Visual Diary #18
plus new memoir, zines to buy, beatniks, psychics, dogs
A TATTOO A CAR A DOG
Above is the image that accompanies my piece in the Age today - when I first saw it I felt a bit breathless - like the artist (Dionne Gain) had been in my brain. I really love it. It’s been a while since I’ve had a memory piece in the paper. This one is about romantic delusion and young adulthood, and the things that help you through.
“Love for a person can be like love for an object – or is it that the person becomes an object, every bit as resonant and vital and self-making as a book or a film or the right pair of shoes? Love is a delusion, or at the very least a distraction. First love is the worst.”
. You can read it here
WHO WILL BUY? ZINES ETC
I have some limited edition mini memory zines and collage postcards for sale. Perhaps you have a nostalgic friend in need of a pick-me-up or xmas gift - sort them out with my wonky art and human words. The zines are 8 x 10. The postcards are normal postcard size. If you have any questions there is a contact form on the page.
https://lostalgia-5797.bigcartel.com/
VISUAL DIARY
I’ve been under the weather this last week and finishing up marking essays and applying for unlikely jobs in state-of-the-art offices with salary-sacrificing and annual leave and other things beyond my ken. Despite that hellscape there has been occasional joy and intrigue:
This is from the Roger Corman film Bucket of Blood - it’s on Kanopy at the moment. Corman was the master at finding whatever was in the zetgeist and making a B-movie out of it. This is set in a Venice Beatnik cafe where the maladjusted busboy dreams of being an artist. An accident with the landlady’s cat allows him to realise his dreams but only for so long. I love this review by Juliet Clark.
The film is short and very funny - but not even that ridiculous when you think about modern art, and the modern artiste. Dick Miller is fab as the hapless sociopath Walter Paisley, and the cast includes hep cats (“I can’t man, I’m too far out,”), ol’ (art) ladies pushing ‘horse’, bards, troubadours, and eminent beat poet Maxwell H. Brock:
"I refuse to say anything twice. Repetition is death... When you repeat something, you are reliving a moment, wasting it, severing it from the other end of your life. I believe only in new impressions, new stimuli, new life!”
This is the car I parked next to at Savers today. At first I thought was abandoned because it was looking torched and faded with the windows all open, but then I saw that the whole backseat was taken up with a big, old, gnarly-looking hound who watched me with great interest as I locked my doors and gingerly stepped away. It turned to be a good visit as I found a book about Ena Twigg, the world famous medium, late of Gillingham, for $3.49 and the price sticker came off without trouble.
This is Margeurite the undead before she torches herself in Anne De Marcken’s It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over. The novel follows a narrator who has forgotten her name as she wanders through the apocalypse? the afterlife? She’s a zombie but her hunger makes her alive, and she has a crow in her chest who spits out almost-poetry. It’s weird, scabrous and full of strange beauty - Max Porter for Goths and somnabulists. It won the Novel Prize in 2024 and I bought it then. I don’t know why it took so long to get to it.
“Marguerite has grey hair that she wears in two long braids wrapped around her head in a kind of crown into which she has stuck things. Feathers. A pencil. Twist-ties. A Barbie arm….”
This is the long-haired little man who I so upset in last night’s dream. You can’t tell from my bad art but he looked like a cross between Willem Dafoe and Bob from Twin Peaks, and his suit was immaculate. Whatever it was I did to him he wouldn’t let it lie and was shouting at me in the cafeteria in front of all the other dream people. (There were no pink clouds I just put those there so that you would know it was a dream and not a real thing that happened. I haven’t even been in a cafeteria for about a hundred years - although just writing the word made me remember the old Coles cafeteria in Bourke Street. Maybe I’ll dream about that tonight.)
HELS
In my flu-haze I read the first of Helen Garner’s diaries. I was surprised to see how into classical music and opera and plays and highbrow literature she was/is. I am a philistine. I will probably never read Patrick White. I have never been to the opera. I rarely go to plays. I imagine all that stuff was a lot more affordable in the 1980s. Anyway - I will read the next one - I was with her for the bad haircuts and her house dreams. I love how she writes about her daughter, the city, the sky, and the woes and joys of writing.
