New tracks up on Reverb Nation.

Hey All,

  I hate to spruik. I really do. But when I'm not writing shit up here or taking pretty pics of nature to throw up on Facebook, I record my songs.  I started playing because I didn't like what I heard on the radio way back when.  I frequently still don't.  Hence I make up my own rubbish instead of just complaining about everyone else's.

  Anyway, over the past few months I've been recording some new tracks; New Man's Eyes, Sheen and as of last night, Crane.

  I hope you get along to the site and give them a spin. I like 'em.  I hope you do too.

Cheers,

mal

Malcolm Ian Connell - Reverb Nation.

 

Dreamscope and me.

And now for something completely yaddayaddayadda...

  I love taking photos and I love the new buzz about Google's Deep Dreams.  The online app Dreamscope (Google it) makes it simple to convert pics into some seriously righteous headfucks.

Here are some of my rather poor efforts so far. Some photos I took myself.  Others are heroes of yore brazenly lifted directly from the 'net.

Alice Cooper. Age: Nuclear.

Dali and friend.

A glasshouse in the winter of its life.

Talking Heads.

A Magpie apres le deluge etc.

Jayne Mansfield and friends.

A spider flower out in the yard.

A truck I saw in central NSW.

Rubbish from the neighbour's front yard.

Zappa on a good hair day.

And of course, the usual eater egg song to round things out.

People take pictures...

Roquefixade.

I'd been ambling my way up through the Pyrenees with the vague intention of running with the bulls at Pamplona. I was well up in the mountains in the early morning light when a young guy in a souped up Peugeot stopped and picked me up on a precariously winding road with sheer drops along one side.  And even though it couldn't have been much after eight in the morning, he was already stoned.  The smell of really fragrant hashish lingered in the car. 

  He asked me where I was bound for in broken English and I told him that I needed to initiate myself into the world of men via getting stupidly drunk and traumatising and torturing animals that I'd never seen and would never care for again.  I was, in effect, playing the tourist. He laughed maniacally as the stoned so often do and went on to explain that he was a DJ at a local radio station.  He made slight overtures about getting me in to play a song or two but we mooted the idea for one reason or another.  Instead we got talking about the music we knew and loved and I mentioned Midnight Oil (this is the mid eighties, remember).  His whole body exploded with frantic animality. He couldn't keep his hands on the steering wheel, which caused me some small anxieties, and he gave up any attempt at speaking English. And since my French was absolutely pitiable as it still is, I couldn't determine whether he wanted to kill us both by going over the cliff or whether I'd triggered some functional form of epilepsy.

  Finally the squealing and the jazz hands and the laughter settled down and he asked me if I had any of their stuff or could I play it at the station.  I wasn't at all sure of my skills back then so I played it safe by producing my worn out cassette of 10 to 1 that I'd taped off vinyl back in England and he grabbed it out of my hands.  From what I could make out, he'd been following the Oils since Koala Sprint and had been giving Power and the Passion a lot of airplay. Alas, to deaf ears in that far flung corner of rural France. He must have cranked the volume to maximum as he pulled a crumpled jay from breast pocket and lit it.  I was the messiah for those terrifying kilometres.  All efforts at conversation ceased and he flung the little car through corner after corner, entranced in the monstrous sound and at one with his personal universe. 

  It was some time after that that I realised he was taking me the wrong way and by the time I hopped out of that quivering vehicle, I realised I was closer to Toulouse than to Andorra.

  In exchange for the cassette, he gave me a block of Afghan that - without word of a lie - could have covered the Venus mount on my palm. And no matter how eloquently I tried to explain that I couldn't take it since the border guards in Spain don't take kindly to this sort of product, especially given that it was only marginally smaller than, say, a Matchbox car, he wouldn't dream of reneging on such an honourable and equitable trade.

  So here I was - drug laden and marginally annoyed on the outskirts of Toulouse. With the July heat well up by now, I took off my shirt, wrapped it around my waist, picked up the backpack and guitar and started walking towards the mountains again.

  And then the adventure began.

