Mark Mordue

The Ghosteen Cathedral

I wrote this reflection on Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Ghosteen about a year ago for one of those 300-word column glimpses where you are meant to reflect personally on a record. My choice never got taken up because it was ‘already old’, I was told. I was supposed to choose something more of the moment. Oh well. It’s been sleeping in a computer file somewhere. I still like it. Short and sweet, as they say…

Waterloo Sunset

I’m sitting here watching the world slide by. Tower blocks loom. It’s a beautiful day. A few kids on skateboards and scooters grind across Waterloo Fernside Skatepark in Sydney. There’s not much history to the place that I can find. Just what can be glimpsed on YouTube videos, or is writ on the wheels and memories of the kids riding now – and those before them, wherever they might be.

Tumbling Leaves

By: Mark Mordue September 2, 2021

Charge/PoetryCamus, children, COVID-19, Dreams, ghosts, love, love letter, memoir, Mortality, poetry, The PlagueLeave a Comment

It hurts my bones to love you.
It hurts to see the bottle-brush needles
like dried blood on the ground.
It hurts to drive in circles round my suburb
named for ashes on a field…

Astra Zen

By: Mark Mordue August 28, 2021August 28, 2021

Charge/Poetry, RadioBennie and the Jets, birds, chemist, children, covid, hope, lockdown, masks, mental health, vaccine2 Comments

A story about how a vaccine shot during the pandemic transformed me into a bird.

#boysarepoeticbeings

By: Mark Mordue July 24, 2021July 24, 2021

Charge/PoetryLeave a Comment

I believe in the beauty of boys,

their grace, their poetry,

their bicycles, their secret worlds…

Paul Cormack playing bass with Crow at the Palace Hotel in 1988.

Immaculate Friend

By: Mark Mordue May 25, 2021May 25, 2021

Essays, MusicCrow, death, friendship, Paul Cormack, Paul Gormack, Peg4 Comments

I heard the news yesterday that my friend Paul Cormack had died. The message came to me through his daughter Lena. Many might know Paul as the founding bass player for Crow and then Peg, key musical entities on the indie scene in Sydney. I first met Paul back in very early ‘80s when we shared a house together in Petersham.

An interview with Barry Lopez

News is just coming through that the American writer Barry Lopez has died. Lopez was one of the world’s most important nature writers, a profound essayist and poet of landscapes and place. I met him fleetingly and by chance in Alice Springs in the late 1980s and enjoyed a correspondence with him much later when he offered me encouragement while I was working on my first travel book, ‘Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip’. In 1999, Lopez consented to a lengthy interview with me for the Australian literary quarterly, Westerly. It was a wide-ranging and generous conversation and still holds up today as an insight into one of the great writers of our time.

America, I Love You

America, I love you: you’re Peggy Lipton in Mod Squad, you’re Patti Smith in the ‘Piss Factory’, you’re Cary Grant and Sidney Poitier, Arsenic and Old Lace and the Lilies of the Field, my grandmother and I watching you on the television, laughing and finding holiness and beauty in a prayer. You’re the fast talk…

Rushmore

By: Mark Mordue July 12, 2020

Essay, PerformanceBlack Lives Matter, Civil War, fascism, free speech, identity politivs, Lincolm, Rushmore, statues, The Blob, Trump, WeimarLeave a Comment

Sinister and rousing, Donald Trump’s Fourth of July speech at the foot of Mount Rushmore will go down as one of the great political speeches of modern history.

True Romance

By: Mark Mordue May 16, 2020May 16, 2020

UncategorizedBomb the Bass, Helena Christensen, Herb Ritts, INXS, Italian Formula One, Max Q, Michael Hutchence, positivity, soul, summer music4 Comments

Me and Michael Hutchence. A happy day talking in 1994, both of us feeling older and wiser at the ripe old age of 34! I was Editor of Australian Style at the time, which was really going off as a publication. He was a major rock star searching around for his next moves. I don’t think either of us knew how good we were really doing. Maybe we never do when we are inside our own experience? Three years later he was gone.

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.

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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.