astrid had been talking incessantly about the alpacas, but we were yet to see one. i think she has been in love with them ever since we went to an alpaca farm in tasmania, where a rotund man with a grey bushrangers-beard talked breathlessly as he showed us around, emphasising the parental advantages of alpaca cria over human babies in between an information-stream about the minutiae of alpaca farming. a wide-eyed astrid soaked up every last detail and will recall them at any given opportunity. actually, she was sweet on alpacas before that, but the visit to the farm certainly consecrated the affection. read on.
I've launched a new room to my creative caravan – Peej – which has revamped an old MySpace page I once used for spoken word, and turned it into a dumping ground for my musical amusements.
My first track, Red Ecology, was written for Meg on her birthday - part of our developing gift ecology where no gift is produced that creates waste or uses new material. I made it into a film clip that I posted last week. The second, stein, is for Stein09, a year long celebration of Gertrude which is being organised by a number of poet friends around Australia. I'll blog about it in detail throughout the year. The third, 'ornylil'sexpot, is an attempt to marry ideas about cyclic and lineal time with a smutty dance jingo. Astrid Lorange and WB Yeats' provide the ideas, my life as a waiter when I first met Meg, the smut. The fourth, shutdafugup, is a return to my punk days. This track is for Nick Keys who left a smashing comment on my Fugs post, which inspired this piece of musical violence (against 'copy-righteousness' - NK).
Most of the lyrics have come from posts and comments that have appeared on this blog. Be warned! Your comments might be next in line to be Peej'd.
NB I have made these tracks freely downloadable in the settings, however the antiquated beast that is MySpace doesn't seem to give you the option when you're on the homepage. If you want a copy of a particular track I can email you a MP3 - they're about 3MB each.
A few years ago Zeph, Michael Farrell and I were walking from one room at the Ian Potter (NGV) – a gallery for non-compostable toxiculture specifically obsessed with Australian art – to another room where Ricky Swallow's dumb Vader object sat mutely on the floor. Zeph took one look at the dark ziggurat-like mask and launched himself at it, quickly mounting the top. At the time I expressed my delight to Micki Faz (as nicknamed by Nick Keys) that Zeph, at age 4, had out-done his dad in terms of cultural achievement. This little flick, taken a month or two ago, reminds me of that beautiful spirit at the Potty.