  By and by a car stopped to pick me up.  A guy in his late twenties who asked me in near-accentless English where I was heading. I could only mumble something like, "Well, you may not believe this but...". He said he wasn't heading up to the border but he lived in a town not far from Foix and would give me a lift as far as that idyllic little place. From the moment I hopped in, I liked this guy.  He started talking about his time in the States doing pretty much what I was doing.  Just drifting from place to place in search of no great thing in particular. He'd loved living in New York for a year but felt compelled to head out on the byroads to see what else made that country tick.  After three years he wearied of the road and came back to Toulouse where he got a job with Airbus as an electrical engineer.

  He told me that he thought I was tricking, what with the shirtlessness and all and that's why he stopped. But once he heard my accent, he told me he'd met enough Australians to know that we were inclined to do crazy things such as walk through miles of farmland semi-naked just because we can. An amazingly easy human being.  Wise and funny and not without his darkness - he was in an abusive relationship with a dancer at the Toulouse Metro. A real, wonderful, fractured human being like the rest of us. He told stories not unlike my own but with a mature writer's charm for weaving spells with tales of more roads and places not yet explored by me.  And I listened, grateful for the good company, the sunshine, the rolling land but most of all grateful that I hadn't died in a crumpled burning wreck at the bottom of a cliff with Peter Garrett's polemic of Maralinga on an echoing, supranatural loop.

  I spoke of life in Australia, of being a mechanic and of wanting to be a great musician one day.  We spoke excitedly about Dylan's lyrics, Hesse's pastorals and meditations on Buddhism, of the cruel and stupid life in Thatcher's England, of the Cold War and cruise missiles, of protests and rock stars, of geology and astronomy.  I must admit I felt a certain sorrow as we approached Foix but Dominic turned to me and said, "Frank is touring with the dance troupe at the moment so my place at Roquefixade is pretty much empty, if you want a place to hang out for a couple of weeks."

  I jumped at the chance.

 Roquefixade couldn't have more than a couple of hundred people living in it. Basically a few ancient houses nestled at the foot of a mountain set in verdant farmland and foothills. A nothing place with woods and creeks and even wild bears around the way, if that was to be believed. A place devoid of even a local store and an anticlimax to any story.

  But every night, after Dominic came home from work laden with local Pyrenees cheese and the famous Toulouse bread as well as gin and vodka purchased in town, we would walk up the old goat track to the ruined castle overlooking the town.  The castle was almost a thousand years old and for some reason, the way we went took us over a meter-wide precipice that dropped about seventy metres. It was an easy leap when we went up to drink our vodka and gin and smoke that block of hashish.  But coming back - stoned, drunk, in the dark - was an altogether different business. Still, the gods must have been on our side because I'm still here. We'd just rest against the stone walls in the cool night air staring up at the glittering dome above us and laughing as if we were the oldest of friends. Singing bad harmonies on sixties pop songs.  Discussing the merits of Syd Barrett vs Pink Floyd. Working through what the whole Punk and Mod resurgence scenes were all about. Heated but friendly back and forths as to whether there was a god or life after death. Life. The Universe. And our place or lack of a place in it.

  Throughout the days, I'd go off walking through the woods and saying hello to the few people I met. No one thought it odd that a young man should be staying with an openly gay man in a very small farming community. A place well ahead of the curve in every respect in terms of sheer heart. No condescension, no sidewards glances, no innuendo.  Mind, this may all have been borne by the fact that only one or two people there spoke anything other than a thick agrarian dialect of the area.

  One weekend, Dominic opened up the garage downstairs to reveal a Citroen 2CV that he'd stripped down to a mere chassis - not hard to do, as he explained, given that the whole body was simply held on by Phillips head screws. We spent the rest of the weekend doing some four wheel erosion along the creeks and through some of the animal tracks.  We even thoughtfully created a few so that the local wildlife wouldn't have to work so hard in our wake.  At one point we hit something at the bottom of a creek bed that made the Citroen roll onto its side in the middle of the stream. No harm done, other than being soaked through but I marveled at how durable and light that sucker was. We practically carried it back out of the creek.

  On another occasion, Dominic lent me a fishing rod to try my hand at catching trout up in the streams. He took me to a farm that supplied grubs and in a display of kinship so often found outside cities the world over, both Dom and the farmer studied every nuance of my face as I plunged my arm up to the elbow into a fish tank full of writhing maggots bred for just such an occasion. To ensure I passed the test with flying colours, I did it a couple of times - more for their approbation than for any need of bait.  I've never been a good fisherman. In fact, I don't think I caught a damned thing on the two or three occasions I tried it up there.

