Ken Bolton
On Reflection
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On Reflection
for Ruth Fazakerley, punter I will have spent half of my life on this street that I like but that I never pay attention to I think I don’t want its image fixed too unchangeably . It has that combination of bland & bleak I like & bits —sections— have a different character from the whole perhaps there is no whole no single Hindley Street Nothing over two stories pretty much except at either end— lots of sky. I used to ride in from West Terrace in the early 90s, five days a week— the ugly end, that has got even uglier, tho its resolutely charmless sequence of takeaway food, closed businesses, Canadian Lodge, give it character. Unkempt, un-cared for. No foot traffic. The bowling alley amuses— fifties-sixties moderne, curved roof, wall surfaced with some material featuring mica or crushed glass. The sparkle that will entice. Better, the electricity sub-station, so out of place in the centre of a town. Genuinely amusing. Hindley seems suspended between the two relative higher points: the West Terrace end & the King William. I like especially the middle, either side of the Greek chemist # which reminds me of a Hopper streetscape I knew—Mexican-looking, I always thought, tho probably it isn’t— # & where the lovely, anomalous Star Grocery—Greek, blue-&- white—was, on the corner of Morphett, like something in an Australian country town but now, at last, gone The King William St end consists of a flow— people sluice in & out, via Hindley, past various retail snares— from King William and nearabouts— to disappear into the railway station— or they gobble food & go. # (A different demographic.) # This is not the real Hindley St. • The Star Grocery, replaced by the awful Hog’s Breath, which lasted a year or so & closed, where now there is a twenty-four hour convenience store. Like a country town somewhere else—India?—how long will this last? There is one—‘conveniently’— almost every hundred yards. Innocuous enough, there are about three I sometimes go to, not very regularly, on the basis of what they stock: some don’t sell nuts. Some papers, some … (etc) In each case they’re broke I expect tho maybe not (one is forging ahead) Across the road is the hotel, one of the five or six. I’ve seen awful things happen there A crazed bikie head-butted his girlfriend outside this one on a busy Friday or Saturday night She fell instantly. I remember the crowd kept moving— He was too violent to deal with. The street feels both intimate & pleasantly wide, The traffic moves slowly for the most part & you can step off the curb into it pretty much as you like, unless you actually have a death wish—& then, why not if that’s how you feel? • (In which case, Morphett Street or the West Terrace end is the place to go.) • In the coffee shop yesterday as I was reading & thinking—in my agenda-less, ‘some-call-it-thought’ mode— I heard a voice say “Stan Brackhage” How amusingly high-art & avant-garde & shorthand for—well, whatever Stan stood for. Or what he now has been boiled down to mean (I’ve seen half an hour or so of nothing-happening & was not impressed: give me earlier more German film or give me Cassavetes or Fassbinder or even Woody Allen or visual art (LeWitt, Hesse, Smithson) • a film festival is being organized, or so I think— • I hadn’t realized the arts-powerful were at the next table tho, in various combinations, they do come here a bit the ‘arts-powerful’ a phrase coined, on the model of David Kerr’s “the art-interested” one I always loved • Now we just say “punter” • tho I know the Australia Council expressly said somewhere, that we shouldn’t use the term a bunch of people like—well, no, exactly like—a Houyhnhnm Commintern— small-minded, noble, idiotic # I like the light here I like, I think, the way it’s not a shopping street: people move mostly on it —amble, lope, trudge & bounce along— casually to a pub, to TAFE or Uni, or to get to some other part of town someone goes by on a skateboard girls wander talking in pairs, students —the permanent feminine conversation that establishes the limits & shape of normalcy, what is real, & “the Idiot Dreams Of Men” : like mine Or are they more often similar? More than I think? it was a woman who said “Stan Brakhage” this morning —its valency having changed for me changed in my estimation for now. Tho for why for now?— meaning her thoughts focus on the same things as mine do (Eva Hesse Rainer Werner Fassbinder— to use them as counters, tokens things skipping constantly between existing in their own right & as ideas, signs • I think the Marxist term, once, was “reified” • Tho the Australia Council has probably ruled that term out of count, off- bounds at least ‘for a funded oeuvre’ # “You do want to be funded, don’t you, buddy?” # For Communism — No banana! Who, decorative, did Zeus appear to as ‘a shower of gold’ ? — (‘funding’) — Some Baroque bint (in Rembrandt, Gentileschi) (in Klimt & in the film of the Henry James novel Wings Of A Dove? with beautiful Helena Bonham-Carter) # Are We In VENICE Now? # No, I’m pressing the button for the lights & leaning here, with the mail— quite a lot of it this morning envelopes & boxes & waiting for the traffic to stop so I can cross Morphett St & go to work. (really go to work) The LAC, whose grandiosity as a name is made to fade by the sculpted lion that represents it & stands looking out to the Adelaide Cricket Ground, or the shunting yards of the railway, where they’re about to build a hospital, moodily heroic reminding of all that is passed the 1950s, the British Empire a world that was simpler, the avant-garde? Has the avant-garde passed? Someone ask the Arts Council. What is the responsible view? The clouds that gather behind the lion that gather almost as if his profile required them, massed, & ‘beautiful’, if sad— bland, bleak, Turneresque That old bore give me one of the other great names instead almost any will do Dufy, Picasso Gerhard Richter maybe not Stan Brakhage (A Turner painting—The Lion Arts Centre, sunset, storm approaching, ink & watercolour, 2012.) Hindley Street doesn’t even shrug —at these names, these meanings— even to appeal (like a street in Paris), Am I not more beautiful? (Than Stan, than Raoul, than Gerhard would depict?) Hindley Street doesn’t in fact hear or notice • Like a man in a t-shirt & jeans & on his feet, thongs— cigarettes folded into the sleeve of his shirt— concerned with something more practical some dream more earthbound —rent, the body’s well-being— A student I know goes past, I register & say hullo his mind, like his girlfriend’s, less concerned with reification living in-the-moment — as I did, a moment ago. Now the traffic prepares to slow slows & stops & I go to work. # I always knew this would happen # Danae — that is the name. Money for love. # “punter, punter, punter” # & as I arrive there is a punter right there— Ruth, waiting to buy some Foucault
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