a year ago - 'mittens'

this morning in tuscany

I didn't care for Tuscany much, it wasn't anywhere near as good as Tibet or the other place. It was featureless and dull. I couldn't get out without starting all over again though. 

When you get to the black frame in the road you are transported to somewhere else, in this instance it really did look like just going back to the beginning though. 

a tramp in tibet

This morning at the gym, a curtailed experience due to time (I had a meeting at 8) I went to Tibet. My companions were mainly Canadian. 

This is my best attempt at photographing the emergence of a head hole around a ponytail. I think you can just see it. But not really. 

By the way two things: sometimes people's profile pictures suggest they are black people (or a corgi, but forget that). But the avatars I have seen have all been white people. Just saying. Also, I noticed that in the examples in the opening screen for the program, May Pang's name came up. WTF!?

Here's the real world outside. Some prat was smoking a cigarette out there and more prats putting up signs telling you not to walk on the fucking pavement because they are building some new set of dog boxes. Poor dogs I say. 

brush with fame

So continuing my ginger reimmersion in the gym world, cautious because of danger of further back problem, I went to Anytime Fitness again this morning and was mildly active. They have new treadmills (or whatever those things are called) or at least different ones to what you got at Anytime Sunshine in 2019. These ones allow you to choose a walk through a pastoral scene during which slow vehicles pass you going in the opposite direction and people - apparently people from all over the world, christ only knows how this works or what it is meant to mean - are also walking with you, more or less. It is my tendency wherever possible to learn by doing rather than by trying to comprehend a manual or an instruction so I am just letting this wash over me taking baby steps in the first instance, I mean almost literally. Anyway you can choose a walking place, and I chose Ireland, because it was the first on the list. It looked a lot like, I don't know, the road between Coldstream and Healesville. The interesting thing was you walk behind people (some come towards you, there was even one weirdo just standing I guess on an embankment on the side of the road looking at the road and not moving) and when you get close to them...

They become transparent, and you see their arms, which are of course in front of them, through their bodies, then you kind of walk through them I guess. Actually the most disturbing example of this is people (women, presumably) with ponytails, whose ponytails become head holes. 

But this is still pretty creepy. Also, I was in Ireland with a celebrity! Alright, I wasn't in Ireland. And I am almost certain that this is not the celebrity but someone else with her name. Also, I am not even really sure May Pang is a celebrity. Though I did read about her on wikipedia last week. 

So, out of 10 I would say, 7 not a bad gymsperience this morning and I will go again soon. I would also mention that unsurprisingly I suppose the Travancore Anytime Fitness is less intimidating than the Sunshine one, where some man who might have been really into steroids or really into ice or both always seemed to suddenly appear out of nowhere from the back of the room (I would only ever go before 7am, and it often seemed empty when I got there). I walked back through Royal Park it was raining lightly and that was a pleasant experience. 

this post has nothing to do with my cats or any cats, but these days I feel the need to provide a picture of something just to lull you into forgetting how dumbed down everything is by pictures of for instance cats

Not that things aren't dumbed down, way down, enough here.

So I have interlinked dichotomies re: health, pain, fitness, weightloss etc which form a kind of ker-plunk situation probably not uncommon in the almost-56-year-old-men demographic. I have the pain, which I have whinged about previously; I finally made it to the doctor’s on Wednesday unless it was Thursday and she figured I had a slightly (maybe she didn’t say slightly) inflamed (or similar term) vertebrae. The trick, she says, is to strengthen the muscles around it so as to keep it in place and not sticking out hurting me. She recommends physio and that is I suppose something I have to do. But in the meantime, I just joined the gym again after a year away and no bull, I hate it but I am really keen to start going there again on a very regular basis. But I don’t want to, you know, hear a pinging sound and see that disc bouncing out onto the wall. As mentioned previously (thanks for caring) yes I can maintain 10 000 steps a day and my daily average for 2021 is in fact slightly over and I aim to keep that going. Sorry to bring it up but I know that is what diaries are for, and if you want to read my diary, well gee whiz you get what you get because, news just in, it is what it is.