  The other event that will always stay with me was 'going veggie shopping',  Dom wanted to get some veggies and  eggs in.  I assumed that we were driving to Foix - a mere half hour away - but he said he bought pretty much all his groceries from the local farms around the way. On route to the place, he cautioned me with dramatic gravitas not to freak out at what I was going to see.  Just be cool and it would be okay.  This, of course, made me freak out wildly.  At least on the inside.
  
  We pulled up at the end of a long driveway, in front of a ramshackle house built by generations that must have gone back many hundreds of years. The farmer's wife came out, all smiles and hugs and grabbed Dom in a vice-like grip that looked bone breaking from where I stood.  These people really knew how to hug.  The farmer emerged, every bit the surly counterpart, with a large crate brim full of vegetables and fresh, shit encrusted eggs. Large clumps of fennel, onions, garlic cloves and stalks, peas and string beans, pale golden green pumpkin and much more besides. I caught the gist of the conversation.  Local talk.  Friend talk.  Somebody was thinking of selling up.  How could they ever think of doing such a thing? Someone had bought a new tractor but wasn't too happy with it. There was noise about a co-operative being formed but it wouldn't come to much. Local talk.  Friend talk.

  A noise down past a cattle paddock and the parents waved.  Six or seven young men started making their way towards us through the cows.  I caught Dom's cautioning look and assumed that this was the 'now' moment. The men weren't overly agile and all walked with an unmistakable shamble as they closed the gate and came directly towards us with questioning open looks. They all bore features of in-breeding with one of them showing severe signs of Down Syndrome. Each of them carried a large Opinel knife - what the rest of the world would call a  Bowie knife . And I was a stranger. And strangers were an unknown element. What I assumed were the two eldest sons took the knives from their belts and stabbed them into the large, nearly destroyed trestle table that they clearly used for target practice when they weren't eating off it. One turned and asked his Ma if I was English. Dominic shook his head hastily.

  The knife went deep and as the son twisted and wriggled it from the thick wood, he looked me in the eye.
  
  "...Ça va?"

  I couldn't stop the catch in my throat. "Oui!  Bien, merci! Et vous?" Which was the full extent of my French. Everyone went silent for what seemed a slow, painful lifetime. The son looked at the parents and Dominic and said something rapidfire and everyone - the sons, the mother, the father and Dominic - burst into the loudest laughter.

 "He said you can't speak the tongue for shit.", Dominic said good-naturedly.

  After that, of course, the home-made poison came out and after that I don't remember a thing other than the vertiginous, hurdy-gurdy drive home and the four day hangover.

  And I never did get to run with those bulls.

Wish you were here...
  

A year on, Jake.

We were doing just under ninety miles an hour down Beecroft Road.
I remember because I was looking at the speedo, at your stupid smile, at the smartarse in the Mercedes dogfighting us through a run of three orange lights, then back at the speedo. Consistently hovering around ninety.
You could never stand losing and I was ever the gutless bastard.
But I wasn't scared of the dying.
I was only scared of dying on somewhere as unworthy as Beecroft Road.
I had grand and morbid designs. Going off a cliff outside Ventimiglia or disappearing on the outskirts of Roquefixade. At a pinch, stone cold sober and without a deity in sight somewhere and nowhere on the Nullarbor. At least that would have been the way I would have liked to have gone, brandishing a tattered copy of Dos Passos' USA in one hand and a Rickenbacker 360 in the other. And just vanishing.
But no. You were determined to make it here and now under a blue dome devoid of any clouds to give perspective.
On Beecroft fucking Road.
We beat the yuppie fuck,of course.
And we didn't get pinched.
But that stupid forced laugh you always gave, playing victor over a battle you were never sure you should have won. Never quite convinced even of how you had won it.
Afterwards we all hooked up at the local and everyone said, "Where the fuck did you two get to?"
They wouldn't have believed me if I said I'd just glimpsed hell. And suburban heaven.

Remember me.

"You are the only censor..."

(I realised I hadn't posted for some time but being as lazy as I am, I couldn't think of anything new.  Here's an old Facebook word-squiggle that I posted a year or so ago...)

I burst through the door to the tiny flat.  Since I only had visiting rights to see my Mum every third weekend, bursting through the door was both the meta- and the pre-language of those fear and laughter soaked years.

