~ the eve of the ballroom reunion

When the Ears played at The Corner last year, I spent the majority of the time either on my knees or flat on my back. The gig after that I resorted to an on-stage oxygen bottle. Tomorrow evening, which I am looking forward to exceedingly, I hope to vastly increase the time I spend on my feet. I’ve gotten into some sort of routine with my swimming, so my wind is better, my voice is louder and my legs are strong. Relatively speaking.

The vibe on this thing is extraordinary. Every man and his dog seems to know about it. And it’s a truly novel experience watching the discussions unfold ahead of time on the facebook events page ... and perhaps elsewhere, for all I know. Issues left unresolved a quarter of a century ago have resurfaced. There’s been bitterness, vitriol and sweet love. Old wounds have been reopened and cruelly salted.

Sociologically, it’s just so interesting.

A loose clique of friends and associates with similar interests, beholden to a similar fashion sense [mostly involving the colour black] and drawn to certain venues where its needs were most adequately served, dissolves over the decades into the greater cloud of humanity and is gone.

Then, much much later - like a male salmon releasing his milt into the stream - a package of memetic signals is released into society.

These signals are clues - gestural, semantic, mnemonic, perhaps even pheremonal - and intuitively, instinctively, the former members of the clique take note and respond - with the massive assistance of the tool that is facebook.

At once they precipitate from the population. From the suburbs they come, from colonies in the bush, from renovated terrace houses in places that used to be cool, and gather for a few precious hours,

Briefly, the old scene - wearier, less pert, less lissom, less nubile, more sluggish, flabbier, the heroin in their blood superseded by prescription medications - is born anew and briefly blossoms, before once again - like a shooting star in the heavens - it fades away.

How’s that for an analysis? I defy you for a better one!

I know it’ll make it a long evening, but I do advise getting there reasonably early for tickets. Our manager Dolores suspects that it may be a sellout and from the extent of interest I’m inclined to agree. I’ve even learnt that the person who heard mention of the Ears on Gold 104 was not, in fact, hallucinating.

The Ears rehearsed last night, by the way, and are champing at the bit. Cathy is down from Sydney with at least two outfits from which to choose. Nothing’s gone wrong with my voice. Mick is damn serious about it. Ross is just a fantastic bass player and is fundamentally conjoined with Carl. There’s something satisfying about watching experienced old ones do it just right. Our keyboardist, Andrew ‘Terence’ Park, is being tracked by the Parkes Observatory as he passes through the Kuiper Belt.

We don’t play often these days, so it feels like we’ve got to make it count. Strangely, we’re going to attempt a new song. It’s provisionally called ‘energumen'. Here are some of the lyrics ...

“I ate a golden egg! I ate a golden egg!”

Oh and the name-tag idea ... functional, ironic, stupid and monumentally off key, just my kettle of fish. Surrender your vanities at the door, my dark haughty emaciated brooding beloved.

~ just desserts

Carbie Warbie took this lovely shot of the end of Sunday's show. That's the beautiful Dolores getting her just desserts.

Oh, and we've rabidly accepted The Wreckery's invite to play with them at the front bar at the Espy on August 29. It's free. I can't wait. See you there.

~ images from sails of oblivion - the gig

Some fabulous shots from Sunday at the Corner by Andrew McDougall. These ones are mainly of me, apparently, with pictures of Sean's Kelly's cameo and sword swallower Baroness Micha at the end. Andrew's Flickr album is here, and includes excellent photos of Hugo Race, Brian Hooper, Steve Kilbey, Nick Barker and all the sainted souls to who I am so thoroughly indebted so for helping me out. Not forgetting, of course, Dolores San Miguel, David Bridie, Chris Walsh, Andrew Park, Simon Polinski, Mark Gason, Mick Lewis, Cathy McQuade, Kerri Simpson, Carl Manuell, Bryan Colechin, Angus Hooper, Osker, Jo, Michaelangelo, Snicket The Wonder Dog and any performers I've forgotten and every last living soul who came on the day. Eternal gratitude.

