A Hollywood who dunnit solved

Yesterday Mr X flagged down a taxi and zoomed us over to Surry Hills to see Spencer and Abdullah play solo sets at Adam Lewis's Sunset People at the Hollywood. This boring background information is crucial for two reasons. Reason the first, I like being zoomed in taxis. Reason the second, a mystery occurred at the Hollywood. It was time for The Peachette Detective Agency to solve another case.

The detecting business is more tricky than I thought. So far I have solved no mysteries despite opening my first detective agency thirty years ago. Someone must have slipped determination into my beer because when a new mystery presented itself I went ahead and solved it.

The Mystery

Who wrote "WHY AREN'T YOU DATING ADAM LEWIS? HE IS A BABE" on the tiles in a toilet cubicle at the Hollywood?

Answer
I know but I can't tell you. The investigative process was furious and swift. People were questioned, text messages were sent and Adam Lewis became bemused.

By the end of the night beer provided an anaesthetic effect on my broken foot and pain became a memory, which is a shame really. There's nothing like a limp to add a hint of the hardboiled to working a case.

The triumph of solving the case has not been dimmed by the watertight confidentiality agreement made during the investigative process. Triumph whilst sometimes exhibited externally by yelling, clapping, smiling, crying, jumping, dancing or hugging is first and primarily experienced in the mind. Besides, I know who dunnit and in Hollywood that's all that really matters.

A short history of my early years as a detective.

Oh and in answer to the question in question. I would date Adam Lewis but I might be arrested for dating someone young enough to be my son, I think. I haven't done the maths but that answer seems right to me.

Adult contemporary dentist

My dentist's yarmulke pleased me. It lent my appointment a sense of officialness and dignity as though I hadn't set seven separate alarms to make sure I would wake up in time or spent six minutes searching the house for a piece of chewing gum in case I needed to freshen my mouth in the half an hour it would take me to travel from The Peach to the city surgery. Any kind of official or religious hat has this effect on me.

This sense of adult officialness followed me through my medical morning as I produced my private health fund card to cover not only my dental expenses ($263) but new lenses in my old glasses ($120). I worked out that with this morning's appointments I had effectively reimbursed myself nine months worth of health fund payments. I left the combined dental/eye care surgery, makes sense to me, and walked out into the cool morning ahead of schedule.

Marching down Elizabeth St back towards Central I realised that despite my appointments I would be early for work. I was congratulating myself on my efficiency when the first urge to listen to adult contemporary music rolled through me. Confusingly a simultaneous urge to telephone to mother and report on the excellent and cavity-free state of my teeth took hold. I briefly wondered if I was too old for a reward for being good at the dentist.

My confused state of organised adult and childish wish for rewards travelled well. It arrived at my office and caused me to telephone my mother and listen to adult contemporary music and organise my NPR podcast subscriptions in alphabetical order. I'm still waiting to hear if I qualify for a reward.

Everywhere man or The Adam Lewis Awesome Test

Adam Lewis is a young man who is everywhere that is good or interesting or brave or new. He might even be the young man who booked, organised or curated it. For a while now I've been thinking of Adam Lewis as a human everywhere dog. He seems to be everywhere, all the time, all at once. Unless he is secretly identical triplets (could happen) or can travel through time (could happen) or is actually a personal delusional of mine and friends are just being nice and pretending he exists (could happen).

Yesterday I was sitting peaceably in a pub with some friends when Adam Lewis walked in. Straight away I knew that meant I was about to accidentally have a good time because a busy man like Adam doesn't just show up in a pub for no reason.

After I had an accidentally excellent time I started thinking about deciding whether or not I really liked it or if   the fact that I was covered in paint pigments, and a bit high and three beers in, were unduly influencing my decision towards the positive. At first it was kind of hard to tell but then I glanced over at Adam, who waved cheerily, and I had an idea.

Adam Lewis likes things that are awesome. He is a good judge of what is awesome because he sees everything all the time all at once. Once you see everything all the time all at once you can pick something shit a mile away. Here is an example of something that was shit.

Deciding whether something is good, or if I like it, is boring now that I have hung up my reviewing pen. One horrible side effect of being an ex-reviewer is automatically adding complicated layers of questions and filters on top of instinct before making a proclamation. The long deciding process bores me so I have invented something amazing. I give you The Adam Lewis Awesome Test for working whether or not something is good.


