A Poem

You know that you must pay attention

To the course of our recession,

Bourgeois art and your imagination

(Which lead you from a paid vocation)

Are not for those who live these times,

Full with famine and white collar crimes.

Leave aside your childish dreams

Lest the world should split its seams

And drench us all in fiscal anguish-

Better to be restrained, and languish.

The Dow is nothing like an ocean.

It has not that beauty,

That dramatic swelling motion.

 

I hope one day the sea will stop.

Wind lifted, foam white spray will drop,

Back to water churned, that now lies calm,

Its violence lost to memory’s balm,

And in the air the cries of birds

That sudden calm has sudden stirred,

Will echo far across a glassy space

Ring like tin, and fade without trace.

 

For I believe in time all truth should out,

This world again true form should take.

It’s a muddy, and a placid, all frustrating lake.

Cider Party & Accessories

There I am, throwing some sort of frisbee thing that we found in the park. You can't see it, but I'm wearing a black roll neck and velvet jacket, over grey trousers. 

Glassware, a silver tea set, scones and cucumber sandwiches. My chair rather doesn't match, and the tablecloth was far too large, and those plastic folding monstrosities were unfortunately necessary as I wasn't the only person there. Everyone is always getting in the way of my search for perfection... which, on the whole, is probably a good thing.

And here is my newly arrived vintage collar bar, patented in the very late 20s. It is smaller than it looks in the photo, as the earlier ones tend towards being. Essentially it works by clipping onto the two ends of your shirt collar, going underneath the tie, and holding them together. I will need to find a shirt with collars that work with it, but it will be worth it!

An Essay

Ways to make an essay bearable. Marinetti was an interesting old cove, but even he cannot make my history assignments scintillating to write. But fancy South Australian cider can, and I over ordered in preparation for my soon to be cider party. I'm not sure if cider goes well with almonds, but it worked for me.

It's also a lovely colour, and looks well in one of the 41 assorted vintage glasses that I bought for $45 recently. Also for the cider party. These things must be done right!

More Room

The Remington Portable. I'm not sure why anyone ever thought this was portable- it weighs a ton, and the case (not in the photo) is made of wood. This one was also lovingly restored by Drummoyne man. (Who probably didn't actually live in Drummoyne).

The keys fold out, for to bash the paper with.

The other typewriter, larger.

The Deathk Fan. (Delicious pun)

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Being that this is Australia, and thus it gets very hot in the summer time, I thought I'd best buy myself a fan for the room. Floor standing fans are universally ugly, so I decided on a desk fan. Then, as I do, I was wandering around an antique store when I saw a very dusty, very heavy looking desk fan way up on the top of a cupboard. Ignoring the practical details, such as might have put anyone else off- the price tag ($190- I got it down to 150), the lack of any cage for the fan blades- and the fact that it was made some time around 1910, at which point the making of desk fans was anything but a perfected art, I brought it home with me. Then, trusting in the rewired plug, I put it into the wall to see what would happen.

It made a slightly worrying buzzing sound, but the street hadn't lost all power, so things were going well. It got faster, and a little faster, and was producing a nice breeze. Then it got faster. And faster again. Looking at the side, I realised that there was no longer any way to control the speed. At this point, I hid behind a wall, believing the blades about to fly off and cut me in half at any moment. A minute later, I realised a more practical (and less cowardly) approach would be to unplug it. Unfortunately, the clamps holding the head up within the frame had come loose, and the blades dropped down and began chipping away paint with a noise something like that of a circular saw. It did turn off, eventually, but I felt rather foolish... I have learnt my lesson- NEVER plug an antique into anything without a real assurance that an electrician has approved it. Because, apart from anything else, you might damage it.

Redecorations

No longer white.

Indeed, colourful.

Dark oak kneehole desk, 1920's (by my reckoning), 9 drawers. It is a racist desk. On the inside of the central drawer is a sticker that claims it was "European labour only". Australian unions and cabinet makers tended to do that in the early 20th century, out of concern over cheaper Chinese made imports. It was a widespread practice, I believe other nations also did.

1920's Dark oak office chair, leather upholstered. Apparently it came from a board room.

More to come...

The White Room

A very odd day

I've always been jealous of people who have lives full of fantastic experiences that they just wander into. I've been reading Rousseau's Confessions recently. Actually, I was reading it, and then somehow lost my book, possibly at Uni. Which is symptomatic of my absent mindedness. But I've borrowed another copy from the library.

His life, it seems, was a constant series of these sorts of events. It's an excellent book.. very timeless, you almost forget that he is writing about his life in the 1730s, except for the constant romance of it all.

