my new old piano

This is my new old piano. I am worse at it now than I ever was. I played some Eastenders and The Incredible Hulk theme song tonight. And a little bit of Tiffany. It sounded bad but felt quite good.

It’s unlikely I’ll report much here right now. Listening to Enigma and the weather with the doors open. It’s all very atmospheric. Picture diaphanous curtains flapping, a lot of lamplight and some whispering in sham Latin/pre-coital French and you get the picture. Finishing my glass of wine before bed on a Monday night. This evening’s to-do list never got done.

This all goes out to LP and Mr America. I’ve been promising them photos from afar for ages.

New old things are awesome. I guess it’s all about the making new. Maybe Enigma is starting to addle my brain.

 

total control (or Banrock Station & 50-bags)

42 minutes of the weekend remaining. I have been having what I like to call a winter holiday at home. This involves behaving like you don’t live where you live, wandering vaguely through usually familiar places, spending more, ordering cocktails in bars where you’d usually go for your usual and then proceeding to do the crossword, nonchalantly, like you’re from out of town, surrounded by shopping bags. It involves a sort of wilful amnesia. And sleep. And dumb movies. And face masks.

We have been having quite a grand old time. I’m starting to feel wanton and kind of weightless. Limber as an astronaut, even. I can feel my sense of humour coming back to me. I am radiant with calm. Tomorrow is Monday, though.

I was going to call this post Banrock Station and 50-bags (well, as it turned out, I sort of did). As an in-joke between me and a small handful of others possibly reading this. What I was going to say — and will say, what the heck — with reference to the John Pule piece above, is that once upon a time I nearly bought a work from this particular series. I remembered that this weekend when we went to see his show at City Gallery. And I tried to remember why I didn’t buy it. And what else I might have spent my money on (and I seemed to have more of it — money, I mean — back then than I do now, which is very strange…).  And all I could think of was Banrock Station and 50-bags. Probably not completely inaccurate. Although this is dated 2001, which is slightly later than my Banrock-Station-and-50-bag heyday (or some would say low point), so it’s a little anachronistic. But let’s not spoil a good story.

Anyway. Corker of a weekend. Corker. Although I’m now 56 minutes into the new week.

I was just listening to this and thinking what an ace song it is.

(Actually it might be better to listen without the video. I kept getting concerned she was going to burn her fingers off.)

And one day I am going to get this poster below. If it even still exists. Thank god for eBay. I’m going to check it out right now.

I buy things off the internet in the dead of night (& don’t know what the hell they are)

Last night I said I would call this post I buy things off the internet in the dead of night etc, and so I did.

This is our official Damien Hirst internet purchase. It’s a photo of a bunch of unravelled TDK SA 60 cassette tape.

A friend came over for dinner the other night and said:

“Is that a real Damien Hirst?”

To which I said:

“Yes. Why yes it is.”

Never did I think I’d say that. Seemed like quite a strange exchange. I liked it, though. Considering I can’t really afford a million trillion + Euro bejewelled skull or a shark in a giant vat of formaldehyde. I think that’s probably part of the reason I purchased this online (in the dead of night, as the title so cleverly points out). And also because we collect this kind of abstractly music-related paraphernalia for the music room we don’t yet have. But I can see it already, this room, and I know exactly how it is going to look. (Kind of like I pre-order food in my head ages in advance of going to an old favourite restaurant where I’ve memorised the menu.)

The photo is called (and I quote):

“The scariest form of eroticism of a human memory chasing its own dismay.”

The thing that troubles me is that I don’t know what it means. I have tried hard to coax the meaning from it, but nothing. Just a big jumbled clump of tumbleweediness.

Do you know what the meaning is? I’d like to know. Really I would.

The words sound nice all put together, and the tangle of tape is suitably dark and shiny. Maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe that’s all there is. Or else I’m missing something. Am I? Missing something?

animals in our art collection

A while back I noticed something. A lot of our art somehow involves animals (also a lot of typos, but let’s not confuse the issue). It was never deliberate. I never once thought oh, it might be cool to start an animal art collection. It turns out I have been turning into the crazy cat lady without even noticing.

The mother of my best friend in primary school had a big-time rabbit art collection. Ceramics and all kinds of stuff. You’d wake up in the night, all of seven years old and there would be rabbits everywhere. I suppose they do breed, rabbits. They were classy rabbits, too, antiques and shit from all over the world.

Our house is too small for a dog (or so I’m told, although I’m sure I could fit one in), so maybe subliminally that’s where some of this stems from, but I don’t really think so. We have two real cats, Sylvie and Bax. Mogwai (see below) never saw his third birthday. That cat was crazy, and left the biggest grieving hole in my heart I’ve ever had, as stupid as that might sound.

This is one of Matt Couper’s dogs, c. 1999 or so (Matt, you can post a comment here if you want to set me straight). He is the first thing I see as I descend the stairs in the morning. We got the gramophone and dog above as as sort of a tribute to Matt’s dog.

And this is what we have come to call Ohakune Dog, by Leigh Mitchell-Anyon.

Sorry about the shit photo with the bookshelves and me in the background. Just squint your eyes and pretend we’re not there.

And some dogs in the Joycam polaroids here. Fritz and Pavlova (below left).

