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.

 

the den

Tonight we’re hanging out in the den listening to records, doing stuff on our laptops. The rug went down this evening and now it feels even more den-like. (The rug really ties the room together, as The Dude would say.)

The den is far far away from anywhere. I even forget it’s part of the house. I have big plans for this room. The blind needs to be made this side of Christmas. Plus it’s being painted un-red, and the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are going in around the doorframe, which obviously you can’t see in this photo. And then the wall behind Simon is being wallpapered. Fancy having a feature wall! I promise it’s not naff. At least, I don’t think it is.

And that’s about it. In this room, that is. Oh and there’s one more lamp to come. And different art. But I’ll sort that once we’ve replaced the glass in the frames that smashed in the move. Oh and I also need to get the hurricane lamp glass re-blown. That’ll go in the den, too, eventually.

I’m trying to learn not to want to do everything all at once. I can’t help it though. On Sunday afternoon I drove around town in gridlock, late for an afternoon tea date, trying to find small plastic rings to fit inside the plastic Italian lampshades I bought so I can suspend them from the ceiling properly. No dice, though, and today I bought some, but they’re the wrong ones. Something tells me my mind won’t properly rest until those lampshades are in place. And then, when they are, there will be the peas to re-pot and the tomatoes to re-stake. And fabric to choose. And GOD what a boring story. Sorry about that.

Now we are listening to TAPES. Far out. The vocals sound seriously adenoidal. It’s all warpy, like scuba-diving in sound. It’s making me feel a bit hayfeverish.

My grandparents always had dens. They still do, but now their dwellings are sort of one big den. We all used to gather in there, all the aunts and uncles and the grandchildren. Eating club sandwiches and specially-prepared croquettes, sometimes whitebait fritters. Listening to the family stories inside a hot, perfumy fug of smoke. The accumulated damp of all that excited breath lining the insides of the windows. And you’d lose all sense of time. I could never work out if the grandfather clock chimed on the hour or every ten minutes or so. Either the hours went super fast or the minutes went really slow. Everything was a bit monumental. There’s no way of explaining it, really. Or maybe there is, but still I can’t.

And when we were old enough to drink — by god were those pours stiff. In university days when I’d have den time with Didy and we’d smoke cigarettes and talk about writing I’d eventually return to the daylight outside blinking with heavy lids, drunk on gin diluted with the merest dash of poorly carbonated tonic. She always insisted on paying for the taxis, too. I don’t know if she thought she was sending me all the way to Ashburton in a cab or if the regular fistful of money was just her way of saying off you go and be young — go and buy a dress and don’t think too much about things. Actually I do know.

And now I have my own den, so-called in my grandparents’ honour. It makes me think of them. It feels grown-up and grotto-like. Something happens to conversation in here. It’s hard to remember the concerns of the day or the mess beyond the threshold. Hours go by. Cups of tea are had. And now I have no idea what I am supposed to be doing right now, after this. I suppose it doesn’t really matter; I suppose it can’t matter. Maybe I’ll just do this some more. Sit here in a semi-daydream with tape music filling my head like warm water all tight and soupy against my eardrums.

thirteen images from the dark land

Today it felt like winter. I haven’t felt much like writing. I think about Frankie every morning. I think about what to wear and whether to bother with makeup. I think about not much. I get downstairs, unmade up but presentable enough. Sylvie is usually sleeping on the newspaper on the kitchen table, curled up like a tiny woodland creature.

I consult my phone to work out my appointments for the day. A clear-ish schedule bodes well lately. It’s the season for tucking my feet under my desk. Big meetings make me a bit wide-eyed at the moment. They make me feel like maybe I should have bothered with makeup (if only I’d consulted my phone for my daily schedule before making the sometimes arbitrary call on facepaint).

In the weekend we biffed my broken 12 year-old filing cabinet. It had been sitting in our garden shed since forever, its runners buckled and awry, all the drop-files behaving badly, like malfunctioning coathangers or tipsy partygoers, impersonating vertical.

I rescued a lot of notes. I don’t even mean halfway practical lecture notes or cutesy school exercise books. I mean mind-boggling stuff like this.

