That whole entourage thing...

  The following may seem trite to most but it's something that crosses my mind from time to time.  If nothing else it genuinely sheds light on the profound depths of my shallowness.

  I want to say something brief about fame and how our relationship with it has changed. These days everyone knows someone who's had a brush with it, at some point or another. But social media has altered the face of fame, possibly irrevocably. We probably have famous friends or even heroes and heroines that we follow on FB or Twitter but the specific nature I'm thinking of deals with generational fame.

  See, when I was  kid, we all said, "I want to be like so and so."  In my case, I wanted to sing like Stevie Wright or Steve Marriott or Sean Bonniwell, Alice Cooper or Eric Burdon.  Cooper being the odd man out here because the others are what we now loosely call white boy soul. But we wouldn't sing like that.  We'd merely get rollicking drunk on our parents cheap liquor and try to imbue ourselves with their spirit while we attempted to belt out Sky Pilot Or The Eagle Never Hunts the Fly or In My Mind's Eye or Reflected or St Louis.

  Where was I going with all this?  Oh yeah!  Social media.  Well, now on FB, I can leave a question for a favourite guitarist from a favourite 60s band and he'll cheerfully get back to me within 24 hours. And just now, a famous hero's wife (who in her own right is a celebrated soul so perhaps I should say I feel no small pride in being a Tweet buddy with a famous lawyer who has a rocker husband) started following me on Twitter. Don't get me wrong.  It isn't a simple nostalgic parlour trick.  This happens as much with contemporary celebrities (and/or their admin and interns) as with artists from decades gone.

  Part of the whole thing back then was  the unattainability.  The untouchableness. They made their fortune out of that mystique. They were and are exactly as the tabloids herald them - STARS!  I mean many of these people owned jet liners for Christ's  sake. Seriously! And now they are just mortal as the winter of our disco tents closes in.

  But the part I like, the thing I love the most about this modern world is that though it would appear the stars have arced, fallen and crashed back to earth, our hearts are lifted still by their not at all stellar and even all too human toil.

Bring it...

The Sparrows.

It was big. Very big and blackbrown. Is there any other kind in Sydney?
I'm sitting on the tiled verandah floor in Canon Street, Stanmore. Just smoking and staring at the afternoon light playing out over the roofs of Leichhardt. - This is a few years ago, now.
It scuttled along the tiles, looking busy. Or guilty. Both, maybe. As these things do.
The two sparrows were on it before I could give it much thought. Attacking. Attacking. Damn, they were angry little monsters.
One leg. Two - three legs. This thing wasn't going anywhere now.
The 'roach is limping and they stop pecking at it. Tilt their heads and stare. A small chirrup from one and four more sparrows show up.
They don't care about me. About the small cloud of smoke.
Jumping over my stretched, crossed legs with impunity.
I should have reached out and squashed it then but I'm lazy by nature, in spite of my best intentions.
All six set in on that little warrior. Sometimes pecking. Sometimes stopping, heads tilted to admire their own handiwork. Singing gaily among themselves now.
They took their time.
And by the time I finished the small cigar, all that remained was precisely one leg and one small and dark wing.
The Greeks were fooling themselves.
Those little bastards weren't avian Charons sent down to take the living across the Styx.
Those little bastards are just like the rest of us.

Flight reaction.

How?

How DO you exalt the ordinary?  The banal?  The average? The also rans of our lives?
How do you give, to all and everything that gives to you on a daily basis, the moments of immortality their accords?
The roads. Pitted or newly tarmac'ed. The weeds. The power lines and all that the modern forests of life throw up around us?
The sun from  these days of global warming.  These end times in which we mill about, helpless and happy.
The power sub-stations. The discarded and fractured lenticular plastic signs, The wrappers, of course. The crushed and empty and unloved cans. The flowers that the dying and disappearing bees won't even consider touching.

How do we put the wet, juicy pussy, the hard cock and the wiggling arse into the streetlight?
The houses up for sale. The detritus and discard of a billion carelessly manicured lawns. All that has seen its day. All that has been put out for recycling. All that has been put out. The street signs. Even the air, heavy with the smell of burning brakes and honeysuckle.
The crockery left under a tree for purposes beyond imagining or caring.
The vistas of us.
Everything made and all things binary that no one and nothing will know of once we are gone.
The shell of the cicada.

