The Menstruum 41: Microflora

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE, 01.09.2011]

Saul Jarvie smells of filth and righteous mango.

Toowoomba Waste Management Centre.

In the summer of 2002, I got this job with my two housemates. Brad and Ed and I went on contract with the Toowoomba Council, working at the rubbish dump on the north-east outskirt of the city. $20 an hour, we were auditing the waste, pegging it out in three by three metre squares then dividing it in accord with a supplied list of categorisation. We would segregate and weigh each mound – vegetable matter: 15.2 kg, cardboard (thin): 1.9 kg, nappies (soiled): 8.6 kg, animal fur: 0.7 kg, putrescence (unidentifiable): 4.0 kg. 

That summer was a hot one, a proper Queensland one, and there was this week where it hit above 40 Monday to Friday. I don’t know if you’ve ever ripped open a bag of vet’s waste that’s been gently baked at 42 degrees for a fortnight, but it’s something you don’t forget.   

But with all this, with the sunburn and the stench and the hills of maggot-heavy chicken carcasses, I remember that time as one of the greatest.

I can see it: the days over, we’re piling into Ed’s ute and sending it rolling out of town, down the range towards Brisbane and home. Just before the big descent we stop at the fruit and veg barn and get that tray of mangoes for $10 – then the three of us sit on the bonnet with our backs against the windscreen; sun setting, the juice running down our arms and our chins. 

Those nights we did nothing but see bands. We would go to The Healer and watch our favourite: Saul Jarvie’s gang, Watership Down, who then became Rival Flight. Other friends would join us, ask why we smelled like we did, drink cheap beer, cheer, and we were our own gang.

A decade on, it’s winter in a different city and the idea of gangs seems all too far away, but Saul is here, and with friends he’s calling himself Microflora. 

There is a new thing he has given the world; just black plastic, seven inch diameter, just music. But these tracks, just these two, are better even than the amazing music of Saul’s past, and that’s saying a goshdamn of a lot. “I asked him Egan, ‘Why are you sketching swords?’, and with his back turned, he refused to answer, but he’d always draw the same sword”: ‘Egan’s Sketchbook’, it’s one beautiful son of a bitch. Go to the shops, the internet, somewhere, buy the thing, it will kill you proper.

I’m going to take this vinyl record, and there will be so much more to follow, as a signal not that summer’s back, but that it never went away.

A flash: I see my housemate Brad stumbling onto a garbage-bagged treasure of porn at that tip. He loaded up the ute with those sacks of stinking videos and magazines. He was so, so, fucking happy. I think of Toowoomba and Saul and long-buried landfill, and I think that the past has no right to be better than now.

The Menstruum 40: Rome Sweet Rome

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE 24.08.2011]

In his most recent historio-postcard, Rome, Robert Hughes shows the city as an empire, an eternal idea. In Station Street, I offer a Brunswick East cul-de-sac on a fog-hugged Sunday morning.  

Rome: “In Bernini’s sculpture, St Teresa is levitating, borne up on a marble cloud. Only three parts of her body are visible; her face, one bare foot, and a single nerveless hand.”  

Station Street: “Obscured by the concrete letterbox at number 6, Maria Carmella stands watching. Always watching. Been here since ’56 – she knows who lives where, sees you come and go. Through the green of the lemon tree, her white hair is visible, one leg, the dustpan and brush in her single veined hand.”   

Rome: Translating Venerable Bede, “So long as the Colossus stands, Rome will stand; when it falls, Rome will fall too; when Rome falls, so will the world – the idea was to build the largest and most beautiful of all amphitheatres, but it was too grand and time-consuming a project to be carried out by any single emperor.”  

Station Street: “At the blunt end of the road stands the proud and strangely mournful kids playground. Its single short slide, its lone wooden beetle on a rusty spring – the vertical rope netting inviting children and drug dealers to invent their own fun. Moreland Council’s monument to the indefatigability of imagination; the discarded needle sheath points to the burned-out remains of a three-seater lounge. ”

Rome: “No other ancient city had such copious supply of water, and it earned Rome the name of regina aquarium, the queen of waters.”  

Station Street: “Its baby Moses in the reeds, the abandoned underpants, vivid red and soiled, lay clogging the stormwater drain.”  

Rome: It’s 1959 and La Dolce Vita gives rise to the iconically handsome Marcello Mastroianni: “Marcello is a weakling, one of the class of people who create nothing substantial or even authentic but to whom things merely happen and create a brief, tinny resonance – the essence of voyeurism.”  