Anyway, to get to the point, I had a day rather like that today, in my own small way. I had a six hour break between classes, and was waiting about in a courtyard near one of the uni's cafes, attempting to write a sort of awful poetry without any concern for metre or rhyme. Which is to say, words in lines, not poetry at all. After a while I noticed that I could hear a piano, so I stood up and wandered in that direction, wondering if it was a recording. As it turned out, in the hall full of tables attached to the cafe there was a man playing in the corner.

He was rather small, with grey hair, completely hidden until you looked around for him. He didn't seem to notice me, and I thought it best to be inconspicuous and sit there, writing away. For the next hour and a half we were the only two people around, except for cafe staff trundling trolleys across, and a few cleaners who stopped in and looked momentarily capitivated. It was a very nice piece that he was playing- sweetly melancholy. It was just about the first cold day of the year outside, but sunny, and the hall opened onto the courtyard.

I've been at the uni for more than two years now, and parts of it are quite old (by Australian standards), which- being so precious, as very few buildings here date from 1856- aren't often used by undergraduate students. I had a lot of time, and it would be a pity were I to leave in a year or two without exploring them. So I spent another hour waiting for my class in an empty hallway, upstairs in the cloisters, underneath this magnificent carved stone ceiling that sucked up noise like a tomb. There's an enormous stained glass window there which, despite its mundane subject matter, looks amazing in the early evening. Those were my accidental moments today. They don't compare with Rousseau, but I enjoyed them.

Waiting For Godot

Much of my time for the last two weeks (or months, really) has been taken up with this play. I directed it for SUDs- Sydney Uni Dramatic society- with my friend Cale. I also did the costumes, and the design, for sets and posters and such.. it was all great fun. The last few nights of our run, which ended yesterday, really made me proud. And, we had a good turn out- on two separate occasions in the second week we had an audience of 63 people, which for the Cellar theatre is a lot- we had to expand the set and improvise seating.

I'd gone off the play a bit by the time we were starting, but now, after several months of thinking about it, I think I've developed something of a fondness for it. My next plan is to write my own! But I'm not sure how that will go. Anyway, here's a few images- I didn't, in the end, get proper photos of the cast in costume, but you can see some of them in these. Obviously, in the final production, Lucky was not wearing jeans.

My favourite trousers

Such was my attempt to smile in a photo- perhaps I went a bit overboard. In any case, this was what I wore to the opening night of Waiting For Godot, (a SUDs production), that myself and my friend Cale Hubble directed. I actually convinced him to wear a jacket and buttoned shirt, and even got Nick, our producer, to wear a suit. Of course he was wearing it with a T shirt, but it's better than nothing. The play is also the explanation for the lack of entries here, despite various goings on that otherwise would have made their way, I am sure, into posts. Stay tuned for photos of my new desk, as my refurbishment of my room at home continues. I was looking for lamps today, but didn't find any- there was a fairly nice art nouveau brass one, but the lamp shades were overly decorative- I don't like lamp shades designed to look good only when the light is actually on, and terrible the rest of the time.

Velvet Jacket

I've always quite liked velvet, but I'd never come across any of it before I finally found this blazer in the Vinnies on Glebe pt. Road. It's Studio Italia I think, quite nice. You can't see it very much in this, but it's actually dark brown, worn with the bottom half of a grey suit. Were I to take this photo again, I'd tuck the shirt in properly, and get a new belt- it rather has an American not quite fitting into chinos look about it this way, which is a bit sad, because I was quite proud of this outfit. The shirt is actually striped, and is itself also a good find from the same op shop trip. Dark brown contrasted with a brighter colour- bright, dark blues or reds, generally, works well. .. Isn't that building horrendous? It's one of the new USYD campus developments. I honestly cannot understand contemporary architecture. Why would you pay for that much glass and then decide to cover it in ugly, opaque green stickers..

Occidental Authoritarianism

Rachael and I went to the market today, and I bought a Mao Zedong alarm clock- as you do- for the princely sum of $10. I'm absolutely in love with it. It's essentially a tin can with a very basic movement in it, so the ticking is more of a clunking, and the bells don't work unless you turn the key yourself. So it won't be much use for waking the workers of the republic. It just has tons of historical flavour- I'm sure the radium on the hands has done terrible things to a few factory workers in its time.

The green hand, clutching a little red book, waves emphatically as the hands move- I have yet to see if it's glow in the dark, I really do hope so. I can't imagine anything I'd like more than a glowing green arm, eerily denouncing my bourgeois lifestyle, bobbing about in the night.

If at first...

Oh dear.

It appears that this is going to be more difficult than I thought.