How do we revel in the foolish and the tedium?  Kiss Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Nietzsche and Celine, Bukowski and Strummer, McGowan, Camus and Pollack.  Kiss them gently on the cheek, take your hands off their shoulders, look them in the eye and tell them that
though they weren't wrong, they weren't right either.

Wasteland.

Laughing

I can't write
and you can't read.
And this is how we'll see out our days.
Laughing because we can do nothing.

You've been alive through more conflict than I ever want to see.
Seen out more dead enemies than I'd ever care to have friends
and sent off more friends than I could ever hope to have.

And I love you because after the job - a mechanic, a typist, a data entry clerk, a hairdresser, a mercenary, a CEO of a small production company whose name has long since faded from the billboard, a roustabout, an usher, a painter of landscapes, a project manager, an apps developer, factory worker for a cordial company, a shift worker, a counselor, a bastard, a stripper, a musician of some small renown, a lifeguard, a repo woman, a cold caller, an agent.
After all of these jobs and all others
You can't read and I can't write
And the way is thus shown.

You've been deaf for more arguments than I've had fast food.
You've known more people that you've never wanted to know than I've known sunsets.
You've spent more lifetimes talking above armies, legions of the sage than I have wasted lifetimes listening to the ceaseless drone of far off traffic.

And I love you because you've blown it - every chance, every golden opportunity, every shot at stealing a kiss, every occasion to stand tall and fight and beat down the face of bullying, every window to scream at every ghost who offered up every ounce of encouragement you ever received.

And you remain.

You are normal
and I am normal
And I can't write and you can't read.

And with the coming of the new day, we will win the lottery
Because every illiterate has their day this season.

Holy Joe.

Father and Son.

I'm no romantic but...
I was taking a break from work in a quiet street in Katoomba a couple of hours back and a guy walks past - early sixties Italian if I had to guess, care-worn. 

He was holding the hand of his son; big, possibly the best part of forty years old and reasonably crippled with autism. 

The son is leaning out on the verge and with his free hand, scooping up bunches of invisible and beautiful flowers the world cannot see. But I could tell the son could see them by the smile on his face and the way he squeezed and relaxed his hand. 

They must have reached me mid conversation because the son said, "Don't be a cunt, dad."
I'm not making that up.
"Don't you be a cunt too then!", chided the old man.
I'm not making that up, either.
At about this point they walked past me when the son stopped gathering invisible and beautiful things. And they both started laughing openly for all the world and me to hear.
I don't think they saw me sitting there with tears quietly streaming from my eyes.

Father, Son.

Jurek Kowal.

Came around to my flat. Asked me if I had any songs.

I told him I wasn't in the mood.

Fuck your moods, he said.

And I believed him

back then.

A Polish man - a mountain -

in the middle of one of his schizophrenic episodes is something to be feared, even when you laughed as he called you a lazy bastard.

He said, here's ten pieces of paper.

Write

me ten songs.

I wrote five.

Two of which my band would record.

He stormed out the door. Back

to his tall and wide canvases of naked angular women.

I let him think he'd left me feeling like shit.

A few days later

he was back.

Here's three pieces of paper. Give me three.

I gave him three.

He stormed out again, even though they were fine lyrics,

I thought.

Weeks passed and there was a knock at the door.

Let's start from scratch.

You're pissing me off, George Smith, I said.

In the space of an hour

I'd penned ten songs just to get rid of him.

I was 27. He was a drunken, Polish, schizophrenic artist.

He recorded all ten of them.

Not there back in Sydney, of course.

No. He returned to Krakow. Now that the system that had systemically

fractured his already frail health had come apart at the seams.

He sent me a letter, thanking me.

And that was that.

Jurek Kowal, if you're ever back down this way,

you owe me my ten songs,

motherfucker.

Song for George Smith

The white out.

