Showing posts with label Tim Hemensley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tim Hemensley. Show all posts
Sunday, November 22, 2015
GOOD MORNING GIONA, GOOD MOURNING
1
Wake to 'friend request' from Giona Beltrametti! (Wake to the light of day, of course. Raise bamboo blind for Ushas… Flick desk-computer on…) Giona is Franco's spitting image. Notice the birthdate in the Facebook sidebar. 1966, five years older than Tim Hemensley. Son loses father, father loses son. Good morning Giona, good mourning… Twentieth anniversary of Franco Beltrametti's death --Franco, like so many other British, American & European poets, ushered my way by Tim Longville at Grosseteste Review, editor & proselytiser supreme...
"I am not immune", said in softest caveat upon involuntary vanity that perceiving flux spares one from its fateful vicissitudes --insight more fragile than Lao monk-blessed baci such as Catherine ties around my wrist, protection ensured by animist conflation of material & metaphor (--we've been here before : the feminine's place in all of this --60s & '70s paeans to the immortal dyad; fusion then return to sovereign parts, over & again, women & men in ecstasy's every combination --and recall '80s reading of the slanders upon Lou Andreas Salome for a sister's collegiality with Nietzsche, Rilke, Freud, Buber, analogy of the further trivialisation by contemporary sexual politics of muse, soul-mate, lover, protege --and I admit my head full of fathers, sons, brothers here but sisters, mothers, neither lesser nor ever forgotten) --yet while the moment flares with knowledge, the infinite delight of illumination subtracts from commensurate world. In no way a handicap when one belatedly realises Franco Beltrametti isn't narrator of the peripatetic (except of the means it is to experience geography as itinerary, simultaneous & indivisible), but meditator he is upon transience & impermanence, the willingly conscious & joyous recorder of world-as-time : "imagine : incurable! a precise / sensation (not unpleasant -- not pleasing) / that everything is happening somewhere else / at the speed of light SVAAAM while here / 24 hours in a bolt of lightning of 6months as it was / the twisting road / up and down across the valley [3/31/70]"
Apropos 'joyous' : I wonder what my own brother Bernard wrote to him in 1992 for Franco to hope I'd be "more joyous soon"? Twenty-three years since their correspondence & five years after Bernard published it in facsimile (Stingy Artist Editions, UK, folded card; Franco Beltrametti, Two letters to Nado / Bernard Hemensley, 2 poems i.m. Franco Beltrametti) I ask myself again : weren't those good years for me? The return to England beginning 1987, visits every or every other year. Discovering the S W Victorian coast, reflection it would be, John Anderson promised, of my new found Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, --Port Campbell to Warnambool, little towns nestled within limestone cliff & agricultural green, pummeled by Bass Straight & Southern Ocean. This time of new reading & thinking in philosophy & religion. New writing albeit substantially relinquishing publishing. Perhaps post partum anguish each time leaving England, dramatising life-long identity questions, -- but what misery implied?
After Bill Brown & Maggie Brown, most named is Franco Beltrametti in James Koller's Snows Gone By : New & Uncollected Poems, 1964-2002. For example in the poem of 30 Nov 1995 :
"Rising before me now
these mountains are the Sierra,
where you built your house.
Remember the sign : three peaks.
You & I found them,
Truth or Consequences.
I take out the red
harp, Raffaella's, play it --
hear your shadow
caught in the wind."
Helped select it, probably build it. Friendship was never more brotherly… To see a shadow 'caught in the wind' startling enough, but to 'hear a shadow' plays with kinaesthesia whilst eliciting 'shade' from 'shadow'.
In Jim Koller's Coyote's Journal, #10, 1974, are Franco's Five Poems : linked (and linked by Franco or Koller)? They don't follow chronologically --February '72, November '71, January '72 --but unsequenced in Face to Face (Grosseteste Review Books, UK, '73) which suggests they're random. Yet, thematically, if the (SHORT REPORT) : (TOWARDS NOVEMBER) is a five-part poem's foundation, then a psychedelic sense could be made of "a series of irresistible waves / from all directions", or "1, 2, 3 rainbows", given the explicit reference "A. Rouhier, le Peyotl, 1927 Paris"… Hadn't checked before --imagined a Paris street upon which may as well be unknown rake illicitly tripped out! But belatedly discover the pharmacist & Left Bank book publisher Alexandre Rouhier is the man, one of Andre Breton's hundred guiding heads, mescaline experimenter in the wake of Havelock Ellis & others, --the occultist Monsieur Rouhier, member of one of several underground cells, student of Fulcanelli & spoken of in same excited breath as Alistair Crowley, his "astonished eyes" as per "La Plante Qui Fait les Yeux Emeveilles : Le Peyotl", a good look for Franco & the '70s desert mountain back-country crazy gang whose total countercultural beckoning ironically induced in me the opposite reaction, freezing one in English forbidding, making perfect halfway house of Australia, as though it were the Gauguinian, Whitmanic come-all-ye Down Under, --until now that is, NOW! that these alchemical documents thaw the erstwhile timid set, flow & fly one into Illumination (poetry & world thereof)…
2
Nothing met, named, without contiguities which aggregate Real World. Same apparent obliquity first appreciated in Jung's reading of family tree. Nothing more certain than psyche nor misleading as genome, --synchronicity, sirrah, not logical progression...
Two peas in a pod, Aunty Lod of my brother Bernard & I. I didn't plan the radical separations 1966-69 or, as potentially corrosive for all its benefice, the exile I came to call it, 1975-87. Air-letter correspondence there was, the correspondence which carried the entire poetry scene, both local & international. But from children to old men are the essential divergent journeys, mutually exclusive experiences & investments, partial to the Way's myriad matings. And brief or extended circumstance parents all manner of relation, chips off old block, motes in ur-family's eternal light.
For some years I've misremembered Charles Olson telling Lew Welch at the 1965 Berkeley reading (transcribed by Zoe Brown, published by Jim Koller's Coyote Books, '66), "I'm not your father, you had a father!" Now, as I read it again I find it's otherwise. Olson's talking about Worcester ("Wow, I never wrote about Gloucester like this."), reading from An Ode on Nativity, --banter with Lew Welch follows but at this stage of the night Olson confesses : "I am a perfect father, until I am not. And that's another thing I hope is happening tonight, Robert [Duncan]. And I know that beautiful story which you've told to me, that you said a thing which cleared me when you told Richard Duerden, 'He's, Olson's not your father. You had a father.' Am I right?" (The exchange with Welch always struck me as paternal, even paternalistic yet imbued with the kind of love that leadership, as epitome or at least ramification of responsibility, implies. The relationship's ambiguous for although Welch is his own man & no kid at 39, he & Olson are colleagues within a family & community of which poetry is the life-blood. --parents, aunts & uncles, siblings born & adopted… ) In the transcript, Olson is speaking about writing & publishing & the status of talking (addressing the world as if arbitrary room has become the ideal) -- : "I am now publishing. Tonight. Because I'm talking writing." Whatever he was thinking, Lew responds with the literal, "I read forty-seven times last year? Forty-seven!" Olson corrects him as he must : "Baby. Oh, I'm not-- Reading? This is a-- Are you kidding? You think this is anything but a-- […] I mean I think this is a political occasion…"
Ken Taylor wasn't my father yet his welcoming me in Melbourne,'67/'68, felt like it. I should have been prodigal son for my own father, but wouldn't have a chance to perform that role until late '69 when I returned to Southampton from Australia, by then fully fledged Melbourne poet & playwright, new husband & new Australian! But it didn't transpire; there was no reconciliation. Even the appearance of his first grandchild, Tim, didn't displace primary rancour. Not until 1987 when I was 41 and Dad 67, did he acknowledge me as an independent adult! With Ken, sixteen years my senior, amity was expressed in the combined relief & delight of mutual recognition, a relationship which inaugurated the New Melbourne Poetry centred on the La Mama cafe theatre, late '67, early '68 and on, ultimately appreciated as a domain of the New Australian Poetry, the Australian wing of the international "new"… Back in the day, Geoff Eggleston nominated Ken & I as the La Mama poets' "elder brothers", while Ken referred to La Mama's inner circle as "brothers & sisters". Far away from Australia's sun & sea, I thrilled to reports of the brothers & sisters piling into Ken's kombi van, driving to Merricks on the Mornington Peninsula, seventy odd k from Melbourne, to commune & cavort, and why not a version of Kesey & Cassady's magic bus, Taylor's Pranksters… Thrilled & envied --my gift it seems for always missing one or the other country's great cultural events : working in London in '65 at the time of the Albert Hall Reading, I was both timid & unbelieving that the Evening Standard's headline (BEATS COME TO TOWN or BEATS TAKE OVER THE ALBERT HALL) could possibly be true; --in Melbourne in '67 missing, therefore, England's Summer of Love; --in Southampton '70-'72, missing the momentous Moratorium marches in Melbourne, and Ginsberg & Ferlinghetti's visits to Australia for good measure! Et cetera. Of course much to be counted on the other hand…
In 1970, Frank Prince was certainly old enough to have been my father, 58 to my 24. From the start he welcomed me as a new friend into his just then rejuvenating literary life --Stuart & Deirdre Montgomery at Fulcrum Press, via Lee Harwood, were bringing out his Memoirs at Oxford, his first book of poetry since The Doors of Stone, in 1963. He imagined my coming from Australia to England, albeit a return, as similar to his migration to England from South Africa in the '30s, when also in his twenties. Of course, the English wouldn't do this, he told me referring to my zeal for correspondence & communication, soliciting poems for my magazine, describing it as the "colonial energy" exemplified by Pound! Eliot wrote the better poems, he said, but Pound was the poet, the figure who attracted one to poetry as a life. Son or young friend? He complained to me once or twice of difficulties with his own children, whom I figured were older than I, as though we were contemporaries, fathers & men of the world, (--Henry Bolingbroke sotto voce in his cousin Westmoreland's ear of the disappointment young Hal was, especially compared to Hotspur)… Ken Taylor, similarly I recall, granting that parity, sounding me out, '68 or '69, on the New Age protocols concerning wives & their occasional suitors, accepting my advice that punching out the Natural History chap from BBC Bristol was ridiculous & patronising, as plainly antiquated & bad as forbidding one's spouse, he said, to smoke cigarettes in public!
One time Frank asked me to accompany him to a reading by poets from Southampton University, down town somewhere --the Bargate or St Michael's House?-- but at the last minute couldn't bring himself to attend. He hoped I'd still go, essentially to be his spy. I imagine he'd rather renounce his faith so adamant was he not to be there! In a sense his absence was a continuing renunciation of the literary life he'd surely conceived back in the '30s, perhaps defending himself from a repeat of the rejection which followed Eliot, his hero's, initial lionisation. Generally speaking he was a loner and until the Fulcrum Press volume not expecting a renewal of the celebrity he'd enjoyed before & after his war-time poem, Soldiers Bathing. Speculate that the Southampton University prof was at odds with the poet and only after moving on (via a series of overseas appointments) did the poet rejoin the wider world. Not quite true though --he was as happy to meet "the younger poets" as Andrew Crozier, upon hearing of our friendship, was keen for such engagement to occur. I felt then that Andrew, like me, subscribed to lineage & amelioration. It was ripe time, long overdue, for Frank Prince to meet with us, Andrew said. What did or didnt transpire at our Portswood tete-a-tete is another matter but I brought the poets (the Johns, Hall & Riley), he got the beer & Elizabeth the supper! He'd begun to subscribe to the Grosseteste Review journal & books in response to my enthusiastic prompting. He was on the board of the Poetry Review during Eric Mottram's editorship and whatever his opinion of the poetry said he believed in the younger generation, characterised by 'feeling' in terms of love & protest. It was the same feeling he was moved I'd found in his otherwise stumpy rhymed Oxford poem, as I described it in a review I blush to recall, --the feeling animating form he'd explain, --from which I extrapolate the vital part of romanticism's issue modernism, --I hear him saying that, except that he didnt, though modernism out of romanticism is his --not yet stifled by the Auden ascendancy --"a bit of a fat head" he'd quipped, rival we suppose, --over whom he briefly enjoyed Eliot's favour --but of all such brevity, jewel flash moment, is this life made...
[1-11-15 / 22-11-15]
3
Of Franco Beltrametti, to Judith Danciger
"whisky wont lack"? Dear Judith what
ever i'm missing of your translation
this Englishing'll do for me :
whisky no end of (wouldn't say no
black ones [bears] no end of (no shortage (overrun
so
curiosity no end of (vivacity (naturally turned on
Franco no end of
no end of simpatico lifting into
whole heart sky
blooming from vulnerable chest
no end of exultation
heroic for its heedlessness
of ever more tedious
bureaucratic
world
Franco
exclamations !!!!!
!!!!! flowers
[12/11/15-19/11/15]
Sunday, July 5, 2009
TIM HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE, Additions posted July, 2009
A NOTE ON STYLE & AFFINITY
There's an apparent seamlessness to Tim's concerns & style, from his commentaries in PUNK PURGE : TEDDY BOY TALES, in the early '80s, to the late diaries & stand-alone pieces of his last few years (late '90s to 2003). A couple of ways of looking at that : he found his style very early and maintained it for twenty years, or he didnt develop much beyond what the precocious writings reveal. Certainly he was ready for a new stage at the time of his death. In conversations over several years he never disagreed that he had some serious fiction in him as well as music & cultural commentary; obvious, too, that so long as he was playing music he'd be writing lyrics which would have had to transcend the narratives of teenage angst at some time. But who knows? Young deaths suspend everything; one's left with questions forever.
Yet it's clear from the start that he's a cultural commentator & a memoirist (which, coincidentally, recalls a recent conversation with Stella Glorie, about the difference between essay & memoir, especially how autobiography is or may be written). I'm addressing Tim but may as well be explicating myself; my way of recording the history which includes oneself, implicating oneself within the historical, feeling this history course one's own corpuscles... It's clear to me also that at least in the writing there's an affinity which begs the question of authorial distinction, though this might well be what any reader feels of a powerfully resonant text : that one's reading accords with the writing to the extent that it occurs within the pulse of the writing, as though two edges of the same perception. In addition, my son Tim is who I am in his skin & on his scene... The gift for me of this period of transcription is in recognizing another manifestation of the Hemensley writer-chronicler. I feel we are "the Elder" & "the Younger" --name-sakes & inscribers of the very same nuance.
--Kris Hemensley
March 16-18,'09--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TIM HEMENSLEY
THE "KILLAYONI" SCENE
i thought i'd use this last page [of Punk Purge, #5, ed] to remember a club called The Killayoni Club, one of the best non-pub venues for new music (new wave or rock, not strictly commercial) in the last 3 years. when i was interviewed on the "Behind the Shelter Sheds" (a programme for kids on Radio 3CR, what else could it be!), i named the club as one of 2 places kids (under 15s) could get to see live new wave or punk. a few months alter The Killayoni Club was gone, and the bands scattered to other places far and wide. The Killayoni Club was located in Flinders Lane [Melbourne], and bands such as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies, Plays With Marionettes, 3 Toed Sloths, Daughters of Charity, and Voix would be the night's entertainment. the first time i went there was new year's eve, 1981. meeting Kathy Buck (manageress) at the door was a surprise (as i thought it was a Polish night-club)! and later on actually meting the performers was something rare, and something which probably hasn't happened since the demise of the 1st wave of punk in this country in 1980. let me point out that the club was NOT strictly a punk club. this 'zine isn't strictly just a punk 'zine. i am a punk, punk is the music i love and therefore i give considerable coverage to punk. but the music and bands who perform at The Killayoni Club hardly ever get any mention in the rock press, & most of the gigs they do are publicised by word of mouth, so there should be some 'zine or magazine that talks about them. one of the bands who (to me, anyway) represents the true KILLAYONI sound was 2D. they played very sixtiesish garage band post-punk rock, very heavy, very psychedelic (ie, garage psychedelia like late Pretty Things, Masters Apprentices, Shadows of Night, Kingsmen etc), very good. even though 2D are gone now and Ifs, Buts & Maybes have taken their place, the energy etc still remains. THE band of the club was The Incredibly Strange Creatures... who were thoroughly improvisational and seemed to alienate most of their audience rather than attract them. Kathy Buck lying on the stage screaming and Jim Buck monotonously saying "she says / she says / she says" while other 'musicians' have arguments through saxophones, was hardly 'fun' or a 'good night out'! punk was supposed to be anti-music-music but the person who said that would probably be choking on their words when they saw The Incredibly Strange Creatures! another band who sometimes appeared there was Three Toed Sloths, consisting of Jim Buck on heavily distorted guitar, and Terry Shannon on bass. with "songs" (ihn th' greyest C'n'W tradischon!) such as 'i'm gonna bust yer ass, you son of a bitch!", Johnny Cash's "angel from vegas" and "i wanna be a worm". of course, no history of The Killayoni Club would be complete without mentioning Royal Flush (plug!!!), who played the club on the "FINAL FLING KILLAYONI THING", final night. oh, i don't know what to say now!! alas, poor Killayoni, i knew it well! P.S. : watch out for the album, "Killayoni Rag", with Royal Flush, The Three Toed Sloth, Ania Walwicz, et al!
