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?

What’s Beauty to Do?

Can film clips for bands be little works of art? I think maybe they can. Or if not quite that, intimate moments of history, and with the song they match, flickers of true feeling.

Surfing YouTube one night, I slip into a video for The Apartments’ song ‘What’s Beauty to Do?’ And I find myself near tears as singer-songwriter Peter Milton Walsh walks a monochrome landscape. I recognise this world as one I have walked. The back streets of Sydney’s Inner West: a canal pathway with ghostly thin trees; a main road overpass so high you can’t shake a vertiginous fear you will fall; a leaf-strewn table in a park. Across these images a handwritten lyric … “What’s beauty to do in the face of it all? It’s a light in the dark.”

The song invokes the story of a messed-up year and hovers on a voice and musical drive akin to those thin canal trees when the wind gets amongst them. Strong and fragile at once, bending not breaking, calling from another world. Maybe it’s because I’ve been given a car and aren’t walking as much that this melancholy hits me. My streets, my by-ways. I have left them for too long.

Some days I drive past Peter and see him out there. He used to be in The Laughing Clowns and The Go-Betweens. He’s a cult star in France. Soon he will perform with Robert Forster at Sydney’s Recital Hall. Yet hardly anyone knows Peter’s music here, pop sounds from an imaginary Parisian drama that might have been orchestrated by his beloved Scott Walker in the 1960s. I get this feeling Peter is healing himself in the landscape. I’m going to put my headphones on and play his songs. I’m going to walk into this world.

The Apartments ‘What’s Beauty to Do?’ can be viewed here:

Leave a comment Cancel reply

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.

Share this:

Posted by:Mark Mordue

Leave a comment Cancel reply