in a world of ICONS! and CLASSICS

an edited version of this post appeared ina  recent edition of THE MELBOURNE REVIEW

I woke up from a short but deep sleep, feeling groggy due to the potions I had partaken of the night before. They knocked me out but wore off pretty quick. I had dreamed, but was going to, as has been my lifelong  attitude to these things, keep them to myself. As soon as I actually remembered them. (This would be usually with a shout of some quite innocuous word at the shaving mirror or at the car windscreen. I would then suddenly look at myself in the mirror. I loved doing that. ). So I woke in my usual manner is what I trying to convey to yas. A time honoured, long held-to direction, and ambled to the kitchen. In a way, I was waking up in a robotic, zombie like manner, though I have since learned I could use a  much grander term. I was operating in a  CLASSIC manner. It was a VINTAGE shamble into a new day. The cat played its part and ran in front of me at every opportunity, herding me towards its food bowl.  I boiled some hot water in the sleek, new, stainless steel, CLASSIC looking kettle and prepared some tea. No tea bags for me, only loose leaves which I had imported myself from a WOOLWORTHS supermarket in South Australia. A RUST BELT state. The tea is in a  packet which I associate with that part of the world where I sprang from. Amgoorie tea. In a brown paper packet with exotic images of the mysterious east all over it. I drive there to get it. 455 kilometres a pack. I assemble a bowl of my CUSTOMARY cereal which is raw oatmeal from the ICONIC house of BLACK AND GOLD. I drench the rustic oats in LONG LIFE soy liquid and open my newspaper. Below the ICONIC masthead which should by rights be rolling upside down in shame at the “all the goss” bilge which is spewed across its pages every day, and spent a good minute learning of the activities of the world while I slept. AS is my want, I throw it away in disgust and leave for the smallest room. I am sure this is the correct outcome of the transaction. I was behaving in a CLASSIC way of a disgruntled reader of my age. They would have had focus groups to agree with them on this. I needed to be herded toward the online version of the paper, which was full of more intelligent shit, as well as blinking lights and sexier ads. The editor should be happy. In the can , which I had had built by a DUTCH man so as I could inspect my PRECIOUS waste rather than drop it into a small pond of water in the ANGLO fashion, I was gladdened to see a log of much health . A glad, JOYOUS stool. AS one of YORE! “Shakespeare could have dropped this!”, I marvelled to myself.  I felt connected to life on earth. An absolute PEARLER. A CLASSIC! A HUMDINGER!

I turned the radio on to listen to the anguished thoughts of the callers. I wanted REALITY, not some namby pamby EXPERT telling me stuff that only he could know.

I drank a can of pop soda. It had my name on it. A friend had bought me a case. CLASSIC IRONY! The drinks name itself was a brand name synonymous with corporate fascism and mass ill health the world over. Loved by billions.

I went for a walk past a toilet I once did a gig in. It was being hounded by near and far-by residents for being noisy and smelly. People rushed to defend it and were referring to it as an ICONIC venue. I reflected , in my now CLASSIC manner, that my morning stool had been more ICONIC than that dump. That PILE of steaming bricks! That was the times we wuz livin’ in though but. People shouted and talked shit up like holy rolling preachers at every turn. Nothing really rated it. Nothing really ever happened any more. It was a CLASSIC STORM EYE we were experiencing. For how long, nobody knew. We looked to SPOKESPERSONS to talk us out of it. So we could see shit from the outside. “You pay peanuts- you get monkeys” was all I could summon as I heard some lame ABC types stretch their skills to the very limit in brave efforts to be entertaining and then Kyle Sandilands and Allan Jones do the same in the way of being informative.

I got back into my car - a Japanese made 4 cylinder van. A CLASSIC from the early 00’s that will never be made again. For some reason. I’m hangin’ onto it. The wheel. Will to live I guess. Some damn INNATE compulsion. I turn on the radio, set to a CLASSIC rock station and listen to stuff I had heard a thousand times before. It had been great. Once. I waited for the magic again. The stuff was guaranteed. SUREFIRE!.

I wasn’t feeling it. I felt off the worlds game. Out of it. Like Steve Martin in THE JERK.

I turned to one of the few stations dealing with new shit and tried some of that. Scandinavian indie bands singing some dreadful, sexless, feckless, filthless , faux folk song that sounded OLDER than time – than recorded music itself. I guess that’s what they wanted. Terrible lyrics and the boy/mans voice came all out of his throat. There was no rest of his body involved. Sounded like musical theatre pipes happening. Thin and reedy. Punk was never going to happen. Is that why people listen to Neil Young? The reassuring grampiness of it all? There were a lot of other acts around on air, they were all generic too. People liked shit that they could see whole. The beginning and the end. They were blind to anythin’ else. Didn’t have the bandwidth. When I grew up there was a squall of old time shit on the tv too. Made it unbearable. The Waltons and Happy Days. How many teen deaths were those shows responsible for? Then we got stoned and turned to the Blue Oyster Cult with their hit, “don’t fear the reaper”. (The singer is dead and is telling his girlfriend to kill herself and cross over- a CLASSIC).  That would have been legendary if we’d all carked out there in the forest, behind the drive-in, with “Tyranny and Mutation” on the tape deck, repeating on the track “OD’d on life itself”. Total teen death VERISIMMILITUDE! Totally! My life would have had , almost, an appearance of meaning.

I was dressed in quadruple denim. The world had perverted me. I was always dressing for that funeral that never was. A denim cape, jacket, shirt and pants. I was looking for some denim shoes and a denim hanky to poke out of my pocket. Years ago, I had a denim slouch hat made. A fucking CLASSIC! It was ICONIC! Made from a  Generals titfer. Five folds in the band. ANZACIACAL! Still, people eyed me suspiciously. They still do. I am neither romantically driven nor do I strive for a  classic form. Well I do, but that’s just me being polite, trying to get square with folks. Get out of peoples way. Dodgy, but. What I really needed was a one piece suit in dark denim , perhaps like the one designed by black panther Eldridge Cleaver. It was called a cock suit , because it had an exterior sleeve wherein a bloke ostensibly sheathed his throbbing purple headed Gila Monster. That was an ICONIC bit of clothing. It beheld a narrative - a story! Eldridge had fled the USA to Algeria and had come back, with an eye to making a  killing in the rag trade. They mocked him, perhaps that garments time has come? And I could at last assume some agreed human form?