(Xmas Eve, 1982)
[NOTE: Melbourne's Missing Link record shop also published a transcription from Punk Purge of the same review in their newsletter, August issue, 2003. Their memorial for Tim Hemensley can be read at missinglink.net.au/newsletter.php?issue=aug0301 ________________________________________________________________
SELF MOTIVATIONAL THERAPY SPEECH
i walk tall. i walk proud. i create the footprints that the stars walk in. i've seen it all, i've seen the aura of many a holy and disturbed man shatter under the strain of a broken ego. i sit on the left hand of god. i share martinis with the living buddha. the virgin mary cooks my meals and moses does my laundry. i never sleep. i'm awake 35 hours a day, 365 days a week. let's get serious : it's 4 a.m. in fitzroy st. and i'm hanging out with the famous and sleazy. the degenerates, the scuz, the scum, i love 'em all. y'see, i'm a high flyer -- live fast. the fast lane is the only lane there is. 200 m.p.h., adrenalin fling thru' my body, running on empty, my head in full throttle. i'll never die. so, 4 a.m., my t-shirt covered in pizza stains, blood, sweat and beer, and i feel good. yeah. GOOD. i'm out of my mind, out of my head, completely whacked, i wanna die, but i wanna live. YEAH. i'm a full blown crazy, a real live one. the undercover cops know me and stay out of my way. the hell's angels guard my front door. the mafia sends me free siccilian lasagna samples. i look down on everything, the world looks up at me. i need nothing, i want everything. i'm on a natural high, helped along by vast quantities of drugs. i'm a loaded, explosive, armed and dangerous mass of manhood.
(1988)
[Note : "Creative Writing Semester 1, 1988. Well oh wondrous one, let me bask in your aura. Great stuff -- very funny -- excellent use of words -- great juxtaposition of ideas -- great use of cliche as a means of self-deprecating humour, you 'armed and dangerous mass of manhood'! --Graeme Smith, teacher at Ardoch College, Melbourne.]
________________________________________________________________
DEAR KEITH
Dear Keith,
what's happenin' man? You don't know me, but i'm in a band called GOD, we've got some records comin' out on Au Go Go Records. (You've heard of us?) We're doin' a lot of gigs at the moment, 'cept we keep gettin' banned or barred or kicked out of a lotta places, but that's life when you're a young, exciting rock'n'roll band. Anyway, the purpose of this letter is : i'm getting a band together with some of my favourite players, it'll be called SLIM KILLERS, it's nothing serious, just a few gigs here and there, doing lots of my fave songs of all time, maybe write some stuff for the thing? It'll just be good sweaty fun. Mind you, we'll be playing smaller venues than what yr used to, but we'll try for some open-air gigs if the crowds are TOO big!! Anyay, pass the word around, 'cos i want the BEST!! Ask Ronnie Wood. Hey : it'd be coool if youse could both come on down?!
Alright. Anyway, get yrself a copy of "My Pal", the GOD single, and look out for our 12" "PHALLICA" 8 track e.p. Hey, i'll even put your name on the door next time yr in Melbourne, O.K.?
O.K. Take care,
Tim Hemensley
MEAT CLEAVER BOY
(ca, '87-88)
________________________________________________________________
THE FIRST DREAM
The first dream occurred in late 1983 or early 1984. Unable to sleep or relax throughout the nite, breaking into a nervous, shaking sweat around dawn.
A gradual feeling of powerlessness, lifelessness, blood being drained from arteries and organs, a sickening buzz in the ears becoming progressively louder, a sense of suffocation and impending doom. Then a voice, talking not in words but images and feelings
"YOU WILL NEVER FLY IN A PLANE OVER BERMUDA. ONLY DEATH AWAITS YOU THERE. THE SKY OVER BERMUDA TURNS PURPLE. JESUS ON A CROSS. THIS IS THE TERRIBLE SECRET. THIS IS WHY SO MANY DISAPPEAR.
HERE IS A MAP. YOU HAVE NO CONTROL. YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN. THIS IS ONLY THE FIRST OF MANY VISITATIONS."
awakening with a scream as bodily sensation and brain blood flow was returned.
First dream / first death,
First blood / first fuck,
from now on, all would be tainted with the stench of premonition.
oOo
December 1983. The knife was green after being used to stir up paint.
It hurt as i slid it across my left wrist.
Unable to slice through flesh, grinding my veins into a mangled pulp, the blood sprayed as the result of friction.
Blood and skin clung to the paint. Tears ran down my face and the knife turned orange. A small scar the size of a freckle stains my wrist to remind me forever.
oOo
In June 1982 i stepped onstage with my school friends Roman and Simon at an inner city rock'n'roll venue and played Punk Rock for one hour without ever having held a bass guitar in my life. Two girls with short skirts and long blonde hair danced in front of the stage and yelled for more when we finished the set.
After the gig i met Jack Bloom (Feedback Jack) who told me it was the best thing he'd seen in 5 years. He took my number and booked us for two gigs, neither of which we played.
Most of the assorted parents and relatives who had gathered to see us were utterly disgusted by the band, the club, the scene. I felt ecstatic, excited, moved. The serpent gave me the apple and i consumed the whole tree.
I am lustful and greedy. My appetite has never been satiated.
oOo
The end of another drunken weekend -- bruised, battered and bloodshot.
Xmas Eve '89.
They took our only lord and murdered him so society could breathe easy.
In his name we take up the gun / the guitar -- the weapons of god.
The streets of every city will run with blood --
the sky over Bermuda will glow purple.
(Xmas Eve, 1989)
________________________________________________________________
"GIALLO" : ITALIAN FOR MURDER
1
It's a cold, dark nite in early '70s Rome. As David Hemmings walks home from a rehearsal of his Jazz combo, the heavens open & it begins to rain with a vengeance. Just as suddenly, the tense semi-silence is shattered by the sound of a Woman's screaming; Hemmings looks up in time to witness her murder... Through the window of an apartment on the second story of the building opposite him, a figure can be sen staggering, clutching at the deep knife wounds in her chest & side, then collapsing to the floor. Dropping his clarinet case, Hemmings runs into the building, up the stairs & through the open door of the apartment. The flat appears to be empty, except for the blood-soaked woman, & she is dead. A state of uncomprehending shock grips Hemmings as he crouches over the corpse, & he decides to run to the nearby Police Station to seek help. But as he leaves the apartment, Hemmings focusses on one detail : a framed Photograph of a composed yet fearsome looking Male face on the adjacent wall to the dead woman. Returning to the crime scene with the Police, Hemmings is unsettled by the sensation that SOMETHING has been altered here in his absence. While the bloodied form of the woman & the flat's general disarray is as it was, SOMETHING is missing... While describing the events of the murder (as he saw it) to the Police, Hemmings remembers the framed Photograph. He searches around in vain, but it is no longer there. An investigating officer suggests that the killer may've hidden from Hemmings, then removed the Photo (& himself) when Hemmings left the room. Furthermore, that this suggests the picture holds some clue to the crime. Later, Hemmings returns to the apartment alone & while snooping around for 'clues', he's jarred by a terrifying discovery: on the adjacent wall to where he'd stood over the dead woman, hangs a framed glass MIRROR. What he'd taken, at first glance, to be a Photograph was in fact a reflection of the killer himself, staring cooly back at Hemmings from the wall...
2
The above description of a scene from "Profundo Rosso", Dario Argento's most masterfully-realised early film, perfectly embodies the quality of the "Giallo" movie: essentially an Italian "Who-dunnit", with all the trade-marks of that genre (cops, killers, red-herrings & a gradually unfolding murder mystery). The wound is 'salted', if you will, by the uniquely European double-whammy of the "Giallo"; the intended 'effect' is Terror, achieved by utilising plot-premisses & action most commonly found in the conventions of Horror cinema. "Giallo" movies are Who-dunnits occurring in a Horror-movie context, yet "Giallo" is more than a 'genre'. It's more accurately represented as an ATMOSPHERE, an attitude & aesthetic approach to Film-making, achieved by photographic technique, lighting, music & plot-line perversity. Unlike the colour suggested by the word, "Giallo" movies are dark, brooding & cold-blooded. Far from sunny, gay Yellow, the rightful colours of these films are dark blue, black & the Deep Red of their more unfortunate characters' blood & grue. Put simply, "Giallo" is Italian for Murder.
(ca late '90s)
________________________________________________________________
[NOTE:
Transcription from hand- & type-written manuscript follows Tim's syntax, capitalization, & grammar except for typos & mistakes that would ordinarily have been picked up editorially.
--Kris Hemensley,
July 5th, 2009]
There's an apparent seamlessness to Tim's concerns & style, from his commentaries in PUNK PURGE : TEDDY BOY TALES, in the early '80s, to the late diaries & stand-alone pieces of his last few years (late '90s to 2003). A couple of ways of looking at that : he found his style very early and maintained it for twenty years, or he didnt develop much beyond what the precocious writings reveal. Certainly he was ready for a new stage at the time of his death. In conversations over several years he never disagreed that he had some serious fiction in him as well as music & cultural commentary; obvious, too, that so long as he was playing music he'd be writing lyrics which would have had to transcend the narratives of teenage angst at some time. But who knows? Young deaths suspend everything; one's left with questions forever.
Yet it's clear from the start that he's a cultural commentator & a memoirist (which, coincidentally, recalls a recent conversation with Stella Glorie, about the difference between essay & memoir, especially how autobiography is or may be written). I'm addressing Tim but may as well be explicating myself; my way of recording the history which includes oneself, implicating oneself within the historical, feeling this history course one's own corpuscles... It's clear to me also that at least in the writing there's an affinity which begs the question of authorial distinction, though this might well be what any reader feels of a powerfully resonant text : that one's reading accords with the writing to the extent that it occurs within the pulse of the writing, as though two edges of the same perception. In addition, my son Tim is who I am in his skin & on his scene... The gift for me of this period of transcription is in recognizing another manifestation of the Hemensley writer-chronicler. I feel we are "the Elder" & "the Younger" --name-sakes & inscribers of the very same nuance.
--Kris Hemensley
March 16-18,'09--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TIM HEMENSLEY
THE "KILLAYONI" SCENE
i thought i'd use this last page [of Punk Purge, #5, ed] to remember a club called The Killayoni Club, one of the best non-pub venues for new music (new wave or rock, not strictly commercial) in the last 3 years. when i was interviewed on the "Behind the Shelter Sheds" (a programme for kids on Radio 3CR, what else could it be!), i named the club as one of 2 places kids (under 15s) could get to see live new wave or punk. a few months alter The Killayoni Club was gone, and the bands scattered to other places far and wide. The Killayoni Club was located in Flinders Lane [Melbourne], and bands such as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies, Plays With Marionettes, 3 Toed Sloths, Daughters of Charity, and Voix would be the night's entertainment. the first time i went there was new year's eve, 1981. meeting Kathy Buck (manageress) at the door was a surprise (as i thought it was a Polish night-club)! and later on actually meting the performers was something rare, and something which probably hasn't happened since the demise of the 1st wave of punk in this country in 1980. let me point out that the club was NOT strictly a punk club. this 'zine isn't strictly just a punk 'zine. i am a punk, punk is the music i love and therefore i give considerable coverage to punk. but the music and bands who perform at The Killayoni Club hardly ever get any mention in the rock press, & most of the gigs they do are publicised by word of mouth, so there should be some 'zine or magazine that talks about them. one of the bands who (to me, anyway) represents the true KILLAYONI sound was 2D. they played very sixtiesish garage band post-punk rock, very heavy, very psychedelic (ie, garage psychedelia like late Pretty Things, Masters Apprentices, Shadows of Night, Kingsmen etc), very good. even though 2D are gone now and Ifs, Buts & Maybes have taken their place, the energy etc still remains. THE band of the club was The Incredibly Strange Creatures... who were thoroughly improvisational and seemed to alienate most of their audience rather than attract them. Kathy Buck lying on the stage screaming and Jim Buck monotonously saying "she says / she says / she says" while other 'musicians' have arguments through saxophones, was hardly 'fun' or a 'good night out'! punk was supposed to be anti-music-music but the person who said that would probably be choking on their words when they saw The Incredibly Strange Creatures! another band who sometimes appeared there was Three Toed Sloths, consisting of Jim Buck on heavily distorted guitar, and Terry Shannon on bass. with "songs" (ihn th' greyest C'n'W tradischon!) such as 'i'm gonna bust yer ass, you son of a bitch!", Johnny Cash's "angel from vegas" and "i wanna be a worm". of course, no history of The Killayoni Club would be complete without mentioning Royal Flush (plug!!!), who played the club on the "FINAL FLING KILLAYONI THING", final night. oh, i don't know what to say now!! alas, poor Killayoni, i knew it well! P.S. : watch out for the album, "Killayoni Rag", with Royal Flush, The Three Toed Sloth, Ania Walwicz, et al!
(Xmas Eve, 1982)
[NOTE: Melbourne's Missing Link record shop also published a transcription from Punk Purge of the same review in their newsletter, August issue, 2003. Their memorial for Tim Hemensley can be read at missinglink.net.au/newsletter.php?issue=aug0301 ________________________________________________________________
SELF MOTIVATIONAL THERAPY SPEECH
i walk tall. i walk proud. i create the footprints that the stars walk in. i've seen it all, i've seen the aura of many a holy and disturbed man shatter under the strain of a broken ego. i sit on the left hand of god. i share martinis with the living buddha. the virgin mary cooks my meals and moses does my laundry. i never sleep. i'm awake 35 hours a day, 365 days a week. let's get serious : it's 4 a.m. in fitzroy st. and i'm hanging out with the famous and sleazy. the degenerates, the scuz, the scum, i love 'em all. y'see, i'm a high flyer -- live fast. the fast lane is the only lane there is. 200 m.p.h., adrenalin fling thru' my body, running on empty, my head in full throttle. i'll never die. so, 4 a.m., my t-shirt covered in pizza stains, blood, sweat and beer, and i feel good. yeah. GOOD. i'm out of my mind, out of my head, completely whacked, i wanna die, but i wanna live. YEAH. i'm a full blown crazy, a real live one. the undercover cops know me and stay out of my way. the hell's angels guard my front door. the mafia sends me free siccilian lasagna samples. i look down on everything, the world looks up at me. i need nothing, i want everything. i'm on a natural high, helped along by vast quantities of drugs. i'm a loaded, explosive, armed and dangerous mass of manhood.
(1988)
[Note : "Creative Writing Semester 1, 1988. Well oh wondrous one, let me bask in your aura. Great stuff -- very funny -- excellent use of words -- great juxtaposition of ideas -- great use of cliche as a means of self-deprecating humour, you 'armed and dangerous mass of manhood'! --Graeme Smith, teacher at Ardoch College, Melbourne.]
________________________________________________________________
DEAR KEITH
Dear Keith,
what's happenin' man? You don't know me, but i'm in a band called GOD, we've got some records comin' out on Au Go Go Records. (You've heard of us?) We're doin' a lot of gigs at the moment, 'cept we keep gettin' banned or barred or kicked out of a lotta places, but that's life when you're a young, exciting rock'n'roll band. Anyway, the purpose of this letter is : i'm getting a band together with some of my favourite players, it'll be called SLIM KILLERS, it's nothing serious, just a few gigs here and there, doing lots of my fave songs of all time, maybe write some stuff for the thing? It'll just be good sweaty fun. Mind you, we'll be playing smaller venues than what yr used to, but we'll try for some open-air gigs if the crowds are TOO big!! Anyay, pass the word around, 'cos i want the BEST!! Ask Ronnie Wood. Hey : it'd be coool if youse could both come on down?!
Alright. Anyway, get yrself a copy of "My Pal", the GOD single, and look out for our 12" "PHALLICA" 8 track e.p. Hey, i'll even put your name on the door next time yr in Melbourne, O.K.?
O.K. Take care,
Tim Hemensley
MEAT CLEAVER BOY
(ca, '87-88)
________________________________________________________________
THE FIRST DREAM
The first dream occurred in late 1983 or early 1984. Unable to sleep or relax throughout the nite, breaking into a nervous, shaking sweat around dawn.
A gradual feeling of powerlessness, lifelessness, blood being drained from arteries and organs, a sickening buzz in the ears becoming progressively louder, a sense of suffocation and impending doom. Then a voice, talking not in words but images and feelings
"YOU WILL NEVER FLY IN A PLANE OVER BERMUDA. ONLY DEATH AWAITS YOU THERE. THE SKY OVER BERMUDA TURNS PURPLE. JESUS ON A CROSS. THIS IS THE TERRIBLE SECRET. THIS IS WHY SO MANY DISAPPEAR.
HERE IS A MAP. YOU HAVE NO CONTROL. YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN. THIS IS ONLY THE FIRST OF MANY VISITATIONS."
awakening with a scream as bodily sensation and brain blood flow was returned.
First dream / first death,
First blood / first fuck,
from now on, all would be tainted with the stench of premonition.
oOo
December 1983. The knife was green after being used to stir up paint.
