The next chapter
Saturday, 8th August 2009Posted under: life ,
July 2009
So, my friends, here I am, surrounded by magnificent rock cliffs towering like unfathomably majestic sculptures, huge in their scale, ancient in their conception, clothed in a mantle of pristine forest, the wind whispering in seductive lethargy through the infinity of leaves and branches. My adventure, my journey into these wild, empty and stunningly beautiful places of Australia to cobble together my art, has begun.
You may be forgiven for feeling a tad envious, after all, how many of you would not love to leave the drab drudgery of the mundane day to day struggle behind and follow those romantic inspirations that every now and then burst into your consciousness, gasping for breath before ugly reality grabs that whimpering head and pushes those wistful emotions back deep into your subconscious. Indeed, what luck I have.
Yet not all is as it seems, and this journey which seems so perfect, has already revealed its dark side. Let me explain.
Despite the splendour of my location, I sit here tapping out my tale a tired, worn and tortured soul. My enthusiasm for this project sucked to a desiccated crumple by the endless expectation for an electric cello that just never turned up. A year and 2 months after the scheduled commencement of this project, the damn thing turns up and I finally manage to pack my gear and start driving, only to find the wheels of my trailer are rubbing against the sides because the bastards who built the damn thing made the axle too short, so it can’t cope with the full weight of my gear. With Taoist patience I return to the clammy folds of Canberra’s suburbs in order to fix this engineering fuckup. Then I discover it is still possible to receive the government’s $900 cash splash (god bless the Global Financial Crisis) as long as my 07/08 tax return is in before July 09. My poor accountant was no doubt stabbing pins into a doll with my name on it after receiving my late and terrifyingly disorganised financial slurry.
So another month later and again I pack and attempt to leave our consumer capitalist democracy behind. It is a grand day for all the strings have been tied, there are no loose ends and the trailer has two axles! nothing is getting in my bloody way! But fate is a bitch, and just to remind me how weak and feeble I am, I slice the tip off my pointer finger on my right hand while making “the last breakfast”. Half my finger nail is sawn off, dangling mockingly off the end of my finger, blood gushing out everywhere. I fold that flap back into place and hope to hell it will graft back onto itself as I wrap it up in metres of blood soaked bandage. Alas, as it turns out, over a week later my medical experiment in “ignore it and it will heal” fails miserably and I am forced to rip the now blackened and pustulating abomination off the end of my finger.
This wound, this farewell gift, however, had the striking capacity to bang against absolutely everything possible. Not helped by the fact that only 1km out from my destination the right brake on my trailer (yes, my trailer has brakes) locks and the tire starts skidding along the road. One of the bolts holding the brake assembly to the axle shaft had come loose and fallen off, allowing it to swing down and clamp itself onto the disc, snapping the entire brake assembly like a twig in the process. So naturally my incapacitated hand had to confront some greasy undercarriage work in the middle of a dirt road, leaving behind trails of blood over the ground as if fresh road kill had been malevolently dragged around by a sadistic child, splatter marks all over the disc of the offending wheel. Any forensic team would have had a field day with this scenario......
Unfortunately it doesn’t end there, for shortly afterwards in the effort to cross what is by all accounts a pathetically weak and shallow stream to get to a special 4wd camp spot, I get bogged in the sand, smack bang in the middle of the piddley thing!! How is this possible with the monstrous 5 litre V8 4wd fuel guzzling panzer tank I enlisted to stride over these insignificant obstacles?! I had the damn thing engaged in 4wd mode, front wheels locked.... but they weren’t turning, my heart sank as I confronted the real possibility that my drive train had failed, the machine was, after all, over 20 years old. Not to let a challenge slip past, I grabbed my incurable optimism and hauled out my winch cable thinking this was a prime opportunity to practice some good old winching.... and then 3 guys in a 4wd turned up from the other side wanting to cross, well my testicles shrank and my masculinity scuppered this stranded soul.... ran away and hid in a box. My embarrassment was, however, well camouflaged behind the flawless assessment of the engineering failures causing the situation, to which they responded by suggesting connection of the winch to their ute and they would reverse while I winched and spun my rear wheels........... the winch broke, with an almighty metallic clang of sheer stubbornness. The bastards didn’t even laugh, they probably thought I was mad, guffawing away like that, a man on the edge. I guess they weren’t privy to my litany of woes, they just wanted to get across, I was just some amateur fool with annoyingly old and unreliable equipment getting in the way. Bless those lads tho, they had a hefty tow rope that got hooked up in place of the winch cable and eventually, with much spraying of sand, my circus was hauled out of its predicament. When I was securely on dry land, one fellow suggested I drop the pressure on my tyres to get more traction in the last of the sand, which I dutifully do, on the front wheels, which of course weren’t working.....he did the rear....
