Metal City - Hai Ina Ia Mai Ana Ka Puana

Chris Cross'll Make Ya... Jump, Jump. Ah-huh. Ah-huh. Jump. Jump.

So, the rusty wheels have begun turning again. I've finished a draft manuscript of Bronnie The Dog And The Horror Of Sleepy Rock, heavily edited from its original Metal City incarnation, which is designed to be submitted. I'm gonna do it, this time - the artwork has been turning out better than I'd expected, and the draft reads surprisingly well. It's been turned into a kid's book. But I like it anyways. If anyone out there wants to read the end of Sleepy Rock, email me.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. I'm here to talk about Christopher Cross. Amongst other things.

Haunted, I have been. Lately, in particular. I've calmed down, and decided to actually take my writing seriously - and, as such, I've found myself sitting inside for extended periods of time, with either a keyboard beneath my fingers of a pencil in my hand. And you know what THAT is a recipie for, turkeys - especially when you throw dark clouds and chilly into the mix. I've been thinking a lot about things that aren't around anymore. My Grandmother, again. I'm not entirely sure why. I just am.

And I've been thinking about A.M radio. Back in the good old days, you used to get a lot of music on the A.M band. My Grandma drove a cyan-coloured Corona, with a white vinyl interior and an A.M radio. And when I'd sit in the back, as I always did, I would listen to the A.M stations - and one of the people you always heard was Christopher Cross.

Christopher Cross sucks. At least, that's what I want to say, because I know in my heart, that he is the blandest thing this side of dry toast and vegetarian cuisine. The man may have had testicles once, but they were obviously ripped from his body by some unnameable force, judging by his music. You remember him, surely. He was the purveyor of such reviled soft-rock slop as 'Arthur's Theme', 'Sailing', and 'Ride Like The Wind'. He was like a fatter version of Al Stewart. He was like Air Supply stuffed into one body. He was, in short, fairly horrible - with a sound that is one part schmaltz and one part coked-out El Lay ennui. I should detest his records for the same reason I should detest Seals And Crofts or England Dan or The Starland Vocal Band.

But, for silly reasons, at the moment I find myself needing the work of Messr. Cross more than anything else.

I think I've detailed my reticense to let go of anything on this site in about as much detail as you turkeys can stomach, so I won't wax lyrical on the subject again - but at the moment, I've been thinking a lot about moments. Not large slabs of chronology, or dormant traces of The Way It Felt, but - rather - a matrix of tiny, nondescript moments which seem to be taking on far greater resonance than they did when I first experienced them. None of them are especially salient or life-altering - or even particularly interesting, but as I go about my day to day grind of working on Sleepy Rock, they seem to keep coming up. My brain has been reduced - or perhaps elevated - to this, and I endlessly go back and forth, and zig-zag endlessly through the oceans of moments in time that I can remember, in a vain attempt to reconstruct them.

Maybe that's part of what grieving is. When Grandma died, I decided quite firmly that grieving was for pussies, tears were for losers with no balls, and I was far too intense and well-grounded for such namby-pamby girly nonsense. As I sped madly through the backstreets of Warrandyte on the way to my Grandmother's funeral, revving the Torana's engine with manly pumps of my foot, I blared Van Halen's 'Runnin' With The Devil' out of the windows of the car. Nothing was going to affect me, because I am too cool for school. I was going to deliver her eulogy and be back in front of the PS2 before dinner. Yeah. Right on. Peace.

And it did work, certainly. I got through that horrid, wretched day with nary a scratch - no tears were shed, no voices cracked, and I hugged no-one. Except my mother, who was in too many pieces for me to ignore. Apart from that, though, it was all manly handshakes and slacker nonchalance. I refused to let anything affect me - and I was pretty sure that through the sheer force of will, I'd be fine.

We're now a long way from that day now, and I'm still talking about it - which indicates to me that maybe there was a fissure in my plan that I hadn't anticipated. Instead of a massive influx of memories and moments and grief and sadness, everything I felt about the death of my Grandmother has been oozing out slowly, dripping out of the cracks in my memory.

