Attention All Llamas.

Davey Dreamnation, international rock superstar, is back online.

If you're unfamiliar with his work, I suggest you first take the time to slap yourself very, very hard across the face with a neenish tart (that is, if the greedy llama doesn't get to it first) for having been so shamefully out-of-touch with contemporary music.

Once you've scrambled back to your feet, you'll of course want to find out more about this reclusive pop enigma, read his FAQ, and perhaps even take a tour of the Camp Davey compound.

And don't forget the music (it's all about the music) especially a certain Aria award-winning tribute song which kicked off his whole career.

Another Day, Another Fetish.

Who knew one could have so much fun in the kitchen? (Safe for work. Messy, but safe.)

Raw Meat.

Mark Ryden has a website. Why is it that I'm only just now discovering this? Clearly I've been too busy sewing my own mascot outfits. Bollocks.

I almost Forgot.

You left your macrame owl at my place. I'm holding it to ransom until you finish that Monkee fanfic you've been working on.

Hop to it, buster.

Backstage.

I parked my Honda Civic next to a sign that read 'Veterans Only.'

Walking into the club was like landing on the planet where barbershop quartets come from. Chattering tap shoes, frenzied jugglers, wannabe ballerinas looking ready to vomit at the slightest provocation - it was the kind of mayhem that seems light-hearted fun to a bystander and like the eighth circle of hell to anyone trapped in the middle of it.

There were children, swaddled in satin, who shrieked and wove between tables. A distraught Jack Russell whined and scratched and tried in vain to wriggle out of his tasselled bolero jacket and humilating dog-sombrero. Two toddlers assaulted a ventriloquist's dummy. An old digger went flying when the potted palm against which he was leaning tipped beneath his weight; a gaggle of ladies from the canteen scooped him up off the floor like dollop of spilt cream. And, picking his way through the scrambling crowd, an empty-handed man in a threadbare tuxedo jacket searched nervously here and there for something he'd lost. Something valuable.

Agitated, he rubbed his hands as if to make a fire in his palm.

I Depend On Meat.

More evidence, if such a thing were necessary, that I am easily amused.

(Also, I depend on Hats Of Meat.)

Limbs.

The room is awash with dirty light, like a photograph obscured by a coffee stain.

There's a man crouched on the carpet. He's holding something, inspecting it carefully.

At first I can't make out what it is, this thing cradled in his hands. I step closer and peer over his shoulder and that's when I realise that it's a woman's head, a length of spinal cord trailing from her severed neck. Though bloody and clearly removed with violence, there's something modular about the head and jutting jigsaw-piece of bone - it looks like it might just 'click' back into place if reunited with the body it belongs to. The woman's face is white and creamy and beautiful, like Elizabeth Taylor circa National Velvet. Her eyes and mouth are closed serenely.

The man is wearing soiled grey yoga pants, and beside him a pile of dismembered limbs reflects a soft diffused glow, like sunlight through tissue paper. The woman's eyes flutter open, and sleepily, she mumbles a few words. In the heap of limbs, a foot begins to twitch. The man strokes her pale forehead tenderly.

'Shhh,' he says.

The Wild West.

K: You know where I am right now? I'm on our front lawn, bringing in the rubbish bin.

HSG: No way! That's amazing.

K: Yeah. This cordless phone has a really long range. I bet I could just keep walking until I got to your shop and then walk in your front door still talking to you.

HSG: You know, there's a machine that allows you to do that. It's called a mobile phone.

K: Whatever.

HSG: Hey, check this out - if you were here right now I could make you coffee 'cause my work just got an espresso machine.

K: Really? Excellent.

HSG: Yeah, totally excellent. I made myself one this morning and then stood around going 'Look at me, I'm drinking a fucking cappucino.'

K: That's nice. Do you swear at yourself a lot?

HSG: All the time. I love it.

K: Do you go 'I'm drinking a motherfucking cappucino so shut up, bitch'?

HSG: Yes. Yes, I do.

K: Thought so.
K: I'm in the lounge room now. I'm listening to cowboy music.

HSG: You so are not.

K: I am. Listen.

HSG: Wow.

K: It's Rawhide. Did you know that the era of the 'Wild West' was actually incredibly short?

HSG: Yeah, I remember reading that somewhere.

K: Only about twenty years or so.

HSG: Twenty seconds, I thought.

K: Yeah. Like some guy put on a cowboy hat, and then his friend said 'Aw, take it off, Jim.'

HSG: And that was it.

K: And that was it. Exactly.

From the mouth of the Congo To the Mountains of the Moon.

Sometimes, when I'm walking home or waiting by myself at a tram stop, I recite poems. The sound of words escaping into the air is comforting when alone, and if the morning is cold and the poem turns to steam, then so much the better.

There aren't many poems I remember by heart, to be honest. Aside from my own, the ones lodged in my head are from childhood; the first poems I ever committed to memory. Scrape my brains out with a spoon and stuck to the inside of my skull you'll find some Coleridge, a little Shelley and a smattering of Pam Ayres.

My favourite, though, is the beginning of a poem called The Congo, by Vachel Linsday. It's a poem filled with blood-lust and voodoo and skulls. As I child, I loved it. Mr Pansini, my fourth grade teacher, taught me this poem.

I loved Mr Pansini in the way that children love people who can produce coins from behind their ears. Mr Pansini would bring Aboriginal message sticks to class and tell us stories of the Dreamtime. Mr Pansini would hold Sudden Death Maths Challenges on Friday afternoons during which we would face each other like gunslingers and fire numbers at one other, and encouraged us to grunt 'Uh uh uh, and another one bites the dust...' whenever a reigning champion was felled by a challenger's superior arithmetic. Mr Pansini held my bloody face when (falling off my bicycle for the millionth time) I smashed my chin against the bitumen of the netball court. Mr Pansini, my mother assured me years later, was a real dish.

