and many, many (drought tolerant) plants this coming autumn as well as watering and nurturing the blog.
I’m officially on hiatus. Of course, having said that, I’ll probably get the blogging diahorrea next week, but at the moment the VCE and other work and family obsessions have given me writers block.
Back soon.
I heard this on Music Deli a while back and my hair fairly stood on end. It’s been my number one earworm and consolation over a fairly trying too-busy-to-blog couple of weeks.
Here’s the only YouTube of this song I can find, and unfortunately the audio is shit. Imagine this song with wonderful sound, starting with a clean, hair-raising blast from that horn section, and go off and buy Homemade Biscuits. It’s as if Wilson Pickett came back to life as an Australian and joined the Saints.
This song should go in the Pool room along with Know Your Product, Eternally Yours, and other iconic Australian indie foot stompers.
Dan Sultan is releasing another album at the Espy Gershwin room on November 21. I hope he’s still using that horn section.
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Nick Possum
Uncensor