Station Street: “I cut across the bike path on the return trip from the coffee place, unashamed of my skinny cappuccino takeaway. I will walk over the flattened cans and chocolate milk bottles – I walk to my home, then to the settee. I will eat pastry, I will watch DVDs, and so I will live.”    

Rome: “The life and actions of Pius IX confront the Church historian with an apparent paradox, for despite his innate and growing conservatism Pius IX’s papacy marks the beginning of a modern Church.”  

Station Street: “Maria Carmelia is still out there, out on the footpath. More than our custodian, she is our Saint Peter. Trusted by God, she will maintain Station Street’s integrity or she will fall in shame. Maria will remember the loud parties and who had them. She will take your bins back in if you dare leave them on the bitumen for a day after the trucks have been. She will save us and she will outlive us all. 

The Menstruum 39: "Zombie Guns"

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE, 17.08.2011]

Reg Mombassa’s Australia is an attractive and natural and wounded one, and there’s probably something important to the fact that he wasn’t born here and spent the first seventeen years of his life peering over the fence from the other side of the Tasman Sea. 

Reg Mombassa, White shed near airport, Central Queensland.

Murray Waldren’s The Mind and Times of Reg Mombassa draws a bloke that is familiar and understandable, yet powered by an intensely foreign and quiet magnitude. The quiet here is not humility, it is a literal quiet. Page after page, this monograph is one illustrated with Reg’s kind but persistently tight and sealed lips. The impression is there to be taken that this is a man, despite the rowdy colour and volume of his works, who is more comfortable speaking through an instrument – a guitar, a paint brush, a t-shirt. 

Reg Mombassa, Patterns of restrain, smoking monkey.

 

His childhood is a time and place that Mombassa will return to, and refine, for all the years to come. From art school, to Mental as Anything, 100% Mambo, Dog Trumpet, and every other thing, those early self-images of a candied New Zealand suburbia will return and return. We write histories – they don’t exist by virtue of having happened. Waldren: “Chris O’Doherty’s [Reg] preferred recall of growing up in Auckland’s Papakura district is of carefree days passed in a cocoon of imagination where mischief and adventure had comic-book filters ... a haven of innocence and endless summer lights his early paintings of nostalgia-tinged urban landscapes and still-life houses.”

70s and 80s Australia has undergone its own re-remembering over the last decade, and it’s perhaps fitting that Reg finds himself now implanted, set in amber, in this cosy scrapbooking of a time. The Triffids, the Go-Betweens, Nick Cave; Don’s Party, Barry McKenzie, Dame Edna – these and so many more, now having been visibly, consciously canonised. We might include Mental as Anything in there; Countdown and Skyhooks. It may well be an ordinary thing, and it’s not a good or bad thing, the simple passing of spare time and money to the next cluster in line. If you were 20 then, young enough to feel part of it, then you’d be, what, 50 now? Getting close? Of time to open a beer to the setting sun, remember the past as being not nearly as shitty, and crack the plastic of that brand new double-disc remastered edition. 

But this may be the last of its kind, for I have a sense, and I have nothing but ignorance and bravado to back this up, that the nature of nostalgia has undergone a genuine change. It was once a by-product of passed time, of memories being remodeled and hung for display. It seems now to be included in the purchase price. Instant historicisation: there is a compulsion to a sense of nostalgia for moments in the very second they are taking place. Cardboard histories, if we could only harness this. Nostalgia is a force more powerful than love and fear and wind-powered energy combined.      

The Menstruum 38: A Campylobacter Kinda Love.

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE, 07.08.2011]

2.00 am – And it begins. I’d been out for dinner a half dozen hours earlier and now, on my knees and with the rim of the toilet bowl gripped hard under my hands, I’m quite sure I’ve been served up something unexpected along with the mains. The evening’s delights are taking place in reverse and escaping from my mouth. 

Campylobacter bacteria. Image courtesy Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

3.30 am – I’d managed ten minutes back in bed before the Siren’s call of the latrine brings me hands and knees across the tiles. There is nothing left in me, not a scrap, but the heaving rolls on unaffected. My body is contorting into shapes I didn’t know possible, head down, my legs twisting in the air – from a great distance, with bad eyesight, this could be an audition for So You Think You Can Dance.

 

4.45 am – I’ve spent three-quarters of an hour on the floor of the shower. I’d planned for the hot water to be soothing, in the end it was like being poked with a million horrible fingers. The vomiting doesn’t stop; I’m hurling air and moans. 

Philip Glass, 2008.

