Rigby Instant Books
In the 1970s in Australia, the equivalent of the internet was the Rigby Instant Book. They covered many topics from Ways with Dried Flowers to Transcendental Meditation, Your Teeth and How to Keep Them and Shell Collecting as a Paying Hobby.
Earlier this week my friend Jane posted me a package of Rigby Instant Books she’d found among her Great Aunt’s books.
One of the great things about the Rigby Instant Book is that they are just the right dimensions to slip into your apron pocket. They cost 25-35c, and for the 21st century reader contain plenty of lost information, such as the Egg Crash Diet, from The Simple Art of Egg Cookery.
You can have as many eggs and as much black coffee as you like on this diet, a combination that I imagine would make you feel crazy a few days in, even with the occasional steak for variety.
Another favourite excerpt comes from 365 Home Hints ”the most valuable little book you will ever buy”. The back of the book has the half-peeled-off price tags, which shows that the book was 29c at Target. I like this page not so much for the overall concept but for the one really rather serious situation among the small domestic moments.
Mostly life in the 70s was washing one’s hair with eggs or icing one’s sunburnt skin, with the occasional bushfire threatening your home.
The Instant Books were published by Rigby Ltd, which operated from South Australia, with offices in London and New Zealand. The American equivalent of these books, Dell Purse Books, were the same size and shape.
This book, with invaluable advice about how to position your wiglet, comes with the usual list of other titles of Dell Purse Books you might enjoy. This list has some intriguing titles such as: Face Reading, How to Spell it Right, Test your Emotions, Self Hypnosis, and possibly my favourite What To Do When “There’s Nothing To Do”. With a collection of Rigby’s Instant Books, you would never have had nothing to do ever again. There are endless new topics to explore.
Stick Insect
Most of the time I move through life encountering the usual sorts of things: queues, washing up, email checking, walking to the bus stop. Sometimes moments of strangeness or difference appear. Whenever they do I get the feeling that this is the kind of thing that happens to me in particular, although this is surely not the case. But there are particular stories that those who know me identify as Vanessa stories. This is one of them.
I was on a train going over the Harbour Bridge. The train continued on to Wyong but I was only going to St Leonards. I was thankful for the crisp air conditioning, and could feel the blush of heat dissipating from my cheeks. Behind me a woman was conducting a phone conversation in which she was reporting on the health of a friend or family member. “She’d just had the gastric band so we only had to buy one serving and we shared it.” I looked forward to the time when the train would go into the tunnel after North Sydney station and her phone would drop out. There’s a black hole in reception at that point and every time I’ve caught the train through it, someone seems to not know this, and has their call drop out. This time I regarded it as punishment for inflicting tales of gastric banding on me.
As the train approached my stop I stood up and walked down the stairs to the train doors. On the side of the stairs I noticed a green and brown stick insect, clinging to the moulded white plastic of the stairway wall. I looked up at the people in the carriage I had just left, who were about to watch me pick up the insect and rescue it. I struggled with self consciousness, but the thought of the stick insect dying on the Wyong train, or worse, being squashed under the foot of a business-suited man, was too horrible.
I picked up the insect and put it on my hand. It was so light it was like picking up nothing. No one seemed to notice what I was doing, or didn’t care, which suited me. With the stick insect on my hand I got off the train at St Leonards. I considered putting it in the garden bed on the station, but that was only a small patch of fake-looking tough grass. While I paused, deciding what to do, the people who had alighted from the train cleared away and the station was momentarily quiet.
What would you do with a stick insect like this?
We went up the escalators, through the ticket gates, out past all the people rushing home from work. I held my hand in front of me to protect the insect, which was starting to explore up my arm with tiny pinprick footsteps. The creature was a perfect and complex arrangement of thin limbs, driven by instinct, a beautiful thing too delicate for these surroundings. I would walk until I found a suitable place. Although I had a large insect on my hand, few people seemed to notice. A family even asked me directions to the hospital without noticing my passenger. I wondered how far I could go before someone said something.
I slowed down so I was walking behind the family, and followed them as they turned into the path that leads to the hospital. There is a garden here, with trees and bird’s nest ferns. I tried to dislodge the insect onto one of these ferns, but it clung resolutely to my hand. It preferred the nest of dried leaves covering the ground. It wrapped its front legs around a stick, crawled off my hand and was immediately camouflaged within a patchwork of green and brown.