It hurt as i slid it across my left wrist.
Unable to slice through flesh, grinding my veins into a mangled pulp, the blood sprayed as the result of friction.
Blood and skin clung to the paint. Tears ran down my face and the knife turned orange. A small scar the size of a freckle stains my wrist to remind me forever.
oOo
In June 1982 i stepped onstage with my school friends Roman and Simon at an inner city rock'n'roll venue and played Punk Rock for one hour without ever having held a bass guitar in my life. Two girls with short skirts and long blonde hair danced in front of the stage and yelled for more when we finished the set.
After the gig i met Jack Bloom (Feedback Jack) who told me it was the best thing he'd seen in 5 years. He took my number and booked us for two gigs, neither of which we played.
Most of the assorted parents and relatives who had gathered to see us were utterly disgusted by the band, the club, the scene. I felt ecstatic, excited, moved. The serpent gave me the apple and i consumed the whole tree.
I am lustful and greedy. My appetite has never been satiated.
oOo
The end of another drunken weekend -- bruised, battered and bloodshot.
Xmas Eve '89.
They took our only lord and murdered him so society could breathe easy.
In his name we take up the gun / the guitar -- the weapons of god.
The streets of every city will run with blood --
the sky over Bermuda will glow purple.
(Xmas Eve, 1989)
________________________________________________________________
"GIALLO" : ITALIAN FOR MURDER
1
It's a cold, dark nite in early '70s Rome. As David Hemmings walks home from a rehearsal of his Jazz combo, the heavens open & it begins to rain with a vengeance. Just as suddenly, the tense semi-silence is shattered by the sound of a Woman's screaming; Hemmings looks up in time to witness her murder... Through the window of an apartment on the second story of the building opposite him, a figure can be sen staggering, clutching at the deep knife wounds in her chest & side, then collapsing to the floor. Dropping his clarinet case, Hemmings runs into the building, up the stairs & through the open door of the apartment. The flat appears to be empty, except for the blood-soaked woman, & she is dead. A state of uncomprehending shock grips Hemmings as he crouches over the corpse, & he decides to run to the nearby Police Station to seek help. But as he leaves the apartment, Hemmings focusses on one detail : a framed Photograph of a composed yet fearsome looking Male face on the adjacent wall to the dead woman. Returning to the crime scene with the Police, Hemmings is unsettled by the sensation that SOMETHING has been altered here in his absence. While the bloodied form of the woman & the flat's general disarray is as it was, SOMETHING is missing... While describing the events of the murder (as he saw it) to the Police, Hemmings remembers the framed Photograph. He searches around in vain, but it is no longer there. An investigating officer suggests that the killer may've hidden from Hemmings, then removed the Photo (& himself) when Hemmings left the room. Furthermore, that this suggests the picture holds some clue to the crime. Later, Hemmings returns to the apartment alone & while snooping around for 'clues', he's jarred by a terrifying discovery: on the adjacent wall to where he'd stood over the dead woman, hangs a framed glass MIRROR. What he'd taken, at first glance, to be a Photograph was in fact a reflection of the killer himself, staring cooly back at Hemmings from the wall...
2
The above description of a scene from "Profundo Rosso", Dario Argento's most masterfully-realised early film, perfectly embodies the quality of the "Giallo" movie: essentially an Italian "Who-dunnit", with all the trade-marks of that genre (cops, killers, red-herrings & a gradually unfolding murder mystery). The wound is 'salted', if you will, by the uniquely European double-whammy of the "Giallo"; the intended 'effect' is Terror, achieved by utilising plot-premisses & action most commonly found in the conventions of Horror cinema. "Giallo" movies are Who-dunnits occurring in a Horror-movie context, yet "Giallo" is more than a 'genre'. It's more accurately represented as an ATMOSPHERE, an attitude & aesthetic approach to Film-making, achieved by photographic technique, lighting, music & plot-line perversity. Unlike the colour suggested by the word, "Giallo" movies are dark, brooding & cold-blooded. Far from sunny, gay Yellow, the rightful colours of these films are dark blue, black & the Deep Red of their more unfortunate characters' blood & grue. Put simply, "Giallo" is Italian for Murder.
(ca late '90s)
________________________________________________________________
[NOTE:
Transcription from hand- & type-written manuscript follows Tim's syntax, capitalization, & grammar except for typos & mistakes that would ordinarily have been picked up editorially.
--Kris Hemensley,
July 5th, 2009]
Thursday, June 4, 2009
BLOOMSDAY 2009 + COLLECTED WORKS' AUTUMN REPORT
Farewell Autumn, welcome Winter! April & May have come & gone! We'd better advertise Bloomsday then, the annual June 16th celebration falling this year on the Tuesday, which will be the next event at the Shop. In recent years, the profusion of Bloomsday events elsewhere leads us to concentrate our reading into the lunch period, midday til 2.30 or so. All James Joyce fans welcome!
The Autumn report, begun late March, was put to the side while I composed The Divine Issue (published in April), and though I took up the former again in early May, I was then wonderfully diverted by correspondence flowing from TDI as well as revisiting the same period's literary material, some of which research accrues now as its Addendum.
Had I been better organized I'd have flagged the two May events, namely the launch of Mary Napier's spoken-word CD, Open Thoughts, on the 15th, and the tribute reading for Dorothy Porter on the 28th.
A major distraction has been Loretta's health glitch (--an irregularity detected via breast screening which led to needle biopsy and then surgery for breast cancer; disappointingly this is a continuing story with further though smaller surgery in the offing)... On the day Dorothy's tribute took place at Collected Works, Loretta was having her operation at the Peter Mac. What I called 'exquisite irony', Jenny Harrison (who, with Gig Ryan, curated & catered the Tribute) named a 'symmetry' in which Dorothy was linked to Retta & all women touched by the illness. There was never a thought to cancel the event; Retta would have been appalled. She was certainly at the shop in spirit just as all her well-wishers were with her at the Peter Mac...
Disaster & disease affect everyone; the poets die the same kind of deaths as everyone else. Today I've read a notice posted by Lorin Ford on the Overload Nation poetry site concerning the death of Andrea Sherwood. We catch our breath, then breathe again... Geoff Eggleston, Dorothy Porter --mourned & celebrated by their families & literary communities in December... In February the fires came. Entire hamlets, towns disappeared. Family & friends were burnt out &/or killed. Young poet Ella Holcombe's parents perished in Kinglake. The subsequent memorial service at Montsalvat, attended by Melbourne poets in solidarity with Ella, was also a grieving for that whole community... In Redesdale, Robert Kenny faught for his house for ten minutes before abandoning it to save his own life. His academic work-in-progress was backed-up at La Trobe University but library, archives, art work & studio are all gone... From Berlin the shocking news of artist, print-maker Julia Harman's tragic & untimely death --she was Tim Hemensley's first serious partner, and felt that however separated by distance in life, & then by his death, she was always with him, and now she is I guess... Concentric circles of all whom one considers family. A good friend of the Shop, Tim Sheppard, died on the 11th March after illness. A great devotee of poetry, especially the 1st World War British poets, he also wrote poems although a collection never saw light of day...
For the poets, as I'm fond of saying, t'was always so. All of this in the midst of life. And life goes on (--and it does go on despite the traumatisation of survivors --so well and still do I recall the experience of 6 years ago when the fact of my son's death was like an imposed nakedness upon me -- worse : I felt skinned, scourged of my skin, wearing only the fact of his death, feeling as I stood there in the world that only I knew the catastrophe and no one could see what I was feeling)... Some of the life that goes on, for the poet, involves the readings & launches, gatherings of the clan... For the Melbourne poet these are all around town, constantly, if the handbills or emails I see are any indication.
Collected Works' Autumn season kicked off on the 12th March with the first of two new poetry collections published by Barry Scott's Transit Lounge : Kent McCarter's In the Hungry Middle of Here (--launched by Jenny Lea, whom I dont think I've seen since I dropped in on a Meanjin/Overland cricket match on the Domain Oval in South Yarra --early 90s? --I'm not sure whether she was playing or barracking but we chatted at tea in amongst the trestle tables & eskies --and what a dynamo was Meanjin's skipper, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, clapping for attention, darting hither & thither in the field when he wasnt bowling --but that's another story!), & Jennifer Mackenzie's Borobudur (launched by Tim Lindsey from the Asia Law Centre) on the 20th. Good attendances for both, more local poets at McCarter's, lots of Asian Studies people at Mackenzie's.
It's a truism in the Melbourne writing & performance community now that with the scene's current proliferation there are always going to be new names, poets one hasnt previously encountered. Blurbs from Gig Ryan & CWC for McCarter underlined my ignorance. Conversely, my blurb for Jenny Mackenzie attests a long acquaintance with author & family punctuated for the times she lived in China.
I remember twenty years ago Jennifer thinking of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights as a potential publisher of her Borobudur project. This must have been canvassed around about 1985 since that was when Robert Kenny's Rigmarole Books withdrew from the fray, having to decline such new writers as Brian Castro as well as foreclosing what had become a new writing stable including John Scott, Anna Couani, Ken Taylor, Ken Bolton, Chris Barnett, Ania Walwicz, John Anderson, Laurie Duggan, Walter Billeter, Kenny himself & yours truly. Who knows how it might have developed had personal & financial conditions played out differently? Rigmarole might now still have been the major small-press in Australia that one or two publishers in North America survived sufficiently long to become over there. But then again, gaps are inevitably filled and the culture is always changing, implying different aesthetical & political imperatives for different times. Rigmarole in the mid to late 80s would have been a natural home for Borobudur. While congratulating Jenny Mackenzie's tenacity and sighing with her At last, at last, one realizes it was more the case of putting something aside than of battling for twenty years; even so, twenty years is quite a hiatus.
A note now on Tim Lindsey's comments (overwhelmingly in the poet's favour)... Inevitably it was an Asian Studies/Foreign Affairs appreciation of the book as a cultural-political object --that is, Mackenzie's poem was read as a long overdue Australian translation of a classic Javanese story subsuming crucial aspects of that tradition, a belated but worthy act reflecting Australian recognition of the antiquity & authority of an important geopolitical neighbour.
Lindsey's pitch was not uninteresting --indeed, in the context of an exotic literary publication, his political & economic language was an instructive counterpoint. However, as I quipped to him later, I'd contend Indonesian-Australian relations, as with East-West relations in general, are a two-way street. Interesting that Australian ignorance of Javanese epic is supposedly indicative of an Australian know-nothing arrogance which will marginalise us in the future; yet the lay observation of the Asian neighbours' voracious appetite for Western popular forms, from democracy & personal freedoms to t-shirts & rock & roll, is unmentioned. Actually, Western translation of Asian literary & religious classics is the typical form of the Anglo-European interaction with Asia over a very long period, and as fast as we gobble up their elite texts so do they our popular ones.
It also occurred to me last year, after meeting a Singaporean poet & academic, that his expertise in modern British poetry, from Hardy to the present, surely curries our conception of the post-colonial! Furthermore, the considerable East-West collaboration of artists & writers, including Australian & Asian, in my opinion significantly corrects the postcolonial ideological cliche. I offered Tim Lindsey the examples of Sandy Fitts (whose View from the Lucky Hotel (Five Islands Press, '08) has won this year's Anne Elder Prize for a first collection) & Jane Gibbian (Ardent is her first full collection, published by Giramondo Press, '08) as Aussie poets redeeming quality collaboration from their trips to Vietnam. I also mentioned to him Cathy O'Brien's description of her meeting in Vientiane, Laos with an Australian colleague's partner, the Iraqui poet Basim Furat, residing there after a spell in New Zealand where, according to Mark Pirie, he had impressed the local scene. They may well collaborate in the future. For me a tiny but interesting example of the hybridization increasingly possible in global culture.
Of course, violent displacement is also increasing & is one obvious explanation of such unlikely crosscurrents. Yet let's recall Ford Madox Ford's witty definition of English culture, against the xenophobia of his day, as the happy result of "successive periods of unrest amongst the Continental peoples".
_________________________________________________________
Kris Hemensley
March/May/June 4 '09
The Autumn report, begun late March, was put to the side while I composed The Divine Issue (published in April), and though I took up the former again in early May, I was then wonderfully diverted by correspondence flowing from TDI as well as revisiting the same period's literary material, some of which research accrues now as its Addendum.
Had I been better organized I'd have flagged the two May events, namely the launch of Mary Napier's spoken-word CD, Open Thoughts, on the 15th, and the tribute reading for Dorothy Porter on the 28th.
A major distraction has been Loretta's health glitch (--an irregularity detected via breast screening which led to needle biopsy and then surgery for breast cancer; disappointingly this is a continuing story with further though smaller surgery in the offing)... On the day Dorothy's tribute took place at Collected Works, Loretta was having her operation at the Peter Mac. What I called 'exquisite irony', Jenny Harrison (who, with Gig Ryan, curated & catered the Tribute) named a 'symmetry' in which Dorothy was linked to Retta & all women touched by the illness. There was never a thought to cancel the event; Retta would have been appalled. She was certainly at the shop in spirit just as all her well-wishers were with her at the Peter Mac...
Disaster & disease affect everyone; the poets die the same kind of deaths as everyone else. Today I've read a notice posted by Lorin Ford on the Overload Nation poetry site concerning the death of Andrea Sherwood. We catch our breath, then breathe again... Geoff Eggleston, Dorothy Porter --mourned & celebrated by their families & literary communities in December... In February the fires came. Entire hamlets, towns disappeared. Family & friends were burnt out &/or killed. Young poet Ella Holcombe's parents perished in Kinglake. The subsequent memorial service at Montsalvat, attended by Melbourne poets in solidarity with Ella, was also a grieving for that whole community... In Redesdale, Robert Kenny faught for his house for ten minutes before abandoning it to save his own life. His academic work-in-progress was backed-up at La Trobe University but library, archives, art work & studio are all gone... From Berlin the shocking news of artist, print-maker Julia Harman's tragic & untimely death --she was Tim Hemensley's first serious partner, and felt that however separated by distance in life, & then by his death, she was always with him, and now she is I guess... Concentric circles of all whom one considers family. A good friend of the Shop, Tim Sheppard, died on the 11th March after illness. A great devotee of poetry, especially the 1st World War British poets, he also wrote poems although a collection never saw light of day...
For the poets, as I'm fond of saying, t'was always so. All of this in the midst of life. And life goes on (--and it does go on despite the traumatisation of survivors --so well and still do I recall the experience of 6 years ago when the fact of my son's death was like an imposed nakedness upon me -- worse : I felt skinned, scourged of my skin, wearing only the fact of his death, feeling as I stood there in the world that only I knew the catastrophe and no one could see what I was feeling)... Some of the life that goes on, for the poet, involves the readings & launches, gatherings of the clan... For the Melbourne poet these are all around town, constantly, if the handbills or emails I see are any indication.
Collected Works' Autumn season kicked off on the 12th March with the first of two new poetry collections published by Barry Scott's Transit Lounge : Kent McCarter's In the Hungry Middle of Here (--launched by Jenny Lea, whom I dont think I've seen since I dropped in on a Meanjin/Overland cricket match on the Domain Oval in South Yarra --early 90s? --I'm not sure whether she was playing or barracking but we chatted at tea in amongst the trestle tables & eskies --and what a dynamo was Meanjin's skipper, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, clapping for attention, darting hither & thither in the field when he wasnt bowling --but that's another story!), & Jennifer Mackenzie's Borobudur (launched by Tim Lindsey from the Asia Law Centre) on the 20th. Good attendances for both, more local poets at McCarter's, lots of Asian Studies people at Mackenzie's.
It's a truism in the Melbourne writing & performance community now that with the scene's current proliferation there are always going to be new names, poets one hasnt previously encountered. Blurbs from Gig Ryan & CWC for McCarter underlined my ignorance. Conversely, my blurb for Jenny Mackenzie attests a long acquaintance with author & family punctuated for the times she lived in China.
I remember twenty years ago Jennifer thinking of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights as a potential publisher of her Borobudur project. This must have been canvassed around about 1985 since that was when Robert Kenny's Rigmarole Books withdrew from the fray, having to decline such new writers as Brian Castro as well as foreclosing what had become a new writing stable including John Scott, Anna Couani, Ken Taylor, Ken Bolton, Chris Barnett, Ania Walwicz, John Anderson, Laurie Duggan, Walter Billeter, Kenny himself & yours truly. Who knows how it might have developed had personal & financial conditions played out differently? Rigmarole might now still have been the major small-press in Australia that one or two publishers in North America survived sufficiently long to become over there. But then again, gaps are inevitably filled and the culture is always changing, implying different aesthetical & political imperatives for different times. Rigmarole in the mid to late 80s would have been a natural home for Borobudur. While congratulating Jenny Mackenzie's tenacity and sighing with her At last, at last, one realizes it was more the case of putting something aside than of battling for twenty years; even so, twenty years is quite a hiatus.