And here is Pavlova again (above right), a photo I keep of her beside the bed, along with a photo of Simon when he was younger and looked like a lion.

Pavlova was our family dog. She died at the age of 15 or so, the day that Turin Brakes came to town, c. 2003 (I know this because I remember crying at the gig, and the mirrorball sparkling wetly above me). She was one hell of a girl. She used to like to sleep in the middle of the road and make cars drive around her.

And to your right is Black Cat, by Mark Rayner.

Scroll down a bit and you’ll meet Mogwai, mentioned above. Photo by Jo Russ. I can see him from my bed, and some nights I still remember to say goodnight to him. Sometimes I point him out to Sylvie and Bax and say say hello to Uncle Mogwai. I know he is not really their uncle, but it saves me explaining the full story.

And it’s not just dogs and cats. These are Emma McCleary’s wallpaper birds (below right). Emma and I used to live together, once upon a time.

And here is a platypus-type creature (below left) with an otter in the background. I have forgotten who did this, and have buried the paperwork. I bought it online from a gallery in Auckland a couple of years ago when I was going through a bout of insomnia. I woke up in the morning and remembered I had bought it.

And this is a cartoon we pulled out of a New Yorker calendar. It still cracks me up every time I see it. In case you can’t read the writing it says: I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.

I think this might be one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

And that ought to do it. There is also a sort of faux leather-clad papier mache camel we inherited, but my camera died before I could get the photo of it. I took it as a sign.

Mostly we try and hide the camel round at our neighbour’s house for ‘safekeeping,’ but he keeps finding his way back to us.

the spoon board

This is my spoon board. The favourite of all my Christmas presents.

Ruth, my grandmother in law, 87, of Hastings, gave it to me. She has a whole wall of spoon boards, which I have admired – almost coveted – on a number of occasions.

Now I will have to collect spoons from all the places I visit. Simon is going to try and find me a Hawkes Bay spoon, to commemorate this holiday.

I think I have some leadership and fellowship spoons from school in the cutlery drawer back in Wellington, and they’ll definitely go straight to the spoon board. They’re a bit huckery from years of cups of tea. But I do have some very good silver polish – the foaming kind.

I’m not sure quite where the spoon board will live. I think it may go in our drawing room/library (that’s what I have taken to calling it, as of now, although it’s really just a sitting room – no TV though! – towering with badly arranged books).

Now all I need is a beach house, in which to house my spoons.

collecting stickers

This is just a selection of them. This was practically the best thing about the weekend just been. Finding Simon’s childhood sticker collection. That, and hanging out in a swimming pool. And Popcorn Chicken in Paraparaumu (technically outside Wellington, so I wasn’t breaking my no KFC in Wellington rule).

My childhood sticker collection has long since gone the way of gone things. Mine were delicate and shiny or furry and came on small sheets of paper. For a while there were scratch ‘n sniff. Mine were cute. Ducklings and bears. There were also scented rubber collections, pressed flower collections, stamp collections. For a while I think I also collected mini soft drink cans, the sort you used to get on planes on long-haul flights. I kept them in a special wooden display case, mounted to the wall.

Growing up I was a collector type, I guess (and by that I don’t mean butterflies, or a predilection for confined underground dwellings). I was a little bit haphazard or – shall we say – laissez faire with the whole thing. Fads came and went. Stickers and rubbers got swapped. Things got lost and demolished. I forgot about them. I grew up and then only suffered occasional pangs of nostalgia for things I fleetingly remembered and then forgot again.

Being the first of four voracious, hard-wearing children, not many kiddy trinkets survived to see my adult years. If they did, they were usually re-gifted, in whatever shabby state, or farmed out to clear garage space for golf shoes, defunct mobile phone accessories, old-model TV remotes, empty wine bottles and old framed school photos. Some of the hard-backed books escaped a Salvation Army fate. The dolls’ house did (but is in dire need of a 21st century interior re-fit). Franny Lanny the Cabbage Patch Kid did. Even if she is now scalped (someone cut off her yellow wool hair for finger-knitting) and one-armed, and vivid-stained, and smeared in glitter (god knows how the glitter happened).

Simon, on the other hand, has pristine evidence of his childhood pastimes. Toys still in their original boxes (eBay here I come). Complete collections of undefiled Golden Books, their spines still entirely functional. Boxes full of stickers. Stickers!

We had talked about our sticker collections, and collections in general, at length, but my eyes had never actually beheld the wonder that was (is) Simon’s sticker collection. Until this weekend. Ah, the elation! The immense affirmation I felt, knowing I have well and truly found my soulmate! Who else would collect the stickers that were never supposed to be collected? The blank tape stickers out of VHS boxes. The retail sale! stickers that really haven’t changed so much since the 80s. Plain red dots. Kiwis and sheep. Bumper stickers (including one that said: if you smoke after sex you’re doing it too fast, apparently won at the A&P fair, but Simon’s grandmother snaffled that one up, claiming she was going to stick it on her bedhead). Alf. Garfield. The usual suspects.

Now we collect other stuff. Books and wall adornments and music. And jugs. And cats’ eyes. Maybe not because we’re deliberately collecting, but more like hoarding in a very small house, because we can’t help it. It’s harmless, even if things sometimes fall out of the cupboards.