Update: As suggested by one of my readers, I asked Dave Britton at the Australian Museum what kind of stick insect I had found. Here is his reply:
It was a ringbarking vandal, commuting to the central coast!
Zines I Made in 2011
I thought a lot about making zines this year, and what it means to me to make them. Again I started off the year thinking I’d probably only do a couple of zines and that would be it, after all I have made an awful lot over the last 15 or so years. When I sat down to write the 2011 list I was surprised that I’d made seven, including two I am a Cameras.
I am a Camera 15 was about visiting Dunedin and looking for traces of the Flying Nun scene, which had its heyday in the 1980s. Dunedin is a university town and I was there in November, when many of the students had packed up their things from their rooms in the big, wooden houses, and gone back home. This gave the city a quiet, romantic feeling to it. It seemed like a place where it would be easy to fall in love. Simon and I explored its steep streets and I wrote the story of our adventures in this zine. I nervously gave a copy to Graeme Downes, the lead singer of the Verlaines, when they played a show at the Annandale Hotel earlier this year. I would have chickened out if it were not for my friend Eric’s persuasive stare from across the room. One of my Dunedin objectives was to find the house where the Death and the Maiden videoclip was filmed. I had thought it no longer there, but Graeme wrote to me and told me that it was, and gave me directions, should I ever find myself in Dunedin again.
I am a Camera 16 was the story of my trip to the Rabbit Island, Okunoshima, in Japan’s inland sea. When I took copies of this zine in to Sticky Elle said I am a Camera had become a travel zine. The last two issues have swung that way, yes, but I have a feeling that the next will be set in Sydney again. I am a Cameras #15 and #16 were stories of pilgrimage, or quests. As some of you may know I work at a university teaching writing. One of the units I taught this year was Travel Writing, and in the week on “pilgrimage” I asked my students what pilgrimages they had been on. There was one of those great tutorial silences. “Don’t you go on them,” I asked? “Do you?” one student asked back. “Yes, all the time,” I said, again realising that my reality is a different kind of reality.
Another one of my quests was detailed in the zine Kingdom by the Sea, which I made around the same time as I am a Camera 15. It is also set in New Zealand, and is about going to Oamaru and to writer Janet Frame’s childhood home. After I made this zine I discovered that not as many people know about Janet Frame as I thought they would. Others, however, knew plenty about her, one particular friend had even dressed up as her for a fancy dress party once. As well as being the childhood home of Janet Frame, Oamaru is the self declared Steampunk capital of the world. They were even steampunk children running around, though we missed seeing the annual penny farthing race by a week. We did travel on a very old train to a shed in which a creaky old man showed us a penguin nesting in a box, however.
If you are a member of the NSW writers’ centre you would have read about my travels to Janet Frame’s home town in Newswrite, the members magazine, one of my non-zine publications this year. I didn’t submit much to magazines or journals this year, which is probably not a good move if one cares to cultivate their niche in the world of literature. I think my role in the world of literature is a kind of bag lady, pacing the streets while the proper writers talk in cafes and flatter one another.
I made this tiny zine for the Zinata, or zine pinata at the Snapdragon Zine Fair, which was held at the Red Rattler in September. I organised it along with Emma and Tim from Take Care distro. My tiny zine was a sampler of my Biblioburbia blog, my major blog project from this year, in which I have been going to libraries around Sydney and writing about my experiences at them. This zine joined many others that people made and sent to us:
To go inside this dragon:
Which was then smashed open, an act which I am still slightly guilty about. Why did we have to make the dragon so cute? Snapdragon made me feel good about zines and the Sydney zine community, a feeling that had waned a little for me after the MCA zine fair. The MCA do a good job of organising a big, busy zine fair, and I know they take it seriously, but unfortunately there are a lot of stalls there selling objects I wouldn’t call zines. An example of this is the “zine” that was two A4 pages folded in half, made up of ads clipped from 1950s women’s magazines, which was then copyrighted by the person who put it together, and sold in a cellophane bag for $13. The stall was also selling panties. I know zines have evolved from when I started making them in the 1990s, and I am interested in their evolution, but this kind of thing makes my spirit wither.