A note now on Tim Lindsey's comments (overwhelmingly in the poet's favour)... Inevitably it was an Asian Studies/Foreign Affairs appreciation of the book as a cultural-political object --that is, Mackenzie's poem was read as a long overdue Australian translation of a classic Javanese story subsuming crucial aspects of that tradition, a belated but worthy act reflecting Australian recognition of the antiquity & authority of an important geopolitical neighbour.
Lindsey's pitch was not uninteresting --indeed, in the context of an exotic literary publication, his political & economic language was an instructive counterpoint. However, as I quipped to him later, I'd contend Indonesian-Australian relations, as with East-West relations in general, are a two-way street. Interesting that Australian ignorance of Javanese epic is supposedly indicative of an Australian know-nothing arrogance which will marginalise us in the future; yet the lay observation of the Asian neighbours' voracious appetite for Western popular forms, from democracy & personal freedoms to t-shirts & rock & roll, is unmentioned. Actually, Western translation of Asian literary & religious classics is the typical form of the Anglo-European interaction with Asia over a very long period, and as fast as we gobble up their elite texts so do they our popular ones.
It also occurred to me last year, after meeting a Singaporean poet & academic, that his expertise in modern British poetry, from Hardy to the present, surely curries our conception of the post-colonial! Furthermore, the considerable East-West collaboration of artists & writers, including Australian & Asian, in my opinion significantly corrects the postcolonial ideological cliche. I offered Tim Lindsey the examples of Sandy Fitts (whose View from the Lucky Hotel (Five Islands Press, '08) has won this year's Anne Elder Prize for a first collection) & Jane Gibbian (Ardent is her first full collection, published by Giramondo Press, '08) as Aussie poets redeeming quality collaboration from their trips to Vietnam. I also mentioned to him Cathy O'Brien's description of her meeting in Vientiane, Laos with an Australian colleague's partner, the Iraqui poet Basim Furat, residing there after a spell in New Zealand where, according to Mark Pirie, he had impressed the local scene. They may well collaborate in the future. For me a tiny but interesting example of the hybridization increasingly possible in global culture.
Of course, violent displacement is also increasing & is one obvious explanation of such unlikely crosscurrents. Yet let's recall Ford Madox Ford's witty definition of English culture, against the xenophobia of his day, as the happy result of "successive periods of unrest amongst the Continental peoples".
_________________________________________________________
Kris Hemensley
March/May/June 4 '09
Thursday, December 4, 2008
THREE FUNERALS AND A BIRTHDAY
1
An Open Letter to Corinne Cantrill, in the aftermath of her 80th Birthday Celebration, at La Mama Theatre, Carlton, November 9th, 2008
Dear Corinne,
We came to praise you --and do. The strains of the traditional "Happy Birthday" & "For she's a jolly good fellow" and the cheers raised in your honour as you hovered over the cake, still ring in our ears... I anticipated bumping into so many people associated with you (--and in this instance, 'you' includes Arthur &, of course, Ivor, as well as your magazine, Cantrill's Filmnotes, & your events & programmes principally at La Mama & your former home in Brunswick Road) --and I did meet a few of these erstwhile supporters, like Michael Lee, John Flaus, Jude Telford (who was also representing the late Bernie O'Regan), and didnt I hear Solrun Hoaas's name spoken as we took our seats?
You said that one of the reasons for closing your magazine, apart from loss of AFC funding, was the burden of recording the seemingly endless succession of deaths of friends & colleagues. Yet, I must say, given relatively long & stable life, doesnt one become a memorialist, a custodian of at least the memories of our friends' works & lives? But the magazine wasnt, to my mind, burdened by that aspect. It brimmed with filmmakers' contributions & critical commentary; it brought all the news a little mag, profuse with colour & b & w reproductions, could hold. Of course, the deaths of friends is always sad, but death itself is the tragic penumbra of all human life & endeavour and the definitive element of the wonderful cycle we express & project ourselves within... So when you then disparaged your work as a filmmaker because, you said, of its inconsequentiality in this doomed world --the end of life as we know it, global warning, climate change, environmental destruction, et al --I have to disagree.
You wouldnt have seen me shaking my head in the audience but hear me now. Calamity is what it is but surely cant be a conceptual surprise; it's the proverbial wake-up call and only ever unseats illusion. One year, five, ten? --you predicted the time-frame for this end of the world. Who knows? Whoever did? People drop off the perch anytime, anywhen --and the perch itself drops off some time (the natural process or a cataclysm). Not knowing when was always the situation. That's what highlights the beauty of our art & craft, since nothing produced lasts forever. Whatever the degree of human responsibility for climate change (--and lately I've been rereading Welsh poet & environmentalist, John Barnie, on this theme, in his book No Hiding Place : Essays on the new nature and poetry (University of Wales Press, 1996), which confirms me in a kind of cheerful fatalism, encouraging my amused wonderment at the miraculous place of human life within the deepest workings of geological time), I'd have to ask you Corinne, when was your film work ever political in that literal sense? How & when did you conceive of your extensive colour-separation experiments, for example, or your major landscape works ("film-form/land-form" as you called them), as politically effective statements? Or, to put it another way, what was your political conception of these consummately visual experiences, perceptional analyses if you like, often meditative in the way they induced a state of mind akin to wide-awake dreaming? How could your films have been 'all for nothing' when the something your statement supposes has more to do with social-political documentary than anything seen in your work?
Perhaps you were teasing us into consideration of the art & politics question (which never goes away & perhaps shouldnt for the clarification that attending to it always brings)? I've been there myself recently, responding to comments by John Berger, extracted from his essay, The Hour of Poetry, by Robyn Rowland for the on-line magazine, Zest, she edits for the Australian Poetry Centre. Hard to decipher exactly what Berger was calling for in his 1982 piece : an art of witness & testimony yet somehow not guaranteed by individuality, which is how I understood his valorisation of 'totality' and relegation of the 'sentimental' in his quip, "sentimentality always pleads for an exemption, for something which is divisible". For Berger it seems it isnt the individual & the complex of eccentricity realized as such but "poetry that makes language care because it renders everything intimate." It's as though poetry, per se, is intimate (and other forms not?), when the fact surely is that the art is made intimate by the poet's particularity & insistence on peculiarity (that is, detail & angle) whereby poem, in this case, rises to the ineffable, if that be the statement of the whole (--i cant bear to use the term 'totality' after Berger's political tar-&-feathering!), but only & always through the only-ness of an individual accent, and not the general. We're talking about that partiality which is voice and has to be to break through what every poet under the sun hears as hubub ( Berger's undifferentiated 'language') before experiencing the poem's rising up into song, as though the striving voice in each poem recognizes the chorus to which it belongs! The personal is always the pitch of it, never the general!
I remember the late John Anderson, to whom I introduced you Corinne as I did your work to him, confessing his confusion as to whether he could achieve more as an environmental activist than a poet. His poetry, he implied, was written to raise awareness of the sacred beauty & ecological importance of, say, the eucalypts; but, he anguished, could his time & energy be better spent physically preventing their destruction? I didnt understand the mutual exclusivity within his question. What prevents the poet from also being an activist? But neither did I accept the implication that art, whatever its literal subject, was subordinate to political action.
In 1979-80, I broadcast a series of Melbourne letters for ABC radio's Books & Writing programme. On one of these I announced "the end of the world, the new world" (which sounds a bit Orson Welles-ish now)... I remember being misunderstood, as though I were nihilistically clamouring for the end or giving up the good fight. Tom Shapcott & I think Dorothy Green, wrote to encourage me away from what they assumed was my defeatism & depression in the face of that time's political crisis. I probably contributed to the misconception because my sense then of the condition of the poet, let alone of the world, was undeveloped --like many of my friends & colleagues, I spoke out of the tension between the aesthetics garnered by an avant-gardist & the politics my left-wingism proposed; though acquainted with it, I hadnt yet recovered the religious or philosophical perspective I enjoy now. At that time --and it's thirty years ago already!-- I felt that because of the threat of nuclear war (recall Carl Sagan & the acceptance by both the American & Soviet sides of his 'nuclear winter' thesis?), the condition of the world we lived & made art in had changed : the ability to think the unthinkable, that is the end of the world, had created a new condition. Whatever happened, we now lived in a new world. I have come to think, though, that this was always so : crisis is the fact of it, masked for many years sometimes, and then painfully revealed again for what it is. For the apocalypse was always adjacent. No life without a death might be the moral to assuage personal grief but speaks also for the vast non-human time described by geologists of this earth & astronomers & physicists of the universe. It's all there, isnt it, in the ancient Chinese, from Arthur Waley's translation : "Yung-men said to Meng Ch'ang-chun (d 279 BC), 'Does it not grieve you to think that a hundred years hence this terrace will be cast down?' Ch'ang-chun wept."
Though I doubt your maths, Corinne, regarding the time-line of the beginning of the end (one year, five, ten, before we suffocate on the stench of the dead krill, rising from the dead oceans to the centre of the Australian desert), how is this supposed to invalidate art & artist? The noble krill notwithstanding, when wasnt the apocalypse upon us? Poet, novelist, artist, filmmaker as historian, witness, chronicler, singer of what-is, protester of what shouldnt-be : such roles are well known. But let's not neglect or disqualify the art of the art, of the poem, of the film. Dont sacrifice it to the anxiety to which activism responds. Dont lose heart! Believe with Wallace Stevens in "the heavens full of colours and the constellations of sound", whatever the semantic content! Believe in your life, believe in your life's work. Believe like your teacher, Harry Hooton, in this great adventure of life!
Happy birthday, and may there be many more!
All best wishes, Kris Hemensley
(11-17th, November,'08)
2
+
Mark Zenner passed away today after illness. A great reader of literature (poetry & prose), and a keen eye on contemporary cinema. He made short films and was a contributor to Senses of Cinema. We mourn him.
R.I.P. 3rd September, '08
[According to Bill Mousoulis, Mark Zenner had serious health problems in recent years. He was hospitalized in February, '08, recovered, then returned to hospital in August. He was being looked after by Sam Pupillo assisted by Daron Davies. As Bill says, "He was quite a character, fierce & unique."
At Collected Works Bookshop, I thought of him as the Russian-American, because of his accent and his literary taste. He valued Nabokov as much as Robert Lowell. He was erudite, opinionated & passionate. He coughed, smoked, spat contempt, chuckled with deep literary pleasure. He loved the art of cinema and hated the industry. His voluminous essay on Bresson is published on-line in Senses of Cinema; footage from unfinished films of his own (including a moth being eaten by ants) have been incorporated in films of Bill Mousoulis. We hope for a fuller biography of this enigmatic man in due course.]
3
+
We mourn Don Grant, a friend of this bookshop, a Scot & great enthusiast for Scottish poetry,Gaelic music & poetry, who was an artist & printmaker, a friend of artists & lover of the arts, passed away October 21st,'08 in Tatura, Victoria.
R.I.P.
[from an e-mail to Clinton Cook, October 23rd, '08 : "As I'd already shared with Julia [Harman] a couple of weeks or so ago, my anxiety for him whenever he climbed the creaking metal ladder to reach the highest shelf of the Scottish section of the bookshop. Happily never an accident. [In her email of 30th September, Julia wrote, "I can imagine Don searching in the heights for hidden treasures! I vaguely remember him climbing the ladder to the top of his own bookshelves when he knew there was something which would be of particular interest to me!"] He'd be looking for Iain Crichton Smith or Sorley Maclean, one or other of the Gaelic poets, of whom we spoke, especially after I'd begun revisiting Britain, late '80s, through the '90s. He presented me once with tapes, he'd made from his own collection of records, of such Scottish poets as Hugh McDiarmid, Sorley Maclean, Norman McCaig, & Irish poets Austin Clarke, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, & also the wonderful pipes of Seumus MacNeill & John MacFadyen. He may have first met Retta & I at Collected Works Bookshop via Julia, though intrepid bookman that he was, may also have simply discovered us on his city rounds. We were always aware of Julia's regard for him &, of course, of his championing of her as artist, printmaker let alone friend. John Ryrie was another mutual acquaintance for whom Don had great regard. After our boy Tim had visited Berlin, in the mid '90s, once with the Powder Monkeys, once solo, Don gave us a map-book of Berlin to pass on for what he assumed would be Tim's further visits. Retta & I remember him as a softly spoken gentleman, a lover of poetry, music, art, who brought his own stillness into the increasingly busy & noisy city world. Retta & I hope you can give him a great send off. Best wishes, condolences, Kris."]
4
+
Jacob Rosenberg has died. His funeral today, 31st October,'08, at Springvale. Poet, story-teller, memoirist; accomplished in Yiddish & English.
*
"Arm in arm we walk, but we walk apart
Will the horizon ever let us be?
Can we expel the ruins of our heart?"
(from My Father's Silence)
[The article on Jacob Rosenberg by Jason Steiger and the obituary by Jacob's editor & dear friend, Alex Skovron, both published in recent weeks in The Age newspaper, comprehensively describe his life & work. Having only recently viewed him on television appearing in a documentary about the international project to translate a particular Holocaust survivor's chronicle, written in Yiddish, of which he was one of the willing translators, it was a surprise then to hear of his death. I only have a few personal memories... The new & self-publishing author trying to flog us his wares back in the late 80s, early 90s, when the Shop was on the first floor of Flinders Way Arcade. He was persistent in the initial placement and the follow-up! Late 90s I remember discussing with him a new & younger poet's contention that poetry didnt or didnt have to mean anything (Wallace Stevens would have concurred), but what got up his nose was her example of Paul Celan. No meaning in Celan? Jacob was horrified. There are a thousand articles on Celan's Death Fugue alone! he said, shaking his head in exasperation. I reviewed his collection, Behind the Moon (Five Islands Press), in ABR, #237 (Dec.01/Jan.02), and quote here the opening & concluding lines. "Seamless with his two previous collections, Behind the Moon is Jacob Rosenberg's potted autobiography of a survivor of Lodz and Auschwitz, delivered from the hell, of which he writes with the kindness of an angel, into the heaven that Melbourne must then logically be. To be the poet of reality and not self-delusion is his commission. The trouble he contends with is that his present is posthumous, for the contemporary world could never be charged with such reality. Heaven doesn't exist. (....) Simplicity, concision, so as not to offend the subject with anything remotely resembling ornament : Rosenberg's poetry of the place and the condition 'where language died for very fear of words'."
R. I. P.]
4th December, 2008
________________________________________________________________
An Open Letter to Corinne Cantrill, in the aftermath of her 80th Birthday Celebration, at La Mama Theatre, Carlton, November 9th, 2008
Dear Corinne,
We came to praise you --and do. The strains of the traditional "Happy Birthday" & "For she's a jolly good fellow" and the cheers raised in your honour as you hovered over the cake, still ring in our ears... I anticipated bumping into so many people associated with you (--and in this instance, 'you' includes Arthur &, of course, Ivor, as well as your magazine, Cantrill's Filmnotes, & your events & programmes principally at La Mama & your former home in Brunswick Road) --and I did meet a few of these erstwhile supporters, like Michael Lee, John Flaus, Jude Telford (who was also representing the late Bernie O'Regan), and didnt I hear Solrun Hoaas's name spoken as we took our seats?
You said that one of the reasons for closing your magazine, apart from loss of AFC funding, was the burden of recording the seemingly endless succession of deaths of friends & colleagues. Yet, I must say, given relatively long & stable life, doesnt one become a memorialist, a custodian of at least the memories of our friends' works & lives? But the magazine wasnt, to my mind, burdened by that aspect. It brimmed with filmmakers' contributions & critical commentary; it brought all the news a little mag, profuse with colour & b & w reproductions, could hold. Of course, the deaths of friends is always sad, but death itself is the tragic penumbra of all human life & endeavour and the definitive element of the wonderful cycle we express & project ourselves within... So when you then disparaged your work as a filmmaker because, you said, of its inconsequentiality in this doomed world --the end of life as we know it, global warning, climate change, environmental destruction, et al --I have to disagree.
You wouldnt have seen me shaking my head in the audience but hear me now. Calamity is what it is but surely cant be a conceptual surprise; it's the proverbial wake-up call and only ever unseats illusion. One year, five, ten? --you predicted the time-frame for this end of the world. Who knows? Whoever did? People drop off the perch anytime, anywhen --and the perch itself drops off some time (the natural process or a cataclysm). Not knowing when was always the situation. That's what highlights the beauty of our art & craft, since nothing produced lasts forever. Whatever the degree of human responsibility for climate change (--and lately I've been rereading Welsh poet & environmentalist, John Barnie, on this theme, in his book No Hiding Place : Essays on the new nature and poetry (University of Wales Press, 1996), which confirms me in a kind of cheerful fatalism, encouraging my amused wonderment at the miraculous place of human life within the deepest workings of geological time), I'd have to ask you Corinne, when was your film work ever political in that literal sense? How & when did you conceive of your extensive colour-separation experiments, for example, or your major landscape works ("film-form/land-form" as you called them), as politically effective statements? Or, to put it another way, what was your political conception of these consummately visual experiences, perceptional analyses if you like, often meditative in the way they induced a state of mind akin to wide-awake dreaming? How could your films have been 'all for nothing' when the something your statement supposes has more to do with social-political documentary than anything seen in your work?