You have stared and stared and the hours passed.
The screen got no darker. No words sullied the terrifying purity of the screen.
No character came to life. No memory drew pulse.
No gossamer storylines unfolded - haltingly or otherwise.
You simply stared.
And smelled your hand.  Is that tobacco?  Have you been sneaking a cigarette or small cigars again?
Jesus fuck! When will you ever learn?!
Was it not enough to stand outside in the cool air and watch the stars and storm clouds pass over this mountain while you sulked into the empty dark?
Was it not enough to hear the train and the traffic off in the distance?
You had to smoke?
Did you?  I forget.  The hour is, after all, late.
You've done this before too. But still you come back.
You always come back.
And why?  You pursue immortality of some small kind?  Are you kidding?  Are you fucking joking?
Like you've ever given a shit as to whether someone - anyone - even remembers your name let alone your risible, scrabbling snatches at posterity.
I sound harsh, I know.  I sound sadistic.
But no, don't turn me off.  I was kidding.  Just - fuck it.  You know?
I've missed you, my friend.
I've - and I'm being honest here - I've missed your gaze.
The way you sit and look at me.  I want to say stupidly but you're not stupid.
Or perhaps you are and I'm simply giving you the benefit of the doubt in this dying hour of magnanimity.
But it's not the point and you know that and I know that.
No.  The point is this.
While you weren't watching,
look what appeared!

'Cuz everyone is a fucking Napoleon.

Music=breathing.

Whatever other fortunes or misfortunes might have befallen my funny life, I'm grateful to have been born when I was.  I came into a world when the Beatles were just starting to make their mark and the world was changing at a hitherto unprecedented pace. I come from a relatively large family over a wide age difference and I have the warmest memories of two of my brothers (the Twins) coming home from their Saturday morning jobs, arms piled high with 45s and the occasional long player.

  Much to the chagrin of my father (the Old Man), Saturday afternoons and Sundays were filled with the Beatles, Roy Orbison, Desmond Dekker, The Easybeats, The Bee Gees, The Kinks, The Small Faces, Kaleidoscope (and Fairfield Parlour), The Pioneers and other early reggae acts, Elvis, Little Eva, Frankie Lymon, Little Anthony and the Imperials, The Byrds, The Monkees and countless others. Not too much later another brother (the Favourite One) would turn me on to WEIRD.  Frank Zappa and his proteges Alice Cooper, Iron Butterfly, Uriah Heep, early Pink Floyd, King Crimson and the not so very weird Creedence Clearwater Revival. My eldest sister would bring David Bowie into the fold eventually and my youngest sister would give me the age of the singer-songwriter. So it all comes as no surprise that to this day my heart skips a beat when I hear Sean Bonniwell's growl.  Or Eric Burdon's pissed off white boy soul.  Or the sheer level of quality in the harmonies back then.

  But the one thing those early years instilled in me was a boundless curiosity to look further afield.  Mercifully, by my late teens I was drowning in the company of friends who shared similar sensibilities and we'd sit around with whatever drugs and alcohol we could buy, steal or borrow and listen to Dantalion's Chariot, The Music Machine, The Litter, some Bob Dylan, The 13th Floor Elevators - basically anything that had fuzz guitar and/or some early skying/flanging/phasing across the instruments or vocals (Itchycoo Park, anyone?).

  Besides serving to let it be known that I am an unrelenting name dropper, all of the above is essentially a hopefully-less-than-maudlin farewell to Mark Loomis, the guitarist for the Chocolate Watch Band who was a crucial part of the melange and the soundtrack of our lives.

  To date, I have so few regrets but one will be never getting the chance to compile a fanboi biography on the likes of Mark or Sean Bonniwell or the guys from We The People or The Golden Cups.  I cannot begin to express how grateful I am to all of these people for radically altering my internal compass, only ever for the better.

  Who knows, maybe one days I'll suck up to the members of Talking Heads or The Jam or The Pretenders or The Plastics and at least partially fulfill the dream but the most important thing that all of those musicians taught me was that without curiosity, we are all the lesser for it. As people.  As call and response organisms. As spirits.   I hear that spirit still in the likes of London Grammar, Daughter, Jamie T and a whole bunch of stuff coming out of Australia, The States, Europe, Africa, South East Asia and Africa.

  And that's why if you ever hear me utter, "I just don't get the shit that they play today", you have my permission to punch my fucking lights out.

 Remain intrigued.

  If you've made it this far, here are some links to life-changing goodness.

Masculine Intuition - The Music Machine

The Smell of Incense - Southwest FOB

Follow me - Lyme and Cybelle

Action Woman - The Litter

Don't need your lovin' - The Chocolate Watch Band

New York Mining Disaster 1942 - The Bee Gees.

Hey Joe - The Golden Cups.