Three of the best hours of music, words and performance you could imagine: Leonard Cohen and his brilliant band under a late summer's stunning sunset and night sky at Pokolbin in the NSW Hunter Valley. He surpassed all my hopes and expectations.
At Centennial Park the perfect spot for an Anansi Boys picnic is just over the grassy knoll that separates this pond from the lilly pond. It's there that Coots reveal themselves to be as daft as ... coots, I suppose.
So ... the two small wounds on the back of one's right leg finally close and you think, we're on the way to healing at last; and you think, I might make it to the swimming pool soon after all. Then you discover a not-so-small damaged area on your left buttock, which makes you think ... and where did that come from as well as wondering ... how many holes in his bum does one man need?. So you get out the granuflex (which is lovely looking, isn't it?) to begin the repair job and healing, which will be slow because you've got very bad quadriplegic's blood circulation.
Ye ugly, creepin, blastit wonner,
Detested. shunn'd by saunt an sinner,
How daur ye set your fit upon her -
Sae fine a lady!
Gae somewhere else and seek your dinner
On some poor body.
Swith! in some beggars hauffet squattle:
There ye may creep, and sprawl, and sprattle,
Wi ither kindred, jumping cattle;
In shoals and nations;
Whare horn nor bane ne'er daur unsettle
Your thick plantations.
Now haud you there! ye're out o sight,
Below the fatt'rils, snug an tight,
Na, faith ye yet! ye'll no be right,
Till ye've got on it -
The vera tapmost, tow'rin height
O Miss's bonnet.
My sooth! right bauld ye set your nose out,
As plump an grey as onie grozet:
O for some rank, mercurial rozet,
Or fell, red smeddum,
I'd gie you sic a hearty dose o't,
Wad dress your droddum!
I wad na been surpris'd to spy
You on an auld wife's flainen toy;
Or aiblins some bit duddie boy,
On's wyliecoat:
But Miss's fine Lunardi! fye!
How daur ye do't?
O Jeany, dinna toss your head.
An set your beauties a' abread!
Ye little ken what cursed speed
The blastie's makin!
Thae winks an finger-ends, I dread,
Are notice takin!
O wad some Power the gift tae gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An foolish notion:
What airs in dress an gait wad lea'e us,
An ev'n devotion!
1786
.
One of the marvels of Google is that merely by typing the words "hot weather" into the search box you may stumble upon a page headed "Rabbits & weather - hot weather information" by Jane Morrison.
Spike and I sat in Belmore Park at lunch time, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of final preparations for this evening's launch of the year of the ox. It was hot so there was more than a little exasperation and frustration in evidence as people sorted their tents of Buddhist charities, hare krishna brown rice, private health insurance and all the rest. Short-tempered men squeezed promotional Volkswagons into tight spaces between trees and portaloos. A bored man driving a fork lift truck deposited refrigerator units to ice cream tents. Swarming through the construction site, dozens of body-painted cricket fans .... slightly worse for their morning's drinking sessions and the lunch time humidity ... made their way to Central station and the Sydney Cricket Ground for the one day-day match against South Africa.
Barking mad, unless you're an eighteenth-Century Mason. But the music is lovely and the singing was truly captivating. Emma Pearson's two arias as Queen of the Night were stunning. The crowd in the opera house was simply stopped in its tracks by the second piece and we roared our appreciation until we didn't know what to do next. So we sat back and enjoyed the rest of the show with its neat little resolutions of boy meets girl stories and the more than slightly incredible idea (these days) of Masonic good triumphing over the female / night's evil. Me? I'm on the side of the lady who sings from the Moon."Dear Shaz,
Thank you for the manuscript. I finished it yesterday and have been digesting my reactions.
I would definitely encourage your friend to keep submitting it and keep writing. It has a strong and distinct voice that I found generally enjoyable, entertaining and easy to keep with.
I found many of the observations funny and the events sad/thought provoking/informative.
I can offer other comments but don't want to overstep the bounds as I think you said you were just looking for a broad reaction.
How would you like me to arrange to return it to you, and also, when is our next book group?
Regards,
Heather"
According to the web site we checked-out, BOT would be playing at The Famous Spiegeltent in Hyde Park at eight o'clock. There was only one small error in that information ... the band came on stage at Midnight. Still, it was a blast. The band is a lot of fun, the music is good and Spike got to dance to her heart's delight for an hour and a half. It was three o'clock by the time our heads hit the pillow ... maybe closer to four.
All clouds have a silver lining, though. To fill in some of the four hours we found ourselves suddenly confronted with, we bought tickets to a dance show by Wendy Houston - Desert Island Dances. Quirky is the word, I suppose, which springs too easily to mind. But I enjoyed the show.
I tried to get into this book, chosen as the subject of the monthly reading group at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I have tried and I'll try again but its didactic, heavy-handedness really gets in the way of telling a story.
So ... you visit your GP because you have what looks like a mild infection in an old would on your right leg and you're given Cephalexin. That seems fair enough, although I don't really like taking drugs. But Dr Mann tells me the antibiotic will assist not only the old wound but clear up my urinary tract, which I think has something to do with my sweating.
It turns out that my Nitrolingual Pump SL-Spray 400 mcg/dose goes by the name (in brackets in smaller type) of Glyceryl Trinitrate Pump ... better known to you and me as nitroglycerene, which (according to Wiki) "in its undiluted form ... is one of the more powerful explosives ... [which] makes it highly dangerous to transport or use."
I'm not exactly in the demographic sub-section thought of as prime audience for stories about teenage romance triumphing over the prejudices of hostile families and social mores. But I've seen worse movies by far in the recent past and the sixteen-year old girls behind us in the cinema seemed to love it.
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimneypots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That times resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
The photo arrived today in an e.mail from Scotland, sent by John Murray (older brother of my great childhood friend Gordon who is standing next to me in the photo. He's wearing a blue sports shirt with a white trimmed neck line). It all took place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Keanu Reeves isn't as bad as some people say. i quite liked him in this nonsense but it is the dullest, deadliest bore you could imagine. A bit like the original in that sense, which is hugely over-rated.
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