Perhaps you were teasing us into consideration of the art & politics question (which never goes away & perhaps shouldnt for the clarification that attending to it always brings)? I've been there myself recently, responding to comments by John Berger, extracted from his essay, The Hour of Poetry, by Robyn Rowland for the on-line magazine, Zest, she edits for the Australian Poetry Centre. Hard to decipher exactly what Berger was calling for in his 1982 piece : an art of witness & testimony yet somehow not guaranteed by individuality, which is how I understood his valorisation of 'totality' and relegation of the 'sentimental' in his quip, "sentimentality always pleads for an exemption, for something which is divisible". For Berger it seems it isnt the individual & the complex of eccentricity realized as such but "poetry that makes language care because it renders everything intimate." It's as though poetry, per se, is intimate (and other forms not?), when the fact surely is that the art is made intimate by the poet's particularity & insistence on peculiarity (that is, detail & angle) whereby poem, in this case, rises to the ineffable, if that be the statement of the whole (--i cant bear to use the term 'totality' after Berger's political tar-&-feathering!), but only & always through the only-ness of an individual accent, and not the general. We're talking about that partiality which is voice and has to be to break through what every poet under the sun hears as hubub ( Berger's undifferentiated 'language') before experiencing the poem's rising up into song, as though the striving voice in each poem recognizes the chorus to which it belongs! The personal is always the pitch of it, never the general!
I remember the late John Anderson, to whom I introduced you Corinne as I did your work to him, confessing his confusion as to whether he could achieve more as an environmental activist than a poet. His poetry, he implied, was written to raise awareness of the sacred beauty & ecological importance of, say, the eucalypts; but, he anguished, could his time & energy be better spent physically preventing their destruction? I didnt understand the mutual exclusivity within his question. What prevents the poet from also being an activist? But neither did I accept the implication that art, whatever its literal subject, was subordinate to political action.
In 1979-80, I broadcast a series of Melbourne letters for ABC radio's Books & Writing programme. On one of these I announced "the end of the world, the new world" (which sounds a bit Orson Welles-ish now)... I remember being misunderstood, as though I were nihilistically clamouring for the end or giving up the good fight. Tom Shapcott & I think Dorothy Green, wrote to encourage me away from what they assumed was my defeatism & depression in the face of that time's political crisis. I probably contributed to the misconception because my sense then of the condition of the poet, let alone of the world, was undeveloped --like many of my friends & colleagues, I spoke out of the tension between the aesthetics garnered by an avant-gardist & the politics my left-wingism proposed; though acquainted with it, I hadnt yet recovered the religious or philosophical perspective I enjoy now. At that time --and it's thirty years ago already!-- I felt that because of the threat of nuclear war (recall Carl Sagan & the acceptance by both the American & Soviet sides of his 'nuclear winter' thesis?), the condition of the world we lived & made art in had changed : the ability to think the unthinkable, that is the end of the world, had created a new condition. Whatever happened, we now lived in a new world. I have come to think, though, that this was always so : crisis is the fact of it, masked for many years sometimes, and then painfully revealed again for what it is. For the apocalypse was always adjacent. No life without a death might be the moral to assuage personal grief but speaks also for the vast non-human time described by geologists of this earth & astronomers & physicists of the universe. It's all there, isnt it, in the ancient Chinese, from Arthur Waley's translation : "Yung-men said to Meng Ch'ang-chun (d 279 BC), 'Does it not grieve you to think that a hundred years hence this terrace will be cast down?' Ch'ang-chun wept."
Though I doubt your maths, Corinne, regarding the time-line of the beginning of the end (one year, five, ten, before we suffocate on the stench of the dead krill, rising from the dead oceans to the centre of the Australian desert), how is this supposed to invalidate art & artist? The noble krill notwithstanding, when wasnt the apocalypse upon us? Poet, novelist, artist, filmmaker as historian, witness, chronicler, singer of what-is, protester of what shouldnt-be : such roles are well known. But let's not neglect or disqualify the art of the art, of the poem, of the film. Dont sacrifice it to the anxiety to which activism responds. Dont lose heart! Believe with Wallace Stevens in "the heavens full of colours and the constellations of sound", whatever the semantic content! Believe in your life, believe in your life's work. Believe like your teacher, Harry Hooton, in this great adventure of life!
Happy birthday, and may there be many more!
All best wishes, Kris Hemensley
(11-17th, November,'08)
2
+
Mark Zenner passed away today after illness. A great reader of literature (poetry & prose), and a keen eye on contemporary cinema. He made short films and was a contributor to Senses of Cinema. We mourn him.
R.I.P. 3rd September, '08
[According to Bill Mousoulis, Mark Zenner had serious health problems in recent years. He was hospitalized in February, '08, recovered, then returned to hospital in August. He was being looked after by Sam Pupillo assisted by Daron Davies. As Bill says, "He was quite a character, fierce & unique."
At Collected Works Bookshop, I thought of him as the Russian-American, because of his accent and his literary taste. He valued Nabokov as much as Robert Lowell. He was erudite, opinionated & passionate. He coughed, smoked, spat contempt, chuckled with deep literary pleasure. He loved the art of cinema and hated the industry. His voluminous essay on Bresson is published on-line in Senses of Cinema; footage from unfinished films of his own (including a moth being eaten by ants) have been incorporated in films of Bill Mousoulis. We hope for a fuller biography of this enigmatic man in due course.]
3
+
We mourn Don Grant, a friend of this bookshop, a Scot & great enthusiast for Scottish poetry,Gaelic music & poetry, who was an artist & printmaker, a friend of artists & lover of the arts, passed away October 21st,'08 in Tatura, Victoria.
R.I.P.
[from an e-mail to Clinton Cook, October 23rd, '08 : "As I'd already shared with Julia [Harman] a couple of weeks or so ago, my anxiety for him whenever he climbed the creaking metal ladder to reach the highest shelf of the Scottish section of the bookshop. Happily never an accident. [In her email of 30th September, Julia wrote, "I can imagine Don searching in the heights for hidden treasures! I vaguely remember him climbing the ladder to the top of his own bookshelves when he knew there was something which would be of particular interest to me!"] He'd be looking for Iain Crichton Smith or Sorley Maclean, one or other of the Gaelic poets, of whom we spoke, especially after I'd begun revisiting Britain, late '80s, through the '90s. He presented me once with tapes, he'd made from his own collection of records, of such Scottish poets as Hugh McDiarmid, Sorley Maclean, Norman McCaig, & Irish poets Austin Clarke, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, & also the wonderful pipes of Seumus MacNeill & John MacFadyen. He may have first met Retta & I at Collected Works Bookshop via Julia, though intrepid bookman that he was, may also have simply discovered us on his city rounds. We were always aware of Julia's regard for him &, of course, of his championing of her as artist, printmaker let alone friend. John Ryrie was another mutual acquaintance for whom Don had great regard. After our boy Tim had visited Berlin, in the mid '90s, once with the Powder Monkeys, once solo, Don gave us a map-book of Berlin to pass on for what he assumed would be Tim's further visits. Retta & I remember him as a softly spoken gentleman, a lover of poetry, music, art, who brought his own stillness into the increasingly busy & noisy city world. Retta & I hope you can give him a great send off. Best wishes, condolences, Kris."]
4
+
Jacob Rosenberg has died. His funeral today, 31st October,'08, at Springvale. Poet, story-teller, memoirist; accomplished in Yiddish & English.
*
"Arm in arm we walk, but we walk apart
Will the horizon ever let us be?
Can we expel the ruins of our heart?"
(from My Father's Silence)
[The article on Jacob Rosenberg by Jason Steiger and the obituary by Jacob's editor & dear friend, Alex Skovron, both published in recent weeks in The Age newspaper, comprehensively describe his life & work. Having only recently viewed him on television appearing in a documentary about the international project to translate a particular Holocaust survivor's chronicle, written in Yiddish, of which he was one of the willing translators, it was a surprise then to hear of his death. I only have a few personal memories... The new & self-publishing author trying to flog us his wares back in the late 80s, early 90s, when the Shop was on the first floor of Flinders Way Arcade. He was persistent in the initial placement and the follow-up! Late 90s I remember discussing with him a new & younger poet's contention that poetry didnt or didnt have to mean anything (Wallace Stevens would have concurred), but what got up his nose was her example of Paul Celan. No meaning in Celan? Jacob was horrified. There are a thousand articles on Celan's Death Fugue alone! he said, shaking his head in exasperation. I reviewed his collection, Behind the Moon (Five Islands Press), in ABR, #237 (Dec.01/Jan.02), and quote here the opening & concluding lines. "Seamless with his two previous collections, Behind the Moon is Jacob Rosenberg's potted autobiography of a survivor of Lodz and Auschwitz, delivered from the hell, of which he writes with the kindness of an angel, into the heaven that Melbourne must then logically be. To be the poet of reality and not self-delusion is his commission. The trouble he contends with is that his present is posthumous, for the contemporary world could never be charged with such reality. Heaven doesn't exist. (....) Simplicity, concision, so as not to offend the subject with anything remotely resembling ornament : Rosenberg's poetry of the place and the condition 'where language died for very fear of words'."
R. I. P.]
4th December, 2008
________________________________________________________________
Sunday, November 23, 2008
TIM HEMENSLEY'S BIRTHDAY
[TIM HEMENSLEY'S JOURNAL, '99-2000]
Monday, 29/11/99
...So, me Birthday's been & gone --much w/out incident, really... i spose by one's 28th, 'specially after going thru' all the shit-ups, downs & in-betweenies --that i have over the last few years in partic., but over my entire life-span in general, just the mere fact of having SURVIVED to 'nother year is cause enough for celebration, making the actual Birthday itself kinda insignificant... not to say that celebrating yer actual day-of-entree to this here planet & life is necessarily something one "gets over" (cue that hideous contempo trendy turn of phrase -- used for everything from train rides to rock gigs --"i'm over it now"... kee-rist!! Hearing folks say that makes me wanna PUKE!), rather that, at least This Year -- & this time 'round, i was content enough to not feel TOO let-down or disappointed or distracted by not celebrating in "traditional" B-day mode (e.g. : party('s), or other such type o'stuff). Main reason for this, me-thinks, is the fact that (as i briefly alluded to on the preceding page) for the first time since i became addicted in '96 & entered the slow-but-steady down-ward spiral of vicious circles & catch 22's that that particular situation necessitates by its v. nature (& it is INEVITABLE i now realise -- once you invite the Devil in, you gotta pay his dues -- as cliched as that may be, it's the only truth there is -- to use is, actually, to lose, & there's no other way it possibly can be, don't matter who you are or how "strong" ya fancy yourself to be mentally : once the monkey bites, it bites darn deep-ly... end of story)...
But i've digressed a little here... i believe what i was about to say was this : The main reason for my feelings of "contentment" as opposed to my usual state of frustration/dissatisfaction on turning another year older is that for the First time in years, my battle 'gainst the heroin monster has drawn to a temporary halt, due to my afore-mentioned joining up to the methadone program; it's still somewhat surprising to me that events progressed to the point that my only course of salvation should be via the methadone "avenue" -- so to speak --, a substance and system i've always been suspicious of & -- in theory at least -- opposed to (the concept of being a "state controlled junkie", addicted insidiously to a government sanctioned & administered drug no better than smack (in some scenarios, quite arguably WORSE, as a matter of fact) being a situation my determinedly Anarchistic nature has always found to be hypocritical & mebbe even EVIL...) , & one that even a matter of weeks ago i was in stern opposition to, but THERE YA GO; part of my problem, i've in fact come to appreciate, & part of the reason for the LONGEVITY of said problem, is the fact that i never realised -- nor would allow myself to accept -- how seriously i was actually ADDICTED... in the back of my mind lingered always -- even in the midst of the most glaringly obvious DESOLATION (: of mind, of spirit, of body) & physical DETERIORATION -- the almost Nietzsche-ian, self-serving logic that when all was said & done, i could just DUMP this DOPE-thingy & simply walk away unharmed... 'f course, THIS WAS NOT TO BE. But then, IS IT EVER? i mean, ol' W'm S. Burroughs --icon of JUNKIES thru'out the universe -- certainly didn't do any of his prodigious output of writing / thinking / creating during his first 15 years of smack-addlement, despite the myths (of his own making) that his classic NAKED LUNCH was written whilst addicted (it wasn't -- in fact, 'twas written/compiled under the influence of MAJOUN -- a pot/hash like substance) --&, "EXILE ON MAIN STREET" besides, Keith -- also a great myth-maker 'bout his own ability to create &/or FUNCTION even, under the most chemically adverse conditions, -- didn't produce anything of any comparable worth during his wasted years, either ... bringing me to my main point -- that Dope addiction equals naught but the DESTRUCTION, or at least the putting-on-ice, of one's creative faculties. ANYWAY -- we'll see how successful this 'done program is in terms of helping kick smack & the associated lifestyle (or LACK OF LIFE-style, as the case may be...) in the long term, but the initial results are something i feel very satisfied with -- so far, i feel my life is in a better state than ever -- already feeling better & more positive than i've felt in LONG TIME. & that can't be nothin' but a GOOD thing!
O.K. -- "W.C.W. MONDAY NITE NITRO" is on, so my attention's required ELSEWHERE!
More later! ...
___________________________________________________________________
[Posted today, 23rd November, 2008, on what would have been Tim's 37th birthday. "At the age of 37...", yeah yeah, sweet tune, sweet thought, and, regarding Tim, sad & happy memories.
Kris Hemensley.]
Monday, 29/11/99
...So, me Birthday's been & gone --much w/out incident, really... i spose by one's 28th, 'specially after going thru' all the shit-ups, downs & in-betweenies --that i have over the last few years in partic., but over my entire life-span in general, just the mere fact of having SURVIVED to 'nother year is cause enough for celebration, making the actual Birthday itself kinda insignificant... not to say that celebrating yer actual day-of-entree to this here planet & life is necessarily something one "gets over" (cue that hideous contempo trendy turn of phrase -- used for everything from train rides to rock gigs --"i'm over it now"... kee-rist!! Hearing folks say that makes me wanna PUKE!), rather that, at least This Year -- & this time 'round, i was content enough to not feel TOO let-down or disappointed or distracted by not celebrating in "traditional" B-day mode (e.g. : party('s), or other such type o'stuff). Main reason for this, me-thinks, is the fact that (as i briefly alluded to on the preceding page) for the first time since i became addicted in '96 & entered the slow-but-steady down-ward spiral of vicious circles & catch 22's that that particular situation necessitates by its v. nature (& it is INEVITABLE i now realise -- once you invite the Devil in, you gotta pay his dues -- as cliched as that may be, it's the only truth there is -- to use is, actually, to lose, & there's no other way it possibly can be, don't matter who you are or how "strong" ya fancy yourself to be mentally : once the monkey bites, it bites darn deep-ly... end of story)...
But i've digressed a little here... i believe what i was about to say was this : The main reason for my feelings of "contentment" as opposed to my usual state of frustration/dissatisfaction on turning another year older is that for the First time in years, my battle 'gainst the heroin monster has drawn to a temporary halt, due to my afore-mentioned joining up to the methadone program; it's still somewhat surprising to me that events progressed to the point that my only course of salvation should be via the methadone "avenue" -- so to speak --, a substance and system i've always been suspicious of & -- in theory at least -- opposed to (the concept of being a "state controlled junkie", addicted insidiously to a government sanctioned & administered drug no better than smack (in some scenarios, quite arguably WORSE, as a matter of fact) being a situation my determinedly Anarchistic nature has always found to be hypocritical & mebbe even EVIL...) , & one that even a matter of weeks ago i was in stern opposition to, but THERE YA GO; part of my problem, i've in fact come to appreciate, & part of the reason for the LONGEVITY of said problem, is the fact that i never realised -- nor would allow myself to accept -- how seriously i was actually ADDICTED... in the back of my mind lingered always -- even in the midst of the most glaringly obvious DESOLATION (: of mind, of spirit, of body) & physical DETERIORATION -- the almost Nietzsche-ian, self-serving logic that when all was said & done, i could just DUMP this DOPE-thingy & simply walk away unharmed... 'f course, THIS WAS NOT TO BE. But then, IS IT EVER? i mean, ol' W'm S. Burroughs --icon of JUNKIES thru'out the universe -- certainly didn't do any of his prodigious output of writing / thinking / creating during his first 15 years of smack-addlement, despite the myths (of his own making) that his classic NAKED LUNCH was written whilst addicted (it wasn't -- in fact, 'twas written/compiled under the influence of MAJOUN -- a pot/hash like substance) --&, "EXILE ON MAIN STREET" besides, Keith -- also a great myth-maker 'bout his own ability to create &/or FUNCTION even, under the most chemically adverse conditions, -- didn't produce anything of any comparable worth during his wasted years, either ... bringing me to my main point -- that Dope addiction equals naught but the DESTRUCTION, or at least the putting-on-ice, of one's creative faculties. ANYWAY -- we'll see how successful this 'done program is in terms of helping kick smack & the associated lifestyle (or LACK OF LIFE-style, as the case may be...) in the long term, but the initial results are something i feel very satisfied with -- so far, i feel my life is in a better state than ever -- already feeling better & more positive than i've felt in LONG TIME. & that can't be nothin' but a GOOD thing!