I made two issues of Disposable Camera this year. The first was another one of those instances where I put an unpopular animal on the front and people get scared to pick it up. People like birds and bunnies. They don’t like alligators or moles. This summer (or this weekend – let’s face it, it won’t take long) Simon and I plan to make the ultimate zine cover with all of the images that people gravitate towards: typewriters, birds, bunnies, cats, an all you can eat of retro cute. Around the time I started making zines in the 1990s there was a zine called Ms.45. One issue had a cover which satirised all the things that people wrote about in their zines at the time:
I must boast that it only took me under a minute to find this zine. For those who don’t know me you are picturing that I have an outstandingly organised archive, for those who do, you are thinking how it’s a miracle. At the time this zine came out, almost every zine reprinted the McLibel information, my zines included.
The animal jury is still out on the puffer fish. This Disposable Camera is made up of a story about Melbourne and an A3 map which attempts to document details of the 25 or so times I’ve been to Melbourne. In the words of the Three Thousand reviewer, who seems ambivalent about this aspect of the zine: “Footscray is the place she only visited to get doughnuts, Carlton is the place her friend’s boyfriend shoplifted some ouzo by stuffing it down his pants, and Frankston is the place where she was photographed next to the grave of someone called Tom Cockhead”. Subjective though these details be, that’s how I know and remember these places.
The final zine I made this year is Band T-shirt, which is a memoir of the band t-shirts I used to wear as a teenager. I debuted a few of these stories at the launch of PAN magazine in September. People seemed to enjoy them so I set to work polishing them into zine form. I particularly enjoyed drawing each of the t-shirt designs, though my drawing sometimes leaves something to be desired. I was excited how you can listen to music when you draw. When I write I need quiet.
This photo was taken by either Belle Dipalo or Mitchell J Hokin, it's from the PAN Magazine Facebook page.
Here is me reading about my first love interest in Turramurra Franklins. The poor girl in her Mudhoney shirt back then would be pleased to know I turned out this way, I think.
If you’re interested in picking up copies of my zines, you can get them from my Etsy store, from stores such as Sticky, Red Eye Records York St, Sydney (band t-shirt zine), Urchin Books Marrickville, or Format Zine store in Adelaide, online at Take Care zine distro, Pushpin distro, UK (I am a Camera #16), Smells Like Zines (when I send them some more!) and possibly more places I have forgotten. You can always write to me too, about trading for your zine or organising some other method of exchange.
That forever address is: PO Box 1879 Strawberry Hills NSW 2012 Australia. Write to me and I’ll write you a letter from a library, or from the lawn, two places I am sure to be a lot this summer.
Thank you to everyone who I met through zines this year, who wrote to me, who swapped their zines with me, who made their own zine, who commented on this blog and showed an interest in my projects, and to my friends old and new.
In January I’m doing a few zine workshops, in Mosman and Blacktown, for those who are or can pretend to be under 18. I’ll see you at the Sticky Zine Fair in February, and in March Simon and I have an exhibition based on my Biblioburbia blog. All else remains a mystery.
1 Parramatta Rd
We found a mirror ball with half the mirrors fallen off and hung it from the balcony. From here I could see the backs of the rundown shops and the Annandale Hotel, the Parramatta Rd and Bridge Rd intersection, and the billboard on top of Strathfield Car Radios that I imagined held special messages for me.
Stare at something long enough and it will become fascinating, and it was so with the building across the alleyway. It’s not the kind of building that has ever had a name and was noticeable only due to its position on Parramatta Road and its dereliction. I called it the Shanty Building. When I moved into the house across from it there were still shops functioning in there. Every morning a man would stand on the top step and shave, looking into a mirror hung in the doorway. Through another window I could see the outlines of sports trophies on the windowsill.
Then one by one the businesses – the rug shop, Janet’s Planet gifts – closed down and the building started to decay. From day to day it looked no different but over time it became more dilapidated and overgrown. The only inhabitant of the building was the constantly drunk man who lived in a shack arrangement out the back. I had an affection for this neighbour of mine, although he could trap you with his long, incomprehensible rants. When he was more sober he’d patrol the neighbourhood, keeping order, at least in his own mind.
