On Taking a Seven Week Old Baby to an Interstate Music Festival We took our seven week old baby on a plane across the Bass Strait to attend Dark Mofo, Tasmania’s mid-winter arts festival.If I’m honest, my partner and our friend Greta took the baby on the plane, I was on a separate flight an hour later, being upgraded to Economy X which has a skerrick more leg room because I had a glut of frequent-flyer points.When I arrived, they were already checked into the hotel and baby was happily feeding. The trip down was seamless, baby sleeping happily strapped to mum the whole flight, and he happily slept some more as we went out for Udon noodles to warm us in the icy Hobart evening.We wandered into Pablos Cocktail Bar and I had a solo beer in the beer garden with the baby while the girls watched some jazz inside, then the girls took the baby home and I went to see Clown Core, an equal parts horrific/satisfying/awe-inspiring mix of hectic breakbeats, AI-generated art, and post-apocalyptic themes. It’s music for the Tiktok generation, constant chopping and changing between ideas. Every 10 seconds something new is thrown at you, an absolute barrage of information and dopamine hits. Highly enjoyable. I had a couple of beers and got back to the hotel at 11 to find baby absolutely cracking it. He proceeded to scream and feed and shit until 3 am, when he finally passed out letting me and my partner get a small amount of sleep. Tears were shed, mostly not the baby’s.Continue reading “On Taking a Seven Week Old Baby to an Interstate Music Festival”
On Patience Night-time nappy changes are like trying to bag an ebullient octopus. His limbs multiply, his torso stretches out, he releases his siren call. He dips his heels into the mustard yellow pool in his nappy and merrily kicks it across the room, and while you reach over to grab a towel he happily fountains wee straight into the air, across the change table, into his own mouth.All the while he is screaming bloody murder. My boy was born with a strong set of lungs, and he will happily tell you how he feels. One friend likens it to an on/off switch. He doesn’t have the nuance to tell you what’s wrong, but by god will tell you something IS wrong, and once you’ve run through the laundry list of possible problems – does he require inputs or outputs? He turns off the alarm and leave you wondering which of the things you tried worked.…I thought having a baby would bring me patience.Continue reading “On Patience”
On Touring New Zealand (part 2) I am naked in a forest glade in the centre of a patch of purple heather. The festival organisers have set-up a shower block here which is a flimsy set of bamboo lattice and a couple of tie-dyed cotton sheets. It’s entirely see-through and I can see the rest of the band having breakfast while I shower. Peny tells me a bird flitted in and sat on the edge of the bath-tub while she was in there. Glimmers of Disney.I arrived here by van, a 1980s Toyota that barely made the trip up the mountain. Towing a campervan we did the entire journey in second gear, grumbling around hairpin curves with a convoy of angry drivers behind us. It took an hour to drive from Nelson to the top of Takaka Hill, then another hour along a dirt road that twisted through Pikikirunga Trail and into the Abel Tasman National Park. When we finally made it to the festival the driver pointed me in the direction of the info tent and cheerily told me to ‘watch out for the carnivorous snails’.We find out that this forest is home to a set of snails that eat each other. Not whole, but in slow snail sized bites. The risk of being caught and eaten by a snail is low, but the risk of humans on the snail’s natural habitat is high, so we’re warned away from them. The snails can live for twenty years, and we find a row of empty shells, large hand sized spirals stretched out on a branch in the woods.Continue reading “On Touring New Zealand (part 2)”
On Touring New Zealand Tour is salt and vinegar chips, spilled under the driver’s seat. Tour is launching ourselves into every possible body of water. Tour is a 4 am bed-time, followed by an 8 am lobby call.We spent the week travelling up the guts of New Zealand’s South Island, ensconced within an eight-seater Kia Carnival I nicknamed Carmen in tribute to an ex-girlfriend. The car is a capsule, a bubble, a closed ecosystem with developed routines, rituals, ways of being.Sam and I inhabit the front seats. We alternate driving, marvelling over this car’s inexplicable features. The car beeps at us, non-stop from the moment we roll out of the rental carpark. It beeps to tell you when you’re speeding (sixty in a thirty zone), then it beeps any time you cross a line on the road, it beeps when you get within two metres of the car in front of you, and it beeps incessantly while you reverse. It beeps when we place a bag on the backseat, assuming it is a small child.The beeps all have slightly different cadences and wildly different pitches. One is Eno’s Music For Airports, another is Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name. We scroll through the car settings to try and disable them but eventually give up and accept the discordant symphony of beeps interrupting our conversation.Continue reading “On Touring New Zealand”
On Gusto Gusto’s New Album Gusto Gusto have a new album!To The Ocean They Returned is out today. It’s our debut full-length album, which is a funny music marketing thing I’ve seen everyone else do and figured we’d co-opt for our project.Is this our ‘debut album’? No, of course not. We’ve got two EPs out already. But it’s our ‘debut full-length album’, which basically means it’s the first time we’ve done a longer album. Weirdly, music industry people LOVE stuff like this. Anything that can make something seem new and cool sells right? Blergh.I first saw **name redacted because some of my friends play in his band** try this, and suddenly all these people were raving about this ‘cool new artist’ who has just released his first album. Not his first album, and definitely not new, he’d been kicking around Melbourne for years at that point, but he just scrubbed the internet of his first two albums and started fresh. The marketing worked and his ‘debut’ album did really well and now he has a successful career, so let’s see how it goes for us.To The Ocean IS a much different album to our two EPs.Continue reading “On Gusto Gusto’s New Album”