O.K. -- "W.C.W. MONDAY NITE NITRO" is on, so my attention's required ELSEWHERE!
More later! ...
___________________________________________________________________
[Posted today, 23rd November, 2008, on what would have been Tim's 37th birthday. "At the age of 37...", yeah yeah, sweet tune, sweet thought, and, regarding Tim, sad & happy memories.
Kris Hemensley.]
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
TIM HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE
SID SINGS : A RE-EXAMINATION & REVIEW
In the closing bars of the Great Rock'N'Roll Swindle's title track, Ten Pole Tudor (a welcome addition to the film, tho' a less than adequate replacement for Johnny Rotten, a position he was touted to be filling at the time - '79) shouts, "Sid Vicious - a rock'n'roll cliche," a slogan that came to pass as a summation &/or condemnation &/or epitath for the man, and stands (along with two posthumous tributes : "Sad Vacation" by Johnny Thunders & "Love Kills" by The Ramones) as the only musical acknowledgment of John Beverley's short existence on this wretched mortal coil. As for Sid's own musical legacy, apart from his few "contributions" to the above mentioned double sound-track L.P. (pedants will note that I'm including amongst these the live version of "Belsen was a gas" on which he indisputably plays bass - altho' credited on "Never Mind the Bollocks", it's commonly known that Sid's bass parts were played by Steve Jones or Glen Matlock on all Pistols recordings issued during his tenure with the band) & a handful of live bootlegs recorded from '77 to'78 with the Pistols, we're left with "Sid Sings" - a live L.P. of dubious quality issued by Virgin to cash in on his death in '79. Slim pickings, indeed, & not much to base a legend (even a "rock'n'roll cliche") on. Huh? Well, I'm here to tell you that that aint so, & that in my view "Sid Sings" (much derided in its day & almost universally forgotten/ignored now) is a fucking gas, if you'll pardon my French! In fact it's one of my favourite & most played records, from the time I had my Dad purchase it at Gaslight Records on the way home from his work in 1981 to the present day, & it's this very same scratchy, well-loved copy that I drag out to liven up every party I have & is in fact playing on my scratchy, well-loved stereo as I write this (at the god-forsaken hour of 2 in the morning, no less!). Due to its lack of credits, it's virtually impossible to know who the musicians on the L.P. are, tho' I've read numerous suppositions over the years. My own theory is, as the L.P. is culled from one (or more) of the four Max's Kansas City gigs (booked by Sid's "manager" of the period, Nancy Spungen) Sid played in late '78, early '79, the rhythm section is (definitely) Jerry Nolan, of Dolls/Heartbreakers infamy, on drums, Arthur Kane (ex-Dolls) on bass (I'm guessing here - photos exist of the "Killer" on stage with Sid at Max's) & as for the guitar - someone who does a very good Johnny Thunders impersonation - I've heard Clash's Mick Jones mentioned, but I'm placing my bets on Walter Lure - surely Jones would've been too busy w/ the Clash's own vigorous touring & recording schedule in 1979 to be bothered slumming it with the cream of N.Y.'s junk-rock crop at this stage of the game. As you'd guess from the players on the L.P., the set-list leans very heavily towards Dolls' & Heartbreakers' songs, but who's complaining? Some of these uppity & straight-arse contemporary punkers should take notice of this L.P., 'cos in my humble opinion, this is a close to unbeatable selection of bona-fide punk rock classics, which raises another important issue. "Sid Sings" single-handedly introduced me to the work of some of the genre's pioneers & is still seen by me as a virtual "classic" punk text-book. This was the place I first heard "Born to Lose", "Chinese Rocks" & "Take a Chance on Me" by the Heartbreakers; these were the first versions of "Search & Destroy" & "I Wanna Be Your Dog" by the Stooges I ever heard. It was this version of the Dolls' "Chatterbox" that I transcribed (I'd assumed Thunders' own version on the 2nd Dolls L.P., "Too Much Too Soon", was sung by a female vocalist, making it (perversely) unintelligible to my untrained, male-dominated 9 year old ears!)(side note : I'd read that female singing group The Stillettos backed up the Dolls, so at this point in my life I imagined it was Debbie Harry singing "Chatterbox"! or maybe that was just wishful thinking : remember, that was the era of "Heart of Glass" & "Rapture", & it wasnt easy getting my primary school chums to tune into this punk rock garbage I was getting into... Perhaps if that spunk Blondie was in on this racket I'd gain some schoolyard cred!!). The album's only dud moment, to my ears, is the studio out-take of "My way" - presented in this setting minus Steve Jones' ripping guitar track, & Sid's greatest Rotten-inspired vocal of the more commonly known version (off, once again, "Swindle"). The one original, perhaps the only song Vicious actually wrote, "Belsen Was a Gas" (& introduced fittingly by the man himself as "Belsen Was a Gas - By Sid Vicious", making a mockery of the bogus label-credits, which suggest the rest of the Pistols to 've been co-writers of the track... Anyone who's read Jon Savage's exhaustive book, "England's Dreaming", will no doubt have noticed the original lyric sheet of the song, originally composed for Sid's 1st band, Flowers of Romance, in Sid's handwriting, reproduced within) is presented in the Ramones/Heartbreakers style one imagines Sid originally conceived the song to be &, as such, rocks along very nicely indeed. As does the entire album by the way. Not convinced? Here's some other reasons why Hemensley considers "Sid Sings!" to be such a clas-sick : great RAW AS SHIT low-fi sound quality, with loud guitars, & a primal rhythm section BIG BEAT that cuts thru the NOISE like a hot knife thru stubble. So, what have we got? Exciting, fun versions of GREAT rock'n'roll songs ("Something Else" shits on the "Swindle" studio version, & "I Wanna Be Your Dog" rocks with the kinda conviction only somebody with Sid's total lack of self-esteem & extreme nihilism could muster - not to mention a genuinely PROPULSIVE & gut-thudding bass performance : one note has never sounded so good!) by the Stooges, Dolls, Pistols, Heartbreakers, Eddie Cochran & The Monkees (a version of "Stepping-stone" every bit as good as the Pistols & better than the Heartbreakers in my estimation); oh, and one other important factor that used to be a prime consideration in this type of rock'n'roll - ATTITUDE. The type of attitude that may've made Sid "a rock'n'roll cliche", but a hell of a more entertaining one than some of those alleged "survivors" of the same era, who got out of their lives minus their integrity. "Sid Sings" is everything a live rock'n'roll record should be : raw, trashy, powerful, dirty-mouthed FUN. Turn it on, turn it up, TURN IT OUT!
--Tim Hemensley
[This piece written on front & back of a Commonwealth Employment Service letter to Tim, dated 27th February, 1997, advising him of changed date of appointment with the department's psychologist... I imagine Tim's "re-examination & review" of Sid Vicious as preempting the CES's own examination of himself!]
In the closing bars of the Great Rock'N'Roll Swindle's title track, Ten Pole Tudor (a welcome addition to the film, tho' a less than adequate replacement for Johnny Rotten, a position he was touted to be filling at the time - '79) shouts, "Sid Vicious - a rock'n'roll cliche," a slogan that came to pass as a summation &/or condemnation &/or epitath for the man, and stands (along with two posthumous tributes : "Sad Vacation" by Johnny Thunders & "Love Kills" by The Ramones) as the only musical acknowledgment of John Beverley's short existence on this wretched mortal coil. As for Sid's own musical legacy, apart from his few "contributions" to the above mentioned double sound-track L.P. (pedants will note that I'm including amongst these the live version of "Belsen was a gas" on which he indisputably plays bass - altho' credited on "Never Mind the Bollocks", it's commonly known that Sid's bass parts were played by Steve Jones or Glen Matlock on all Pistols recordings issued during his tenure with the band) & a handful of live bootlegs recorded from '77 to'78 with the Pistols, we're left with "Sid Sings" - a live L.P. of dubious quality issued by Virgin to cash in on his death in '79. Slim pickings, indeed, & not much to base a legend (even a "rock'n'roll cliche") on. Huh? Well, I'm here to tell you that that aint so, & that in my view "Sid Sings" (much derided in its day & almost universally forgotten/ignored now) is a fucking gas, if you'll pardon my French! In fact it's one of my favourite & most played records, from the time I had my Dad purchase it at Gaslight Records on the way home from his work in 1981 to the present day, & it's this very same scratchy, well-loved copy that I drag out to liven up every party I have & is in fact playing on my scratchy, well-loved stereo as I write this (at the god-forsaken hour of 2 in the morning, no less!). Due to its lack of credits, it's virtually impossible to know who the musicians on the L.P. are, tho' I've read numerous suppositions over the years. My own theory is, as the L.P. is culled from one (or more) of the four Max's Kansas City gigs (booked by Sid's "manager" of the period, Nancy Spungen) Sid played in late '78, early '79, the rhythm section is (definitely) Jerry Nolan, of Dolls/Heartbreakers infamy, on drums, Arthur Kane (ex-Dolls) on bass (I'm guessing here - photos exist of the "Killer" on stage with Sid at Max's) & as for the guitar - someone who does a very good Johnny Thunders impersonation - I've heard Clash's Mick Jones mentioned, but I'm placing my bets on Walter Lure - surely Jones would've been too busy w/ the Clash's own vigorous touring & recording schedule in 1979 to be bothered slumming it with the cream of N.Y.'s junk-rock crop at this stage of the game. As you'd guess from the players on the L.P., the set-list leans very heavily towards Dolls' & Heartbreakers' songs, but who's complaining? Some of these uppity & straight-arse contemporary punkers should take notice of this L.P., 'cos in my humble opinion, this is a close to unbeatable selection of bona-fide punk rock classics, which raises another important issue. "Sid Sings" single-handedly introduced me to the work of some of the genre's pioneers & is still seen by me as a virtual "classic" punk text-book. This was the place I first heard "Born to Lose", "Chinese Rocks" & "Take a Chance on Me" by the Heartbreakers; these were the first versions of "Search & Destroy" & "I Wanna Be Your Dog" by the Stooges I ever heard. It was this version of the Dolls' "Chatterbox" that I transcribed (I'd assumed Thunders' own version on the 2nd Dolls L.P., "Too Much Too Soon", was sung by a female vocalist, making it (perversely) unintelligible to my untrained, male-dominated 9 year old ears!)(side note : I'd read that female singing group The Stillettos backed up the Dolls, so at this point in my life I imagined it was Debbie Harry singing "Chatterbox"! or maybe that was just wishful thinking : remember, that was the era of "Heart of Glass" & "Rapture", & it wasnt easy getting my primary school chums to tune into this punk rock garbage I was getting into... Perhaps if that spunk Blondie was in on this racket I'd gain some schoolyard cred!!). The album's only dud moment, to my ears, is the studio out-take of "My way" - presented in this setting minus Steve Jones' ripping guitar track, & Sid's greatest Rotten-inspired vocal of the more commonly known version (off, once again, "Swindle"). The one original, perhaps the only song Vicious actually wrote, "Belsen Was a Gas" (& introduced fittingly by the man himself as "Belsen Was a Gas - By Sid Vicious", making a mockery of the bogus label-credits, which suggest the rest of the Pistols to 've been co-writers of the track... Anyone who's read Jon Savage's exhaustive book, "England's Dreaming", will no doubt have noticed the original lyric sheet of the song, originally composed for Sid's 1st band, Flowers of Romance, in Sid's handwriting, reproduced within) is presented in the Ramones/Heartbreakers style one imagines Sid originally conceived the song to be &, as such, rocks along very nicely indeed. As does the entire album by the way. Not convinced? Here's some other reasons why Hemensley considers "Sid Sings!" to be such a clas-sick : great RAW AS SHIT low-fi sound quality, with loud guitars, & a primal rhythm section BIG BEAT that cuts thru the NOISE like a hot knife thru stubble. So, what have we got? Exciting, fun versions of GREAT rock'n'roll songs ("Something Else" shits on the "Swindle" studio version, & "I Wanna Be Your Dog" rocks with the kinda conviction only somebody with Sid's total lack of self-esteem & extreme nihilism could muster - not to mention a genuinely PROPULSIVE & gut-thudding bass performance : one note has never sounded so good!) by the Stooges, Dolls, Pistols, Heartbreakers, Eddie Cochran & The Monkees (a version of "Stepping-stone" every bit as good as the Pistols & better than the Heartbreakers in my estimation); oh, and one other important factor that used to be a prime consideration in this type of rock'n'roll - ATTITUDE. The type of attitude that may've made Sid "a rock'n'roll cliche", but a hell of a more entertaining one than some of those alleged "survivors" of the same era, who got out of their lives minus their integrity. "Sid Sings" is everything a live rock'n'roll record should be : raw, trashy, powerful, dirty-mouthed FUN. Turn it on, turn it up, TURN IT OUT!
--Tim Hemensley
[This piece written on front & back of a Commonwealth Employment Service letter to Tim, dated 27th February, 1997, advising him of changed date of appointment with the department's psychologist... I imagine Tim's "re-examination & review" of Sid Vicious as preempting the CES's own examination of himself!]
Sunday, August 26, 2007
TIM HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE
From Tim Hemensley Diary, c December, 2000 / June, 2001
the biggest regret of my life --
in 1986, Johnny Thunders played at
Melbourne University & i couldnt go
(i had school the next day) --
echoes still through the fog
of memory & across the years;
16 years since then -- i've
lived my life around this event,
& even now the memory strikes me
as (blackly) humorous : i missed seeing
Johnny Thunders & his band (included
Jerry Nolan & Glen Matlock on bass, too)
'cos it was a sunday nite & my
folks figured i'd had plenty of
nites out lately & in my case
it was a sunday nite & i had school
the following day -- school that i
ultimately failed every subject
in & left as soon as i turned 17!
school that i have virtually
no memory of now -- nearly no GOOD
ones, anyway! yet i still kick
myself EVERY DAY for missing out
on seeing Johnny Thunders (& Band)
that nite 16 YEARS AGO.
& my recall of that nite comes
back as vividly as if it were
yesterday :
while Johnny Thunders & Band
played at Melbourne University,
i sat at home in my bedroom
(downstairs in the bungalow)
& played my New York Dolls tape
("too much, too soon") whilst smoking
a pack of cigarettes (a rarity for
me at that stage -- i neither enjoyed
cigarettes nor wanted to learn how to enjoy
them -- at 14 i considered tobacco to
be worth smoking only when mixed
w/ marijuana); my only consolation
on that crap evening was the vague
thought in the back of my mind -- "NEXT
TIME HE COMES OVER HERE... NEXT TIME I'LL
BE THERE" & we all know how that little
hope ends up!
no, i NEVER got to see Johnny Thunders --
not that nite or any other;
& tho' it is my "biggest regret in life",
it's also one of my most vivid teenage
memories -- a nite when i stared
disappointment in the face & attempted
to make do w/ the next best things
at hand! -- & as such
it brings a smile to my face as well
as a frown to my forehead! --
the eternal duality of existence
expressed in one fell swoop!! --
& i cherish it, this memory of
a gig NOT SEEN OR HEARD, in fact
MISSED ENTIRELY by me...
i cherish it -- as my memory,
& they can't take that away from me.
(January,2001)
the biggest regret of my life --
in 1986, Johnny Thunders played at
Melbourne University & i couldnt go
(i had school the next day) --
echoes still through the fog
of memory & across the years;
16 years since then -- i've
lived my life around this event,
& even now the memory strikes me
as (blackly) humorous : i missed seeing
Johnny Thunders & his band (included
Jerry Nolan & Glen Matlock on bass, too)
'cos it was a sunday nite & my
folks figured i'd had plenty of
nites out lately & in my case
it was a sunday nite & i had school
the following day -- school that i
ultimately failed every subject
in & left as soon as i turned 17!
school that i have virtually
no memory of now -- nearly no GOOD
ones, anyway! yet i still kick
myself EVERY DAY for missing out
on seeing Johnny Thunders (& Band)
that nite 16 YEARS AGO.
& my recall of that nite comes
back as vividly as if it were
yesterday :
while Johnny Thunders & Band
played at Melbourne University,
i sat at home in my bedroom
(downstairs in the bungalow)
& played my New York Dolls tape
("too much, too soon") whilst smoking
a pack of cigarettes (a rarity for
me at that stage -- i neither enjoyed
cigarettes nor wanted to learn how to enjoy
them -- at 14 i considered tobacco to
be worth smoking only when mixed
w/ marijuana); my only consolation
on that crap evening was the vague
thought in the back of my mind -- "NEXT
TIME HE COMES OVER HERE... NEXT TIME I'LL
BE THERE" & we all know how that little
hope ends up!
no, i NEVER got to see Johnny Thunders --
not that nite or any other;
& tho' it is my "biggest regret in life",
it's also one of my most vivid teenage
memories -- a nite when i stared
disappointment in the face & attempted
to make do w/ the next best things
at hand! -- & as such
it brings a smile to my face as well
as a frown to my forehead! --
the eternal duality of existence
expressed in one fell swoop!! --
& i cherish it, this memory of
a gig NOT SEEN OR HEARD, in fact
MISSED ENTIRELY by me...
i cherish it -- as my memory,
& they can't take that away from me.