The Shanty building lay on the Annandale side of Johnson’s Creek, a boundary which was once the edge of the municipality of Petersham. In the 19th century, when stagecoaches made their long journey to Parramatta, there was a toll booth near here. Even without knowing the history the creek feels like a boundary. It is the low point between two rises and it is from here the street numbers start anew on Parramatta Rd, so the Shanty building is 1 Parramatta Road. Johnson’s Creek, like many of Sydney’s city waterways, has long been diverted into an underground concrete drain. I liked to imagine it at the end of the alleyway, flowing towards the harbour and taking with it all my bad dreams.
Of all the windows in my house the balcony window was the one I looked out the most often. The view was my connection to the outside world. I’d watch for rainbows and when one appeared I’d take photos I referred to as “motivational postcards”.
While I was living there plans for the development for the shanty building arrived in the post. The people from the house at the end of the lane wrote an eloquent protest letter about overcrowding and vermin, but I knew that some kind of development was inevitable. I just felt sad for the impending destruction of the building that had been my companion for so many years.
Moving out of my Annandale house felt like the end of a relationship. The rooms had been so cluttered when I lived there and when they were empty they looked naked. I painted all the walls white again to cover over the blu tack stains and bike wheel marks, a process that became my saying goodbye. On moving day all my furniture piled up in the alleyway waiting for the truck; it looked so pathetic and insubstantial, like someone else’s junk pile.
Over the next eight years I watched the shanty building become more and more run down and covered in posters and tags. The ‘For Sale’ signs affixed to the broken balcony looked neat and crisp until they too started to fade. I went from thinking the building was in its last moments to regarding it as a ruin, left to crumble.
Last week I was in a taxi travelling down Parramatta Rd and was shocked to see the building was gone. I felt surprise rather than sadness, and a reconfirmation of the fact that change, even if slow, is inevitable. It has been a long time since I looked out of my window to see it, part of another life. Ten years earlier the shanty building’s imminent demolition would have changed my world, but after I moved away it became a place from my past, part of the architecture of my memories. I realise now that the building ceased to be real for me long ago, and whenever I passed it I felt I was seeing a ghost.
The ghost will appear again; the development planned for “One Annandale” looks surprisingly familiar, as it incorporates the “heritage listed facade” with the familiar decorative urns along the top. I’d known well the pattern of these urns, I used to move my gaze across them, some were intact, some missing or damaged. I am sure the new building will have a reconstruction of the facade but I like to think it was dismantled brick-by-brick and is being stored somewhere, ready to be reassembled.
When I went to explore a few days later I took photos of the front and the back of 1 Parramatta Road, as I have done so many times before. The house where I used to live looks more ragged than ever, and exposed without the shanty building as its neighbour. The balcony where I once hung my mirror ball is gone, removed or fallen off, and the window where I looked out over the alleyway is obstructed by piles of egg cartons, so whoever is inside couldn’t see out of it even if they wanted to.
Closing the Circle
Summary: You can now buy my Band T-shirt zine at Red Eye records.
The Full Story: When I was a nervous teenager I had to build up a lot of courage to approach the counter in the music stores where I stocked my zines. Sometimes I’d browse the shop for half an hour or more, waiting for the right time, rehearsing my opening lines in my head.
It has been a long time since I stocked zines in a record store, but that is where a zine about band t-shirts belongs, so I took some along to Red Eye earlier this week.
Red Eye was probably the place I discovered zines, either there or Waterfront. It was the early 1990s and Red Eye was located in the Tank Stream Arcade, an dingy underground arcade on the corner of Pitt and King streets in the city which has now been replaced by an underground Coles supermarket. The store was adjacent to a food court with big 70s orange chairs, where punks would sit smoking and office workers would have lunch. The store moved to a few locations in the Tank Stream arcade before moving across the street and above ground to Pitt st. Recently the store has moved underground again to 143 York st, behind the Queen Victoria Building.
Descending the stairs I felt a sense of full-circleness, both about the zines and about the band t-shirts. I bought a fair few of the shirts I wrote about from Red Eye. Everything was coming together in this moment, I even felt a shadow of my old nervousness as I waited at the counter to drop off my zines. But my old shyness was a shadow that faded as soon as I started to speak.
“Do people still buy band t-shirts?” I asked the Red Eye guy. He told me they still sell lots of them. I had noticed on a previous visit that there was a whole section of band t-shirts at the back of the store.
