April 2010
1 post
I am iSam
It’s been a heck of a two weeks ! It started out driving to Byron Bay from Sydney (for the Blues Fest) and ended up in Seattle in the United States. That’s a total of about three thousand miles of driving, and fifteen thousand miles of flying and a whole slew of wonderful music en route ! It’s a fortunate life that I lead and I enjoy sharing it, so I guess I had better...
March 2010
3 posts
in a cabin in the woods
Sometimes it is necessary for a “decent interval” to have elapsed before one can write meaningfully about historic events, especially if those events have intersected with one’s own life in a dramatic fashion. In my case this “decent interval” has extended to some forty years. That period of time has seen the period of which I write (the Sixties and its counter...
the birthday blog
Yesterday I was sixty seven. One of those strange ages lost somewhere between the polarities of sixty five and seventy - “neither fish nor good fried herring” as my long departed grandmother would have mordantly observed had she been around to witness the event. It was appropriate that my sixty seventh should have occurred on a Wednesday - a day I have always felt to be marooned...
the life of a writer
Writing is a solitary craft. The life of a writer is a solitary life. It doesn’t have to be so, but I write here of myself and my own experience. My own privileged and self-centred life has landed me just prior to my sixty-seventh birthday in a position which could (perhaps) be described as “in the world but not OF the world”. I imagine that it is a position somewhat analogous...
February 2010
2 posts
How to clean up our cities
UPDATE: “The Lynx Effect” on youtube, click here to watch!
I arrived back from Bali full of the joys of Spring even though I had just experienced the wet season. Two weeks in Paradise had lifted my heart, made me look at the world with fresh eyes, and equipped me for the journey of the next few weeks. I was really looking forward to getting together with the bus - my home - which...
Dead Heads Unite !
I am in Bali - the island of the Gods. A short break before I go to America and Canada and Europe on a promotional tour for my book. I have come to Bali to re-charge my batteries - to re-connect with the ‘spiritual center’ and to get a tattoo ! Here there is a man (Leon) who is a Master artist - one whom I trust to put marks on my body that will be there until the day I die. On...
January 2010
2 posts
Another blog!
Each morning at five o’clock I get up and make my way to the garden. I am in Petersham, an inner-west suburb of Sydney Australia, looking after my dear friend who has a broken leg. At six the first of a thousand planes will be landing at Sydney airport and flying low over the house on their landing-approach - there is this opportunity for one blissful hour of peace and tranquility before the...
there's life in the old blog yet!
With “other fish to fry” the poor old blog got side-lined for a while there. No puny excuses no “exit stage lines” no explanations just the simply reality. It refused to appear and I didn’t force it to. But like a comatose body with the apparent characteristics of a corpse one day as I considered its sad and immobile bulk it twitched, it sighed and farted, and then it...
October 2009
2 posts
Islands in the stream
Having returned to Australia from a wonderful month in Bali, I have begun that process which occurs after a holiday of assimilating the experience, analyzing the pleasures, and generally thinking about what happened. My month in Bali got me thinking about another island which I know and love, Ibiza; and I was struck by some of the similarities between the two places, between their experiences as...
Bali 2
Of course, just because one falls asleep in ‘paradise’ there is no automatic guarantee that one will awake in the same place, and so it was that on my first night in Bali I had some rather strange nocturnal experiences. The bed was hard and firm as an athletes muscles and draped in crisp white mosquito netting so that I felt as if I were in the tent of some desert potentate. I lay...
September 2009
6 posts
Bali
Since the beginnings of my wandering ways, when I was not yet a man, people have been telling me about Bali. A friend of my mothers went there immediately after the second World War and I remember him describing to us the Gamalan orchestras - I must have been around seven or eight years old. With the arrival of my teens and an insatiable wanderlust the people of my generation split from the...
Aftermath
The blog on the sad death of Brian Jones sure made some creatures come out of the woodwork ! As my old grannie used to say “set a sprat to catch a mackerel”. As a result of the blog I have been contacted by people from all over the world with all kinds of bizarre and strange theories about Brian’s death. Theories, theories, some barely believable, some monstrous - the death...
Who killed Brian Jones?
It is now forty years since Brian Jones’ demise, where (dependent upon one’s sources) he either drowned or was murdered. No-one that was around the Stones at the time and none of the Stones’ musicians, have ever offered a public opinion as to what happened to Brian. His death has been “shrouded in mystery” and characterised by police incompetence, an absurd and...