~ we're livin' on dog food - trailer

Richard Lowenstein has just released the trailer for 'We're Livin' On Dog Food' - his doco about the early eighties scene in Melbourne and, of course, the events surrounding the making of Dogs in Space.

It's showing on August 2 at the Melbourne Film Festival. This is its facebook event page and here's the trailer:

~ the black hearted babycino vendor

As you can imagine, my life is currently dominated by preparations for Sails of Oblivion: The Gig. Our promoter Dolores is a whirlwind. Things are progressing swimmingly and at speed. There's a lot of interest out there. Already we have 85 confirmed guests on our Facebook events page.

But the general air of excitement has not stopped my ire being raised on the issue of babycinos.

I don’t know exactly when they first appeared, but when Polly was tiny they seemed like a new thing, at least here in Melbourne. They were a nice, efficient way of including her at a café table. A small, sweet, warm treat to concentrate upon, to delay the onset of boredom, to defer the impulse to whine or crawl over her parents. And they remain useful to this day. And they were free. Always free. And fair enough. A meagre quantity of milk-froth sprinkled with chocolate would probably not break the one cent barrier in production costs. And I suspect they’re good for business too. Mothers often like to chat at cafés and can do so with more amenity if their children are preoccupied.

But then, as time passed, café proprietors would occasionally charge. A dollar. A dollar fifty. Perhaps, as the babycino became more popular, they wearied of making it for no reward. Or perhaps they couldn’t get their heads around providing a service for free. As for me, I began to judge the moral tone of an establishment on whether or not they charged for the babycino.

It all reminds me of what happened when they first introduced cat licences. Every Melbourne council had to start providing these licences, and because it involved paperwork a fee was to be charged. My own Monash council charged about ten dollars a year, (though this has risen over time to about twenty-five). Other councils asked for as little as six dollars, but some, if I recall correctly, charged more than a hundred.

You see, there were no precedents. Nobody knew what an appropriate fee might be, so they they flew on instinct and did not bother to confer with each other. And the greedier and more venal the council, the more they charged. Their ethical fibre was exposed. It was an object lesson in human nature.

Now the other day, my wife returned grumbling from a coffee session with her friends. She had been billed three dollars for a babycino - around the price of a real cino. My hackles rose. Deplorable, unforgivable, extortionate pricing. Worse even than the outrageous mark-ups on beer and chips at the football. Or popcorn and choc-tops at the cinemas. And I can tell you, with a high degree of certainty, that the individual who priced that babycino has a black heart

Here is a link that further explores this dismaying issue.

*

While burrowing through old boxes in the shed today, in addition to dust and house spiders and possum skeletons, I found a couple of unused designs for Ears single covers. I can’t work out why we didn’t choose the first one. It's brilliant. I think it’s by Tony Harding, brother of Christine and Anne. The other’s by Gus Till.

~ the passing of immaculata

I’ve spent much of the last three weeks writing an article on naltrexone implants. Too long for a simple article. I get buried in the research, and in polishing the text, and lastly in reducing the text by half because I inevitably write twice as much as what’s needed. I should be quicker by now, but I’m not.

Naltrexone is a drug that blocks the effects of opiates. Usually, it’s taken in tablet form by recovered junkies to prevent relapse, but there’s also a slow-release delivery module that is inserted under the skin and which can last months. It’s unproven and unsafe, but many desperate users are turning to it as a last resort. A lot of politics are wound up in this story, a lot of overdoses too, and a lot of infected incisions.

If you’re interested, the article will hopefully be in the next issue of Whack!, the magazine of Harm Reduction Victoria. Perhaps along with another article I’ve written on the shamanic drug ibogaine.

On the ornithological front, it is my sad duty to report the disappearance of the white duck Immaculata. She has been missing from the Grey Creek for at least a month now, and I fear the worst. The last few times I saw her, she seemed uninterested in food and I think she was already fading as winter descended.

Lat week, there was a huge flock of sulphur crested cockatoos feasting on the spiky balls that fall from the liquid amber trees at this time of year.

