Trying to tell the world what I think is awesome, since day dot.
The blues and country music
blue.
through.
Irish fiddle and twelve string
yearn.
you.
Indie post garage alt rock
regret.
new.
Atavistic folk Bob
ache.
we grew.
I’m aiming for posterity, like birdsong calling from stanza past, when I was bad and good, wearing shoe leather from foreign lands.
Paid endeavour suppresses it by iteration, but release is =now()
Consume muse by bar, which compels creations in characters.
Bandaids are good. They stop bleeding.
- Amy Taylor, iMessage.
Four Thousand Four Hundred and Thirty Saturdays
Recently I’ve been measuring time: It’s been three years and three months that Mlle. F. has been in my life. It’s been nine months since I wrote for myself, and ten since I posted a photo. Grandma has been dead for twelve days and it’s been fourteen since I last saw her. She lived for four thousand four hundred and thirty Saturdays. I’ve listened to nineteen songs by The National today, shot ten frames of film and thought about logging into my Tumblr so many times I can’t begin to estimate a measure.
I sobbed, squawked and squealed my way through a memorial at my Grandma’s funeral, there’s a simile about a baby bird there somewhere, and I still feel like that was a dishonour, so I’m going to type what I wanted to say, but couldn’t. I was born with four grandparents, one great-grandparent and cherished great-aunts. I’ve seen them all interred and my Grandma was the last. I feel like an epoch is gone with her, and this is what I miss.
Thank you Grandma for being a corrective, supportive and counselling Grandma, and for teaching me, truly, virtues. You extolled everyday these five ways of living:
I love you.
Clive
I messaged my very best friend earlier today:
“The individual known as Clive H. Somerville has had a very rough night, and is now binge listening to Ryan Adams’ cover of How You Get The Girl.”
Their (as ever) sage and sassy reply was:
“Oh dear. How rough does it have to be for Ryan Adams?”
And is the absence of reply within 15 minutes:
“Have you… left this mortal realm??”
And I guess there’s a few things that deserve explanation in that exchange.
1. It has to be woken by one of my two daughters every two hours for a whole night - losing about and hour of sleep each time.
2. That’s about as rough as it needs to be for Ryan Adams.
3. Didn’t leave the mortal realm. I buried myself instead in productive doing.
Skip from 0700 this morning, reaching out to my bezzo for some moral support on a fairly normal parenting day. Fast forward with me through two hours of weedwhacking and mowing on our new section, as Mlle. F., a.k.a. Miss 2.5 cheered me on from the comfort of the ute. Freeze frame for a moment on the scene of us savouring a bakery quiche and sausage roll with a coffee and fluffy, well earned from our collective efforts. Then join us, perhaps on a drone top down video as we, slept and showered, bomb around town on our bike - tail wind meaning we’re spinning out our tallest gear. Dinner cooked, and thenI finally catch up with Mlle. M., a.k.a., Miss 0.5.
It’s been a busy, brilliant, bonzer weekend.
And then I finally stopped. Or at least slowed enough to an enjoyable larghetto. 63 beats per minute. And in some flashback to 2015, I found myself, standing in my sitting room, 3 beers deep, tapping on the back of my baby, kick-kick… strum, strum, strum, strum… My nose nuzzled, buried deep into the chubby neck folds of fat of a bubba. Bouncing on my toes, tapping in between the shoulder blades of a tired kiddo who I’m clutching almost a bit too tight, forearm across their legs, a little bumshelf.
Two years ago it was Sharon Van Etten. Two years ago it was a tiny, grunt, gassy, Mlle. F.
Tonight it was Ryan Adams. Tonight is was a pensive and watchful, tired, Mlle. M.
There’s a little in common here, tired, emotional, cliche ridden, me. Folk/alt/rock/country. My girls.
My. Girls.
And in a protracted way, that is where this post is going. To that realisation: my girls. I’m an unstoppable sop. An immutably proud Dad. I am irretrievably vested in utterly and only two things: the Mlles. I used to doubt that I could ever love another as much as I loved my first. I was invariably vexed by the puzzle that was one whole me divided by two from me. Tonight the elder got a bit excited and hit the younger, and I had no hesitation in forcibly remonstrating that behaviour: because I love her. And because I love, her.