The Adam Lewis Awesome Test


1. Is Adam Lewis here? If yes continue to question two, if no then GO HOME RIGHT NOW because you are somewhere BAD.


2. Is Adam Lewis smiling and nodding his head in a joyful and benevolent way? If yes stay where you are and pay attention to what Adam Lewis is looking at. If no continue to next question.


3. Is it a break between bands or performers or similar? If yes get a drink or talk to friends or Adam Lewis or both and proceed to question four. If no GO HOME CAUSE IF ADAM HATES IT YOU SHOULD TOO, if it is not something with performances proceed to question four.


4. Ask Adam Lewis if he thinks it is awesome. Listen to his answer.If he thinks it is awesome then it is AWESOME, if he does not think it awesome then it SUX AND YOU SHOULD GO HOME RIGHT NOW AND HAVE A NICE CUP OF TEA AND A LITTLE SIT DOWN.


See how much easier my whole life is now?










PS. Hate mail bores the fuck out of me so in case you are confused, or from Finland, let this be your 'takeaway', I like Adam Lewis and think he is pretty great and one day, if he keeps this up, he will be the Captain of Sydney or similar because he is a talented young man with great instincts and popular social graces. I also like his glasses.

PPS. Adam Lewis - the bio by Dale Slamma:
Radiant on FBI
Those millions of gigs he organises
That other thing
Oh and his day job
And all those tweets and facebooks
OTHER IMPORTANT THINGS THAT ARE IMPORTANT AND GOOD
might be best to ask Adam Lewis for his more official bio.

Some call it the Emerald City

My brother sat perched on a bar stool peering out the window at people scurrying around in Surry Hills. He kept exclaiming, "Look at all the people! All those people going places! Look at that guy, and that guy, look at them over there!" like he couldn't believe the volume and variety of humanity of going about its business.

I used to exclaim like that when I first moved to the city, even sit for hours making notes. I couldn't believe my eyes. It felt so strange to see so many people moving about all around me after decades of knowing three streets away from wherever I was there was nothing but distance, mountains and sky. You could walk out the front door of my old house and walk for hours without arriving anywhere at all.

The city feels like a dreamscape sometimes and I still want to exclaim but I'm more likely to close my eyes and see if I can feel it, as well as see it. I'm still waiting to wake up back in the old town and realise I've had the most amazing dream.

How Slamma got her weird back

I got my weird back. For a little while there strange things happened to Grizelda while my days sailed smooth and boring. Grizelda was horrified, she thought we might have swapped, for good. Meanwhile back at The Peach I was like a painted ship, then yesterday happened.

It started on Facebook where I had a brief scare that maybe Alan Jones was the man behind the $1000 grant PAN magazine was awarded from the Awesome Foundation. I discovered, after some investigation, that The Horrible Mr Jones came on board after PAN received the grant, as one of ten trustees but I didn't learn that until today.

Cake-free and worried about Alan Jones* I headed out the Peach Gate onto the street but bumped head first into a neighbourhood friend of mine, who just happens to be Sam Cutler. Sam was talking about talking to Marianne Faithfull about his upcoming book then he offered me a chapter for the next issue of PAN. I said, "Well, if Marianne likes it then I'll take a look". Which was better than the real answer running around in my head that want a little something like this, "Holy fuck yes! WOOO".  Elegant, I know.

After Sam and I walked up the street just shooting the breeze I hopped on a bus and delivered the biggest bunch of flowers I could afford to my friend Robert at his office, because I felt like it. I can not afford a really big bunch of flowers but he didn't seem to mind.

Later in the evening after attending one of those overly hot and crowded exhibition openings at Gaffa Gallery I headed round the corner to Dymocks on George St. I was pleased to escape the gallery. It was loud as in the inside of a firing cannon and seemed to populated by people I am calling Arthouse Bikies. They were head to toe in shades of grey and faded blue denim. Bikie like patches sewn all over their jackets, there were top hats and walnut smoking pipes and various degrees of greasy lank locks. Seriously, there were hundreds of them.

