Mel From Melbourne - Music & Words

  The Town Hall Hotel, North Melbourne   Sorry Jonny, I write better than this, but I got on the piss when I saw your website. The Townie, what it means to me. I started going there immediately after my ex-wife walked out. I went each night to the Townie straight after work, walking from the CBD for a period of 90 days. 20 more than 70 if you like. It was magically half way home. It was back at the start of the century And Jonny was playing live music concert DVDs I particularly remember the Motley Crue video for some reason Somehow Vince Neil suits Jonny’s drollness Like some Viennese Rococo Count Stumbled forward a couple of hundred years. The Townie was also the site of my band’s first gig 10 years after I quit music for poetry. Divorce will do that. You need to make some %^$in noise. The Townie took me into rock and punk and post-punk and punk-blues and rock. The staff were always RocknRoll. I remember seeing Conway Savage in the b...

The Melbourne Artist   Dear Darryl Thompson-Turner,   I’ve been thinking about McLuhan and his belief that the medium a message is received through is the most important question. I think you mentioned something about Baudrillard too. When I first started Mel From Melbourne, which has morphed into Earth To Malachi, the important thing was that where possible I would make my work using free software and as cheap hardware as I could. Hence I use my phone for the microphone and the free software Audacity for my sound engineering/production. I use my phone to photograph my cover art, which is usually hand-drawn or -painted using cheap art supplies usually found in supermarkets or bargain shops. The rationale is that I as a minority worlder have so many extreme advantages in my life I should not also have better audioed-videoed art than artists working in majority world countries. The artwork should boil down to the imagination, skills and work rather than the technologies ...

  What D irection?   You are writing without direction today. You are tired. You are worried. You are casually employed and therefore during lockdown, you are suddenly unemployed. Despite the competence of your work, despite your integrity of character, despite the effort you put in each and every day. Things are so desperate you do something you thought you would never do: you’ve sought to apply for Job Seeker allowance, as Job Keeper is no longer available. You are fortunate you guess in that you have access to the internet. Many do not. You go to MyGov to connect with Centrelink. But, perhaps due to high traffic, the website does not work. You do not know the reason. There is a silence surrounding it. Tomorrow you will try again. And the following day. And the following day. Time for which you and your family will not receive any income.   A man in a suit, with a smirk on his face comes on the news. He’s rhetorically cute and speaking without direction. Evident...

  Selfie   The fact of the Morrison’s profound negligence regarding the COVID vaccine roll out is so obvious that even the Labor Party has finally noticed it. I really don’t want to write about this it is so ugly. And the obvious question is why when lockdowns allow, aren’t people protesting? Our feet, our brains, our wills seem to be in quicksand and everyone looks anaesthetized. Ok we’re worried but is it that simple? It is truly terrible and even the slow witted must have noticed that a lot of people are being left behind and yes it does appear sincerely to be a tragedy. The banks, despite the recent farcical Royal Commission have redoubled their prey drive and the government is actively destroying lives by encouraging vulnerable and desperate people to give up their superannuation. I really want to talk about something different I really do. The bottle shops are doing well. But for how much longer? Before people can’t even afford cask wine. I don’t do politics well. I ...

  It doesn’t feel right… It doesn’t feel right watching the film about Hunter S Thompson “Where the Buffalo Roam” via the web. The central scrutanisers have got to get their hands on every moment you’ve ever had, privacy is dead, and we are at the end of times. The Holy Roman Empire could only jack off at the daydream of such a nightmare and one will never again be allowed to do anything atypical, have a rich and varied imagination, no, everything is known and consistent. The vultures are circling, I shouldn’t have taken that pill, I shouldn’t have laid that man’s wife, to be young these days is no longer to embark on an undocumented experiment in many realities, everything is noted down by the worst stereotype of a killjoy and repressed straight and believer in what exactly?, what kind of Republic? Oh that’s right it is a computer. Once upon a time one could transgress and suffer remorse, now one suffers remorse whilst having the experience, the worst kind of bad trip and one ca...

  Communication Of late I’ve become a bit obsessed with the difficulty of communication. I’m not sure it’s what the postmodernists have been banging on about, I think it has ancient precedents. Part of the issue is individualization. We are cut away from the cloth of humanity each by the uniqueness of our own hands. We are each different, separate and opposing. It starts young, they teach you at home, they teach you in school. Under the spirit of competition. The ego is born in battle: I am not you. In love then, one attempts the impossible: to make a truce, to speak as if you and I are the same. Sometimes it holds. But of course truces strain and the warrior ego can easily spring back, sometimes completely unexpectedly. I love you except for this one thing. To some this is understandable, but nowhere is it acceptable. Any reservation in a declaration of love is perceived by the other’s ego as an act of war. You and I are not the same, which the ego takes to be a declaration of w...