Well, at least I'm all in this one. Unfortunately, my tripod is rather non-functioning at this point, for the usual reason- that blasted thingy you screw onto the camera is gone. So, camera perched perilously upon my car, I bowed to fate. Anyway, here are some close ups:

Shirt/Tie

Shoes

Jacket and pocket square.

The jacket, the shirt and the tie are all from various op shops. The trousers are from Kenji, bought in Myer- I wouldn't believe it either, if I hadn't seen it. They were excellent value, (sale) and they have no awful brand names plastered all over them. The shoes are from Payless, or somewhere like that- I've found good things emerge occasionally, even from Australian shoe stores.

The tie was actually bought in a bag from a big Anglicare depot. All the ties I could eat, for a mere $18. I found several of my new favourites inside, and it had all the fun of a lucky dip to boot. I found lugging a translucent sack of ties through Ashfield quite fun, but that's probably just me.

Shirts with simple colours and classic patterns are the best sort of shirts. Not too formal, timeless, interesting to look at. The sports coat has an early 60s, late 50s air, also not very formal, and more interesting than a simple grey, that works well with a thinner tie- generic fat ties should be reserved for business settings, and avoided even there if possible, to my thinking. This tie is obviously at the very skinniest end- current fashion, I believe, prefers ties to be somewhere in between. Certainly, on most occasions, I find that to be the best choice.

Some might say, that this shirt/tie/pocket square combination is too matchy. To you I say, pooh, sirrah. This is hardly likely to be a popular notion, but I find 'sprezzatura' to be absolutely daft. Unless you actually have just thrown your outfit together you are likely to succeed only in creating an air of deliberately getting it wrong. And, in my position, as a young male Sydneysider, wearing anything more than a pair of board shorts halfway down my arse is going to make me look like I dressed up. Thus, I feel no need to hide my penchant for varied shades of colour. I tried this outfit with a white square; I prefer it this way.

Classical Virtue

It's a sad loos that philosophy is no longer read for personal enjoyment, or, more particularly, for consolation. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (the title's literal literal translation is 'Notes to Himself') have been my own first experience of this. Reading modern philosophy is, largely, desolating. There is a lot about doom, and abandonment, and most of it takes a year's contextual study to even understand. Aurelius is different. Prior to him, I always found the Victorian love of ‘classical virtue’ odd. Classical writers are often not particularly virtuous. Few people now celebrate Cato. We hear rather more of Julius Caesar; the man who slept with Cato’s sister, and then announced it to the senate. The man who rode into Rome on a chariot adorned with a gigantic, carved wooden phallus. The man who killed a measurable percentage of his world’s population. Which is sad. Not because Caesar is unworthy to be learnt of. Rather because it means that men like Marcus Aurelius are left behind, and are heard about only by history majors, and seen only as a minor character in Gladiator. He was an emperor of Rome at the very height of its power, before the plagues, before it fell. And his notebooks, written while on the miserable shores of the Danube, fighting Germans that he did not want to fight, are wonderfully simple and honest. They are a collection of notes, just odd thoughts, on death, on atoms, and all the bittersweet advice that he could give himself after a long life at the top of the world. They are a joy to read. I have written notes to myself, before. Largely they are complaints, little more than a record of my current worries, to express an emotion too private to be told a friend. Something in that line. If I were able, at my slightest whim, to have any man arrested that I chose, or ruined, chastised, anything, would I have written this to myself- “Put from you the belief that ‘I have been wronged’ and with it will go the feeling. Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears.” And would I admonish myself for wanting solitude? Or for wanting to retire; though I were still fighting, a dirty border fight, at sixty? His writing may seem stilted and moralising, particularly at the start. But to read his notes, you have to remember who he was. Remember that he was writing in Greek, a second, ‘academic’ language. Remember, above all, that they were all written as proscriptions for himself- constant reminders to a man already struggling to be good, undeniably and touchingly so, in a position and at a time when it was by no means expected. I am sure he knew that his notes may have been published, after his death. It tends to happen if you are a Roman emperor, particularly an intelligent one. But I do not think that he ever wrote them to be so. And it is sad, even after all these years, to read someone so noble- and much more strikingly, so deeply human and normal- write this: “Mislead yourself no longer; you will never read these notebooks again now, nor the annals of bygone Romans and Greeks, nor that choice selection of writings you have put by for your old age. Press on, then, to the finish; cast away vain hopes; and if you have any regard at all for self, see to your own security while you still may.” Not all Emperors are able to write words that inspire empathy in those separated from them by two millenia. It is an experience worthwhile in itself to understand his feelings, to know that humans, fundamentally, can be the same after all this time. It is unfortunate that Aurelius' Meditations are no longer read as a part of the canon. Because they are often profound, beautiful, and full of consolation for those who are looking for it.