I knew my friends Andrew P Street and A.H. Cayley** were hanging around at Dymocks. Well P Street was doing one of those 'in conversation with' things with Marieke Hardy about her new book "You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead". Poor Marieke was sitting patiently behind a table signing books and being talked at by a man calling himself Edwina. 'Edwina' was sporting a balding bob and what appeared to a miniature safari dress two sizes too small. It seems to me that Ms Hardy is a patient and lovely woman.

I wound up with an invitation to dine with A.H.C, APS, Ms Hardy and her lovely publicist Kate. It was one of those restaurants that I can't afford to eat at. Seriously, I owe the A.H.C and the APS quite a bit of dinner money now. It was mildly delicious but hear this Gemma, not worth the money. The company more than made up for my horror at inadvertently spending so much on dinner. I believe I had what is called a lovely time despite feeling awkward for the poor waiter. I'm not sure how it happened but every time he arrived at our table someone was saying 'anus'.

One day later sitting here thinking about it all, inside my new haircut that makes me look like I'm five years old again, I've come to this conclusion. I've got my weird back. Grizelda, who does not enjoy unexpected events on a daily basis, is certainly glad.


* Alan Jones is the enemy of thinking, the enemy of the arts, the enemy of honest democracies and the enemy of me.
** Listen here APS and A.H.C - can we come to some kind agreement? Either you both have punctuation in your names or neither of you do. It is too hard for a fake intellectual like me to remember who does and who does not have a '.' in their name.

I always thought it would be time to move on when I stop wondering about something. I've stopped wondering about people before, cast them off as solved and useless puzzles but I'm beginning to suspect I might never stop wondering about some places. This afternoon when I was walking home from the thankfully part-time job of corporate doom and oppression I noticed an artist's interpretation of a planned upgrade at the Devonshire St entrance to the tunnel at Central. The artist signed his work and this started me wondering. Who is this man? I know his name is Robert Stewartson or Stewart Robertson or something like that but what kind of artist proudly signs their name to a painting of a planned staircase upgrade? I was going to find out and then I remembered the time I wrote a letter to an architect and the whole thing backfired. This time I'm going to hold back my wonderings, just a little.

I remember standing in the architecture section in the second hand part of Berkelouw Books, in Newtown, some time last year. I saw the same name written in at least fifty books,  I had an idea, did some research and sent the following letter. In an ideal world such letters would not be considered harassment but something else entirely.

Dear Robert Tuckwell,

I first imagined the idea of you upstairs in Berkelouw’s, Newtown. There were so many of your books that I thought you must be dead. You wrote your name in capital letters, deliberate marks more prominent on the downstroke, you did this in every single volume. I sat in a wooden chair and imagined your grey-haired children packing your books into boxes. One of them occasionally ran a finger down a familiar spine, the others repressed their conflicting emotions and pretended it was 3d tetris and thought of mostly of defrosting the freezers in their own crowded houses. One of them decided to stop trying IVF and leaked a single tear on to the front cover of an architectural magazine.

I piled as many volumes into my arms as I could before the weight of them toppled me into an elderly woman in search of engineering books on the subject of home-poured concrete. There are three known reasons for shedding so many beautiful books, death, late onset minimalism or the removal of oneself to a tiny flat in New York with nothing but a double bass, and the burning desire to become a backing bassist for a coffeehouse beat poet. Dear Robert Tuckwell that form of poetry has never captured my heart and this is why I have hoped, for three hours, that you were dead.

I bought one book, consigning the others to an uncertain fate. The engineer peered over the top of her book on music concrète as I returned the last volume to the top shelf without needing to stand on my toes.  My deceased and imagined Robert Tuckwell ghosted me down the warehouse stairs and the length of old King St. Do not suspect that I was not growing fond of him. He crooked his elbow and bid me hold steady his ancient arm as I stepped around the banjo busker who was masquerading today as an elderly homeless man. He raised his arm in greeting before remembering that he was in disguise.

 
Dear Robert Tuckwell I have inadvertently made a dent in the pristine cover of one of your former books and for this I am sorry. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I have inadvertently made a dent in a book that was formerly yours. The endpages are elephant grey, inside there are pictures of white grand pianos in Uruguay, hammocks hung from trees in the British West Indies, and a bookcase on Providenciales Island. It is possible that you live on a street named after toothpaste or a formerly more popular word for noble wolf but I have not sent this letter to alarm you. It seems that you are alive. I hope that you are well and do not spend your afternoons as I do gazing at pictures of grand pianos and googling the imaginary dead.