The view from the balcony took in the Friday night snarl of Devlin Street and the westering sun falling immense and slow beyond the ridge of the black and purple valley of West Ryde.  Before the incurable virus of developers.  Before the apartment blocks came.

Peter had run away from the Old Man two years earlier just prior to his fourteenth birthday.

With a deft manner, he stole up behind me and put me in a headlock - entirely devoid of malice - that only big brothers the world over seem to know how to achieve with any degree of mastery. Dragged me, wriggling and fumbling, into the room that had belonged to our eldest, John, for a time.  But John was back in jail now or off roustabouting with a circus somewhere, dusty and far away.  

And since one of our strongest family assizes was that of finders keepers, Peter had wasted no time in putting up Easy Rider and Willy and the Poor Boys posters and claiming the small bedroom for his own. I was still rubbing my neck with a drama and affected injured pride belying my full seven years when Peter clamped a large set of headphones over my ears, gently placed needle to vinyl and a heavily flanged voice informed me that I was the only censor.  If i did not like what I heard, I had a choice.  I could turn the voice off.

And Alice Cooper proceeded to write home to mother.

That afternoon sun set as countless others have done.

But I remember that one clearest.

Lay down and die, goodbye.

Of teachers, of mothers, of fathers, of monsters.

There may yet be truth in the fact that when we remember something, we're actually only remembering the last time we remembered that event.
I'm not sure who's alive and who's dead now but as the years move on, I can no longer be certain that it happened.  Yet it did.
My teacher in fourth class was a wizened old Lithuanian man who was respected, if not revered, by at least two generations of my siblings before me. He called me Professor Malco. More than likely because I was a smartarse know-it-all a lot of the time. And though his moniker for me implied some small exaltation, he wasn't above giving me four or even six with the cane because he thought I was talking out of turn. Which was almost never true.
One day Teacher X had no sooner walked into the filled classroom than he said without his usual gold-toothed smile, "Professor Malco, would you please follow me?". Our classroom was in the same ancient brick building as the Principal's office - a matter of a few yards, really - but the cloud of uncertainty that hung in the air like death itself made it one of the longest walks of my life. Had I so monstrously done wrong?  Broken or stolen one too many toys?  It was bad enough that the year before I'd had to forfeit a spelling bee prize because the day I was to accept the prize was also the day I was to get the cuts - "six in all" as he liked to call 'em - from Deserthead; the most feared teacher in the whole school because of his soldierly grip when he shook your shoulders and his lead weighted canes. All of this left me with but one choice.  Wag school. And so a precedent was set.
But I digress.
Teacher X ushered me into the Principal's office and to my surprise, I saw my mother standing there, together with my old third class, second class and first class teachers. With so much erudition in that small office, there wasn't a lot of standing room. I had no idea what this was all for. I remember how good it looked outside beyond the window where some kids were weaving cane baskets in the sunlight beneath the large Tannoy poles.
"Mac, the Principal and these teachers want to ask you a few questions and you don't have to say anything you don't want to."  I nodded. Mum worked up around the corner at the local Funny Farm as it was locally known.  She'd been a Domestic there for a few years.  And would remain so for the next two decades.
The Principal began. "Your dad wants to take you off to Perth to live.  Is that true?" I bit my lower lip and nodded. "And you don't want to go?"
I didn't know what to say.
"Malcolm?".
"My friends are here and Mum is here. And Pete and Helen and everyone is here."
"You told Teacher X that your dad had taken you to the police.  Why did he do that?  Were you naughty?".
"I keep walking away to Mum's. But he always finds out and sends the twins to pick me up or gets me along the way."
"And what did the police do?".
"They showed me where the drunk people live at night and told me I'd live there if I didn't stop running away."  There was much slow and deliberate bobbing of heads to all of this.  Keen attention from their faces. I still didn't know what I had done wrong. The Principal felt satisfied with the answers I supplied but the lines on his face only seemed to etch themselves deeper as I spoke.
The Principal nodded to Miss Y, my third class teacher who we all wanted to be hugged by because she was beautiful. And we all wanted to be kissed by her because she smelled nice and was warm all the time.
"Malcolm, would you like to stay here with us?  At this school?"
I nodded slowly, still expecting a trap of some kind.
She continued, "How would you like it if you came to live with me and everyone here except your Mum. Only for a few weeks until your dad went away and the police weren't coming around."
"Why?"
"Because then you could eventually live with your Mum and you wouldn't have your classes disrupted because we could do them with you at home. But you wouldn't be able to tell anyone about it.  Not for a long time. Could you do that, do you think?".
It was then that I saw my Mother's tears. She didn't encourage an answer one way or the other.  She just let the tears slowly build and fall. I looked from face to grave face.
I saw immediately that I would no longer have to wait three weekends of every month just to spend time with Mum and my siblings and friends for forty eight short hours.  I saw a secure place for my pushbike up in Mum's flats, in my mind's eye. I saw days spent with creeks, waterfalls, eels and wolf spiders, skateboards, office blocks and new construction sites with sand piles with buried brick shards.
I saw bus rides into town for five cents and low drifting nimbus clouds of cigarette smoke in front of the Friday night telly as we all shushed each other trying to watch the movie in that tiny flat. I saw everyone laughing in the flat. In all the flats.  Friends from Hungary, Iran, Finland, Belgium, Canada, Texas, England, Germany, Kenya, Norway. I saw all of my friends and all of their parents. I saw records on the carpet and kettle elements in need of minor repair.  I saw days spent in the library playing chasings and annoying people who foolishly wanted to read. I saw fish and chips and drinking milk from the carton. I saw flattened cardboard boxes and steep grass hills behind the car dealership on Saturday afternoons.
I saw paradise.
But something started in my head.  A place of indistinction where words and pictures swarm but never resolve. A place below the waterline of day to day life. Insect thoughts. And the swarm grew even though I was not outwardly panicked. Funneling out of some dark recess in sharp slivers that prevented me from forming even the simplest of  sentences. Until finally a handful of words rose up.
"What would he do to her? More?"
I saw so many beautiful things in those long moments. So many things rightfully mine for the taking. And I saw him.  And words such as Magistrate and Desk Sergeant and images of the local pub where they all drank.
And I looked at each of the faces in the Principal's tiny office and I shook my head almost imperceptibly.
No longer being able to stop the wrack that was breaking over me.
Mother