BRIAN JONES and a proper police investigation ?...
There have been press reports that the police have received some “new evidence” relating to the death of the legendary Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones. I was working with the Stones when Brian died and would like to have a short say about the whole horrible business of his death. First though, about the police investigation. The original police investigation was laughable, a...
Life’s Simple Pleasures
Driving from Melbourne to Canberra one passes an endless succession of highway signs advertising fuel and food. These signs are all over the main inter-state highways of Australia, just as they are similarly ubiquitous in America. The driving experience in both countries has become homogenised. Objectively there is little difference between the two places with oil and food provided by the same...
August 2009
4 posts
Is there ANYTHING worse than being late?
An over-extended week of being psycho-phamacologically challenged left me feeling confident that at the very least I could find my way to Melbourne’s Avalon Airport to collect a friend who was coming to town. I set off faithfully following the instructions of my trusty GPS navigator and marveled as left turns and right turns unfolded in front of me and I obeyed the clinically-toned words of the...
The Byron Bay Writers’ Festival
I Drove all night from Sydney to attend the Byron Bay Writers Festival and arrived a little the worse for wear, which I subsequently found was the case with most of the participants. Writers sure do tend to have a “hung over” expression going for them (real or imagined!) and some of my fellow authors looked decidedly grey around the gills. Invited to dinner with a female namesake who’s also a...
July 2009
4 posts
A Grand Night With The Pharaoh
With a life-long interest in architecture I have always been fascinated by the Sydney Opera House. Apparently Jorn Utson’s masterpiece is the “most recognisable building in the world” know from Lithuania to Limpopoland by high born and low, peasants and princes, intellectuals and fools - everybody who’s anybody knows the place. It’s the iconic structure of the twentieth century. With this in mind...
Les Blues & Beef In Billinudgel
I woke up in Billinudgel, parked out of the way in the back of the pub. It was colder than a witch’s tit! All of my Euro-trash fantasies had been shattered by the inclement Australian weather. Where was the sun, the heat, the endless flies? I opened my eyes reluctantly in case they froze open like they do in the Arctic and I’d never be able to close them again. There was a lone fly zipping around...
Pacifically Speaking
Woke up in the bus this morning by the Pacific Ocean - “the big pacific ocean where the sun sinks in the west” as Woody Guthrie used to sing, except where I am the sun rises in the East over the ocean. South Golden Beach was deserted except for a lone figure doing yoga - her salute to the sun. The star crawled from the skin of the earth and it took me a moment to realize that I (and...
June 2009
2 posts
The Noosa Long Weekend
In a dreary and rain-drenched Noosa on the coast in Central Queensland Australia (for those who don’t know where it is!) I have just spent a few happy days participating in “The Noosa Long Weekend”, a festival of the Arts.
My first “duty” was to appear “in conversation” with Anthony Griffis in a piece entitled “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. It had the lovely sub-title (in the Festival...
February 2009
3 posts
Europe, novel
Australia, as everyone knows, is on the opposite side of the world to Europe. When it’s summer in Europe it’s winter in Australia and the converse is true. In January it’s really hot in Australia and the summer is at its height whilst in Europe it’s colder than a witch’s tit. I left Sydney and it’s 30 degrees a week ago to arrive in London where it’s minus four. The air in London was so cold I...
Spanish influenza
Have I been ill! I’ve had Spanish influenza. In 1919 a form of Spanish influenza killed an estimated 20 million people in a pan-European epidemic. You don’t believe me, check it out! More people died in the post war flue epidemic than were killed in the whole of the First World War! The only reason I’m not dead is because some clever man invented antibiotics. Remember antibiotics? Has the bottom...
2009
I apologise for the last few months – they’ve slipped by like a sneaky fortnight. I should have begun my blog on October 1st 2008 and was prepared to do so but on that very day my first book was published. This wonderful event (at least in my eyes) made me lose the plot – I got ‘lost’ in the daily round of promotion and book signings and more interviews than are conducted by a rock star; and the...
October 2008
1 post
The sixties?
In 2009 will be the fortieth annivesary of “the end of the sixties” and people who were in their twenties then will now be approaching old age. The generation that went through all the changes of the sixties are getting on a bit, even if like Ronnie Woods of the Rolling Stones they still have it in them to run off with lucious eighteen year old girls!You could be still surfing, running a bank,...