I mean notes as old as – or older than – the filing cabinet itself. Maybe they should have been given up over the edge of the mucky Happy Valley precipice along with the warped beige husk of my old office storage system. There’s got to be some sort of catharsis in that, surely. (Like burning love letters in a metal drum at dusk once it’s become clear that the paper has outlived — for one person, at least — the very emotion that once upon a time brought the paper to life).

But they wouldn’t make such a satisfying metallic smacking sound as they hit rock bottom. They’d probably waft away halfheartedly on a putrid breeze. They’d snag themselves limply on the wire fence barricades, ensnared along with all the city’s forgotten grocery bags, just as pitifully diaphanous and flappy.

So, no, I didn’t sacrifice my bundle of notes to a new life of decomposition, unlikely bedfellows of whiteware and disposable nappies and hopelessly three-dimensional television sets. Instead I sat cross-legged in bed in the very early hours of the morning some days ago and attempted to type them out. It wasn’t that I wanted to preserve them. I just wanted to maybe get a handle on what the fuck they might have meant. To cut a long story short, I didn’t work out what the fuck they meant. I actually called it quits about halfway through the task (because I wanted to preserve myself).

But I did find some interesting stuff. Like this. Not some Rorschach experiment but my first forays down the Girl Cat path.

And some oblique things that may or may not have been intended as poems, like this:

  

dumb

you say words are over as soon
as we say them
& when we write them
the words are dead
before we even begin

you say
look at the pause
at the end of the line
it is the end of the line
you say
look at the way the dark print
swims
in spaces
all around it there are spaces
that it cannot fill

we spill over
into the drumless beat
of sleep
& silence

I keep a box of words
under my pillow    you
keep a burr of quiet
on the tip of my tongue

you say
a page is
a cage that catches
nothing but itself
in its own hook
of letters

you say
this room
is hollow but
for our bodies
which will soon
be in some other room

& that none of the rooms
will remember us

but i only know this language

it is a driftnet
catching fireflies
sometimes

it is an umbrella of
echoes & reflections

it stands between
me &
the sky

you have made
it into an origami heart
you have made
the surgery 2dimensional
& painless

& now we do not feel
anything we say
to each other we
don’t say
anything we feel
to each other

we live in the same city     one day

we will live in different cities
& the cities will not remember us

I imagine one day
we will live in different languages
rendered dumb
with this

whatever this is
so unsummupable, so enduringly papery
 

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.

yes, I am a brick

I stumbled across this brick in Havelock North a week or so ago. It was sitting atop a brochure stand (saying free please take one) outside a shop. I was on my way to get a spray tan in order to wear a dress with an inordinately plunging neckline, hoping with and against hope (which is correct, technically?… If you hope against hope surely it’s like walking under a ladder or sticking a pin in a voodoo doll which turns out to be perfectly modelled in your own image…?) not to look like a flaking zebra at the wedding.

(It turned out I looked more like a mildly bronzed beast at the watering hole/communal trough, which was good enough for me.)

This brick tickled my fancy. I didn’t take the brick with me or anything. I just took the photo. Nothing like a red-bricked piece of kiwi ingenuity in action.

The letterbox gorilla  – promised in an earlier post – has long captured our imaginations (or at least piqued or curiosities) on our frequent jaunts from one side of Hawkes Bay to the other. Why has he got a scythe? Come to think of it, I guess he is flanked by fields. That probably explains it. I hadn’t really considered it until now. Also, I hadn’t noticed how cross-eyed the letterbox gorilla is until now. I suppose you don’t notice that kind of thing from a passing car.

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.

angel mouse meets santa mouse

(And they both live happily ever after.)

Tonight Angel Mouse met Santa Mouse. Santa Mouse winged his way to us in a FastPost bag, quite unexpected; Angel Mouse was waiting patiently on the tree. Perhaps she knew all along.

Sometimes you just know these things, even if you don’t know you know them.

Sometimes the nicest surprises come in small parcels.

Sometimes the nicest things are the ones that come out of left field, or from the dark regions of a blindspot.

It is nice to have a companion. Angel Mouse and Santa Mouse were meant to be together.

