admin July 30th, 2008
Humming fluro lights in cancerous concrete underground bunker. Footsteps smash off walls in infinite loops like the particles that are traveling around and around on this infinite loop before they are released to smash into some piece of antiquarian looking measurement device akin to a wind up clock in a glass case. The air is filled with the dusty odour of dry concrete and mouldy patches where water has seeped in from the outside. A patch of concrete is stained darkly from a lack of concern.
The walkway is meshed steel, it rings out with our footfalls as we traverse our way alongside the man sized tube which is the particle accelerator. It has a hum of its own when the circuits are in operation and hair stands on end in freakish static spikes if you’re too near. Back in the clinical cleanliness of the labs machines plot and capture data, white coated assistants and professors hover over LCD screens and computer models in a disinfected air of automation. Data , data, data, 1’s and zeros all making sense. Discoveries being baked up in the oven of imagination, theorems proven or disproven , the football match of the science world, competing yet sharing. Competing for a space in the coveted ‘Science’ magazine. Observing all this with fingers wrapped around the handle of of a China cup , feeling fragile and vulnerable with a steaming soup of black tea waiting for me to ingest.
admin July 29th, 2008
At the major league bookstore there are rows of shelves devoted to magazines, each one a confessional for the connoisseur and their chosen area of expertise. They sit on the benches and their eyes confess to the flimsy pages and stiff covers. The magazines are reading them the commandments of current fashion in whatever discipline they have chosen; home hi-lfi with details of thumping bass speakers situated in acoustically ideal spaces filled with light and European furniture. The latest tattle about the latest celebrity, where they’re having their holidays and what they look like in a bikini- read all about in in WOW! magazine.
Within the store there’s a sense of quiet as eyes meander over fonts and type of various sizes while further down the open plan walkways a coffee machine is spitting out another cappucino double decafe soy-latte enema for someone to ingest. Before getting to the magazine racks you have to run the channel of specials, heavily discounted ‘loss-leading’ books that get your foot in the door wetting your apetite for consumption, the taste of a fresh purchase leaves the need for a desert of some sort and a wander though the glossy section or further along the towering corridors will surely reveal another ‘must have’ purchcase. The thrill as the ridged plastic card is taken and the cash register strikes up a series of numbers, the sense of expectancy that starts to build on the walk home. The pavement seems springy and light, the passers by friendlier than usual. That great sense of well being after making a well chosen buy. At home, plastic bags wrinkle onto the kitchen table and feet echo across the medtirannean tiles as the kettle begins a slow grind to boiling point…..
admin July 28th, 2008
Reaching around the side of the seat, hand running over the hard plastic shell and terraforming over the seat release I find it,the petrol cap release. A tug makes a small clunk emit from the left hand side of the car. Opening the door to a surge of traffic noise from Punt road as cars are swishing by the lights. Feet click on desperate concrete as I approach the bowser, it’s sitting there sizing me up like a gunslinger from a wild west movie, but I move first. I tackle the pump in a Ju Jitsu hold and submit it to the cap which I need to twist off. Anti-clockwise turns which let a out a vaporous sigh at the end, the pressure equalising inside the tank, you know like when you put hot water in a plastic bottle and it sucks in the sides as the water cools, expansion and contraction just like high school science in rooms with elongated troughs down the middle where you look to the world outside, to the brilliant blue sky of freedom while the teacher drones on about things you don’t really want to know, but now wish you did.
Fingers grip the muted metal of the pump handle, still cold from the morning chill, the numbers begin to tickle the LCD screen and I watch in shock as my pay packet is gobbled by the adversary- maybe he is going to win this fight, 10, 20, 30 dollars is consumed in a minute! The bowser now looking like a fat penguin having consumed my hard earned. As the transfer is occurring I watch the rest of the world through a streaky haze as the vapours from the tank leak out, the world appears as a mirage until I reach my target number of dollars. I relinquish the pump……
admin July 27th, 2008
Clothes hanging on bat like hangars, empty and devoid as if Dracula had come by and sucked all the life out of them. Haunting ghosts in the darkened cave of the wardrobe. The darkness filled with all the action of yesterday, the aura of action surrounds each piece of clothing. The checked flannelet shirt that speaks of a hike in the north of England. The shiny vinyl 70’s shirt reminds me of a 70’s theme party where she got dressed up in fishnet stockings and paraded about like a call girl, doing her best rocky horror show impression.
I now have a system within the wardrobe instead of random clumpings of shorts and jeans and dress pants I go by colour. The left hand side starts with shades of yellow that morph into orange and then red and dark brown to black and grey. Sheets and pillow slips still sulk in a pile at the bottom of the cupboard.
Fingers run along the various weaves in a rough and smooth pattern when It’s time to select the clothes for the day. When ever I’m searching, the hangars slide along a chrome rail making a metallic swishing sound. They all collide together and click away like frenzied knitting needles at play. I’m not at the stage of needing mothballs yet, but it does seem to be rather stagnant when I open the doors. Maybe that’s a function of the light that occasionally illumines this secret place. Atop the wardrobe are a stack of boxes and collected memories hanging like an executioners guillotine.
admin July 25th, 2008
Holding stiff tiles in hand with the secret code written onboard. Questions are thrown from the podium and caught by contestants like they were a life raft. Buzzers plunge and klaxons fill the air. The desk echoing with ferocity. Answers blurted out, vomited in the excitement of the moment. The other team being given an opportunity when the answer is incorrect. The audience, muttering, sitting attentive as a dog about to be walked.
