The Electrified Journalist

The Basement Tapes

By: Mark Mordue May 3, 2017March 18, 2022

I’ve been invited to take part in the ‘Imagine. The Belfast Festival of Ideas & Politics’ on March 27th. I will be talking about my biography ‘Boy on Fire – The Young Nick Cave’. Because Imagine is a “festival of ideas and politics”, the conversation should be a lot more wide-ranging than usual….

Dead Eyes Opened

Is there anything more depressing than a media scrum and the press conference that follows it when a politician is being pursued today? At the Addison Road Community Centre in Marrickville I witness the background reality to how politics is played out for the public’s so-called benefit – looking into a glass bowl full of piranhas pursuing their ‘Gotcha’ moments and simplistic ‘angle’ journalism.

City of Light

The fine art of forgetting is perhaps The Necks strongest attribute. A concert by the Australian three-piece slips between the tautly engaged and extended atmospheres of organic drifting, utilising bass, piano and percussion to become something so trance-inducing you lose track of where and whatever you are…

Poor Old Dec vs. Ivor the Terrible

By: Mark Mordue February 8, 2022February 8, 2022

UncategorizedABR, Australia Council, Black Books, book reviewing, cultural criticism, Declan Fry, elistism, Giramondo, identity politics, Ivor Indyk, Jessica Au, SMH, Spectrum, Sydney Writers Festival, TwitterLeave a Comment

Poor old Declan Fry! That awful Ivor Indyk has written him a mean email hinting that Fry’s effusive review of Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow may have been tad pretentious. Calling Fry – to his avatar face! – “a bullshit artist when it comes to literary criticism” and (gasp) “making it obvious”.

Now Dec Fry has released the dirty message on Twitter and got the cancel culture drums tap tap tapping away at a furious rate…

Half-hearted Love (Australia Day 2022)

By: Mark Mordue January 26, 2022January 26, 2022

EssaysAnzac Day, Australia Day, Change the Date, Cold Chisel, COVID-19, Don Dale, First Fleet, Marcia Langton, memorials, Mental As Anything, No Fixed Address, Richard Clapton, Survival Day, UTS, VietnamLeave a Comment

The queer slant of a summer day ending. Heat, humidity… I’m half knocked out by work and its only Tuesday. Tomorrow, it’s Australia Day again.

Intuition Kingdom

One year in, one year out. Not too sure what to think of the times we are in. It feels as if we are all sliding towards a date with destiny. And despite the information that pours down over us every day, most can’t see what’s on that horizon…

Marwa/'Sorrow' at Addi Road in Marrickville. Photo by Mark Mordue.

A meeting with Fury and Sorrow

By: Mark Mordue November 22, 2021November 22, 2021

Resistance/InterviewsAddison Road Community Organisation, Afghanistan, grief, human rights, Inner West, Marrickville, multiculturalism, refugees, social justice, Sydney, Taliban, trauma, womens rights, youthLeave a Comment

I meet Fury and Sorrow in the Inner West of Sydney. They have fled Afghanistan by different paths and means. Fury has been here six days; Sorrow six weeks. Old friends come together again.

What’s Beauty to Do?

By: Mark Mordue November 12, 2021November 12, 2021

Current/ReviewsGo Betweens, healing, Inner West, Laughing Clowns, Peter Milton Walsh, The Apartments, walking, What's Beauty to Do?Leave a Comment

I wrote this very short and personally reflective review piece for a newspaper column last year that focussed on this kind of response to artworks. Did not make it through the editorial process but I always thought it had something special to it. Some things never fit right even when they are true…

Dog Day Afternoon

By: Mark Mordue November 6, 2021November 6, 2021

Current/Reviews, Resistance/Interviewsart, cartoons, community, covid, curators, drawing, exhibitions, lockdown, mental health, Peanuts, Sheffer Gallery, Snoopy, Umberto EcoLeave a Comment

Damien Minton invited artists to reinvent Snoopy and Peanuts for a group exhibition at the Sheffer Gallery in Darlington. Somewhere along the way it became a riposte to lockdown isolation and apartness in the time of COVID-19.

Cold Black Style

By: Mark Mordue November 1, 2021November 2, 2021

Music, Resistance/Interviews9/11, Brotherman, Heartbreak Hotel, John Cage, John Cale, Lou Reed, rap, sympathy, Velvet Underground, Wales1 Comment

I did this is interview with John Cale back in 2010. It reflects on a few encounters across the years and his career up to that time.

Why You Shouldn’t Underestimate the Upper Class

Read a fascinating piece in the Australian Financial Review by Pru Goward called ‘Why You Shouldn’t Underestimate the Underclass’. Apparently just everybody is talking about it!

Now another of her colleagues at the AFR, Crud Blower, has replied along like-minded lines to deepen the top-of-town class analysis even further.

There seems to be no stopping this neo-liberal rethink of our social ills. Caring condescension for all! Bravo! Rah rah! Read on….

I’m an Australian journalist, editor, writer and poet.

I was born and raised in Newcastle, New South Wales, dividing my teenage years between the coastal steel-mining town and Nhulunbuy on the Gove Peninsula in Arnhem Land.