This weekend I’ve done little else other than hang with my fam, or tend to our whare. I’ve barely seen anyone who isn’t nuclear family. I’m really ok with that. At this point in my life, Mr. 35.5, I am all about my kids. I am ridiculously grateful for everyone who has furnished me with the tools I needed to get this far. I miss some of them who I never fully appreciated: teachers; Mr. Medley, Mr. Braidwood. I lean still to heavily on the most stoic of them, Briar. I haven’t seen a man I truly consider a brother: Ian. My perfect foil, and total riposte, himself now with two sons, to my two daughters, Steven, checks in like clock work. Amy turns on via velocipede just to give. My life is better for vicarious living via Mike. But after a full day of it, when I’ve pulled stumps, given one a kiss and swift pass to her mother, tucked the other in with two stories and a full day’s recap… This is it. This is my all. I hope I never forget these days, and I’m torn between selfish glee, and being utterly bereft, knowing that my girls will.
How does it happen that forget about the sun?
How can you find yourself standing still dew wet grass
midday
late August
stiff nipples in the shade
But in that forgotten sun absolved woes.
Opportunistic bug climbs up you bare foot for a dry and warm vantage
just like you
leaning head on hands on shoulder high soaked wood fence
north east corner of your section between the neighbour’s hollowstone block garage wall
massive fir
houses
all hemming you to three square metres of focussed sun
That’s your vantage
your back still turned to the sun.
But your ears slowly open:
Birdsong, the chatter of Sparrow
Wingsong, the gush of Tui flight
Roadsong, the whoosh of traffic
Tradesong the scrape of a bricky’s trowel
Too, your nose slowly opens:
Wet, mould, mildew, lichen, alike
Earliest Magnolia bud, last Camellia
Jasmine carried on the startling zephyr, freezing reminder
Lemon lolling on its stem
Pine.
Soft
Such softness in everything.
How did it happen that you forgot about that sun?
How did you find yourself leaning on that fence
midday
late August
heart growing
recondite soul rekindled
Mean hunch of winter rescinded.
I have to try harder to fatherly engage with my daughter when she’s in the back seat of the car -
Whose journey is it to daycare? Me, and The National, and national radios’, or she and the wittering and its own cipher?
I should have stopped at the photo of the densification, three stories, half a balcony, and telegraph wires.
Too the plastic chairs sopping wet in the splattering rain, set in a broken line to watch a non existent tennis match, this scene all artfully obscured by the court caged in dripping netting.
I do(n’t) banal cityscape (non)photography.
It might behoove me to empath less, fabricating fusillades of woe across the roundabout into the bus-driver’s cockpit as she innocently hauls at her wheel, my derivation of her state doesn’t help her game nor mine.
I circled the block three times, dithering on a park, none up the lane - superior haughty cyclists sneering at me through the fogged starboard cafe window pane made me feel so small in my outsize utility vehicle that I retreated awkwardly four-point-turning before stopping at the end of the alley and walking in, in shame.
I am self conscious taking my coffee, seated between the door and all, repeats of leaning forward and apologising like it’s a stim, finally redistributing from near the door to far corner to make it easier to let people come and go all while the serial recliner behind me offers no respite or remorse, it was a dumb stupid move, this table’s uneven, all over a wobbly mistake.
I read the tasting notes of the coffee, Scott Labs 28 and 34 dontchuno and so am now imposter imagining Tamarillo acidly tickling my tongue.
Hey, cafe lady, I dig your vibe: bob length chestnut hair bobbypinned into a fizzy bun, John Lennon’s specs a happy nose and teeth, those tiny plastic beads impossible to do anything except lose threaded onto a pear shaped hoop earrings, sweet tangerine jumper which has served its previous generations well (who knitted the rolling knots down the chest?), your brown woollen slacks of a jazz players cut pausing just above heavy brogues with them gummy soles and stripey pipes.
Hey cafe man, my mate David wore that radical Mango quarter zip sweater before he lost his second syllable and the sweater found its irony. I’m not being mean I mean I dig you too you take me back to fourteen.
I am propelled to go now, there’s no one left here who was here when I arrived, so I don’t want to be that guy but there’s still room for six more covers.
P.S., I’m cheery now.
Sitting in the
hospital chemists
this weird tacky shop
being watched
do I handle this vaccine?
I’m freaking out, I’ve got to chill
or I won’t be able to go.
Sitting in the
hospital chemists
feeling real fucked up
wan, fraught
I’m a pathetic father - useless:
my baby has a tube up her nose.
I regress and cede control.