“You look like your from my vintage,” he said, and told me how strange it was that people had been coming in to buy Mudhoney shirts the week before, after Mudhoney had played. He’d had a Mudhoney shirt in the 90s that he’d worn til it fell to pieces. (The story of my own Mudhoney shirt you can find a couple of posts earlier.)
I left the zines there on consignment, shook the hand of the Red Eye man and ascended to the busy streets above, with Christmas buskers and people charging along with retail madness in their eyes. It has been twenty years since I first went to Red Eye as a shy teenager and I felt a sense of connection to that time, like that girl from the past would be happy to know she would still be around so many years later, stepping out in a spotty dress, into the same and different city.
Sunday Night Listening
I was on a bus yesterday overhearing a conversation between school kids, who were bitching about one of their teachers. The teacher in question was out of touch with the progress of technology and had asked one of them if they knew what a radio was. Of course she knew what a radio was, she had replied, disgusted. While it was a silly question, I sympathised a little with the teacher. I’d done a lecture a little while ago in which I mentioned Choose your own Adventure books. The students, all of whom grew up in the 2000s, had no idea what one of these was and my explanation was enthusiastic but unconvincing (that is meant to be fun?).
If the schoolgirl is listening to the radio this Sunday night, she will hear the person sitting in front of her on the bus talking about her latest zine, Band T-Shirt, and playing some songs she’s dug out from her collection. Yes, that’s right, I’m a guest on Local Fidelity this Sunday night on Fbi Radio, from 7pm, which you can listen to as your driving around, or making dinner, or writing your Christmas cards. I’ll be telling some stories and might even give away a zine or two.
The Band T-Shirt Zine
I have been meaning to write a teenage memoir about my band shirts for some time, and by some time I mean at least five years. It would often be on my to do lists, along with the many other projects that I will not have lifetime enough to complete.
Once I started to write about a few of the shirts, I found it was quite fun. I started off with the Cure shirt I had at age 12, the first band shirt I owned. After the age of 17 I began to document my life in my zines, but details of the period up until that point were noted in a succession of diaries which were usually destroyed before they were filled up. Like many, I had a difficult time as a teenager, and the one thing that saved me from complete misery was music. I listened and obsessed, and even now can recall in detail trivia about the kinds of 90s alternative bands that are busy playing reunion shows. I usually don’t attend – I prefer not to indulge in shared nostalgia. At the time I mostly listened to such bands alone, and stepped out wearing my band t-shirts as a secret code to the few others who might understand.
So I have finally put together my band t-shirt memoir. It spans from the early 90s to early 2000s. Fourteen shirts, and plenty of awkward moments, such as those in the Mudhoney story, which I offer for you below, along with my reconstruction of the image on the shirt. I am not confident of my drawing ability, but it was important for me to draw each of the shirt designs, and have them shaky and in some cases incomplete. I wasn’t particularly interested in writing as a teenager, but I did spend a lot of time listening to the radio and drawing, so drawing each shirt was a way to return to that past self.
Of course it all looks better in the zine and not this awkwardly scanned digital ghost. The actual zine looks like this:
Here a copy rests upon my favourite goth shirt, my Alien Sex Fiend shirt, which was recently discovered in a suitcase of mouldy, tiny, black clothes, in storage. You can read its story, as well as the story of the Bauhaus shirt, the Ratcat shirt, the Ned’s Atomic Dustbin shirt and so on, in the zine. It’s 56 pages long, with illustrations of all shirts, lovingly put together although not gocco-ed or screenprinted or individually signed by my rabbit or whatever zinemakers have to do these days to satisfy preconceptions of what makes a zine handmade enough. I will post details of where to get a copy soon, for now there is Etsy and you can always write to me – there are plenty in a box just beside me here. Now I am off to listen to goth records. Farewell for now.
Autoluminescent
It’s Halloween night and Oxford St is a ghost town. Solitary men go through the trash piled up outside the expensive boutiques with contemporary art window displays. Three men, one wearing a joker hat, pound on the window of the ACP, bellowing obscenities at a man inside, then stumble further up the street, in search of new confrontations.
We escape the scary, deserted street and go into the Chauvel cinema. Sitting inside the dark theatre, I feel comforted by the dark, my old coat pulled around me.