It turns out my front wheels do work, my gears just hadn’t locked into place properly, and the winch has a security pin which shears off if the load is too great, the fault of being pulled by an impatient sack of testosterone. So there is some reassurance that I am not entirely to blame. Yet I sit here in the cold, cloudy, rain pestered beauty of this place, fretting the day when I have to pack up, leave and renegotiate that stream. The mole hill has become a mountain.....
July 22 2009
Having just survived a rain storm, I tap this next entry with some relief. There weren’t too many leaks in this worn plastic bubble. And if it can survive the targeted urinations of a gang of spiteful possums, it can survive a tsunami. All furry on the outside, all fury on the inside. Those little buggers will crawl up your leg to get at something to eat, those claws were so made for scratching on blackboards.....
So if you have read thru the earlier entries you may have noticed a gap of around two years.... well, life kind of gets in the way. I travelled to Europe in 2007 for some conferences related to my PrioritySpace work, my marriage dissolved, our house got sold and I spent a year twiddling my thumbs ever so slowly descending into madness as I waited for my electric cello. In the meantime I acquired my trailer, purchased some solar panels and bolted them to the top.
Built a small kitchenette on one side including a fold out table and a Waeco fridge (basically a large esky with a compressor), installed three back crushingly heavy batteries and wired them up with all the associated paraphernalia to my photovoltaics.
As I sit here the rain starts again, the spider’s web of tangled wires and audio equipment around me glow with the gentle reassurance that all that power came directly from the glorious sun..... all precariously parked under a stretched, aging and torn collection of overlapping plastic sheets held together with string and pvc tubing..... and it’s raining.....hmmmm.
Just as well I have the inside lined with thick polar fleece material. Being so horribly synthetic any drops of water bead and run off rather than get absorbed, forming a wet patch. Nobody likes the wet patch....
So why am I actually here? A question you may have been screaming to have answered as you read my collection of quaint little distractions. At this moment, as the fat rain drops pummel my delicate bubble like a million sperm laying siege to an unwilling egg, I am wondering the same thing. There are many reasons. I shall start with the official version.
In a nutshell, I’m travelling around the country, composing, recording and animating as I go. Drawing inspiration from the places I stay and the characters I meet on the way. This next work, and the journey of its creation is my response to the dire portent that is climate change. So in stark contrast to the wealth addicted consumer mania which so many are witless slaves to, I endeavour to live purchasing only what I need to survive and to maintain a functional studio. With any luck I can survive on less than $10,000 a year. Stay tuned, I will post my budget on this site as it evolves. I will also be posting video vignettes and music as accompaniment to what will become a relentlessly odious narrative.
As far as my financial independence is concerned, I must confess, that I am to a significant degree sponsored by the ACT government through their arts funding. In fact I must give great credit to Helen at artsACT for showing such leniency and compassion when I had to request for an extension on this grant because of one missing vital ingredient, that bloody electric cello. Bless her soul, on my first desperate attempt to escape the gravity well that is Canberra I found myself with all my gear strewn around a dirt car park trying to redistribute the weight from my trailer to my tank so I could limp back home to have the axles fixed, when Helen calls, and in my moment of darkness she shines a small ray of goodwill as she offers me that extension.
Today is Saturday the 8th of August, I am in Lithgow. I have successfully replaced my broken brakes on the trailer. Tomorrow I stock up on supplies and push further north, where the warmth will thaw my frozen arse. What was I doing during the last 5 weeks? Learning to use all my equipment, exploring what my new instrument can do (and despite it's lateness, it is a quality piece of work) and building my library of videos and images, to be brief. I will be posting the trite ditty I composed during this exploratory session in the coming few days when I have added some footage of my ordeal, so stay tuned.
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Comments
Brian (mate of AB's)
Surely a fan of the classics knows that, after a start like that, things can only get better?! But don't winch off a moving object, that's never going to work. Good luck with it.
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The picture with a broken finger looks so morbid! *scary*
Louise
Sounds challenging. But inspirational. I look forward to further updates :-)