Traumax, dress death, incredible happenings and the superness of Superman

One moment I was sitting in the Zammercarship happy after seeing The Maple Trail play at the Hopetoun and going to the gallery Serial Space, hungry for the late late dinner Superman and I were planning on having on the way back to The Peach. The next moment I was lying in an ambulance confused and hurting so profoundly that I did not know where exactly the hurt was coming from. At one point I heard a voice and said, "Oh, is Superman here too?". The ambulance lady told me yes he was but I forgot again and again and was surprised when he appeared by my side in my very own personal trauma room in the emergency part of RPA. I was sure that they were pretending, I could not remember being in a crash, they kept asking me how I opened the broken car door. I did not know that Superman had flung it open, not until he told me the next day.

Small notes of gratitude are scrolling through my still fuzzy and unattractively swollen head for:

Superman who was exceptional, even at 3am sitting in a plastic hospital chair at my side. He went out of his way to be extraordinary. For doing everything possible including making me go in the ambulance and stay in the hospital when I did not want to. For going to great lengths to print and post my manuscript that had to be posted, for wiping the terrible mascara trails from my face when I could not do it myself, for sitting in the hospital forever. For conjuring doctors to come and explain just what the hell was going on. For miraculously fetching hot hospital blankets fresh out of the drier when I was shaking with cold. For his powers of invincibility and not being horribly injured, for talking to everyone from police to parents and friends. For his concern for the occupants of the other car and his gratitude for everyone that helped. For holding amusing things in my field of vision when I could not move my head and could not stand staring at the one roof tile any longer. You're alright Superman.

The woman who lived on the corner where we crashed who came out with her dog, comfort and glasses of water while I sat on a wall and wondered what was happening.

The ambulance lady who was commanding and kind. She held me in a calm centre while police and people and firetrucks made chaos. She did not leave my side, sat by me and put a warm hand on mine every time I started to cry, even while she went about poking me and flashing lights in my eyes. In an amazing display of competence she took my arm softly and cannulated me while the ambulance was moving. She was stern and thorough and wonderful.

The emergency staff at RPA were mostly excellent, except for when six of them suddenly stopped doing all the odd things they were doing to me, all at once, rolled me on my side, cut off my clothes with scissors and let some doctor stick a finger in my bum. That was not excellent. It was also unexcellent when they held open my jaw for x-rays or when they bound my hands to my feet and pulled the ropes tight making my bones scream, or when the nurse pushed pain killers down my throat or when they insisted that the neck brace stay on. What was excellent was being voted favourite patient in emergency.

Grizelda stayed with me all day in the hospital and remedied my cracked lips with ointments, held things up into my limited field of vision for my amusement. For making tea and fetching pillows and telephoning my brother.

The Spatula for coming to the hospital and then missing her appointment to help Superman post my manuscript that had to be posted. For feeding the cat and marching to the shops to fetch me things.

My parents who miraculously appeared from far away. My Dad for waiting in the hospital and in my house, for talking with Superman and saying reassuring things. My Mum and her partner for coming armed with a teapot, two kinds of tea, a bottle of arnica and a fresh apple cake and talking to Superman and saying reassuring things.

Spencer for appearing with a pink shiny beruffled umbrella with whistle attached then sitting in The Peach listening to Superman and I tell and retell the same stories in a blurry fashion whilst high on painkillers.

Ron & Rita who telephoned me from a different hospital where they sit with Ronita and their brand new one day old baby which is so far named Untitled 2008. I am very upset that I did not get to see him this weekend, this tiny brand new person. Being smashed in a car is nothing compared to what just happened to Rita.

Sputnik and Boli for their messages of concern.

My dress, that served me well, I was wearing it the first time I met Superman, I had forgotten this until he pointed it out. My dress that went to parties, galleries, gigs, supermarkets and hospitals. I was going to have it altered next week because it has become too big. The first dress I ever bought for myself, I loved you so. RIP green jungle print 1950's party dress.

My painkillers for making typing and just plain being possible.

My spine for defying all things and not being broken despite the incredible concern of medical people. My left arm for coming out of the piece of car it was momentarily stuck in, this I remember.

I have this picture in my head of a smashed and shaken Superman coming back to the dark Peach alone in the early hours of the morning. How he walked alone and could not find a taxi for such a long time, opening the door to The Peach with my unfamiliar keys and feeling his way down the dark hallway then not going to bed but staying up and printing my manuscript. How he said he was shaking for hours. I would not like to have been him, I would not like to watch him flat and prone surrounded by doctors and lying forever in horrible pain. It is cold, uncomfortable and exhausting to wait in a hospital.

I do not remember the crash. Everything hurts except my right hand and left foot. My jaw is swollen down to my shoulder, I have no neck right now, none at all. My whole face retains a cartilage feeling that comes with a blow to the nose. My teeth, all of my teeth ache and ache and ache. I feel terrible, crushed, smashed, confused, unable to concentrate even on a movie. There is simple sadness and a base need for constant comfort. I cry unexpectedly, sleep unexpectedly, I have no desire to write these words but I type in an attempt to usher in some sense of normalcy and cast out determined surreality in this small window where the painkillers begin to work but have not yet rendered me unconscious.