*
I know a lot about the scene surrounding Nick Cave, especially in the Boys Next Door and Birthday Party eras. This information lay dormant within my memory for a long time. When I was a teenager I was sponge for all kinds of music information. I studied with great passion, following all the branches out from the core bands I loved, digging deeper, on an endless search for detail. One of these threads was the Birthday Party. The video for Nick the Stripper, which was often played on Rage at the time, made a particular impression upon me. While Nick cavorted in what seemed to be a nappy, singing to goats, skipping and stumbling, I would watch for glimpses of Rowland S. Howard. He strolled around with his guitar in jerky steps, cigarette hanging from his lip, as if all the crawling and cavorting around him was something quite normal, but something he was too regal to take part in. At the time I thought he was possibly the coolest man alive.
This is a sentiment that is often repeated about Rowland S. Howard, by his fans and by the many people close to him who were interviewed in Autoluminescent, the documentary about him directed by Richard Lowenstein and Lynn-Maree Milburn. That he was somehow otherworldly, with his boyish, somewhat startled, aristocratic look, his distinctive guitar playing, and his deep, articulate voice. I’d always listen for him in the backing vocals of Birthday Party songs, sliding down the word “Capers” for example. I can’t pick up a jar of capers without thinking of him singing it.
Years later I was friends with a group of people who were conducting their own Birthday Party, a fifteen years later, Sydney version of it anyway. We had a strong shared mythology about Nick Cave and his entourage, and would often inhabit their world: impressions of Mick Harvey (the straight man of the group – the one who seemed less drug addled than the others) were a particular obsession. At our house in Camperdown we’d listen to the first These Immortal Souls (Rowland S. Howard’s band after the Birthday Party split) album often, especially the song “Marry Me (Lie Lie)”. It rolled out of the small black speakers of the ugly black 3-in-one record player in the corner of the living room as we sat around smoking, or, if feeling particularly inspired/intoxicated, waltzing around the room to the seasick piano riff that runs through the song.
One day Vic, the most magnetic person in our group and thus, very much the centre of it, came home bursting with some distressing news: “I heard Rowland S. Howard is working in market research!” We were horrified, and tried to work out how we might save him. Of course, at the time, we were hard pressed to even save ourselves, though we did go see Rowland every time he played a show in Sydney.
Around the same time as Vic dropped this bombshell – which I must say was a rumour that was never substantiated – we might have turned on Rage to see a video of Nick Cave dueting “Henry Lee” with PJ Harvey, building his path towards national hero.
In Autoluminescent, the interviews with Genevieve McGuckin, Rowland S. Howard’s partner for decades, gave the most insight into his character. He was a sensitive person, easily hurt, very smart, a gentleman. This was no surprise – it was easy to surmise this, especially when you saw him live. The one time me and the others spoke to him after a show he was so polite and gentle, I could see why he had been the one to eventually return to Melbourne while Nick strutted his way around London.
Watching the documentary I felt the same sadness that I always had when I thought about the Rowland story, compounded now by his death in 2009, after his struggle with liver cancer. His life was difficult and for long periods he slipped below the surface, into the Melbourne suburbs and heroin addiction.
On screen though, as Simon and I watched, Rowland was again a cute, 16 year old punk. This was the year he wrote the song “Shivers”, which was later recorded by the Boys Next Door, and is the song most commonly associated with Rowland, if people know of him at all.
“Imagine writing a song when you were 16 and having it follow you around for your entire life,” I said as Simon and I walked home later.
“Yes, and to have it covered by the Screaming Jets,” Simon replied. I’d forgotten about this, or perhaps repressed it.
At one show at the Newtown RSL in the late 90s, I remember MC, my boyfriend, yelling out for “Shivers” and me elbowing him hard in the belly and glaring at him. “Don’t!” I hissed, feeling protective of RSH, for whom the song must have been something of a millstone. We had seen him perform it at the recording of the tv show Studio 22 – I only remembered we were there that night when I saw clips from it in Autoluminescent and the memory of being there was reawakened.
The Boys Next Door version of Shivers was recorded with Nick Cave singing, and has become an iconic song. In one of the Nick Cave interview segments of Autoluminescent, he talks about the song and how Rowland should have sung it instead. While he says this though, I noticed he rubbed at his face, as people often do when they lie.