I keep thinking of that photo of Grant.

I get fixated on things that burst with importance one moment only to be of no consequence an hour, a day, a week or lifetime later...
I've spent days - weeks and months, in fact -  idly thinking of a picture of Ulysses Grant.  One of his last. Crowned by a slightly worn top hat, with a scarf wrapped 'round his throat hiding the scars of the unsuccessful operations for the disease that would soon enough kill him.
What a life. An indifferent soldier at Westpoint up on the Hudson. A poor entrepreneur, reduced to selling tinder on the streets of St Louis by his early thirties.  By all accounts a strange and shambolic man. A failure in the eyes of everyone except his long suffering wife Julia. An occasional dauber in oils and charcoals. Quite fine at it too. Proud, in fact, only of his occasional painting and horsemanship.
And then the war broke out and he slowly set about putting down the rebellion. Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Shiloh of course. Savagely fighting Longstreet, who many years before had been best man at his wedding. Heartbreaking success after success until the desperate, brilliant Lee brought him to a standstill outside Petersburg where hubris got the better of Grant for which his army paid a terrible cost in that protracted south/left flank slide. A strange and shocking conflict.
He did all of this often very drunk.
"Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.", Sherman was to say at the height (or rather one of the Union nadirs) of the war.
And Grant sits on that porch, looking up from the newspaper.  All of this past, I imagine, playing like a thread-worn home movie over again and again in his head.
And later, how he became a two term President after the war. Posterity according his Administration small praises but for the corruption, cronyism and whiskey-for-all approach. But some good... Some good... So he might have thought in that photo.
And after the Presidency, a world tour - feted by kings and queens the world over. A fine home in Manhattan bought for him by friends upon his return. But seemingly all for nought as yet again bad investment left him and his family destitute by his early sixties.
And there he is, reading the scandal sheets between bouts of memoir writing. His whole life played out somewhere beneath that damned knitted beanie and the top hat.
But it doesn't end there, does it?  The memoirs restored the family fortune for generations to come.
I look at the photo and I think sometimes life is a mood. An illness or disorder. Cyclothymia. And people are thrown up and down on the waves of its caprice - ever bashing their heads on the ceiling of beauty, ever being dashed upon the rock and sand of heartache and uncertainty.
Masters and mistresses of nothing.
Swan, swan, hummingbird.