Wishful Thinking

So, I’m still doing some unravelling here and there.


There was one time I spent most of my work time learning about Music because one time I was working in music areas meant to create paid work.


It didn’t, apart from a shortish stint in Radio. Things went bad. Very bad, and for a long time, I couldn’t listen to Music and I couldn’t be bothered until a friend began to play Mandolin and Guitar and sing locally, and gradually I got interested again.


Music isn’t just sounds, It’s stories and sagas and egos and mind games and sheer bloody minded madnesses as The Worlds grow longer.


I don’t get to hear much live music these days, it’s not a part of my work scene any more.


Instead I’ve got my CD’s (what’s left of them) and some DVD’s (ditto) and a gecko blaster and the computer and so on.


Additionally, if I spot a book about some musical icon or other, I buy it or borrow it if I can and all that has become fascinating again since I picked up the novel I began to write in 1994. Friend Mike brings me books too and with Booksellers newly moved in next door, some pieces of my old interests have revivified.


Who is gonna survive the long term? In what ways is a Muso part of one time or all time? It’s always a surprise to look back and see. I remember when all the rumours said that Bob Dylan had broken his neck in a full on Motor Bike Crash and we said Goodbye Bob and many caught up with all those amazing albums they’d never never listened to before and we cried as we said Goodbye Bob.


And just as Bob re-appeared to dwell there among the Culture Heroes of Forever, along comes John Wesley Harding and The Band and all the rest of it.


Just lately I read that The Big Motor Bike Accident wasn’t exactly a smasheroo, but that somehow the bike just slipped on the wet grass in someone’s back yard…


Before Bob took that rest way back in Those Days after it had been said that it wasn’t that he was burning the candle at both ends so much as applying a blowtorch to the middle. Was that Shelton? I can’t remember.


Bob did pretty well out of the rest he deserved back then and not only is he still about, I’m still catching up on things I missed out on one way or another. A lot of work, a lot of new equilibrations.


Yesterday I noticed that the DVD Shop around the corner from my Counseller’s Office had a pretty large selection of DVD's and after my session yesterday which was exhilarating and exhausting, I stopped in at the Shop and asked if they had Masked And Anonymous which I’d heard of after John M loaned me the CD.


The CD is stunning and on the DVD (with every single actor relishing their part in a sort of comic book saga), Bob Dylan, playing Jack Fate, is sprung from jail as the only star who’ll front The Benefit, and he genuinely looks like he’s been stuck in jail for decades as he comes up from out of The Grimy Under World.


And there is an Under World where all the Stars disappear to until they are rediscovered or whatever.


The two Stars of way Back When who were held the Least Likely To Survive were Lou Reed and Keith Richards.


I read a lot about The Stones in Mariane Faithfull’s Book. (She might have been on the Least Likely List herself, except that I think that People thought that as a Girlfriend, she was but a flash in the pan.)


(She said she loved Keith best all along but things were complex and that Bob was ready to love her twice but she was otherwise preoccupied.)


Then as it was with Lou Reed ‘punk’s godfather’ the Punk Tide was just right for Marianne. Wasn’t Broken English a great album and then all the rest of it?


I’ve almost finished Lou’s Biography.


He performed Berlin at the Sydney Festival earlier this year and that’s one thing I wanted to see and hear very much.


So, concerning the Bio, as I’m drawing toward the bit where Lou ends up with Laurie Anderson, I check Lou’s website and the speakers are up from having watched Masked and Anonymous last night and there’s this crash of electric guitar and all these New York scenes and maybe some from Freeport, Long Island and it’s just the best site and I heard bits of Berlin and I heard and saw some of the old stuff from when Endersbee took me to see Lou at Festival Theatre Adelaide and Wow.

Thanx Enders!


Apparently, Lou didn’t like Dylan much at first but then Bob turned up at one of Lou's concerts and sat up front next to Sonia, Lou’s wife at the time and there was one moment when Bob said, ‘Man, I wish I’d written that song’ and after that Lou loved Bob Dylan lots.


Which leads me to a small quibble with Victor Bokris' book, which is that the index isn’t all that comprehensive.


It’s fascinating to be thinking of Music and compiling Music Stories again.


I woke from one dream recently wherein I'd finally got paid for work I'd done and got a few rights I'd missed out on and the strange thing was that there was another dream I remembered from sleep during the past week.

I think that if there are two or three dreams within reach of memory when I awake, then because I don't write them out straight away, I don't always remember all of them.....


The dream I remembered from a few days previous was that I flew to New York City and it was a great journey. It went really really well and there were several ther places I visited and time to do some sight seeing as well as catching up with some concerts.


In the dream, this all happened because my book worked out and I had to do the book signing and interview thing.