5.00 am – A rudimentary bed made of towels has been assembled on the bathroom floor. I lay curled up like a pathetic cashew with my head close to the base of the toilet. My iPhone has been brought near, so I cycle through to find some music to appease the beast. I find Philip Glass and Music in Twelve Parts and I lie shivering. The music envelopes me, coming weakly out of the tinny speaker and bouncing around the bathroom’s hard surfaces. 

7.00 am – Philip is a masochist and my saviour. These sounds are perfect and excruciating, the pleasure dolled out as if from a difficult husband: you get the love when he’s good and ready. I will spend the day like this. 

10.00 am – Aspro Clear down. 

10.05 – Aspro Clear up.

3.00 pm – I’ve shifted to the living room floor. Needing a break I shift to Robin Ince: “The moment you are deemed to be on the left, it only takes the tiniest mistake – you are not allowed to do anything that appears to deviate from some kind of socialist agenda, else everything you believe falls flat ... if you’re on the right, you can do anything, you can have sex with the last panda bear alive, you’re having sex with it in the eye, look at me, look at me, I’m killing this panda bear with my cock, look at me I’m A. A. Gill.”

5.00 pm – Water down.  

5.05 pm – Water up.

8.00 pm – I eat a shard of broccoli, 1/8 of a potato.  

8.05 pm – My guts and I repent.

1.00 am – I waltz once more in the arms of Philip: Metamorphosis 1-5, life is a horrendous heaven. I didn’t know I could make these kind of sounds. 

Philip Glass, 2009.

9.30 am – At my desk, writing this. In front of me: a glass of water, a glass of fizzy-good, a glass of lemonade, a quarter of buttered bread. I am so hungry, thirsty. Philip Glass is still alive. Everything will be okay, everything will be okay.

The Menstruum 37: “Hey, man.”

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE, July 2011]

“Have I ever told you about that song, I Want the City, but I Want the Country Too?” he asks. “That pretty well sums it up.”

I’m saying goodbye to Daniel Stephen Miller and the rain isn’t getting any less shitty. It’s an unromantic hour and he’s just shown me All Signs Point To, and I’m walking to the tram, still tasting the Gloria bloody Jeans coffee and wondering if every age has had the feeling of being a more crowded and specialised version of the last.

Daniel Stephen Miller, from Two American Photographs (Profound Meditation on Loss) (2010/11)

Back in field 36, RMIT Level 3, I was holding my cup and looking close at ‘Two American Photographs’. There’s an imported tradition – partly laughed at, partly just displayed – a great U.S. dream to perfectly frame the rough pieces of itself. This guy that fixes engines. This other guy that wore a bomb in Iraq. This is where the lesson would lie: the face and the flag, both made dirty and honest through sacrifice.

Then ‘Four Mixed Signals’. There’s something satisfying, Christmassy, about the adapters hogging a powerboard on the floor, their cables doing an awkward creep up the wall to the digital photo frames. Meanwhile, Dan knows every single person that passes. “Hey, man.” “Hey.” They stop and talk and Dan half explains things, half apologises.

‘One Man’s Trash’, this lady and her gorgeous carried-child looming down as a vision of fog settling on hell. A smudge of light is keeping the good things separated from the bad and the mother is keeping the kid from putting its foot through a rusty can. A young woman is talking to Dan now and she’s laughing lightly.

The room’s last station, photos shrunk to postcards on perspex racks – a roll of stamps and an invitation to send a message to my mum. I grab the pen and see that Dan’s talking to some other guy now.

DEAR MOTHER, SORRY I MISSED YOUR 60^th, I’LL SEE YOU IN NOVEMBER AND TAKE YOU OUT FOR THAT LOBSTER. LOVE, YOUNGEST.

The images are India, an infinite civilisation turned to landscapes, turned to the things you buy on the last morning of your Gold Coast holiday. Post-colonial cultural detritus: 3 for $3. I motion to give Daniel a hug, balls it up and settle for delivering a complimentary squeeze to the top of his left shoulder. “Great, so great.” The room is a gesture of patient moderation; the satire is cold and close to the bone. My grandfather once told me (senile, but making something of a point), “You can shoot more Germans if you keep your heart rate down.”               

We shake hands against the spitting sky and on the journey home I go on Youtube and find that song he was talking about. “I want to live close to downtown to be near my friends ... and still be out by the trees and the wind.”

I wonder where Dan’s going. I’m eyes down on the tram as it makes a giant and ugly butter knife through Melbourne.

“Havin' both will be hard to find ... but then ain't that the way of the world. I want the city but I want the country too.”