swim/swam

The water is held back by the innate mass of the individual dam sections

The river begins

a number of cities such as Chongqing, St Louis and Khartoum, arose at confluences, further examples appear in the list

the word can also be used for a longer artificially buried watercourse

Hanging coffins are coffins which have been placed on cliffs

A riparian zone or riparian area is the interface between land and a river or stream

The ship lift can lift ships of up to 3000 tonnes

Geologists believe that Taum Sauk and its neighbours may be among the few areas in the US never to have been submerged in ancient seas

Ku is a Loloish language cluster of southeastern Yunnan, China

Water passing through undersized culverts will scour away the surrounding soil over time

Of the twenty generator units currently installed, ten generate 50 hertz for Paraguay and ten generate 60 hertz for Brazil

“Deutsches Eck” is the site of an imposing monument to German unification featuring an equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I

Most fishways enable fish to pass around the barriers by swimming and leaping up a series of relatively low steps

When aggregate is mixed with dry Portland cement and water, the mixture forms a fluid slurry that is easily poured and moulded into shape

All of a groyne may be under water, in which case it is a submerged groyne

Consortium is a Latin word meaning ‘partnership’, ‘association’ or ‘society’ and derives from consors, ‘partner’, itself from con-‘together’ and sors ‘fate’, meaning owner of means or comrade

Ten percent of the Earth’s land area is covered by loess or similar deposits

Liquid moving through pipes carries momentum and energy due to the forces acting upon it such as pressure and gravity

Roman concrete (or opus caementicium) was made from quicklime, pozzolana and an aggregate of pumice

During the excavation of Shea’s Creek in 1891, the remains of a dugong were found in the estuarine clay

The four categories of river regimes are Sinuous canali-form rivers, Sinuous point bar rivers, Sinuous braided rivers, and non-Sinuous braided rivers

Days after the first filling of the reservoir, around 80 hairline cracks were observed in the dam’s structure

Low rhythmic seiches are almost always present on larger lakes

If the river water has a higher density than the surface of the receiving water, the river water will plunge below the surface

IMHO


it’s like we were never there
like those turf wars never happened
lying in the rubble
of undecorated opinion
gathered on the desk – who
could be bothered responding?
so different actors were procured
ones with bushier beards
straight off the countrylink
pungent with campfire smoke
singing this is how we were found
and that is how we were interred
the air i can’t permeate
in its variety, lies given. . .
a warm change blows over Australia

All this Mayhem (2014)

The initial appeal was an appeal to my own generation, its obsessions and accoutrements. The brothers that are the subjects of this film are basically coevals of myself and one of my own elder brothers. And though neither of us were any good at it, skating was present as a part of suburban male teenage life, as something you might want to be interested in or to aspire to. And so, seeing the trailer for the film I thought: ‘I’d like to watch that’. And then when I saw the cover in the library my hand darted out to grab it as if it might escape. It would be a ‘treat’, some light entertainment. I watched it last night.

Its attitude, that of its subjects as teenagers and young men, is that of a kind of Jackass-style male homosociality. It also bears strong resemblances to the equally self-serving documentary about the Bra Boys, which came out 6-7 years ago, so much so that it’s hard not to think one emboldened the production of the other. Both were about brothers from working class backgrounds (a fact often recalled), who succeed in very showbiz-style sports (skating and surfing), and do so by beating the reigning American champs, and both stories end in murder.

The disc itself was quite worn and scratched. A sign of its popularity? And it stalled often in the early stages. I had to remove it twice to clean it.

The form of this movie is sort of like the Trump-esque ‘extended prologemena to the actual apology’, which in both cases never really arrives.

And most of this prologemena was entertaining, even if it relied on the threadbare trope of the rough hewn aussie male versus the more effeminate american one, and even though the signs of its self-serving nature are there to be seen at this point (they become much clearer later). The insane single-mindedness with which they went about their goals (and the spectacular results) had the mythic resonance of other australian sport stories, like Bradman as a kid knocking a honky nut against a fence with a stick a million times every afternoon before tea (or whatever it was).