It is best if I tell you immediately that Baudrillard has nothing to do with anything.

There seemed to be hundreds of books in the bookshop bearing the forthright blue felt-tip marks of your name. The man behind the cash register says that your books filled the entire back room of the bookshop when they first came in. I told him my theory that you had died or moved to New York but he was more in favour of a retirement story, I think that he forgot to tell me that he imagined you making room in your shelves for books about landmines and sailing. I am not quite sure what retired men do.

I found your work on the Internet. It would be better if I used words for this part.

An art museum made out of pink, white and yellow paper run through with shadows cast by a miniature artificial sun. I walked the walls and ceilings until I understood the gravity of the imagined. If I mapped and reduced the trails I leave as I cross and cross this city their bleached and condensed shape might resemble the museum as seen from above. I have maps that will answer your questions. I am not known for my ability to imagine architects or the possibility of confining and redefining matter into space. You have forced mastery over things such as bricks, sand and sunlight. I understand this is something they teach in universities. My desk lies in artificial shadow, light blocked by a drawing and the direction to lay bricks, uproot trees and lock panes of glass in channels made of wood. I might once have thought the word homemaker was something of an insult or a self-remedy for failure. This has revealed more than it should.

Dear Robert Tuckwell I am sorry if a report of your imagined death has disturbed you. It was my intention to convey more joy at the discovery of your life and to compliment your skills in wielding pens and folding paper. Such things should be more than ephemera. I imagine that your hands are steady as a surgeon’s and that you have one room dedicated to thinking only about light.

Yours sincerely,

DS

I think I need a brain wash

I have decided to give my brain this one chance to explain to me why it woke up at 7:45am this morning, a Sunday morning, after we (my brain and I) went to bed after 3am. I'm wide awake, ready to throw on shoes and run out into the world but I'm not going to. Rational thought tells me I need to rest and drink approximately seven thousand litres of water.

It was never my intention to drink about a bottle of champagne before going to the Excelsior last night but the waitstaff just kept cruising past. There were round and shining silver trays seamlessly floating past my elbow approximately every three minutes with free drinks. I was starving and the food was much slower to circulate than the wine. I was crammed into The Argyle with five million people dressed in sailor suits, formation shark unitards or Hawaiian shirts. The Argyle is one of those divine buildings where the floorboards seem like they're constantly being crossed by the ghosts of convicts but of course they've turned it into a hideous bar for shiny people. It was one of those work Christmas parties that have a budget so large it's frightening. I'm more used to the annual staff lunch where all five staff at a non-profit arts organisation go across the road to a pub and choose the cheapest things off the menu and share one bottle of wine, then go back to work in the afternoon. I wasn't ready for the shock of five million gyrating people in full fancy dress throwing back as much booze as is humanly possible.

I left after an hour and discovered, as I walked along the quay that it wasn't the green harbour swaying in waltz time but me. I made it up three flights of stairs, onto a train and then up the hill to The Excelsior. I arrived with a lilt, a pocket full of miniature plastic sea creatures and a plan. Each miniature plastic sea creature was assigned to a specific person based on strict criteria that made a hell of a lot of sense at the time. One seahorse for Daisy, one shark for Spencer, another shark for Madam Squeeze and the sparkly lilac seahorse for Halogen. Spencer, Madam Squeeze and Daisy hadn't arrived yet so I presented a bemused Halogen with his seahorse then sat down and proceeded to talk such nonsense that several people offered to go and fetch me a glass of water. Three hours and seven glasses of water later I was decidedly more sober and beginning to regret my decision to present Halogen with a lilac sparkly plastic seahorse, Spencer, Madam Squeeze and Daisy are of course more used to my ways and present no problems in the area of miniature plastic sea creature presentation regret.

After I had achieved an ideal state of kind of sobered up I found myself having a real good time. Spencer's band was magnificent, as always (seriously people if you don't own a copy of Damn You, Ra yet then I don't know what you are doing) I had one of those nights where conversation is easy, interesting and free. The music did it's job of providing a reason to breathe. I keep rediscovering how live music builds my bones, kind of courses through me like temporary architecture holding up my ceiling.