Smashed

Dale Slamma will be back soon, just as soon as she recovers from being smashed, by a car.

Whores, psychonannies, damn building and a new kind of floor

Club 77 is the kind of dive I dream about. Strobe lights in the men's toilets, fluorescent picture of a naked woman spray-painted onto the wall. There is illegal indoor smoking, a Death Star mural, a faux stuffed tiger head behind the bar and a door bitch that has been watching re-runs of original Degrassi Junior High. The women's toilets are decorated with pink spray-paintings of razor blades and naked women on motorcycles. The main problem is the absence of either sticky or bouncy floors. I guess they must hose the bloody joint with a fire hose. Even the vending machine is lit with a red light.

Whores (Chris Colla from Atrocities, some guy I only know as Big Al and Sarah) climbed onto the low stage. Sarah looked damn beautiful under those lights drumming loose and raw like a slow motion roller coaster. This small band was, at times, extraordinary. Chris and Sarah came offstage, came over to sit with Spencer and me, they seemed short and like their ordinary selves. For a moment or two their music had made them large. I'll go out of my way to see them again though it could be difficult to track the trio down. Sarah tells me they might play under a different name each gig. They'll alway be Whores to me.

Psychonanny and The Babyshakers swear they aren't a rockabilly band but they were doing a grand impression of one, they could use more than one kind of drumbeat. Sonia has the kind of voice worth listening to, she's the opposite of a bombshell or what happens after the bomb has gone off. If I could figure out a way to be like her then I'd do it in a flash. You should have seen her up there, cigarette hanging low in the corner of one lip, tambourine rising and falling when she felt like it with an enviable amount of indolence. The not-Simon guitarist has a habit of muddying up the sound, someone give that man a slide, some pedals and the instructions to not play the same thing as Simon at the same time. One song, a slow song was grand until suddenly it transformed into yet another rockabilly song, I'm not sure why they did that. But Jesus they can roll when they get going with that sound that shakes your shoes until you're on your feet and shaking with your shoulders dropped back and knees bent in a stiff-legged forgotten dance from before Elvis.

Earlier I stepped aside so Anthony from Damnbuilders could take his shot, he stalked round the table aiming at balls and smoking cigarettes. Half the girls in Sydney, my side of Sydney not the shiny and terrible side, are developing a thing for him. I've seen him around and idly wondered how he managed to wear that kind of hat with that kind of beard without looking like a serial killer. Spencer and I were talking about him on the way back to Newtown. Spencer kept saying "Is it the beard? Is that what they like?". Someone said he once punched a man for calling him Grizzly Adams, I'd call him Grizzly Adams if I ever got the chance but I'd hang on round his neck really tightly until his urge to punch subsides. Damnbuilders opened with Batman, not Prince but Adam West, followed by what happens when you play Deep Purple in slow motion. After that who the hell knows what that was, I didn't mind it but things definitely took a turn for the what in the hell when Anthony shifted from guitar to keyboard, a sort of dance thing, greatly appreciated by the wall of Indie Kids obscuring my view.

Two known associates of Freddie Mercury Guy played overly loud obsurely chosen tracks between bands, sitting in the dj booth looking like extras from the 1970's. I walked through a dense wall of marijuana smoke in the women's toilets, Sonia nearly got stuck in a cubicle and a Goth who calls himself a death rocker danced like it was 1952.

Dear Melbourne

Please attend the launch of Sunblind by Geoff Lemon

Thursday 27th November at 7pm
The Dan O'Connell Hotel function room (the old back bar)
Corner of Princess and Canning streets, Carlton.

I have been reading and rereading this book and can't quite make out what I think of it, I'm taking this as a good sign.


Geoff Lemon is a known associate of The Hivesters. Gemma once described him as an 'increasingly attractive man', the more you stare at him the more attractive he becomes. I did intend to test that theory but was distracted by beating him at Balderdash. That's right, I beat Geoff Lemon at Balderdash, I am adding this to my list of triumphs.

I'll keep walking

The oddest day, sticky bun for dinner, urgent need for silence thick as honey. I keep talking about this but if you'll excuse me ten seconds at a time I might come back with an explanation. My mother just phoned me from the Russian Embassy, this has never happened before, she was talking about ram raiding something in Redfern but I advised her against that particular course of action. I am certain that committing imaginary crimes after retirement age is a bad idea, no matter which embassy you are currently sitting in.

Last Friday night I was standing in Z Block watching The Holy Soul (Spencer's band) play and it occurred to me that I love this music. I do not love it just because it is good or that it is Spencer's music, not even because I happen to be on the new, as yet unreleased, album. What I long for, more than anything, is to see the ribbons I'm tied together with, to pull apart my building blocks and cradle them one at a time like other people's children.

I like complete thoughts, it is rare that I have them. Rarer than milk and comets. The songs thread through my history, consistent, necessary and whole. You can hear in the songs the progression of their learning, as songwriters and musicians. If you listen, very closely, to their old songs on Myspace** you can hear me learning to stand in a crowd by myself. You can hear the shuffle of university things blocking cogs in my brain, you can hear my old red shoes that I loved so and photographed before finally throwing the tattered things out. You can hear beginning one complete thought.