On Gardens Charlotte Wood reminds me I have a garden.A derelict patch down the back of the house where I stacked four planters along the top of the Astroturf and enthusiastically grew silverbeet one year, supplanted it with a half-hearted attempt at zucchinis the second year and finally succumbed to beds of mint and oregano on the third.It’s not that I’m not a good gardener, a large part of it is the environment. The house shields the planters from sun for most of the year, the olive trees shields them from rain for the rest. The plants that thrive are the ones that don’t need sun or water.The other part is of course a lack of care. The busier I get the easier it is to sequester myself inside the house where there’s warmth and light and coffee, and a distinct lack of the pollen that sets off my spring hayfever. When I’m busy the garden is left to its own devices, and it does a good job of growing, not in rigid straight lines of easily accessible zucchinis, ripe for the dinner table, but more in a higgledy-piggledy explosion of weeds and oregano, woody knots that find their way through cracks in the side of the planter box and then dig down through the Astroturf to find Mother Earth.Continue reading “On Gardens”
On Surgery and Slowing Down I’m realising that I’m not good at slowing down. Of all the things I’m bad at, slowing down might be the worst of them.I went in for surgery this week, a fun experience that involved punching a hole in my groin and running a tube through my kidneys. It was actually the second round of surgery. I went in last week for the same procedure and they couldn’t find the vein they were looking for, so I went home with a limp and track marks down my arms. I had to get a CT scan where they inject iodine dye in to your veins. The nurse in charge told me I’d feel warm, have a metallic taste in my mouth, and then have the sensation of wetting myself. Accurate. I had just barely recovered when they brought me back in for surgery round two, which was thankfully a success.As part of the surgery I’m meant to be spend the next two weeks chilling. Not bed rest for two weeks, thank goodness, but a couple of days of not doing anything at all, followed by ten days of not lifting anything, no hectic exercise, just generally lazing around the house.I hate it.Continue reading “On Surgery and Slowing Down”
On Kotor We’re in Kotor. Brilliant beautiful Kotor, nestled on the Bay of Kotor, a stunning spot with mountains disappearing straight into brilliant blue seas.Step back.We spent two days in Podogorica, the capital of Montenegro, taking a little side-quest out to Ostrog Monastery – a blazing white building built into the side of a cliff. It was constructed back in the 1600s, originally tucked into the cliffs as a protective measure against the Turks, but now it makes it a quiet calm sanctuary in the 38 degree heat.The options for transport to Ostrog are a bus tour at 40 Euros per person, a train and a two hour hike (hitch-hike if you’re lucky), or Neno, a middle-aged taxi driver who spends the entire trip driving one handed and mumbling into his phone. It seems like Neno has some family drama going on, unfortunately he speaks no English, but he stays on the road and cranks the air-conditioning so we’re happy.We arrive at the monastery to a crowd of people – there’s a long line out the front snaking down the hill, starting at the entrance gate where people are asked to dress modestly – I’ve worn full pants for the occasion, the first time in two weeks, but anyone with bare legs is given a giant monk’s smock to wear. Most people wrap them around their waist just to cover their legs, but some people put them on properly, and it feels like some sort of pre-school art convention, ill-fitting smocks for all.Continue reading “On Kotor”
On Montenegro Our bus driver is too angry for seven in the morning. Well, maybe he’s angry because it’s seven in the morning, but when I tell him I don’t have any Euros for the baggage and ask if he can take card, he yells at me and throws our bags on the ground.Grace scurries off to find an atm to get cash out and gets slugged with an 18% transaction fee. I take pity on the other guy who also just had his bag thrown on the ground and we cover his bag fee too. Then we climb aboard for what is meant to be a five hour bus trip (spoiler alert, it wasn’t).The first hour of the trip is glorious, driving along the Croatian coast-line from Dubrovnik to Montenegro. When we get close to the border we run into some hectic traffic and the bus driver puts the bus in park on the middle of the freeway and walks off down the road. We sit there for a bit wondering if we should follow him, or wait, or take the chance to wee while we can, but he comes back and the bus edges along again, taking almost an hour to cover the last kilometre of Croatia.At the border crossing the bus driver mumbles something in Croatian and then gets off. I see him drop his passport in the middle of the road, and someone else on the bus takes that as a cue. We all pile off the bus and stand in the thirty five degree heat. We get ‘stamped out’ of Croatia by a guy in a mirrored box on the side of the road. You can’t see him because the hole is down at waist height and small enough to only allow one hand with a passport in, so I push my passport in and strain my ears for a response. I look at myself in the mirror. I hear the clunk of a stamp and my passport gets pushed back out. I go to find a toilet.Continue reading “On Montenegro”
On Croatia Croatia is warm. Very very warm.We’re in Dubrovnik, the most touristed place in all of Europe. Estimates are 36 tourists per each local resident and we feel it when we first arrive in the Old Town. There’s a literal swarm of people walking every direction, icecreams held high above the crowd. There’s icecreams everywhere – every second shop is an icecream shop, which makes sense in a week where the temperature is 35 when we arrive and bottoms out at 30 degrees overnight.The city is glorious – giant stone walls, ramparts, skinny laneways with tiny tables laid out. Our host suggests we dine at the Stara Loza restaurant, but that we’ll need to book in advance. We stumble in by accident and manage to get a table for two on the street, finding out in the process that this is a Michelin-starred restaurant and the food is on the expensive side. Splash out, its not a honeymoon is the call of the night and I order the beef ribs which melt away as I eat them. We spend 150 Euro on one meal and promise that we’ll have breakfast in for the rest of the week to compensate.Continue reading “On Croatia”