Author: skullthorpe

Lat – 37.9286

Long – 145.1287

Reading – The Witch by Ronald Hutton.

On a train to Beaconsfield to see Fee.

How sexist am I?

Quite really.

On the train to Melbourne. At Sale a hullabaloo erupted as a whole lot of big girls in school dresses yahooed onto the train.  Clearly more mature than school kids but young none the less.

All was revealed  when they identified themselves as netball team off to Geelong to compete. The school uniforms were dress-ups.  There pony-tails bobbing, they were loud, exuberant, full of fun.  There were smiles all around the crowded rail car.    Grinning along with everyone else it suddenly occured to me how different the reaction would have been if they had been blokes.

On the station about about half an hour ago I looked up from my coffee scroll to see a female walking away from me. She was in a backless shoestring black lace evening  style dress with black knee length boots. Her hair was dyed that gothic black and she was very pale skinned. Something jarred. Then I realized I was reacting to the way she was walking, she was walking like a bloke.

Sexism indeed.

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Long – 149.755

What I am reading – 

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump – Bandy X Lee (ED)

Know This – John Brockman.

Ancillary Justice – Ann Leckie

 Sounds – James Taylor.

What I’m doing – Making Bread, Eating Cake, Drinking Coffee.

Just finished the Sunday Clean. A beta clean this week due to tiredness.

Had a very pleasing gig on Friday Night. The first Poets and Musos in Mallacoota for 15 years.  A certain back pressure was revealed for community arts. Community participation  in the arts that used to be one of the cultural mainstays of our community has become a thing if the past.  This has now changed and needs to change further.

  I sense that people want to move away from the passive hegonomy of the more or less wealthy elite who want to relegate the arts to things to buy and spectacle to passively absorb.

We put on a supper in support of the school music program and raised over $650.00.  The community wants to support paricipation and self expression. 

In my mind right now is a notion to hold a singer and song writer night. Celebrating original material.

Above is a gig from the sixties in Mallacoota.

Sounds – Donovan Leach

In the meantime the Green Ball approaches and we need to organize some workshops to make some green lanterns.  The market looks like the go.

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Long – 149.755

ESST – 4.28 pm

Sounds – BOTO

Eating Cake.

Rachel has an ‘Opening’ tomorrow night at the local gallery. Generally  a citadel of Nanna Art, decore and greeting cards. I don’t  ‘do’ openings. I don’t drink and find talking to people pharmaceutically enchanted (whether legally or otherwise) tedious  and frustrating. A crowd of people jostling and talking loudly – not for me and nothing to do with art.  

ESST – 5.14 pm

Sounds – VOX

Drinking Tea 

What Satre would call bourgeois and I am inclined to agree.  People who want to make money from ‘art’ must either forgo authenticity  and be content with making decore or be very lucky in striking the right harmonic with the zeitgeist.  

Generally ‘art’ is about the doing.  The ‘work’ is almost the waste product of the process.  If you can sell it all well and good but to set out to create something to sell is decore. Setting out to sell is a different activity than creating from visceral impulse.  The difference perhaps between art and craft.

Much of the philosophical discource on art (as with many things) is about the meaning of words qnd the uses of language.  Too often there is the old confusion between map and territory.  The creating of authentic works are existential acts. The impulse and the medium fuse into the finished piece.

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Long – 149.755

ESST – 6.25 pm

Sounds – Andreas Vollenweider

The tree outside the window is just greening.  One day I must make an effort to find out what sort it is.  It has been sculpted for decades around the contingencies of the powerline that comes to the house and those of a swing tree back in the days when The Boyz valued such things.  

For now, the cat, dogs and I can see the sky when congregated on the bed. When fully leafed we will just see green. We will be glad of it, as summer will be hotter than last year and for every year until we all die.  On the cusp of summer once again I wonder whether this year will be the one when the fires come by. 

I wonder about fear. Increasingly everywhere about everything.  What a wonderful way to create and control a pliant psudo-slave economy.  Marvelous that we enslave ourselves while being played like fish by the puppets of the 1 percent.  

Sounds – GOL

Surrounded by national park our population beaver away at promoting climate catastrophy.  The fish killers, the golf players, the four wheel drivers, the eaters of processed poisons rich with road miles suffocatingly wrapped in the plastics economy.  