I'm glad my sub conscious reminded me of that dream, because even if it's a Wishful Thinking Dream, it's a good one.

at 4:56 PM 0 comments

Saving Graces

Huge house, smaller life, but hey, I'm still recovering from quite a few Times of Trauma.

I have so much to sort after times of cognitive dissonances when my own true story was stolen. I thought I did pretty well to put together a memoir dealing with What Really Happened (from an Autistic point of view, somewhat) and now the old computer isn't working.

I never was a very patient person. At least if I'm learning patience now, I have more space with which to work some new solutions.

The Sixties was a time of many changes. Me, by the time I'd got to University I'd missed out on my classical schooling because my family situation had already seriously broken down.

In the old home life, there were saving graces indeed. There was an abundance of books and magazines in our home for example. (Mind you such a phenomenon may offer a slightly skewed perspective in a family who doesn't communicate.)

My own book world was built out of ideals. With a Father who'd gambled away my Private School Fees and a Mother stressed beyond measure, I took to Religion and Bible Studies. Crazy, crazy stuff really.

We still say we're a Christian country in Australia. What does that mean?

Well, for myself, while trying to maintain Spiritual ideals and ideologies, I worked at as many jobs as I could, and my Muma, a well paid teacher also took on jobs and then eventually I was the one to do the cooking and housework and so on, and none of it got us ANYWHERE!!!!

I considered the Lilies Of The Field and envied them. I would willingly have been Mary as a relief from being Martha, but hey.

'The Rich Man and The Kingdom Of Heaven', did that have something to do with the money disappearing faster than it was earned? O Dear.

Now it seems to me, we live in a time when Money is Everything and Nothing Again!

With Asperger's Syndrome, with my own peculiarities of interpretation, I truly believed it to be better to be honourable in one's doings and to serve creativity and understanding than to principally pour oneself after wealth. I believed that if the creativity was attuned, then wealth would be automatic.

Admittedly it was a mistake to marry a Liar in the midst of the Breakdown in my early twenties and it was also a mistake in terms of the dissonances which had caught up with me and manifested themselves by the time the Seventies arrived.

That particular breakdown which caused me to drop out of University was at least diagnosed.

Trouble was that Old Time Asperger's Trap:

'DO YOU HEAR VOICES?'

That's what the shrink said, and I said , 'Well, yes, (I hear your question, for example.)'

Oh yes, there had been a little bit of Acid, not much, (I was underweight & fashion only allowed a small amount of some things). Not much is probably still too much in the light of some downtime dreamtimes.

Marianne Faithfull describes the amazing insights into archetypes which can be gained by such experiences, but the problem with Archetypes is that if they've already been disrupted in one's world, the visions of the same can easily fool one.

If all that wasn't enough, there was also the Sexual, soon to become the Sexist Revolution, not to mention the Vietnam War which I'd originally believed in until I read the History of that business!

For a child who decided to be conservative in order to cope, all that stuff was indeed a breeding ground for serious Cognitive Dissonance (as if the original family crap hadn't been bad enough!)

So it's interesting to read Memoirs of Those Times. Marianne Faithfull, Wow!

Today, I'm pretty much through the latest fluey illness, still overdoing it sometimes. I'm preparing for the Dentist tomorrow etc, and today I've been pretty much absorbed in Lou Reed's Biography.

I heed the fact that Victor Bokris' bio of Andy Warhol was in some ways negated by Andy's Diaries, but the Lou Reed Book is interesting indeed.

I couldn't have guessed that Lou had had serious Electric Shock Therapy as a youngster.

(One friend of mine, John M had that treatment lately. He said he stopped when he realised that he'd become addicted to the preparatory drugs.)

My Dad had ECT too, way back in the mid sixties, soon after Lou Reed went through it, and it was strong and heavy back then.

I think my Dad had Asperger's. Did they ask HIM about Voices perchance?

Well, when they put my Dad in The Bin, he later said to me that he dreamed they cut his brain into four pieces and put them all back the wrong way round. I understand that possibly questions, drugs and treatments are a lot more gentle these days. I understand that if, for example, a person is gay, they wouldn't be likely to have to endure a lobotomy as Alan Ginsberg did way back when in the forties!

All the same, I got very scared of psychiatry after what happened to my Dad and after my own enormous and stupefying dose of Largactyl.

Believing that some things may be saner in these times, a couple of years ago, I decided to see a Shrink because I'd been through Domestic Violence and a particularly nasty violating legal disaster which mucked up all my prospects at the time... (I agree I may have colluded with some problems, but if you are losing your temper on account of Bad Dentistry, that's something else, even, possibly, mitigating circumstances!)

Anyway, I went to The Shrink and I said, "I have Asperger's Syndrome."

She said, "There's No Such Thing"

Please remind me, which Century are we in?