 

Speaking of which in the last week or so I have had password hell with two media orgs I subscribe to, Slate Plus (longtime member) and Crikey (recent convert). Slate Plus has always been a bit iffy with proper labelling of its podcasts on its site, so you kind of take a stab in the dark whether you get the ‘Plus’ version (longer with a coda) or the regular version which has ads. I can’t stand the ads. Of course, being in Australia they almost never have anything at all to do with me, things I couldn’t buy even if I was inclined. So it is galling to have to listen to them. But now when I try to access the ‘Plus’ version of the podcasts (or ‘Dear Prudence’, the text advice column, which frankly I am addicted to) I have to go through a rigmarole of logging in and then the humiliation of being admitted to something I should not have log in for but at the same time being told that I could not, at this point, make the transaction. UGH.

 

Crikey has just been sending me on a change-your-password-thanks-your-password-change-is-successful-oh-who-are-you-change-your-password trek which sucks and also as some would say blows. OK I managed this one by complaining to them (sorry, I would have complained to you first but I’ve been busy) and they sent me what I assume is a generic password for Crikey which I’m just going to keep using until I can’t anymore. 

 

If you know anything about the two above you’ll know that they are left-leaning online journalism sites from the US and Australia respectively. I have been a Slate adherent for 8 or 9 years. I bit the bullet and took on Crikey a few months ago and while at first I was doubtful (perhaps, I now think, not much was happening over summer) it is paying off in terms of in-depth actual news, political news, which I enjoy. My leftist world view was created by my parents being intelligent from the mid-1960s and exposing me to the appropriate views, proof, rhetoric. I was leftwing before I knew what it meant, like supporting a football team, but when I found out what it meant I realised it was appropriate to what I actually believed, lol. I remember a long series of arguments with my Auburn South Primary School friend John Parncutt about Liberal vs Labor at a time when I could barely often recall (those two words do seem kind of similar – was that deliberate on the part of the Liberals?) which word stood for my alignment. John would ask me why I thought Labor was the best party to lead the nation and fuck it, I was ten, I had no idea of anything at all, of course, except that Enid Blyton was exciting and ABBA were grand. Looking back I now suspect that had I actually posited anything like a reasonable response he would have shat and died, because he certainly (in my memory anyway, maybe blocked it out) didn’t have a policy position on anything except that the Liberal Party was his family’s football team. In any case, I have always essentially voted Labor (yeah, I have actually often voted Greens, particularly in Broadmeadows where it feels like Labor’s so rusted on anything that puts a bit of a sad old damp firework under it might be useful) and, unimaginative as it might seem, I kind of like them. I have no special idealism and I don’t even, really, care about people above everything (I care about people I care about, but I also care about animals I care about, I also, I am sure I’ve mentioned this, question the whole notion of a world-view concocted as though what you/I care for really matters). 

 

Last night I recorded two hours of lecture to my computer to be released unto students on Tuesday. By the end I was very croaky and in that weird state – I have to say it is almost pleasurable – of feeling like I’d run out of vocabulary, just a general exhaustion of verbality. My lectures, by the way, are not written so much as commentary to a series of assembled slides. I try to have a summary at the beginning, but I tend not to have a summing up, and usually that’s because I like to keep things open-ended. I don’t believe there is a neat ending, and to imagine one is to cut yourself off intellectually. Everything bleeds into everything else. I spend hours telling students that mid-century modernism* is still heavily affected by some of the concerns of the late 19^th century, and then I say ‘so to wrap that up, no-one is prey to their formative influences anymore, year zero came along and the reset was entirely successful’ - ?!

 

Today I have to write another lecture, almost completely from scratch (there will be some callbacks to the first week of lectures – this is for undergraduate students who are not dumb but I think do need a little bit of hand-holding, JUST NO SPOONFEEDING, early on). It will be great, I have good material, but the composition of it will be arduous. Fortunately, as I always tell everyone in my usual smug way, I really enjoy my job. 