(January,2001)
Sunday, May 27, 2007
KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, #6
LAUNCHING SPEECH FOR JOEL DEANE'S SUBTERRANEAN RADIO SONGS (published by INTERACTIVE PUBLICATIONS), AT THE VICTORIAN WRITERS' CENTRE, October 21st, 2005
I first read Joel in the 4th issue of the sad-to-say defunct Melbourne poetry mag, Salt Lick Quarterly. I was launching it --reemerging from a period of 'retirement'! I probably had Joel in mind when I commented upon the "poets of every type" publishing in the magazine, including, I said, "the no-type-at-all (who seem to me to be finding form for their spoken, spieling poems)"--
I have a memory of Joel, in a huddle with Retta on the bare boards at Dante's in Gertrude Street, saying he hoped he wasnt one of those 'non-poets'! But no, I hastened to console him, I was welcoming the non-affiliated poets & their new poems, and I sincerely meant that they were story-tellers coining forms --I wasnt disowning them at all --
At that time I didnt know Joel, and didnt have a handle on his poetics --but influencing my proposition was a feeling that the traditional pleasures of poetry, found in the music or shapeliness of the words & ideas, had to reaffirmed in order that there was a point in calling a story a story and a poem a poem! Ultimately the writer makes the call, whether or not satisfactory to the critic or the reader; but constructively raising the question is always to the good, especially in a time of wholesale relativism & the abandonment of specific value & distinction.
*
Conversation on the Midnight Stream (on page 18) --which is soft & limpid as the sleep-talk or dream-talk it emulates --is an unusual poem to be written in Melbourne in this time. Poets rarely stray from monologue --and here is this dialogue, as fleeting & confidential as nocturnal exchanges can be. "'Are you sleeping?' / 'I want to, / I've been trying to, / but I cannot / sleep.' / 'Don't worry. / Time's black tide will catch us soon, / then we'll both be sleeping.' // 'A welcome sleep?' / 'A welcome knowledge.' / 'I'd rather a welcome memory- // Like Ubud.' /"
Another kind of story is told on p32, Under Westgate, whose form resembles a James Dickey poem --that great poet of rage & rampage, --that is the poet most intimate to the energies of human occasions --
Joel's poem is the Melbourne auto-poem, par excellence. I'm probably the only person in this room who doesnt drive and has never driven --but why do I need to with this kind of literary experience? "As the lights slowly roll green to red and back again / we wait in the outside lane for our turn / and when it comes I gun it to the floor / Through first second third fourth then overdrive / with the landscape towering and throbbing through / my one-way mind at the speed of / but watch me now / double-clutch then handbrake slide into Lorimer Street / with the chassis squealing in expectation of / Never mind"
Of course it's a poem of a state of mind, of abandon & distress via the agency of the car.
This first book of Joel's poems is preceeded by his novel, Another, also published by David Reiter's Interactive Press [Queensland]. It's a book of short episodes, practically self-contained --they're almost like prose-poems, except that prose-poems arent usually full of action & dialogue.
I wonder if one could say : Joel's novel is written by a poet; his poetry by a novelist?
In the novel it's his ear for the music of the speech of the characters he's invented that impresses one. He creates a space --call it poetic --around their non-reflective interaction. He makes a musical construction of monosyllabic utterance, a musical theatre of a one-dimensional world.
In his poetry we would, traditionally, assume his ear, his rhythm, his cadence, his craft and then be ready to be surprised by the stories, reveries, snatches of conversation, dreams & day-dreams; and to be moved by his thought and his perspectives.
*
Because the first poem I read by Joel was Lager Pistol, for William Burroughs [as published in Salt Lick Quarterly], here in the book on p48, I always associate him with Burroughs & the Beats. Burroughs is the only major literary dedicatee in his book so perhaps one can assume a certain significance --
"We play William Tell.
What better way to mark Burroughs' passing
from Beat to truly beat, we decide over Tequila,
salt crystals and diamond hard methamphetamines."
(Talking with our Beat scholar acquaintance George Mouratides recently, I posed the question : What would the Beats make of the current political situation --international terrorism and the War on Terror including the Allies' war in Iraq? George said we knew what Ginsberg would think --others were less predictable --but coming out of Spengler (the author of The Decline of the West), Burroughs would say it was always doomed, the whole box & dice, no surprise. Kerouac & Corso maybe neo-cons we thought, to balance the leftism of Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg --but, and I said, it sems to me that Spengler's philosophy of history plus oodles of Buddhist & Catholic compassion is the relevant Beat attitude for the day!)
*
"For the members of my family; living & dead" writes Joel. He means the ancestors and the contemporary old ones & young ones. The hearts of all those who know Joel go out to him & Kirsten in respect of the tragedies that have befallen them... As a poet, Joel has no choice but to make wine of the tears of grief --he makes poems, he remembers his stillborn, his would-have-been children along with those who survived, indeed everyone who survives as Family.
From my own experience of being a parent and losing a grown-up son, I've learnt that dead does not mean cease to be. The world, as I said at Tim's funeral, is, after all, composed of the living & the dead. One carries one's dead child, as well as one's ancestors, within one until we too die...
The counter-culture biographer Miles describes Burroughs' Navaho sweat-lodge ceremony late in his life; the shaman praying, "Family, all one family, no matter what race we are from. All relatives together in a room."
Joel writes, "There is no country. Only family."
This epigram informs the major structure of Subterranean Radio Songs : the family, history, Australian place of the 1st half, South; and North, in which the poet-narrator is travelling abroad in the USA & Latin America, in Britain --an acutely felt & observed travel-diary but one constantly interjected by the concerns, the Angels & Demons of Family.
*
In a way it's all there in the first poem of the book, The Bridge at Avenel.
The crossing of water, the grave that water can be, the lure of crossing, the necessity (and I'm thinking now of the poetic rather than the economic or political necessity) --the necessity of crossing.
In this poem Joel Deane states, "I cannot find a way across" because of the particular reasons for that poem. But the poet will, --and certainly will attempt that crossing again & again in his career --a career begun tonight with this collection, which it is now my great pleasure to declare launched.
I first read Joel in the 4th issue of the sad-to-say defunct Melbourne poetry mag, Salt Lick Quarterly. I was launching it --reemerging from a period of 'retirement'! I probably had Joel in mind when I commented upon the "poets of every type" publishing in the magazine, including, I said, "the no-type-at-all (who seem to me to be finding form for their spoken, spieling poems)"--
I have a memory of Joel, in a huddle with Retta on the bare boards at Dante's in Gertrude Street, saying he hoped he wasnt one of those 'non-poets'! But no, I hastened to console him, I was welcoming the non-affiliated poets & their new poems, and I sincerely meant that they were story-tellers coining forms --I wasnt disowning them at all --
At that time I didnt know Joel, and didnt have a handle on his poetics --but influencing my proposition was a feeling that the traditional pleasures of poetry, found in the music or shapeliness of the words & ideas, had to reaffirmed in order that there was a point in calling a story a story and a poem a poem! Ultimately the writer makes the call, whether or not satisfactory to the critic or the reader; but constructively raising the question is always to the good, especially in a time of wholesale relativism & the abandonment of specific value & distinction.
*
Conversation on the Midnight Stream (on page 18) --which is soft & limpid as the sleep-talk or dream-talk it emulates --is an unusual poem to be written in Melbourne in this time. Poets rarely stray from monologue --and here is this dialogue, as fleeting & confidential as nocturnal exchanges can be. "'Are you sleeping?' / 'I want to, / I've been trying to, / but I cannot / sleep.' / 'Don't worry. / Time's black tide will catch us soon, / then we'll both be sleeping.' // 'A welcome sleep?' / 'A welcome knowledge.' / 'I'd rather a welcome memory- // Like Ubud.' /"
Another kind of story is told on p32, Under Westgate, whose form resembles a James Dickey poem --that great poet of rage & rampage, --that is the poet most intimate to the energies of human occasions --
Joel's poem is the Melbourne auto-poem, par excellence. I'm probably the only person in this room who doesnt drive and has never driven --but why do I need to with this kind of literary experience? "As the lights slowly roll green to red and back again / we wait in the outside lane for our turn / and when it comes I gun it to the floor / Through first second third fourth then overdrive / with the landscape towering and throbbing through / my one-way mind at the speed of / but watch me now / double-clutch then handbrake slide into Lorimer Street / with the chassis squealing in expectation of / Never mind"
Of course it's a poem of a state of mind, of abandon & distress via the agency of the car.
This first book of Joel's poems is preceeded by his novel, Another, also published by David Reiter's Interactive Press [Queensland]. It's a book of short episodes, practically self-contained --they're almost like prose-poems, except that prose-poems arent usually full of action & dialogue.
I wonder if one could say : Joel's novel is written by a poet; his poetry by a novelist?
In the novel it's his ear for the music of the speech of the characters he's invented that impresses one. He creates a space --call it poetic --around their non-reflective interaction. He makes a musical construction of monosyllabic utterance, a musical theatre of a one-dimensional world.
In his poetry we would, traditionally, assume his ear, his rhythm, his cadence, his craft and then be ready to be surprised by the stories, reveries, snatches of conversation, dreams & day-dreams; and to be moved by his thought and his perspectives.
*
Because the first poem I read by Joel was Lager Pistol, for William Burroughs [as published in Salt Lick Quarterly], here in the book on p48, I always associate him with Burroughs & the Beats. Burroughs is the only major literary dedicatee in his book so perhaps one can assume a certain significance --
"We play William Tell.
What better way to mark Burroughs' passing
from Beat to truly beat, we decide over Tequila,
salt crystals and diamond hard methamphetamines."
(Talking with our Beat scholar acquaintance George Mouratides recently, I posed the question : What would the Beats make of the current political situation --international terrorism and the War on Terror including the Allies' war in Iraq? George said we knew what Ginsberg would think --others were less predictable --but coming out of Spengler (the author of The Decline of the West), Burroughs would say it was always doomed, the whole box & dice, no surprise. Kerouac & Corso maybe neo-cons we thought, to balance the leftism of Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg --but, and I said, it sems to me that Spengler's philosophy of history plus oodles of Buddhist & Catholic compassion is the relevant Beat attitude for the day!)
*
"For the members of my family; living & dead" writes Joel. He means the ancestors and the contemporary old ones & young ones. The hearts of all those who know Joel go out to him & Kirsten in respect of the tragedies that have befallen them... As a poet, Joel has no choice but to make wine of the tears of grief --he makes poems, he remembers his stillborn, his would-have-been children along with those who survived, indeed everyone who survives as Family.
From my own experience of being a parent and losing a grown-up son, I've learnt that dead does not mean cease to be. The world, as I said at Tim's funeral, is, after all, composed of the living & the dead. One carries one's dead child, as well as one's ancestors, within one until we too die...
The counter-culture biographer Miles describes Burroughs' Navaho sweat-lodge ceremony late in his life; the shaman praying, "Family, all one family, no matter what race we are from. All relatives together in a room."
Joel writes, "There is no country. Only family."
This epigram informs the major structure of Subterranean Radio Songs : the family, history, Australian place of the 1st half, South; and North, in which the poet-narrator is travelling abroad in the USA & Latin America, in Britain --an acutely felt & observed travel-diary but one constantly interjected by the concerns, the Angels & Demons of Family.
*
In a way it's all there in the first poem of the book, The Bridge at Avenel.
The crossing of water, the grave that water can be, the lure of crossing, the necessity (and I'm thinking now of the poetic rather than the economic or political necessity) --the necessity of crossing.
In this poem Joel Deane states, "I cannot find a way across" because of the particular reasons for that poem. But the poet will, --and certainly will attempt that crossing again & again in his career --a career begun tonight with this collection, which it is now my great pleasure to declare launched.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS # 3
WORDS FOR MICHAEL DUGAN (9/10/1947-16/3/2006)
In his darkly humorous poem, How To Succeed in Death Without Really Trying, from his booklet Returning From the Prophet,published by Robert Kenny & Philip Edmonds' Contempa Publications in 1972, Michael imagines the dead poet reincarnating as his own biographer! Now that his biography is beginning we, his biographers, must welcome his benevolent spirit.
I'm honoured to have been asked by Michael's dear sister Sally to say a few words about those late 1960s when our lives as poets in the world began.
I wish, of course, that this was another kind of occasion, twenty years on from now let's say, and Michael & I meeting with all of you for a long jar & jaw about the good old days including these. But it's not to be.
Now we must remember. "Remember to remember..." For instance, Ken Taylor showing me at his Parkville home or telling me on the phone from the ABC, April'68, to visit him because he had something very exciting to show me --me who was working on the production of the first issue of my little poetry magazine, Our Glass --I ought to know, he told me, that one, Michael Dugan,had just published a little poetry mag from a Heidelberg West p.o.box address, called Crosscurrents. Astonishing!
Something was indeed happening!
The something-in-the-air of the 1960s, which had impelled one towards performance & publication, -- that imperative for the New, particularly with war around us, had simultaneously inspired two 21, 22 year old poets on opposite sides of the city!
Dennis Douglas, poetry editor at The Age, later called this the "mini-mag explosion" --the start of the Poetry Revival! I introduced Michael to Betti Burstall's La Mama cafe-theatre --and "his people" & "my people" met! And the rest is history!
I remember Michael then as someone already on the inside of a Melbourne literary world and with a similar passion for the new & young poetry & art & music as me. I was a migrant from the U.K. to whom the ins & outs of Heide & Ern Malley & Meanjin & etc had to be explained. Michael explained.
I remember Michael enjoying the Counter Culture but advocating change through education & literature, the schoolroom & not the street. He spoke as a Fabian Socialist I suppose. My own revolutionary aspirations flourished then dissolved. His Fabianism continued. I think he was on the right track!
He was also right about Jimi Hendrix! I momentarily allowed me head to be swayed by a musician friend who said anyone could waa-waa like that! I should have believed my belly & my heart like Michael --and bit my tongue on smart-arse rhetoric. Hey Joe was & is a brilliant anthem!
I remember Michael as the most loyal & dependible friend & ally --opening up the venue, La Mama, if no one else was around --always attending the reading or the all-night eating & drinking and usually providing most of it. As it was around La Mama so too in the rest of his life, especially at the Fellowship of Australian Writers. Many times too when Michael would leap & shout without restraint, responsible for his own happiness rather than others'.
Michael rang me a few weeks ago to run past me, he said, a sketch for the autobiography he'd decided it was time for him to commence. With some feeling he said : "I dont know if you agree but I've always considered my relationship with you & Retta & Tim very important." I took a deep breath and said it was the same for me because despite different directions, different opinions, despite breaks in contact, what we'd experienced & shared was real --it was the beginning of a great many marvellous things-- it's a reality that can't be denied --it's inscribed in our hearts--
As, dear friends, Michael himself now can only be, but for always.
-------------------------------------------------
Michael's funeral service , Wednesday, 22nd March,'06, at Le Pine, 1048 Whitehorse Road, Box Hill. The celebrant was Lee Burgemeestre; other speakers included Doug MacLeod, Sally Dugan, Jo Swarc, Petro Georgiou, Jane Tanner, Barry Dickins.
In his darkly humorous poem, How To Succeed in Death Without Really Trying, from his booklet Returning From the Prophet,published by Robert Kenny & Philip Edmonds' Contempa Publications in 1972, Michael imagines the dead poet reincarnating as his own biographer! Now that his biography is beginning we, his biographers, must welcome his benevolent spirit.
I'm honoured to have been asked by Michael's dear sister Sally to say a few words about those late 1960s when our lives as poets in the world began.
I wish, of course, that this was another kind of occasion, twenty years on from now let's say, and Michael & I meeting with all of you for a long jar & jaw about the good old days including these. But it's not to be.
Now we must remember. "Remember to remember..." For instance, Ken Taylor showing me at his Parkville home or telling me on the phone from the ABC, April'68, to visit him because he had something very exciting to show me --me who was working on the production of the first issue of my little poetry magazine, Our Glass --I ought to know, he told me, that one, Michael Dugan,had just published a little poetry mag from a Heidelberg West p.o.box address, called Crosscurrents. Astonishing!
Something was indeed happening!
The something-in-the-air of the 1960s, which had impelled one towards performance & publication, -- that imperative for the New, particularly with war around us, had simultaneously inspired two 21, 22 year old poets on opposite sides of the city!
Dennis Douglas, poetry editor at The Age, later called this the "mini-mag explosion" --the start of the Poetry Revival! I introduced Michael to Betti Burstall's La Mama cafe-theatre --and "his people" & "my people" met! And the rest is history!
I remember Michael then as someone already on the inside of a Melbourne literary world and with a similar passion for the new & young poetry & art & music as me. I was a migrant from the U.K. to whom the ins & outs of Heide & Ern Malley & Meanjin & etc had to be explained. Michael explained.