Now I am gangrel grown, 

Bent to the beam of my back.

Sanded joints and unexpected weaknesses travail.

All that was once so sure

Balloons softly and slowly

As dust from the boots

of some lunar explorer.

Desire, except for solipsistic spasms,

Has lost all purpose and strategy.

Leave me to forge:

What I can,

What I must,

From old dreams

And new surmises.

​There is no doubt that my most common lifelong  literary companion is Lord of the Rings. Since I first started to read it in 1962 I have read it at least twice a year, every year since. Quite a while ago now I discovered the audiobook version on Limewire and spent many nights downloading it in bits and assembling it.

I have read or listened to the tale up mountains, in caves, in boats, aeroplanes and in a canoe. It has been a companion when I have been troubled and a celebration when I have been happy.

Tonight was one of its stranger outings. We have been having trouble with the surface of our Main Hall here in Coota. It has developed a very slippery finish and has caused much problem as a playing surface.  We’ve had our contract cleaners onto it and they have gone over it with various preparations to no avail. Tomorrow is a big interschool basketball tournament and the crunch was well and truly here.

I dragged out of my brain our old standby at Ballet Oz for getting rosen off the floor – Coca Cola. Well it worked but now we had to get rid of the coke-rosen mixture. So yesterday two washes with hot water. Today one more then a spray of the entire floor with a surface cleaner and another mop-off. It seemed to have worked.

Its a lonely business mopping especially at night.  

When I started the process Boromir was fighting for his life against the Uruk-hai and as the bucket trundled up and down the hall the orcs were slain, Pippin and Merry met Treebeard and Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas met Gandalf – returned from the dead.  Theoden was delivered from sorcery, there was a great battle at Helms Deep. 

As I ernestly sprayed Nifti, Saraman fell, Pippin and Gandalf rode to Minas Tirith.  

As I finished the final mop Aragorn and his companions had survived the Paths of the Dead and Merry and the King approached Dun Harrow. Pippin was awaiting Seige.

What might have been a long wearying, tedious business was a time of satisfaction and adventure. There is no book like Lord of the Rings and no writer like Tolkein. The closest we have been able to muster is Alan Garner.

I am once again grateful for my best of literary friends.

Saturation bombing, started with The Spanish Civil War, The Blitz and Allied retaliation and has continued somewhere in the world relentlessly since.  These are attempts to exterminate or break the spirit of ordinary people.  This is not noble heroism this is the employment of industrial processes to kill the defenceless wholesale.

Once, when acting in a tv series pilot, I had to run through a simulated artillary barrage. I knew it wasn’t real and I was terrified – no acting necesary. What the Mums,  Dads and kids went through in Coventry, Dresden and now in Syria is unimaginable.

War has never changed anyones mind except in unpredictable and usually catastrophic ways. 

Dispite the 100 million plus deaths in war since the start of the 20th Century we still choose war as an acceptable means of getting our own way. This is stupid and evil.

This should be the message of ANZAC Day.

​Adjusted for inflation the average daily wage, for Australians, is less than it was in 1950. However we spend 50 percent less on food than we did then. This is because, in part, then, the cost of food included the care and time invested in family land by small farmers to ensure the continued natural health of that land.  

Today farming, packaging and distribution is undertaken by global corporations whose only criteria is the short term bottom line. Market driven economics admits to no ethics, morals or external concerns other than profits.

If you care about the future then buy nothing from any public company!

​I think the issue is to redifine ‘a standard of living’. At the moment design, marketing and manufacturing are about producing goods that are considered to be saleable and competative. This rarely matches useful, durable, necesary or efficient.  The need to ‘create jobs’ by producing poor quality products with lots of pointless ‘features’ that quickly breakdown is standard practise. 

Centralising services, food production and manufacturing creates supply chain nightmare called cities.

Consider the possibility of creating consumer durables that will last a guaranteed twenty years and leased rather than purchased and paying a substantial chunk of the population not to ‘work’ but contribute to social health, aesthetic projects and environmental maintenance.

Not a matter of lowering our standard of living but revolutionizing its nature.

​It is with lasting shame that we confront the realities of the gang of buffoons that constitute our government.  That the Australian people should be so self-centredly solpsistic to be uncaring about their descendants future to continue to tolerate them is even more shameful.