But more exciting by far was my sighting of about a dozen black cockatoos by the grey creek. Identifying them has been hard.. There are five types of black cockatoo. Glossy black cockatoos don’t live here. They weren’t gang gangs. Red and yellow tailed black cockatoos do live in Victoria but I didn’t see enough colour to tell … It must have been one of these two.

The Sails of Oblivion Gig surges on. Dolores, the promoter is a force to be reckoned with. We’ll have facebook and myspace pages set up within the next few days.

~ spider sac

Circumstances have forced me back into that most cruel of tasks: selling books on Ebay. I have reassumed the identity of ‘Lampsucker’ and am diligently slaving away, as I expect to be for at least the next year.

While burrowing through my stock the other day, I found the egg sack of a spider attached to an Isabel Allende biography. Though it was slightly torn, it seemed quite full, so I investigated further, to find it was filled with tiny spherical eggs of a light green colour.



The eggs seemed to have crystallised. If you crush a crystal of sugar under the end of a spoon you are left with the same type of powder residue I was left with when I crushed one of these eggs. Only pale green instead of white.

I’m pretty certain the sac was the work of a huntsman of the holconia group – the species which most commonly inhabits houses here in Melbourne. They produce ‘a flat, oval egg sac of white papery silk, and lay up to 200 eggs’. Well there were about fifty eggs in this one, but otherwise it fits the facts. Also the ‘spiderlings are pale brown or green in colour’, so perhaps this was one of the green batches.

I was also surprised to learn that huntsmen have lifespans of about two years.



The other possibility was the dreaded white-tail (Lampona cylindrata or Lampona murina). Its saccing habits were described thus: ‘they make temporary silk retreats and spin disc-shaped egg sacs which contain as many as 90 eggs’. I saw no evidence of a silk retreat and there was nothing particularly disc-like about the sac

But I did learn something interesting.

My wife hates white-tails with a passion and is always checking Polly’s sheets for them. (They like clean linen.) Her mother, Di, was bitten once and reacted very badly, perhaps experiencing the necrosis that their bites are said to cause. I have spoken to a woman who claimed a white-tail bite caused her to lose two years of her life in the mists of chronic fatigue syndrome. Without really thinking about it, feeble sceptic that I am, I was quite prepared to believe that these spider bites could cause seeping wounds that never heal – a condition named "necrotising arachnidism". (“Occasionally, the reaction is so severe that the person loses large amounts of skin and needs extensive skin grafts.”)

It appears this is something of an urban myth or at least a vast exaggeration.

I myself first heard of white-tails around the time my wife moved in, around 2000, and it surprised me that I’d been ignorant of such a seemingly perilous threat. And apparently it has only been since the 1980s that reports of severe skin lesions have been reported.

Here are a few random quotes from the web:

A recent study has monitored the medical outcomes of over 100 verified White-tailed Spider bites and found not a single case of ulceration (confirming the results of an earlier study). www.austmus.gov.au

The University of Adelaide’s Clinical Toxinology Resources (www.toxinology.com) have an excellent run down of the venoms of all sorts of Aussie fauna and their effects. The entry on white-tails says that necrosis “does not occur, based on current clinical evidence”. bencruachan.org

Bites from these spiders have been reported to cause necrosis (decomposition of the skin). This has only been verified in 14 spider bites over the past 10 years, and none of the victims could confirm the type of spider responsible. This reaction is considered to be rare. However, bacteria on the fangs of the spiders may cause severe infection or other allergic reactions.

I’m getting the feeling that the white tail thing has been blown out of proportion. In their favour, they’re an arachnovore, hunting other spiders (like red-backs and daddy-long-legs) for food.

*

If you’ve stayed with me this long, you might be interested to know that there’s been some movement on the Save Sam’s Neck effort, coming principally from my guru to the north, Steve Kilbey. I was thinking about arranging a theatrical-style benefit, that being the scene I move in these days, but Steve’s suggested, and offered to be part of, a musical benefit.

It’s early days yet, but it will probably be in August and legendary promoter Dolores San Miguel has offered a hand. Also, unless the sky falls in, The Ears will be doing a reformation.

I’ll leave you with this still by Marc Morel from The Goitre Birds, performed at Snatches a little over a week ago.