I remember Michael enjoying the Counter Culture but advocating change through education & literature, the schoolroom & not the street. He spoke as a Fabian Socialist I suppose. My own revolutionary aspirations flourished then dissolved. His Fabianism continued. I think he was on the right track!
He was also right about Jimi Hendrix! I momentarily allowed me head to be swayed by a musician friend who said anyone could waa-waa like that! I should have believed my belly & my heart like Michael --and bit my tongue on smart-arse rhetoric. Hey Joe was & is a brilliant anthem!
I remember Michael as the most loyal & dependible friend & ally --opening up the venue, La Mama, if no one else was around --always attending the reading or the all-night eating & drinking and usually providing most of it. As it was around La Mama so too in the rest of his life, especially at the Fellowship of Australian Writers. Many times too when Michael would leap & shout without restraint, responsible for his own happiness rather than others'.
Michael rang me a few weeks ago to run past me, he said, a sketch for the autobiography he'd decided it was time for him to commence. With some feeling he said : "I dont know if you agree but I've always considered my relationship with you & Retta & Tim very important." I took a deep breath and said it was the same for me because despite different directions, different opinions, despite breaks in contact, what we'd experienced & shared was real --it was the beginning of a great many marvellous things-- it's a reality that can't be denied --it's inscribed in our hearts--
As, dear friends, Michael himself now can only be, but for always.
-------------------------------------------------
Michael's funeral service , Wednesday, 22nd March,'06, at Le Pine, 1048 Whitehorse Road, Box Hill. The celebrant was Lee Burgemeestre; other speakers included Doug MacLeod, Sally Dugan, Jo Swarc, Petro Georgiou, Jane Tanner, Barry Dickins.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
TIM HEMENSLEY (b,1971-d,2003) ARCHIVE
Kris Hemensley's Eulogy for Tim including some messages from family & friends, Springvale Crematorium, July 30, 2003
*
Tim's paternal grandmother, Tina [Berthe] Hemensley [nee Tawa], on behalf of my father, Alan, & herself: "Dieu te benisse a la fleur de l'age mon cheri" trsl "God bless you in the flower of his life"
*
Tim's uncle Bernard [who'd enjoyed Tim's visit to Dorset,UK a few years ago] : "The little bird [in his condolence card] sang to me of Tim, his little spirit... He lived his life on his own terms & with none, or few, concessions. Buddhist terminology comes to mind -- 'no birth, no death, no coming, no going, not the same, not different, no being, no non-being.' Love, Bernard"
*
From Roman Tucker, in London at the moment with his band [Rocket Science] : "I feel enlightened to have known him & proud that I was his longest friend.
I watched him with admiring eyes as he put comic plays together or wrote in his fanzine PUNK PURGE (TEDDY BOY TALES), selling it on the street corner for 20cents.
I loved his room, it was wild, with pictures & junk, horror toys, books & cartoon he had created. When Tim asked me to join Royal Flush I was ecstatic.
Playing gigs in adult bars, we were well read little children, singing about concepts & experiences that lay ahead... The foundations were set & for both of us there was no looking back.
Long live Royal Flush, God, Bored & The Powder Monkeys -- Long live Tim Hemensley."
*
From Helen Gardener this quotation from John Donne :
"We your sad glad
friends all bear a
part of grief"
*
Kris Hemensley's Eulogy for Tim :
I am speaking to you, this afternoon, aware of so many contradictions...
We're here to farewell Tim who has died.
He is dead -- And that means forever.
For all of us it means we will grow old, n'sh'allah, without our darling Tim, our grandson, our nephew, our cousin, our son, our brother, our dear,dear friend.
And this is shocking.
And yet, it isn't a shock.
It is unbelievable, yet it is awfully believable.
Let me say then, as gently as I can, that whilst it is wonderful to Retta & I that you are all here --all of our families --Garveys, Kennys, O'Briens, Massaraneys, & in spirit Hemensleys, Tawas --all of our friends & colleagues from Tim's schooldays, from the kindergarten, the bookshop, from the literary world and, crucially, from the world of rock & roll music and performance --whilst this is overwhelmingly beautiful & comforting, it's surely a tragedy that we're all here at all.
We are here to celebrate Tim, and to mourn him.
But we were happy to celebrate him alive. We would so gladly have him back... to an anonymous life...
Tim was devoted to his art and life in rock & roll. It was a practice and a culture. In that sense he was truly a rock & roll hero.
To be so committed can make one a martyr to that practice.
But Tim is a hero & martyr, if you like, within the art & life of rock & roll music and not of or to heroin.
He is not a heroin hero.
Heroin was a hoop he apparently enthusiastically leapt through.
He didnt ultimately complete that leap into further adventures and the marvellous discoveries of any simple life.
Addiction put him on trial day & night, it tested his friendships, it (in the phrase of the poet Philip Larkin, writing of parents) it fucked him up.
There is a crucial discussion we all of us have --it is about quality & quantity, quality versus quantity.
I thank Justin Negler for describing to me so succinctly the other day how the dynamo that Tim was at his best --the informed, energetic, hilarious, brilliant young man --was the product of all of his activities, all of his involvements, all of his commitments including heroin. The life measured as quality is indivisible -- Indeed--
And I also have subscribed to that idea of quality being more important than quantity-- Except that I have enjoyed the slow evolution of my life in which the idea of longevity seems equally rewarding--
I believe in quality but I like some quantity too--
I dont believe Tim wanted to die-- He had so much more to do--
Retta had an enormous involvement in his music life -- You were a wonderful ally Retta --His dancing, his ryhthm has everything to do with you-- As you have reminded us, Rett, you sang The Trogs' Wild Thing as you were giving birth to Tim, in Southampton General Hospital, in England on that wintery, November 23rd, 1971--
I was on the edge of his professional music in person though in my mind there too--
But I looked forward to an older Tim --or the same young Tim, if you like --to be with me as I grew older-- I looked forward to a continuation and development of our conversation. I confess that I feel cheated of that prospect.
I liked Tim's mind, his critical & conceptual ability, and I knew he would inevitably return to education formally or, like I did, off his own bat. I liked his imagination-- I believed, as he did too, that he would write prose-fiction, prose-essays one day --that the writing he did in rock & roll, both as lyric & review, would lead to story-writing --even to films, his lifelong love.
I liked his humour, his mimicry, his wicked parodies --
I was a willing accomplice in Tim & Retta's sending-up of my seeming elitism & pomposity, my thick-headedness before a film's story-line not to mention characters, my putting-my-foot-in-it in umpteen social occasions --I played along & fell about with them in helpless laughter --
When he was 9 or 10 he busked outside of Myers, a spikey-top, singing Jonathon Richmond's Roadrunner, accompanying himself on tambourine. What else did he have to prove in terms of courage? At the 2nd Surrealist Festival in about 1981, he read his epic poem The Punk Poema (which included the line "Fascism is boring! Long live art!") against a room of heckling plus amazed laughter and eventually great applause!
I was at Retta's side when Tim was born --look! I shouted at her through her shot of pethadine --look! the baby's coming out! When the baby didnt immediately respond to the midwife's little smack Retta thought he was dead! Is he dead? No, I said-- of course not-- myself waiting for that miraculous cry--
Retta & I found Tim in the outside loo of our small backyard-garden on Monday the 21st-- 10 days ago-- He'd dropped from the toilet seat onto the floor, head into the base of the door, legs crazy around him-- Rett applied mouth to mouth as I ran to phone O.O.O. --
The paramedics arrived & dragged him into the night garden beside the leafless apple tree & the dug-over tomato patch... They worked on him in torch-light --like a battle scene-- for 45 minutes but couldnt bring him back.
Rett & I have literally seen Tim into life and out of it, into his death...
We are heavy-hearted, sad but not bitter--
He lived his own life, he died as a consequence of his own lifestyle--
We love him, we're proud of him, we will miss him forever even as we understand that the world is composed of who we call the living & who we call the dead.
*
Poem by Tim [notebook, 02/03?]
Every Monday nite i watch
"the Sopranos";
Every Monday nite,
i eat, & eat & eat.
i eat more more -- bread, cream-cheese portions,
salami, turkey-breast, pretzels,
fried eggs, toasted cheese sandwiches --
on a Monday nite whilst watching
"the Sopranos"
than i ate on every
Monday nite last year put together;
consequently, it could be said
i am putting on a little weight
at this point in time.
when i see the ease with which
Tony Soprano glides thru each episode
munching, chewing & gnawing all manner of food stuff
with undisguised relish however,
i can honestly say that this development
is no great cause of concern to me.
*
Poem by Kris Hemensley
TELL ALL
Tell all
tell everything. Dont fling love
back at me. Dont ditch it love
dont give it all away.
Tell all
this dying day lest we die out
before everything's spelled out.
Spill it out. Love enough
to snuff out deathly
cutting-off. Tell all
without fear of tax or toll.
Love more than there is
so that more than there is
can grow. Tell all
against the threat of all hell
breaking over love's only child
whose telling all
even softens death's absolute fall.
Tell its unloveliest tale until
it calls love of life its own.
for Tim
[19/11/97]
*
Retta Hemensley read Anna Bronte's poem, Farewell :
"Farewell to thee! But not farewell
To all my fondest thoughts of thee;
Within my heart they still shall dwell
And they shall cheer and comfort me.
Life seems more sweet that thou didst live
And men more true that thou were one;
Nothing is lost that thou didst give;
Nothing destroyed that thou hast done."
*
-------------------------------------------
[Other contributions from Tim's funeral service to be added as they come to hand]
April 25th (Anzac Day), 2007
*
Tim's paternal grandmother, Tina [Berthe] Hemensley [nee Tawa], on behalf of my father, Alan, & herself: "Dieu te benisse a la fleur de l'age mon cheri" trsl "God bless you in the flower of his life"
*
Tim's uncle Bernard [who'd enjoyed Tim's visit to Dorset,UK a few years ago] : "The little bird [in his condolence card] sang to me of Tim, his little spirit... He lived his life on his own terms & with none, or few, concessions. Buddhist terminology comes to mind -- 'no birth, no death, no coming, no going, not the same, not different, no being, no non-being.' Love, Bernard"
*
From Roman Tucker, in London at the moment with his band [Rocket Science] : "I feel enlightened to have known him & proud that I was his longest friend.
I watched him with admiring eyes as he put comic plays together or wrote in his fanzine PUNK PURGE (TEDDY BOY TALES), selling it on the street corner for 20cents.
I loved his room, it was wild, with pictures & junk, horror toys, books & cartoon he had created. When Tim asked me to join Royal Flush I was ecstatic.
Playing gigs in adult bars, we were well read little children, singing about concepts & experiences that lay ahead... The foundations were set & for both of us there was no looking back.
Long live Royal Flush, God, Bored & The Powder Monkeys -- Long live Tim Hemensley."
*
From Helen Gardener this quotation from John Donne :
"We your sad glad
friends all bear a
part of grief"
*
Kris Hemensley's Eulogy for Tim :
I am speaking to you, this afternoon, aware of so many contradictions...
We're here to farewell Tim who has died.
He is dead -- And that means forever.
For all of us it means we will grow old, n'sh'allah, without our darling Tim, our grandson, our nephew, our cousin, our son, our brother, our dear,dear friend.
And this is shocking.
And yet, it isn't a shock.
It is unbelievable, yet it is awfully believable.
Let me say then, as gently as I can, that whilst it is wonderful to Retta & I that you are all here --all of our families --Garveys, Kennys, O'Briens, Massaraneys, & in spirit Hemensleys, Tawas --all of our friends & colleagues from Tim's schooldays, from the kindergarten, the bookshop, from the literary world and, crucially, from the world of rock & roll music and performance --whilst this is overwhelmingly beautiful & comforting, it's surely a tragedy that we're all here at all.
We are here to celebrate Tim, and to mourn him.
But we were happy to celebrate him alive. We would so gladly have him back... to an anonymous life...
Tim was devoted to his art and life in rock & roll. It was a practice and a culture. In that sense he was truly a rock & roll hero.
To be so committed can make one a martyr to that practice.
But Tim is a hero & martyr, if you like, within the art & life of rock & roll music and not of or to heroin.
He is not a heroin hero.
Heroin was a hoop he apparently enthusiastically leapt through.
He didnt ultimately complete that leap into further adventures and the marvellous discoveries of any simple life.
Addiction put him on trial day & night, it tested his friendships, it (in the phrase of the poet Philip Larkin, writing of parents) it fucked him up.
There is a crucial discussion we all of us have --it is about quality & quantity, quality versus quantity.
I thank Justin Negler for describing to me so succinctly the other day how the dynamo that Tim was at his best --the informed, energetic, hilarious, brilliant young man --was the product of all of his activities, all of his involvements, all of his commitments including heroin. The life measured as quality is indivisible -- Indeed--
And I also have subscribed to that idea of quality being more important than quantity-- Except that I have enjoyed the slow evolution of my life in which the idea of longevity seems equally rewarding--
I believe in quality but I like some quantity too--
I dont believe Tim wanted to die-- He had so much more to do--
Retta had an enormous involvement in his music life -- You were a wonderful ally Retta --His dancing, his ryhthm has everything to do with you-- As you have reminded us, Rett, you sang The Trogs' Wild Thing as you were giving birth to Tim, in Southampton General Hospital, in England on that wintery, November 23rd, 1971--
I was on the edge of his professional music in person though in my mind there too--
But I looked forward to an older Tim --or the same young Tim, if you like --to be with me as I grew older-- I looked forward to a continuation and development of our conversation. I confess that I feel cheated of that prospect.
I liked Tim's mind, his critical & conceptual ability, and I knew he would inevitably return to education formally or, like I did, off his own bat. I liked his imagination-- I believed, as he did too, that he would write prose-fiction, prose-essays one day --that the writing he did in rock & roll, both as lyric & review, would lead to story-writing --even to films, his lifelong love.
I liked his humour, his mimicry, his wicked parodies --
I was a willing accomplice in Tim & Retta's sending-up of my seeming elitism & pomposity, my thick-headedness before a film's story-line not to mention characters, my putting-my-foot-in-it in umpteen social occasions --I played along & fell about with them in helpless laughter --
When he was 9 or 10 he busked outside of Myers, a spikey-top, singing Jonathon Richmond's Roadrunner, accompanying himself on tambourine. What else did he have to prove in terms of courage? At the 2nd Surrealist Festival in about 1981, he read his epic poem The Punk Poema (which included the line "Fascism is boring! Long live art!") against a room of heckling plus amazed laughter and eventually great applause!
I was at Retta's side when Tim was born --look! I shouted at her through her shot of pethadine --look! the baby's coming out! When the baby didnt immediately respond to the midwife's little smack Retta thought he was dead! Is he dead? No, I said-- of course not-- myself waiting for that miraculous cry--
Retta & I found Tim in the outside loo of our small backyard-garden on Monday the 21st-- 10 days ago-- He'd dropped from the toilet seat onto the floor, head into the base of the door, legs crazy around him-- Rett applied mouth to mouth as I ran to phone O.O.O. --
The paramedics arrived & dragged him into the night garden beside the leafless apple tree & the dug-over tomato patch... They worked on him in torch-light --like a battle scene-- for 45 minutes but couldnt bring him back.
Rett & I have literally seen Tim into life and out of it, into his death...
We are heavy-hearted, sad but not bitter--
He lived his own life, he died as a consequence of his own lifestyle--
We love him, we're proud of him, we will miss him forever even as we understand that the world is composed of who we call the living & who we call the dead.
*
Poem by Tim [notebook, 02/03?]
Every Monday nite i watch
"the Sopranos";
Every Monday nite,
i eat, & eat & eat.
i eat more more -- bread, cream-cheese portions,
salami, turkey-breast, pretzels,
fried eggs, toasted cheese sandwiches --
on a Monday nite whilst watching
"the Sopranos"
than i ate on every
Monday nite last year put together;
consequently, it could be said
i am putting on a little weight
at this point in time.
when i see the ease with which
Tony Soprano glides thru each episode
munching, chewing & gnawing all manner of food stuff
with undisguised relish however,
i can honestly say that this development
is no great cause of concern to me.
*
Poem by Kris Hemensley
TELL ALL
Tell all
tell everything. Dont fling love
back at me. Dont ditch it love
dont give it all away.
Tell all
this dying day lest we die out
before everything's spelled out.
Spill it out. Love enough
to snuff out deathly
cutting-off. Tell all
without fear of tax or toll.
Love more than there is
so that more than there is
can grow. Tell all
against the threat of all hell
breaking over love's only child
whose telling all
even softens death's absolute fall.
Tell its unloveliest tale until
it calls love of life its own.
for Tim
[19/11/97]
*
Retta Hemensley read Anna Bronte's poem, Farewell :
"Farewell to thee! But not farewell
To all my fondest thoughts of thee;
Within my heart they still shall dwell
And they shall cheer and comfort me.
Life seems more sweet that thou didst live
And men more true that thou were one;
Nothing is lost that thou didst give;
Nothing destroyed that thou hast done."
*
-------------------------------------------
[Other contributions from Tim's funeral service to be added as they come to hand]
April 25th (Anzac Day), 2007
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