S1E6: Notes
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A mixed tape of an episode that takes in The Saints and New Order at the Seaview Ballroom in 1982 Melbourne, writes a song about a closed cemetery in rainy Paris in 1989, nicks a guitar pick from the INXS stage, and reads a lot of Dick Francis.
After the last two interview episodes with special guests, this episode of Bad Diaries Podcast brings Jenny and Tracy back together, to read from our own diaries, on the theme of NOTES.
We set the same theme for a Bad Diaries Salon in Melbourne in May this year – our first Melbourne salon since 2019 – and it got us thinking (as our salon themes always do) about the different ways to interpret NOTES. We riff on notes we write, notes to ourselves and to others, musical notes on the page and on the voice and in the ear. Love notes, lists (of books read, of spaghetti marinara eaten); notes that have fallen out of place, and notes that remain where they belong.
Both of our readings, though, focus on music. Tracy reads from her travel journals, from a few days in Paris in 1989 that she later turned into song lyrics. Jenny reads from 1982 and her music-soaked Melbourne, nights catching INXS and No Nonsense, The Saints and New Order, Night Moves on the telly.
To note is to observe, to notice, and we notice the value of notes, lists, ephemera. As Jenny says, “we might be thinking this is a podcast about diaries … all this other surrounding stuff – the notes, the scraps, the ticket stubs, the postcards … in some ways maybe gives more detail than the diaries themselves.”
In this episode:
We had a brilliant line-up for the May 2023 Melbourne Bad Diaries Salon on the same theme, NOTES
Groynes are totally a thing – here’s the Cottesloe groyne that Tracy grew up close to
The 1981 film The French Lieutenant’s Woman (screenplay by Harold Pinter, adapted from the 1969 novel by John Fowles) starred Meryl Streep (occasionally with Jeremy Irons) on a waveswept groyne
Pat Cash was an Australian tennis player and legendary ‘80s spunk
Zenith Music is still in Claremont, and still run by the Cranfield family
Party like it’s 1989, and send your mail Poste restante
We don’t have a recording of the Frenzied Love Puppets cover, but here’s Elvis, ‘The Edge of Reality’, you’re welcome
The short story ‘In Paris’ was published in Helen Garner’s tiny, brilliant collection Postcards from Surfers. You can find it in Garner’s Stories: The Collected Short Fiction (Text Publishing, 2019). Back in 2014, Tracy wrote about reading ‘In Paris’ in Paris for Annabel Smith. Annabel is a brilliant writer, excellent karaoke-ist, and many-time Bad Diaries Salon reader (including #BURN in Perth in 2019)
On the topic of ‘In Paris’, we stumbled upon this in The Guardian, ‘Novel recipes: fish and greens from Helen Garner's Postcards from Surfers’
Cimetière du Père Lachaise – if only websites had existed in 1989, Tracy could have looked up the opening times
Here’s Jen’s beloved ‘80s ska band No Nonsense
Moving Pictures’ ‘What about me?’ was a horrible song that was everywhere (in Australia) in 1982
Late night weekly TV show Nightmoves ran from 1977 to 1984 on Australia’s Channel 7
Jen saw The Saints and New Order at the Seaview Ballroom, aka the Crystal Ballroom, in St Kilda. Epic.
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Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.
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