Entertaining because I’ve always liked watching people skating – the weird weightlessness of it. There was an interesting theme along these lines, briefly suggested but never followed up, about the hyper-(body)-image-consciousness of skating, and about it being fundamentally an aesthetic form. From the beginning, the two brothers had a kind of embedded reporter, filming them, and it was clear that this was an integral part of the sport, or rather this rhythm of performance followed by the studying of one’s and others performance on video. Given its fledgling status as a sport, the way it was plugged into the market was mainly by ‘making videos’, which could then be sold to and watched by aspirationals, who would perhaps go on to make their own videos. This image aspect is true of all sports now, but in skating it was more of a closed-loop situation, there appeared to be little else. There was no game aspect, it was more like gymnastics or diving – essentially about style, and new tricks.

As such, the tone of lament, towards the end, for how skating was ruined by the Big American promoters (against which the brothers were cast as the heroic rebels, and so on) was hard to credit. It had always been about showbiz.

My thoughts and feelings about this movie kept turning over after watching it. I didn’t know the story before watching it, hadn’t heard of its subjects. I was expecting something fairly light, something, I guess, nostalgic, and so it caught me by surprise. The accompanying material alluded to a downfall, to drugs. It didn’t mention murder. Indeed I don’t think the word was mentioned in the documentary itself, and the brevity with which the event itself was passed over, the lack of interest or inquiry into its effects, was breathtaking.

‘Greek tragedy on skateboards’ proclaimed the cover. I can only read this as a facile, and quite weird attempt at exoneration, following a logic of the kind: ‘People get murdered in Greek tragedies; Greek tragedies are understood to give insight into the human condition; A person is murdered in this story; This story give insight into the human condition.’

Another set of statements. There is not one woman interviewed in this documentary. We don’t actually hear a woman speak. One of the main subjects went to prison for violence against his female partner. The other murdered his female partner and then committed suicide.

And yet, its title, ‘All this Mayhem’, is, it appears, to be read as a general reference to that idiotic, coyly euphemistic (and very American) gerund ‘partying’. No reference then to the trail of tears these two men left in their wake.

Searching for reviews after watching it I see that the main subject successfully campaigned against (bullied?) another, earlier, film going into production, with the contention that it was ‘exploitative’. In the place of that film, then, we get a PR film for this subject’s New Life™, as slick as any skating video (the New Life™, by the way, involves that most American of tropes: born again Christianity – amusing mainly because of the anti-American stance he adopts throughout). The final shot is a long take of the guy skateboarding along a busy road, and then along a footpath, with his son riding on his shoulders (wearing a helmet), as a background to a set of short captions appearing on the screen. This I believe is intended to show how the child and family life have redeemed him, but also how skating, by a circuitous route, has redeemed him. But, I have to say, the kid looks terrified. And I recognised the second shot as the footpath next to Melbourne General Cemetary, which I know for a fact to be full of corrugations and potholes, so all I could see this image depicting was his continuing carelessness with other people’s lives.

But the thoughts about it continue to turn around. This morning I thought: where was the critical culture to receive this film? Was it ignored by serious critics because it was a film ostensibly about skateboarding?

What it needed, what it needs – and I don’t think this is should be that much to ask – is someone to show how it is about something quite other to what it purports to be about; to pay attention to those cracks in its surface, to those parts of the story it somewhat cack-handedly tries to smooth over, but which, with a little reflection, emerge as its truth. One of these cracks, I think, suggests that a correct reading of the film would be to understand it as self-parody. It is an uncanny moment. One of the brothers has been arrested after trying to smuggle cocaine into Australia. It is the late 1990s. The shots are of a familiar kind – a young man is in a suit, girlfriend by his side, walking quickly towards or away from a city courtroom. Who then, in his former life as an ABC TV Court Reporter in Melbourne, pops up to give the breathless account of events, but Chris Taylor of The Chaser.