I go on about music far more than is healthy. I know it - you don't have to tell me. I talk endlessly about bands and records and rock stars and never-were-rock-stars, and all points in between - because amongst all of thouse hours of sound, I've stretched conduits that connect every note to every second that I've been alive. And, sometimes, it seems that the only way I can go back is to move through the sound. I know how pretentious and artsy that sounds, and you'd be right to point your finger at me and accuse me of devolving into exactly the kind of self-important clown that I spend my life ragging on, and you'd be right. That doesn't invalidate what I'm saying, though. In this case, though, I'm talking about a long-forgotten purveyor of smooth A.M soft rock.

So, I was discussing Christopher Cross with my mother for absolutely no reason at all, and the following day, I sang 'Ride Like The Wind' to Bronnie - just to see what would happen. She went wild, quite literally running like the wind through the house. I knew I was onto something. So, I 'acquired' Cross's entire back catalogue and began to listen sequentially. And I was transfixed by how well I remembered every song from his debut. And how well I remembered the times when I heard every song from his debut. Some things should only be listened to on a crackly A.M stereo.

And it stirred up a lot of stuff. Cross's not-inconsiderably large gumboot splashed firmly down into my brain's previously-settled mud puddle, and the dust and dirt began to immediately float to the top, swirling gently around and causing me to go back to another time.

I've also been watching a lot of Doctor Who. Patrick Troughton's accent was almost exactly the same as Grandma's. It's nice to just listen to him speak. I have audio recordings of 'The Fury From The Deep' and 'The Power Of The Daleks', and I lie in bed and just listen to Troughton talking. It's good to hear that accent one more time.

The other person who has her accent is Wilfrid Brambell from Steptoe And Son. Steptoe is my favourite comedy of all time - by far the funniest thing I've ever heard, but also, by far the saddest, most upsetting thing I've ever heard. Albert Steptoe talks like her. The same British in-jokes and common phrases and the same politics and worldview. The rhyming slang, and the double entendre, and the allegiance to the monarchy, and the endless, frightening war stories. I have the audio tracks from all eight seasons of the Steptoe And Son television show, and I just play them and play them.

By now, most people will have stopped reading. That's okay - most of you stopped reading a long time ago. This is really incoherent, undisciplined nonsense - but I felt like writing something about it tonight, and I may as well post it.

So, here are some moments. They're just a few things I've been thinking about. None of them are especially revelatory, or important, or even interesting. But they're there, and they won't go away.

There was a swimming pool. Years ago. Blue and metal and wet - out in the back garden, with a thing called 'the octopus', which was some kind of pump with eight hoses. I hated the pool. There was an old tree that hung over it - one of those red trees that you see in the eastern suburbs, and the leaves would fall in the water. And I didn't like stepping on the piles of leaves - I would jump around and climb out. And at night, as the sun went down, and you sat out in the garden, all you could hear was the swimming pool pump humming and buzzing - as Grandpa poured chlorine into the water in his singlet, with a fag hanging out of his mouth.

And the trees! I talked to Belle about this one night. The trees in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne have a strange quality. They are red, you see. There are red trees everywhere. There aren't any red trees in Greensborough, but once you hit Templestowe, you can see streets lined with brilliant crimson trees - stretching up towards the sky with leaves the colour of blood and wine. But the thing is - if you're very careful, and you look hard enough, at exactly the right time, from exactly the right position - those trees become an absolutely perfect black as they sihlouette against the starlight of the night sky. Normally, trees become all kinds of colours at night - they are green and black and grey and white, with moonlight and starlight refracting from them in all directions. But in the east - and in my Grandma's garden - the red was dark, and when set against the cobalt fabric of the night sky, they turned the darkest shade of black that you could ever imagine, and they would move and shake softly with a timeless, ageless beauty.

Grandma drank sherry. Always in her sherry glass. Hunched over in her chair.

'GlAh-ses'. 'Dahr-ling'. 'Treash-ure'. '848373... won'. And an elegant, spindly, ornate handwriting that became shakier over the years.

And that blue cardigan with the pearl buttons. And those polished boards, and that big sticker with a picture of the sun.

Hey! Tomorrow I'll post some of the drafts for the Sleepy Rock illustrations. Would you like that?

You know, I wish she could have met you. She would have liked you.

Posted by David at March 8, 2005 12:42 AM | TrackBack