On my walk this morning, a severe gust of wind sucked my cap aloft from my head and took it completely from view. This has never happened to me before. Always, until today, the cap has landed on the ground nearby and rolled along until I could retrieve it. To add insult to injury, I had to curtail my walk because the sun was shining on my bald pate.
Jesse Jarnow agreed with my request to record my reminiscences of the Bickershaw Festival, rather than an interview. I have just emailed Steve, asking him to set up the recording.
I have just sent the USB containing the updated Image Library, to the Queensland Museum by registered post. In addition to the 246 video frames, there are an edited 1,007 photos covering the years 2019, 2020 and 2021, plus the data documents listing subject matter, species identification and location. When I checked the files on the USB, I discovered that all the photos were listed, so I had to convert them to large icons.
This morning, Jesse Jarnow, who co-hosts and co-produces the official Grateful Dead podcast, sent me an email. It contained a request for an interview to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Bickershaw Festival, where I produced a firework display to accompany part of the set of the Grateful Dead, who were the headline act.
Two days ago, I phoned the Queensland Museum to speak to the person in charge of the Museum’s images, having last spoken to him at the start of the pandemic, when I was advised to delay updating my Image Library. The Museum’s images had still not been put online. The person I spoke to was no longer at the Museum. I left a message for his successor and spoke to her yesterday. She wasn’t aware of my Image Library, a rather unsettling admission, but found the Deed of Gift. She is now waiting for me to update the Library, which I began doing today, starting with transferring the 246 video frames of Stills 24 to my Image Library folder and creating and writing a new data document, listing subject matter with species identification and location. Ahead is writing data documents for all the photos I have taken from the beginning of 2019 to the end of 2021.
We are experiencing an infestation of European garden snails. They like the wheelie bins we use for garden waste, but are particularly fond of our letterboxes with their paper contents. The contractor who cuts the lawn and trims the hedges left an invoice in my letterbox, the day before bin night, which is the only time I open it because I have a post office box for my mail. There was just enough of the invoice left for me to post it for payment, to our building manager.
Around lunchtime I parked at the dry cleaner’s in Upton Street in Surfers Paradise to collect a woollen blanket. As I returned to the car, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The car next but one to mine was a Burgundy Honda HRV, number plate 105 VUV. My car is a silver Honda HRV, number plate 106 VUV. Where were you when you were needed 107 VUV?
In 1987 I came straight from London to Tamborine Mountain in subtropical south east Queensland – some twenty-two kilometres from the Pacific Ocean as the crow flies – and have lived there for the past thirty-four years. I was bowled over by the natural abundance and exuberance of the place — by the brilliant colours of the birds, the size and profuse growth of the vegetation and, above all, the alien beauty of the rainforest. I had not long been here when I visited nearby Lamington National Park and went for a walk on one of its many trails. Someone I happened to tell of my visit, remarked that there were areas in the park where no human foot had trodden.
This had an enormous impact on me, newly arrived from Great Britain, which, according to Paul Theroux, is the most minutely transacted, walked on, documented and recorded spot on the globe. For millennia its land has been bought and sold, mined, built on, fought over, grazed, farmed, re-arranged, hunted on, dug up, charted and mapped. It has been written about in poetry and prose, it has been drawn and painted, photographed and filmed and had music written… Read Complete Text
It didn’t take long for Steve and I to start work on the new footage. This evening we did the video frame captures and the titles for the four videos. The plan is for us to put the videos together and upload them to Vimeo in a week’s time.