— Oct 12, ‘16

Consisting Entirely of a Sentence By Martin Duwell


It’s unexpected 
that in this section 
of rather bleached visuals 
something baroquely verbal 
should be preferred – 
but perhaps 
for McCooey 
quiet obliqueness 
may only go 
so far.

approximately 45 minutes in kangaroo point, brisbane, on a sunday morning, in summer, in the year 2012

five shaggy plants are in a line, each potted in the same
kind of glazed terracotta pot, each the same variety and
roughly the same height. someone crosses through
this scene with a newspaper folded under his arm.
and now my banana bread arrives, 1.5 cm. thick with
a volume of butter the size and shape of a new eraser

[sketch of butter]
caption:
intended to be
actual size,
but when measured
against actual butter
approximately half a centimetre smaller

two women in tank tops (purple, pink), holding
water bottles, wearing sunglasses; one says, not loudly
“holy shit”. has she seen a queue at the cafe,
longer than she expected, and disapproves? is this
uttered as a way of claiming propriety, local right,
perhaps the unspoken privilege of ‘one who has run’?
apparently not, as seconds later they are
ordering: there is no queue. on the newspaper
being held by the man who crossed through this
scene earlier are the letters FAM LIV FEA
“not far from here . . . near the gabba . . . near
dan murphy’s” are words registered, spoken by
the woman in the purple tank top or the woman
in the pink tank top who have now (did, in fact
some minutes ago, their coffee has now arrived)
taken position at the adjacent ‘high’ table
furnished by stools. “that will be nice if it
all comes together,” the woman in the pink
tank top or the woman in the purple tank top
says in response to the woman in the pink tank
top or the woman in the purple tank top, who
has been describing her plans for a new deck.
the leaves of the five shaggy potted plants that
are all in a line and all the same variety are
long and thin and connect to the branch
at an angle of around 180 degrees at the base
and around 90 degrees at the apex, however
most of the leaves appear to ‘hang’ vertically
and are dense, obscuring the branches almost
entirely and contributing to their resemblance
to marijuana bushes. a runner or would-be
runner, one at least in the accoutrements,
is stretching his right achilles tendon against
a tree branch, or was, is now checking his watch,
and at intervening glances was observed stretching
respectively his groin and lower back muscles. a man
walks through wearing a dark blue t-shirt, a pair
of glasses on his head and a second hanging from
his neck, picking something from between his teeth.
“if they complain about the cleanliness of the
unit, i’ll fly off the handle,” the woman in
the pink tank top or the woman in the purple
tank top says. the parking meter has a crooked
bar of metal attached to it, attached to which
is a blue sign with the words, in white

 ________
|    P A Y    |
|   H E R E  |
|________ |

two joggers cross through the scene, walking.
a tall man walks through pushing a pram and
wearing a hat, next to a woman, shorter than
him. three men cross through, the last shiny
with perspiration and perhaps applied water,
apparently scanning the cafe display and
‘showing’ his teeth; the group, several seconds
later, can be seen pointing at different tables,
potential places to sit. approximately
twenty cars are visible, twenty standing still
and three in motion. a young man crosses
through listening to a mobile recorder.
a woman walks past, and appears to be
smiling to herself. a man and a woman walk past
in the dress of a bride and a groom, along with
another man in a yellow t-shirt and jeans,
carrying a camera. four different groups
cross through, each going in a different direction,
a man with dreadlocks and a smart phone
attached to his bicep is apparently the most
memorable. the woman in the pink tank top
and the woman in the purple tank top are
talking about the eating habits of one of their
sons or daughters, or stepsons or stepdaughters.
the bride and groom walk back in the direction
from which they came, the bride lifting
her dress slightly above the ground.

dissolving aust, 2012

Martin’s ‘Summer’

No
rm
an
 W
hi
tf
ie
ld
 a
nd
 B
ar
re
tt
 S
tr
on
g 
ar
e 
he
re
 t
o 
ma
ke
 r
ig
ht
 e
ve
ry
th
in
g 
th
at
‘s
 w
ro
ng
 H
ol
la
nd
 a
nd
 H
ol
la
nd
 a
nd
 L
am
on
t 
Do
zi
er
 t
oo
 a
re
 h
er
e 
to
 m
ak
e 
it
 a
ll
 o
ka
y 
wi
th
 y
ou

 

                               thouought 

 

Late Writings, 2016

onion, 2013

lightswitch, 2013