Mel From Melbourne - Music & Words

  I’m cut up   I’m cut up like a collage. My head’s where my knee should be. At least the mouth is. My nose is fixed like a cap to my neck. There’s a saxophone instead of my left foot. And Elon Musk’s space ship is where my heart should be. Should be, that’s if the whole thing wasn’t a moving trainset going over a series of cups and jigsaw blades set amongst a 17 th century rainforest, with the Indigenous trading with aliens for a concert hall in place of what? Did I say it was an artwork racist at its heart? It belonged to Herman Goering who modified it with a team of concentration camp child slaves. But you know it’s hot amongst the Monaco set and is projected onto some IMAX-like cinema screen as background entertainment for old billionaires, while they are fed from the bellies of beauty queens sourced by a former president of some country you’ve never heard of but probably declared war on through your giraffe-headed-rainbow-footed popularly elected leadership bottoms, ...

I don’t know man, the weather? I don’t know man. Issues seem to be being fed to me in a way where I can no longer see the Buddha’s lotus. Constructions of reality by organisations. I can’t see the forest for the carbon offset. But the forest speaks. It has many voices in concert with one another. The bird’s call is not an alarm. Nature speaks. It is a beautiful call. Not all good nor all bad. It might have nothing to do with man-made concepts like morality. Life is rich and way too short, to borrow from all people Sir Mick Jagger. Don’t tear me up. Don’t poison my blood. Again Sir Mick. Strange that rocknroll should make sense, but you know there are times when it really does cut through. Songs are important. Singing is important. If we’re honest with ourselves, the soundtrack to our lives is at least as important as the passing news cycle. That’s much like the weather. Sometimes the weather is brutal. But if we have a song in our heart and a song on our lips, we can endure, while poss...

  Historical Materialism says that it is the conditions of our existence that give rise to our ideas. Or at least the widespread adoption of our ideas. The creation of the practice of farming gave rise to the adoption of the belief that the animals were actually lower than human beings, no longer our siblings/parents/ancestors, justifying this with stories of God loving man highest and giving us rule over the other ‘beasts’ as they were now known. But what if we could, through the reach of the internet produce more sustainable ideas and through this change the conditions of our existence. Is this mere fantasy? You might seduce some it is argued, but under the microscope of business and government policy, they will be seen as impractical. Not holding water, as they say. And so, it seems our pens must come second to our behavior and in our daily lives we must enact what we wish to achieve, we must be models for a new humane civilization. Our lives must seek out more sustainable p...

  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 ...