 

*By the way it occurred to me while I was talking about that that the mid-21^st century is looming on the horizon; a book I was reading for review this week which claimed to be about ‘mid-century’ began its narrative in the 19-teens. 

oh, and... 'rabbit rabbit'

 

apparently i interviewed richard thompson in march 2006

Richard Thompson

Richard Thompson is on a level where he can pretty much do what he wants, within the bounds of logic. As an early, invaluable member of the folk rock legends Fairport Convention, who left after a few years for a thoroughly successful solo career (a bit of which was not really solo as in the 70s and 80s it was as part of a duo with Linda Thompson, who was his wife), and being a gentleman whose guitar prowess has always been admired and adored around the world, he has pretty much got it made. And – don’t you hate it when you read this kind of thing? If I’d achieved what he’d achieved I’d be a mean freak – he is still a very down-to-earth and amiable fellow.

The Thompson oeuvre is often nicely pommy and he has a social commentator nature that’s often quite Ray Davies-ish: have a listen to the great ‘Let it Blow’ on his current album Front Parlour Ballads to see what I’m on about. In fact Front Parlour Ballads is highly recommended a tremendous introduction to Richard Thompson and a reminder that he’s one sixties artist who still retains a swag of credibility and has all his wits about him, and can crank out a bunch of catchy tunes to boot.

‘I’m aware that you don’t write or play music in a vacuum,’ he says, when I ask him about how he introduces his audience to his new stuff. ‘The only way you can really find out if something works is to sit down and play it for an audience. If they get it, fine, if they don’t – back to the drawing board.’ But at the same time, ‘Audiences are by their nature a conservative body – you have to pull them along a bit, drag ‘em forward, play something new then something familiar. Sometimes you fail, but I think that should be part of the live performance – the element of failure, that you try something and you don’t always succeed.’

Like Bjorn and Benny from Abba used to be, he’s a nine-to-five songwriter. ‘I like to do office hours. The more you work at it the more spontaneous it becomes… you open your mind to great ideas on a regular basis, more possibilities flow through you. You just get more tuned in.’

He’s also stayed a catchy and relevant songwriter, surely, by examining the popular song in depth with his Thousand Years of Popular Song project. ‘It started with, I suppose, Playboy magazine. Playboy were asking musicians in 1999 to submit what they thought were the ten greatest songs of the millennium. I thought, ‘They’re being very pretentious about this – they don’t mean millennium, they mean the last twenty years’ so I thought, I’ll tease them a bit and I’ll start with 1000 AD. I don’t think they printed my list – a little bit too obscure. But then I was asked to do a show at the Getty museum in Los Angeles, so I thought this would be an interesting idea, if a little ambitious, so I put together a small group, three of us, to perform it… it’s become an occasional thing, we’ll do a few shows every year, it’s great fun. The music is really all over the place, every conceivable style of music, most in the English language, I suppose it’s Anglocentric more than anything else, but we do a song in Mediaeval Italian, there’s a song in 12^th century French, right up to Fats Waller, Abba, Britney Spears and whatever.’

So having examined the medium up close, and written a few greats himself, can Richard tell us the essential element of pop music, so we can put it in a bottle? ‘It’s hard to say what that is, I think it does vary. You can say that there are consistent things that run through popular music, three chords will get you a long way, that hasn’t really changed. Love is the big theme that runs through everything – love and a bit of politics. A drone was popular in dance music in the 1300s and was still popular in Tamla Motown in the 60s and 70s. There are consistent things that continually reappear... But then, there are always exceptions to the rules.’

Know the rules and break them – that’s the key. There is one rule Richard knows not to break – he’s emphatic about how much he loves Australia, which he’s been coming to for a couple of decades now and which he’s touring this week. ‘It’s always a fantastic country. Because I’m a wildlife fan, the wildlife is the first thing that really struck me. Just seeing rainbow lorikeets flying around and sulphur-crested cockatoos in the parks, galahs – that still amazes me! It’s a great country, the people, the cities…’

He’s a gentleman!