But. The Congo. I'll never know what possessed Mr Pansini to teach us a poem about cannibals. Why did he choose a poem so obviously controversial, if not downright racist? Years later I found the poem in a book of my father's and realised that, read in its entirety, it's a dangerous poem; a poem full of gunpowder. The full title is, in fact, The Congo (A Study of the Negro Race) and begins 'Part One: Their Basic Savagery.' I did not know this at the time, and he only gave us the first portion, which is a little tamer than the rest. How then, to take such a poem? Vachel defended himself (and indeed distanced himself from the the piece) but it seems to me that there is no absolute judgement to be made: perhaps it is both beautiful and offensive.

Mr Pansini taught us this poem using the choral suggestions in the original piece and added elements of his own, transforming the class into a three-part rhythm section. He did a marvellous job and even now, I recite it using the same inflections that he himself demonstrated. He would have us stand up, hoot and beat our chests as necessary as we chanted:


Then along that riverbank
A thousand miles
Tattooed cannibals danced in files;
Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song
And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong.

It's in my head even as I write this, and as tempting as it is to pound the table and shout along, I can't because I'm in a library. Sometimes I do it in the shower and this poem lives for me - despite its problematic race connotations - because of its music. Also, and perhaps most importantly, it's wonderfully transgressive. Imagine, as an eight or nine-year-old, shouting:

Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle!
Harry the uplands!
Steal all the cattle!

Poetry seemed then, as now, an exhortation to do mischief. To break the rules. To steal cattle and bang gongs with human thigh-bones. Thanks, Mr Pansini.

Some Words Of Advice.

Dear Disappointed in Darlinghurst,

In a way, the whole week was just a countdown to tonight. You had plans. Preparations. Things you had to do to get ready for this moment. Here are a few of them: borrow aftershave, wash bed linen, buy candles and new jocks, practice walking with your chin in the air and try to embody all that is sexy about Sean Connery. Make sure the bathroom's cleanish. Think positive thoughts, that was another one. Also, wash behind your ears. (For some reason, almost every time you spent extra effort scrubbing that little patch of skin on your head behind each ear, you get lucky. Sorry, I should have italicised that, for special emphasis: you get lucky. Of course there's no scientific explanation for it, but it just feels right, somehow - even if it's only the confidence of knowing that you'll smell nice if you do end up getting nuzzled.)

(Though there will be no nuzzling tonight.)

Here's what you were thinking about yesterday: shouting over the noise of the music. More specifically, that part where one of you can't quite hear what the other has said and so that person (the one who can't hear properly) cocks their head to the side as an invitation for the other (the one who's speaking) to position their mouth closer. That's a little parcel of flirtation right there: proximity, exposed neck, private discussion. And then, when the communication is delivered - undoubtedly a witty retort of some kind - the one who listens smiles at the other, the posture lending a quality of irresistable coyness. Heads close. Breath on neck. Upturned face. Raised eyebrows.

And here's another idea that's been occupying the space between sleep and wakefulness for you: pillow talk. Daydreams of crazy carpark-sex have been replaced by fantasies of post-coital debate about John Cage. In the past, topics of discussion in bed directly after (or even during) sex have included the following: dark matter, robotics, the AGPS Style Manual, scones, leaf litter, the career trajectory of Alan Alda, asteroids, nudibranchs, recipes for home-made lemon butter and how bad your sense of direction is. More recently, while alone and half-asleep, you've imagined murmurs, fragments of conversation - a montage sequence of giggling and intense looks and playful kisses leading, inevitably, to second-servings of everything. Accompanied by a soundtrack. And - let's be humiliatingly frank here, shall we? - it's probably something like the Dawson's Creek soundtrack. Isn't it? Isn't it? Fuck.

You got it bad, my friend. You miss the jolt of recognition, the feeling that someone else has used all these words before, and in this very order. You miss being told to shut up. You miss the opportunity to juxtapose the absurdly highbrow (ie. "And that was the moment I became fascinated by the study of ethnomusicology as it pertains to brain wave patterns...") with the lowbrow (ie. your fingers moving inside her).

You even mentioned tonight's so-called 'date' to a couple of people - in fact, reciting answering machine messages to friends and milking them of hidden meaning has become something of a team sport. Word structure has been analysed to reveal desirable personality traits; a running joke has become evidence of flirting. Let's face it, you got yourself into this mess by reading poetry into a pile of alphabet fridge magnets. Whatever it was that might have happened would be happening right now - this very half-hour - were it to happen at all. She called it off. That's okay. There's no shame in being wrong about these things. Everyone's allowed to make a mistake, once. Let it go.

It's static electricity and marsh gas. There's no such thing as the old lead-into-gold. The muppets were sock puppets.

Cast your mind back a week or so and try to remember how it felt to be cynical.

Good. Now, hold onto that. Baby, the sky's the limit.

Ganguro Girl Delighted With New Banner Ad.

"When I discovered that my blog had been adorned with a special, double-sized banner ad, I just about fell off my platform shoes with happiness. It's super-good, and I can't wait to get home and cover my whole head with white lipstick in celebration! Thanks, Bloogle!"

We Like The Moon.

We also like zeppelins and marmots.

Movement at the Station.

Okay, so Cordite's back up. It's a blog now (published daily instead of quarterly) and the theme of the current issue is 'Test Match.'

In the meantime, perhaps you need more dogs with roofs. It's just a thought.