Sitting in the hospital
chemists
glaring at shelves of pointless shit
can I put on this plaster now?
this t-shirt is already stained
can I put my jumper back on?
I too ashamed to stand up.
Sitting in the
hospital chemists
bodily. Coins being slid in pairs
from pile to palm
tallying the take.
Anachronism of noise making me feel seven,
Mum, can we go now?
Sitting in the
hospital chemists
as my Mum counts the float
next I’ll drag in the sign
she locks the safe
we set the alarm
Oh god, I want to be home.
Sitting in the
hospital chemists
“Ok, you can go now.”
Standing in the hospital chemists
“You just have to pay”
Walking out the hospital chemists
Practice
Mlle. F., (who is now) my (two year old) daughter and I jumped the low hollow stone and chicken wire wall from our backyard, over to the large carpark and lawn at the neighbouring church so she and I could (respectively) ride a trike and shoot some hoops. Mlle. F. chuckled and squealed with joy as she rode over the kerb from the grass and down the slight drainage gradient of the carpark, over, and over again. We had just been watching the latest round of the UCI MTB Dowhill world cup - perhaps she was emulating what she’d just seen. I tried to plonk a ball through the hoop which stands on the same edge of the carpark as Mlle. F.’s kerb - which a success rate of 1:20. One in twenty: I was lurid with self rage at my uselessness, whilst Mlle. F. seemed chuffed with her own efforts.
Mme. L. mandated that I shoot photos of her labouring our second child (Mlle. M.). I loaded a familiar camera with high speed black and white film and then awkwardly fumbled around as things got underway. I was struggling with finding the setting for aperture priority, and felt gangly trying frame a shot that was anything I liked. The aperture dial on my Leica IIIf was almost seized, and I freed it with a drop of oil - having done that I’ve started carrying it around, and I am shocked at how slow I am… I can’t guess exposure values and I frequently twist the lens lock out the wrong way. Fourteen of my cameras sat under a quilt of dust and cooking oil, some of them are gummy to use and I wonder if now beyond repair.
After a couple of futile efforts of writing poetry I jumped straight to the New Zealand zenith of publishing, Fergus Barrowman MNZM, asking for help and advice. Fuck. Me. I am a presumptuous prick. Of all the things I could have done to learn to write, I eschewed and went straight to a literary doyen. Did it, perhaps, occur to me that I could practice a little first?
Huh…, would it not occur to me that I could practice at any of the above endeavours? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah 10,000 hours, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseam. [insert a peer reviewed and published piece of justification for practice].
This morning I spent a lovely couple of hours with Dr. Ken Johnson - who is well practiced: both as a respected physician and a deft dab-hand in the darkroom. I was so glad and appreciative of his time as we talked about the intricacies of his masking, dodging, burning and changing colours, contrast and exposure of papers. All of this he conducts in the darkroom! Which is to point out that he spends hours out of the dark room, too, stalking light and compositions. He is rewarded for his practice with stunning prints of rich textures, whole gamuts of black, grayscale and white tones, and complex contrast. Dr. Johnson has been practicing shooting black and white landscapes in 6x7 negatives for forty years.
I am usually rewarded, too, for my own diligence in repeating and reiterating my efforts, while being clever about it - gleaning tips and advice from literature and connections.
About time I wrote a post about cameras, it is in the title of the blog, after all.
Guilt and Hope
23 June 22:57
Mlle. or M.?
Am I prepared? Am I ready this time? Two years ago I wrote about the utter shock of realisation that I was not prepared for fatherhood. Now two years later from that introspection, I sit, uncomfortably slouched in a red vinyl armchair at the foot of a hospital bed, one of my legs dangled over an arm of the chair, another perched on the end of the bed, Mme. L. apparently asleep, although unlikely to be truly so, as she seeks relief from the discomfort of pre-labour, her legs emanating and radiating shocks of pain, her most recognisable labour symptom… and I wonder if I am any more ready now, for the flood of emotion beset upon me by the realisation of becoming a father, again.
I have innumerable…
(Mlle. M. was delivered 24 June 00:09)
24 June 11:10
I had innumerable fears, doubts and emotional weaknesses leading into the delivery of our second child. As I my wont, I cried at everything: thanking our midwife, Mme.’s labour pains, the moment of realisation. And now I am betwixt my want to cuddle Mlle. F, oh you lovely little maelstrom in toddler; and my want to pluck Mlle. M. from her incubator and just hold her, hold her, hold her and cuddle and just hold, her.