Angel Mouse has always been my favourite. It’s a pleasure to rediscover her every December. I’m pleased she now has a buddy. They look good together.

I will package them up close together, side by side, when this season is over. For their hibernation. And then they will emerge again, closer than ever.

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.

by the side of my bed

It is a source of some marital angst, the amount of shit I keep by my bed.

This is an inventory of everything on my bedside table/on top of my bedside bookshelf. Plus there is a laundry hamper, a freestanding photo thing (see below) and some photos on the wall – I’m not counting them as part of the clutter.

NB this is on a Sunday after a sizeable Saturday, so the disarray is pretty impressive. Maybe some time soon I will list everything on my makeup table – that is far more scary.

So, by the side of my bed…

Lamp (see below). Alarm clock. Cell phone. Home phone.

2 x hair ties. 2 x pens (1 x Hyatt Regency Coolum, 1 x Intergen).

2 x bracelets (1 x shiny costume jewellery, 1 x fake jet beads purchased for $3 in Bling sale).

1 x pink highlighter. 1 x packet of pencil leads.

3 x necklaces. 1 x jewellery box. 1 x jewellery pouch. 1 x blue sparkly earrings.

1 x pill box, containing a variety of pills (that’s another post in itself). 

1 x moisturiser. 1 x memory stick. 1 x measuring tape (??).

1 x hair straightening CD.

1 x notebook.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now; Lorrie Moore The Collected Stories; Ali Smith The First Person and Other Stories; Alain de Botton The Architecture of Happiness; Paul Auster Ground Work; Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own; House and Philosophy; Carol Ann Duffy Rapture; Kate Camp Realia; Haruki Murakami After Dark; David Sedaris Barrel Fever; Eleanor Catton The Rehearsal; Janet Charman Rapunzel, Rapunzel; Charlotte Grimshaw Singularity, Opportunity; Owen Marshall Living as a Moon; Lisa Appignanesi Mad, Bad and Sad; Miranda July no one belongs here more than you; Margaret Atwood Mornings in the Burned House; Jenny Bornholdt The Rocky Shore; JG Ballard Miracles of Life; Isabel Allende My Invented Country; Chris Price The Blind Singer; Our Own Kind – 100 NZ Poems about Animals; The Six Pack Three; Chuck Klosterman Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.

And then there’s everything in the little bookshelf, of which I have read approximately 35%. I may some day get around to reading the other 65%, or more likely the books on top of the bookshelf will keep turning from disordered stacks into precariously-balanced towers, and I won’t get around to it.

don’t be nervous because that’s perverse

This is another Thing I Like. It’s a sort of photo montage stuck on a piece of plasticky linoey stuff, made up of art-room offcuts, given to me by Aimee, a girl I went to school with. We were at boarding school together. She gave me this in 1995.

On the back of it she has written:

To Katy

Congratulations for youre achievement.

Love from Aimee xxx

I think I remember what the achievement was, but the thing was she was always bringing me stuff. Funny stuff, mostly, and she would draw things.

Once she slipped a note under my door, saying don’t be nervous because that’s perverse. I think it was scholarship exam time. That line still comes to me out of nowhere sometimes. In my head, when I say it to myself, nervous rhymes with perverse. Actually, perverse (pervous) rhymes with nervous. It works best that way. It’s become a kind of mantra. Plus this little concave montage has been blu-tacked to many a wall over the years, taken pretty much everywhere I’ve lived, like the worry dolls.

Aimee always had paint stains all over her seventh form uniform – standard issue white linen shirt and ankle-length navy skirt. She came to boarding late in the piece, as a last-ditch attempt on her parents’ part to ground her. She was a little bit unhinged, and not in the affected artful way we all tried on then. She refrigerated her own urine and then drank it; that’s one thing I remember. She told some farfetched stories that couldn’t not be true. I think she might have also plastered herself naked to a ranchslider door once, in protest, in the presence of her parents, which may have something to do with how she ended up at boarding school, bestowing handmade gifts deep from within the darkroom, sellotaped to board.

Anyway, I just found this tonight, buried in the corner of the sunroom where I Dare Not Go.