I don’t think particularly badly of Nick Cave, by the way, though I take issue with the god-like status he has created which is upheld by the media. In this interview, though, he was quite subdued and respectful of his position as for once not being the centre of attention. Other interview subjects, particularly Henry Rollins, inspired a groan from us and the other people watching, “I can’t really imagine them hanging out,” I whispered to Simon. I can’t imagine Rowland and Henry hanging out too often. By far the worst celebrity interview, however, was Bobby Gillespie, who, in an attempt to show his appreciation of Rowland’s guitar playing, utters a most inappropriate and ridiculous proposition. I will not ruin it for those who have yet to see it.
Watching Autoluminescent was to rekindle all the facets of my earlier knowledge and fandom. The faces on the screen were familiar but aged, people in their 50s who I was more used to thinking eternally 20 years old. It made me think of how time passes for everyone. In 2030 might make a ten second appearance in the documentary of someone I knew when I was young, and hopefully not in a Bobby Gillespie kind of capacity. I hadn’t thought much about Bobby Gillespie for a long time, since the 1990s. Yet he has been living his life the whole time, as has Henry Rollins and Lydia Lunch and all the rest. People don’t just disappear when the light of fame and fashion, or of my personal interest, slips off them.
In the last few years of his life, there was an upsurge of interest in Rowland’s music, and he worked hard to put together his album “Pop Crimes” despite his illness. Ever the optimist, Simon argued with me that this was a great thing, in response to my sadness that recognition came so late. “Think how much he did in his life!” Simon said – and he is right, of course, but it didn’t take away my feeling of sorrow. In my own way I know how hard it is to live as a creative person, in a world where being a self promoting bully is the best way to guarantee success.
“It was different in the 80s,” I said to S as we walked home, past the dark apartment buildings and then the bright and odorous KFC. “You could hang around on the dole and write songs and take drugs.” I could still feel the shadow of this world at the end of the 90s. People older than me harked back to those days, or they clung onto the tiniest wisps of it.
“But it was gone,” S said.
“Does authenticity even matter? People still try and live that life now, and they’re not worried about the fact they missed it by 30 years,” I said. I felt very 90s saying “authenticity”. It is hard to know whether authenticity even still exists in a world where so much of life is archived online.
Yet I think that, ridiculous as the concept might now be, this idea of authenticity is what draws people to Rowland S. Howard. Nick Cave described him as a teenager already fully formed with his look, ideas, and identity, which never seemed like affectations. Whatever he did musically came from his heart but never seemed overly earnest, just real.
I don’t want to be a cynic and make a big point of how people are drawn towards the more obscure figures in culture although I think this mainstream/alternative binary that has been around since the 90s persists more than ever. Mainstream here equals “popular” (in its most judgemental bourgeois sense), whereas alternative is “real”, clever and progressive. I don’t believe in this as utter idiots can drone on about their love of the most obscure music and be total conservatives with no interest in anything beyond proving their superior taste. They might as well be bragging about their new 4 wheel drives.
The danger in this thinking is that it prefers artists to suffer, the more adversities the better, rather than enjoy success. A story of struggle also fits in with stereotypes of the tortured artist, a myth which helps no one. Along with this comes the idea of artistic purity, that people can be born with a gift, a powerful genius which is the source of much pleasure and pain. This drives them forward, and sometimes drives them mad.
All these big ideas are touched on in Autoluminescent, although you don’t have to engage with them. While it can never break free of the sometimes Spinal Tap-ness of all rock documentaries, it is a remarkably open-ended film, which comes to no conclusions and has many elements you can either ponder or ignore. It is a film about an distinctive person and his legacy, as well as being about fame, and music, and life as an artist. Since I saw it last week the film has stuck with me like a ghost.
Before Simon and I had left home to go to the cinema earlier that evening we’d listened to Brian Wilson singing “You are my Sunshine” from the Smile Sessions. So we were surprised that at the end of the film, just before the “Rowland S. Howard 1959 – 2009″ epitaph, there was a moment when Rowland was enthusing about the sadness of this very song. S and I froze and looked at each other, spooked. Happy Halloween.
Home and Halloween
I am temporarily back home from the north for the most romantic night of the year, Halloween. I arrived home to find the cookie jar had got into the spirit of things, and even the rabbit had his own Halloween totem. Soon I will wrap my cloak about me and take to the streets.