After I finished uni in Newcastle I headed for the big city, and have lived in Sydney ever since – not counting detours back to the Northern Territory and down to Thirroul on the south coast – a year overseas back-packing everywhere from Iran to New York – and a block of time studying in China as a writer.

I’ve written a few books of poetry, a collection of travel stories and a recently completed biography of Nick Cave that has taken me forever. There’s a draft of a novel I’m reworking and pretty happy about too. It’s as if all the voltage of the past has built up and despite all kinds of struggles much of what I’ve pursued is finding some fuller radiance now.

In the meanwhile, I’ve been published all over the country and internationally – from making my start in rock journalism to writing essays to doing interviews and reviews and covering all manner of things that take my interest.

Some of those crossed wires, bright sparks and loose connections can be found here.

– Mark Mordue

Back in 2004, I wrote an essay called ‘The Electrified Journalist’. It was an attempt to explore the line I’d been walking for most of my working life between non-fiction interests and fictional techniques, not to mention my attempts at a poetic style.

The New Journalism was one obvious reference. But really the lyricism of rock ‘n’ roll has always been a driver inside me, affecting me and pushing me, reshaping me.

‘The Electrified Journalist’ and was published at a wonderful music and arts website called Neumu.

The essay focuses on my rock journalism – but it speaks for much more in what I try to do. Nearly two decades on from writing it, I don’t think that much has changed.

Here’s a relevant fragment:

“I think there is a vaguely religious quality to all this, that writing about music and writing inspired by music leads to songs of innocence and experience on the page as much as between the ears. It’s a devotional act, a real love thing, which is why it can be an angry and hateful and messy thing too. I often think the best rock ‘n’ roll magazines and writers have a reach-for-the-stars touch of anarchy about them, a sense of risk that inevitably involves failure as much as moments of white-light wonder.”

‘The Electrified Journalist’ can be found in full here at weblink for Neumu.

Via Us: Poems From Inside the Corona

Via Us is a collection of poems exploring the impact of COVID-19 on an individual and the society he exists in. The meaning and nature of love, in particular relation to parenthood and connections to one’s children, is vital to the work. Questions of mortality are inevitably raised; reflections coloured by the virus as awareness of its presence grows. The writing struggles with isolation, but is also ecstatic with this same energy – connecting it to our era and its strangely separated, socially distanced, yet deeply shared mood. The goal is not just poetry, but a form of existential reportage enquiring into the day-to-day conditions of the world: journalism with an inner eye. It’s a vision supported by photographs taken at the same time as each work was being written: a few images even initiate the drive to create a poem; most are taken to enhance what is developing, or has just been set down in words. With the exception of some handwritten works from a notebook, all poems and photos were developed on an iPhone 9 using Notes and Camera facilities. All poems were developed over a period of seven weeks, from early March till just after Easter in April 2020. All poems were written in the Inner West of Sydney. Via Us is a diary of this place and time ................. PLEASE NOTE: A pdf 'Via Us' download is available below. The PayPal charge for one copy is accepted on trust. You can actually download 'Via Us' from the link supplied (just scroll down further to find) for free – or choose to donate the RRP$9.99 in multiples of 1,2,3 etc through PayPal as you wish. Any donation to project will cover time spent and costs, as well as a possible print outcome.

$9.99

Above is a video of me reading a poem of mine called ‘Tuesday Flowers’. It’s about a day with my kids. It was filmed at Jane Siberry‘s Songwriters in the Round night at Estonian House in Surry Hills. You can see Jane seated beside me, then Paul Andrews and Tanya Sparke. It was a special kind of event. Wherever you are in the world you should go when you see Jane when she is in town and it is being advertised… music, poems, conversations about creating, it’s a kind of magic opening up and different every time she gathers a community of artists together. Special thanks to Gary Crockett for making this slice of film and passing it along.

Berlin Babylon

Television – Berlin Babylon. Created and written by Tom Twyker, Achim von Borries and Hendrik Handloegten. Starring Volker Bruch as Inspector Gereon Rath and Liv Lisa Fries as Charlotte Ritter.

Books – The Plague by Albert Camus.

Film – Nada. They are closed for social distancing purposes.

Music – Shame, Drunk Tank Pink.

Performance – Kate Tempest at The Factory, Marrickville. It was something else. And yeah it has been a while since a live show was a normal thing to experience.

Count Volta demonstrates his newly-invented battery or “Voltaic pile” to Napoleon. Alessandro Volta (1745- 1827) was an Italian physicist. He became interested in electricity in 1786 after seeing the work of Galvani. Volta was the first to show that an electrical current flowed when two dissimilar metals were brought into contact. In 1800 he constructed a device which used this effect to produce a large flow of electricity. Bowls of salt solution were connected together by metal strips, each composed of copper at one end & tin or zinc at the other, and a current was produced. A compact version of this, using a stack of discs of copper, zinc & cardboard moistened with salt solution, was shown to Napolean in 1801. Upon presenting his invention, Napolean awarded Volta the medal of the Legion of Honor and made Volta a count. The unit of electrical potential, the volt (V), is named after him.