Studio lights are small suns burning overhead. The illusion is broken by the failure of a buzzer. The floor manager sweeps into view and a couple of technicians rush to the set, make up attendants douse the guests with a cloud of make up , they were getting to the point of sweating. A few small adjustments to hair, buzzers working again.
I’m sitting on a plastic seat and it’s the second show, after two and a half hours my bum is numb and I’ve had nothing to eat. My stomach is becoming a grand canyon within, a wide chasm, a body builders stretching machine. At least half an hour yet until the show is done. We have sworn secrecy , can reveal nothing until the show has gone to air - supposedly, but morsels will no doubt drop from the table of my mouth over the next week or so, at least there will be food in it!
My interest drives more toward the mechanics of making he program than the actual content now. I see production staff hanging about like muggers in an alley in the darkened wings, but straight ahead it’s all glitz and colour and personality, shining personalities competing with each other for attention, and don’t the crowd love it. There’s some bloke called Hamish - think he does a radio show, and there’s Myf of course, who’s now defected to MMM. Spicks and Specks.
admin July 9th, 2008
On the highway
Once we climb the hill out of the jammed maze of Geelong, the dust dry paddocks start to fill the windscreen. The drought’s been long and hard, there seemed to be a shimmer of green last time I came through, but summer has been unforgiving, those days in the high thirties [centigrade] and early fourties […]
admin July 9th, 2008
I wait my place in the queue. In hand a flimsy rough paper ticket, the sort you used to get on long rail journeys or on a tram, rough matted paper with big blocky printed numbers that want to jump off and start doing weight lifting exercises; fat strong type. I’m sitting in a room with maybe twenty other people, the hum of the fluro’s the only sound, these are the days before wall to wall media and the constant assault of sound into our mindscape.
Sitting on the chair thinking about how things will play out. A last minute change means I am now going to the UK via America, and you HAVE to have a visa, this is Easter Thursday just past midday - the whole country winding down and I leave on Sunday. Part of me is nervy - a twitchy fidgeting belly, bat cave thoughts scream in my mind, movie scenarios of what if they don’t give me one? a whole trip will be canceled. I start to bite into the disappointment to come, even though it’s not arrived yet, just to set myself up in case of failure. It won’t descend in a Niagra falls moment that way, more like a slow rising of the tide.
My number is called and I make my way to the counter on the aching balls of my feet from the run I did to get here before the early close for Easter. My torso is bathed in a light layer of drying sticky sweat. I ‘must’ get this visa. The clerk waddles off behind a screen and I sing to a tune that runs through my head. Funny how I do that - when we got caught stealing at Woolworths as kids I did it, I was even singing along to the background music. She reappears - thankfully with my passport franked and ready to go. Relief sweeps over me like a Melbourne summer afternoon change- sudden.
admin July 8th, 2008
It’s a tightrope walk, a dance of anticipation and outright fear, I walk in balancing my pole hoping they won’t notice it. Thinking ‘CONFIDENCE’, definitely the key. Sitting positively in the chair see-sawing into position, not too far forward nor back. My eye swivels across the panel, a momentary clicking of the key in the lock of their eye, but not too long, not too familiar. A comment about the mundane art on the wall or the curling bank of grey clouds that are grappling with the building.
Throat is oven dry, been sucking on a lozenge for five minutes before entry but it hasn’t loosed up any rivers of saliva, voice is scratchy, croaky, not sonorous as I imagined in my mental walk through. I reach for water. It gargles around my mouth like mercury in a thermometer on a hot day, like a raft going through rapids on a raging river. There, that’s better. “as I was saying”…………. I bite into a sandwhich of confidence that the water has provided me and begin to rise above the barbed wire nerves that jangle in my tummy, I am lifting off, locked into the seat, safety drills dispensed with, my voice roaring with power, like a set of jet engines at take off, but not too loud, just quiet confident power. I am a floating balloon up there with the dull clouds that seem to be parting through tethered weighty glass. Smoky questions rise from the panelists and I get the bellows out and pump them up to a roaring crackle. This is gonna work! I sense I’ve got the position. What was I worried about? I walk out carrying a 250 kg weight above my head–EASY-, hey I can do anything! I look on at the other chumps who are going to be eaten for breakfast and pass into the elevator. My tummy is left on floor 39 as it descends.
admin July 8th, 2008
Library
It’s a long stop-start drive out to Monash Uni, but, that’s where the musty tomes I require reside. After hunting the parking lot for a deserted space, I crunch over oven dried yellow stalks of grass and then the unforgiving concrete apron before star trek doors whisper open.As the doors slipper shut, I feel a […]
admin July 7th, 2008
coffee shop
So here I am, on the very same stage where the ‘Seekers’ got there start in the sixties. It’s almost like that folky vibe is still just rippling through the air. Mavis the proprietor is bent over shuffling around, almost bound for a wheel chair, she was here back in those days, with the tiny […]