Spencer sometimes brings songs to me raw and unmade, I hold my hands for them, greedy as children, because I know that by the time this one makes it onto an album I would have discovered or invented a brand new complete thought [or invention***].

** People in The Holy Soul! It is time to update your songs on Myspace because the songs on there now are very very old.

*** Like a chewable brain guard to protect my brain from terrible people, events, thoughts or activities. For example, I am at a pub watching some band, decide to go outside and come face to face with someone terribly toxic, horrid and regrettable. Instead of leaving with horrible thoughts or results in my brain I simply pop in a small square of delicious Slammatown Chewable Brain Guard and chat away confident that the person will have no harmful lasting effects in my brain, where it is important to not have harmful lasting effects.

I lost my hair straightener

JON WAH: A RETROSPECTIVE

JON WAH: A RETROSPECTIVE
1980 - 2008

Exhibition opens: 6 - 9pm
Thursday 4th December
Exhibition continues:
Friday 5th December -
Thursday 18th December

Serial Space:
33 Wellington Street Chippendale
Wednesday- Saturday 12 - 6pm

Wire

I have just bent a straightened paperclip back into its paperclip shape. This feels like something of an achievement.

Pass me my pipe and slippers I'm going to be a man today

According to Genderanalyzer:
"Dale Slamma is written by a man, however it's quite gender neutral."

Maybe I should show them the inside of my pants?

In Z Block's final hour a man spilled red soda into my shoes

Spencer finished art, last night. He did it with guitars, two drummers, an occasional accordion and the raising of his right arm but right now I’m in Penrith RSL watching a big band. The women are dancing together, men all dead.

I avoided Z Block for a while, a year or two, feeling that it belonged to all the things I left behind when the great tide moved me East and away from this RSL with big band afternoons, shopping malls and heat haze. I came back for the last hurrah, the night the University of Western Sydney shut its art school doors.

Most of the time I think of Western Sydney in the frame of mind I reserve for being stung by bees, undergoing chemotherapy or being pulled out to sea in a rip but I have to tell you this big band is very good.

Z Block is a rat maze warehouse with toilets and one kind of ceiling higher than ladders. Whole glass walls fold and raise like sails with insides worse than weather like, greenhouse, submarine, Western Sydney maybe that’s why they’re shutting it down.

It is important to note that the trombone section just spelled out a giant letter ‘E’ using four trombones, this made the audience clap.

I cut beats with tennis balls in some sort of miniature satellite dish, the balls tracked by cameras, projected onto walls and generating sounds. I drank wine from a popular interactive fountain, saw brains floating in tanks, stood on a platform wearing headphones and a vest heavier than lead. I walked in spirals through diaphanous curtains, a jelly fish forest and the space where once there was a giant walk through vagina. Student art is always precisely what it should be but this is isn’t about the art its about the artists.

We all went, all except Boli who was tired from Jazzercise, the long haul west to where we first came across each other, in Z Block, O Building or the Swamp Bar or on the hills in Werro. The catering at the last ever Grad Show defied the temptation to go out with a bang and instead supplied us with baskets of sandwiches and two bath tubs full of beer. The big band is now playing Jump by Van Halen.

The woman who fell out the window with Spencer, Mona and Mr Hunter made some noises. Freddie Mercury Guy took to the stage with his band Numea, he was breaking for cigarettes in the middle of his set, rolling on the floor and screaming like Damo Suzuki.

It is difficult to define the feeling of a university exhaling, memory confined to memory.

I might have been eight years old when they opened the University of Western Sydney. My father took us, my brother and I, to the grand opening. There were free balloons, sausage sandwiches and the biggest library I had ever seen. Dad stood above us on the big set of stairs with the light looming behind him. He told us about the necessity of this university, the great hope for the future, access to education for everyone no matter where you live. He talked about the tyranny of distance and explained the concept of elitism then looked up at the ceilings with a kind of reverence muttering about brutalist architecture. I stood three steps down clutching my balloon and staring about with a sort of wonder.

Fourteen years later I walked down those same set of steps and took my place in the queue outside the co-op bookshop, clutching my first ever compulsory book list, a small sense of hope and a free balloon. Nine years after that I stood there holding half a sandwich, a free can of beer and a mobile phone.

The problem is that this university is mine, I belong to it. I have belonged to it since that day on the stairs but it is very difficult to define the feeling of a university exhaling. At the end of the night a man pulled down the folding glass wall, the lights went off and there was nothing left to do but leave.


(article about shutting down Z Block)

This Peach-House room my Prison (tired plus sniffy narrowly defeats restlessness)

This Peach-house room my prison ! I have lost
Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness ! They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
On springy health, along the King St,
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring pub, of which I told ;
The roaring pub, o'ercrowded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the dim cheap light

Bats

I like this zine. I'm thinking about why, maybe one day I'll come up with some reasons.

If at first you don't succeed try again in locations three

First I was inside the cafe...
But outside looked more appealing...
Then it rained so I went home...