COVID-19 – The Electrified Journalist

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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.

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…

The Magic Hour

By: Mark Mordue April 13, 2020April 13, 2020

Charge/Poetry, Essayscollective unconscious, COVID-19, light, Not The Same Anymore, poetry, prose, psychic, sunsets, Terrence Malick, the magic hour, The Strokes, twlight, walking, wanderingLeave a Comment

Walking the afternoon streets of the Inner West, waiting for that time the American film director Terrence Malick called “the magic hour”. It’s still too early yet, not silver enough by half, but the coolness hints at the night to come, and the promise of the first stars…

Making Hard Yards with the Swans

By: Mark Mordue April 7, 2020

Resistance/Interviews#PlayForLives, Addi road, charity, connectedness, COVID-19, Craig Foster, food secrity, foodreliefSydney, home, Inner West, Marrickville, Newtown, socialjustice, Sydney SwansLeave a Comment

What does leadership mean anyway? It can rise up from the ground as much as something delivered from above. In the car park for the Addison Road Community Organisation two of the Sydney Swans finest, Nick Smith and Kieren Jack, are standing around having a chat about what’s going on with food relief in the city and what they are doing now.

Black Blanket

By: Mark Mordue April 3, 2020April 3, 2020

Charge/Poetrychildren, consolation, Coronavirus, COVID-19, diary, Dreams, friendship, love, memoir, memory, Mortality, sufferingLeave a Comment

I see us
in the curve of our love,
kissing in the sunlight
in a park…

White Crosses

By: Mark Mordue April 1, 2020

Essayactivism, Addi road, charity, community, Coronavirus, COVID-19, foodreliefSydney, hope, Inner West, Marrickville, social justiceLeave a Comment

Day ends at the Addison Road Community Organisation. Gurwinder starts to take the chairs from the road, leaving only the white crosses that now mark out the social distance needs of our times…

Living in the Time of Dylan

I believe we are in the Time of Dylan as much as the Time of COVID-19, and that maybe the former will be remembered as much as the latter.

Map of My Heart

By: Mark Mordue March 27, 2020

Charge/Poetrychildren, COVID-19, fatherhood, fear, freedom, Inner West, love, parenthood, poetry, Sydney, teenagers1 Comment

I try I pull my children
from the city
and its viral air,
but they live
like rebels
saying no,
maybe, it’s ok…

Food Pantry Banjo Ballad #1

By: Mark Mordue March 25, 2020

Current/Reviews, MusicAddi road, COVID-19, folk music, food relief Sydney, food security, social justice, unemploymentLeave a Comment

The words of the songs take on the strange timeless energy of old storytelling that needs repeating, and hard-won wisdoms that need to get won again…

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.