Visiting the Well

Vinyl Love IV

I was talking to one of my sons the other night about a new sound system he wanted to buy for his room. He was telling me about the interconnectivity he was looking for with his range of other devices including laptop, TV and iPod. According to him, his system, which still looks pretty good to me (he bought it a few years ago), is dinosaur territory. God knows what that makes my Sansui Hi-Fi system, including turntable, which I bought in 1978 and is still in use.

Anyway his observations made my memory fly back to the wonderful device my parents had in what passed for our sitting room when I was very young boy. It was a radiogram – a gloriously large piece of wooden furniture that contained not only a heavy-duty turntable but a radio as well. Phonogram + Radio = Radiogram.

The records being played on the beast were all 78s - those shellac discs that shattered when dropped and spun at 78 rpm. My parents loved musicals and had the ‘albums’ for many of them. 78 albums consisted of multiple disks in paper sleeves sandwiched between stiff cardboard covers like a book. My love of records began at this time. Songs like Bali Hai from South Pacific, Surrey with the Fringe on Top from Oklahoma, and the Drinking Song from The Student Prince are still in my head.

Whenever I’m kidded about keeping my old vinyl albums (although funnily enough that doesn’t happen as much as it used to) I have to smile when I think about those ‘other albums’ I wish I still had. Now the sight of those would really place me back in the Jurassic with my ‘sound system’ buying son.

Other Vinyl Love posts:

Vinyl Love
Vinyl Love II
Vinyl Love III

Nine Lives

While I was visiting my boyhood haunts last weekend, I had the opportunity to visit a place where I once had a very close call with the grim reaper caused purely by my own stupidity.

Now most of us have these stories we can tell – near misses in cars, dumb stuff in high places, being blasé with electrical devices. This one involved having too much belief in my youthful invulnerability and having little respect for the power of nature – a potentially lethal mix that claims a fair share of young lives every year. I’m only here because of the quick thinking and steady nerve of a friend.

I grew up in a seaside suburb of Brisbane – a existence which allowed me to fully explore the range of dumb things boys can do with water - like falling out of boats, getting bitten by nasty marine beasties and generally finding innovative ways to lose touch with dry land.

Being part of Queensland (albeit the southern part), we are used to cyclones in summer. Most strike the northern parts of the state like the recent Cyclone Larry (a Category 5 monster).  Just occasionally they come south, and my experience comes from one of those times.

Growing up in a place makes you feel like you own it. ‘This is my beach’, ‘my pier’, ‘my creek’ etc. You get to the point where you feel in total command of your surroundings. ‘I’ve been doing this here since I was 5!’ That’s dangerous stuff because it means you’ll put yourself in situations where commonsense takes a backseat. Couple that with the bravado of being a teenager and you’ve got double trouble.

On ‘my beach’ there is a pier (been there since the 1880s) and a stone breakwater. I spent a large part of my childhood crawling over both structures. At the end of the breakwater there is rusted section of iron railings (encrusted with barnacles) that is a remnant of a swimming enclose from many years ago.

On the occasion in question, a cyclone was just off the coast and the seas were huge. For some reason which totally escapes me now, a small bunch of us ventured out to the end of the breakwater to play chicken with the waves. Our ‘vast’ experience told us that the waves would only reach ‘so far’. Naturally that wasn’t the case, and a huge rogue wave came out of nowhere, crashed right on top of us and swept me off.

I’m a reasonably strong swimmer but I was absolutely powerless to do anything but just keep my head above water. The waves began picking me up and slamming me back against the breakwater and the iron railings. Everytime I grabbed hold of the slimy rocks, the sea dragged me back out and then hammered me again.

I could see my friends looking aghast at what was going on but probably expecting me to crawl back out under my own power. However after a few minutes of this, which seemed like hours, I’d just about had enough. The wind was roaring and anyway everytime I tried to call back up to my mates my mouth filled with water. I though the end was nigh when I was slammed face first into the iron grate and could feel my forehead split on the barnacles.

Just then a big hand grabbed a handful of my hair (thankfully long) and using the power of the wave hauled me out. It was one of my mates who pushed his way forward, lay flat of the rocks and reached down while the others braced him.

I rolled around coughing, spluttering and bleeding till I was grabbed under the armpits and dragged away to be dumped on the beach.

Needless to say we just sat there for a while not saying anything until our bravado returned. We then started joking and gesticulating at the sea like cavemen hooting at the wild beast they just escaped from the safety of a tree.

All this came flooding back standing on the edge of those same rocks the other day. That was over 30 years ago but again shows the power of artefacts as memory triggers. It also hints at how paper thin the dimension of time might really be.

Ex Libris: Kit Williams

Over twenty years ago, British artist Kit Williams created a publishing phenomenon that has current echoes in the emerging field of location based games. In these games (played in the real world, online and on mobile devices) players move through real space, interacting with one another to  complete a quest or series of quests. Questing and adventuring have always struck a  chord with the human psyche, particularly when a treasure or significant reward lies at the completion of the task.

Kit Williams created such a quest, twice actually, with his two books Masquerade and Untitled - the Bee Book. Both were illustrated story books that contained visual and literary puzzles the would lead readers to the two prizes. In Masquerade the prize was a beautiful golden hare encrusted with real jewels. Kit buried it at a location in the UK that would be revealed when the book's puzzles were solved.

He actually sealed the hare in wax and buried it in a clay jar to foil metal detectors. His strategy worked.

In Untitled, he created an amazingly detailed marquetry box as a cover for the book whose real title was covered by the timber pieces and a jeweled bee. The task was to decipher the puzzles in the book to uncover the true title. From memory, readers had 12 months from the time of publishing of each book to solve the puzzles.

Both were eventually solved, but I'll let you scour the net to read how that happened.

In 1984 Kit came to Australia on a book signing tour for Untitled. I was lucky enough to have him sign both books for my two (then very young) sons. I'm sitting here looking at books now.

They were a great publishing success at the time and while the puzzles were intriguing, even to someone stuck on the other side of the world and having no chance of ever recovering the jeweled hare in particular, it was William's art work that really stunned me. Beautiful does it no justice at all. I believe the originals paintings are on display in the UK.