Karma has given me two daughters to fret over. Yet another phala is that I have Mme. L., she is the ultimate mother, wife. I know that any emotional struggle I ever bear, she has earned tenfold and yet shows only one tenth the level of my quivers. So I know that no matter what I need to face, to grow two fierce women, that I do it with the best woman I’ve ever met at my side.
“At night you write out of guilt, but in the morning you write out of hope.”
(Roger Deakin, Notes From Walnut Tree Farm)
Being a Man Amongst Men
I cried in the car on the way to work today, because Okkervil River and I have a cause and effect relationship; and then I told weightlifting, man-talk making, Meatstock attending, plane and chisel wielding, beast-mode-always-engaged, David about it. David laughed and nodded knowingly, admitting that very angry music and a lot of tin thrown about was his coping mechanism, “you gotta do…”
I was tormented by my sister via Return of the Living Dead so badly at five years old that I slept with a light on through my twenties; and drifting, shooting, spannering, shredded, fishing boat owning, Geoff and I howled in laughter about it on our sushi date last week. And then he subtly rebuked me for noticing 7′ of legs and long hair gliding past the window.
I shared my deep love of three live albums apropos their studio versions** with my ultra masculine, Fred Perry devotee, soccer hooligan incanting, archetypically angry Scots, hair cutter, when in his chair last month, and he told me I looked like a fat Justin Bieber fan and then proceeded to obliterate three month’s of diligent growing efforts while elucidating his parenting goals.
The thing is that these are interactions with men that I’d never, ever, have considered venturing or surviving only a few short months ago, yet here I was, doing this stuff, talking to men, being amongst men, at my and their level.
Dive instructor Mitch, replete in suede boots, aged chinos, blue checked shirt, a fucking walking RM Williams advert, with his twenty-year-old high school gym-bag emblazoned ‘Virile Agitur’ slung over his shoulder, which is literally “Do the Manly Thing”, ergo manly man, Mitch and I talked at length over lunch of the existential dread, families, careers, various worries and weaknesses.
These confessions and considered collaborations on enfeeblements and emotion with men are very new for me, and only subsequent of immense effort and conscious observations. I have many female friends with whom I wouldn’t hesitate sharing a moment of frailty, or engaging on a spiritual connection to music. Leaning on their resilience when I have none, or counselling their singleness saliently. But exposing the …real… me to a man, non.
Nowadays I’m of an age and place where the old crutch of emotionally baring oneself to a [girl] friend in anticipation of reciprocation via benefits is useless and some atavistic affect. Nevertheless I still traipse out the old trope, rehearsed in the theatre of conquest, accidentally… in that way an immortal thespian will hold their hand aloft and stare through poor Yorick in their sleep, or the way my Blitz surviving grandparents flinched and stared forlorn for a moment at the local volunteer fire station muster siren, a reappropriated air raid siren in small town Waikato. Old habits die hard, I find myself flogging a horse that isn’t even there.
it’s been 3 months of baby steps and horrible self illumination. I’ve learnt that I test man friends for weaknesses by dangling my own like a poisoned chalice to join me in drinking from, only to have been repulsed should they dare expose by, supping at that cup, their own. The realisation that my relationships with woman-friends were nearly all so selfish that having to accomodate their needs incited fury, was a horrible moment in a life of excoriating self review. The problem wasn’t men. It was me having to learn how to be a man.
There is a quantum of hope. My new mates show patience and a relaxed caring. In having to drop my gruff guard with my doting daughter I’ve found a true masculine challenge, with instant reward.., she perseveres. Jim laughs when I try and laager my defences and he chuckles: “you think you’re the first man to…” when I’ve had a total meltdown over nothing. I am at least aware of what is me gaming the system, and when I’m slipping in to the old yoke. I’ve started migrating appropriate friendships to my wife, or perhaps just getting out of the bloody way. Affectations which are a wall of camp constructed to repel cobbers are being forgone.
Sometimes when I’m totally stumped on how to wrap up a blog post, I borrow from someone else, and since today has been bookend by Okkervil River, I’m going to close this out via Will Sheff:
^^“I had to let it go,
I gotta gotta let it go,
Gotta let it go,
All right, man?”
**Portishead - Roseland NYC Live vs. Dummy
Ray La Montagne - Live from Bonnaroo vs. Trouble
My Morning Jacket - Okonos vs. Z.
^^The Industry - Away - Okkervil River