I wrote and contributed this experiential essay then although not immediate to the 17th. What definition I wonder did we choose, the ed. and me … to move on to something else instead.
The hubbub of children oscillated like a drone in the hall. Fashionable ladies with smiling grey-haired, white-headed and bald men gathered near the vinyl/leather lounge where I was sitting. Hardly an individual voice could be heard. I was lost on the second/third floor of –perhaps – an outlier of a department of the NGV for all the sense I could make of foyer areas of bare walls and stretches of carpet with scrambles of schoolchildren pets accompanied by their teacher-owners walking them. Wherever I walked. Some carrying chairs and so far I hadn’t seen any art much. It is a big place to feel adrift. Feeling very much a loose cannon, might I cut and run. Escape the noise setting up its one all mighty gig in my head. As if off the end of a water slide whooshed. Barely treading water was I considering the carpet a stretch of a hard sea. I had decided to walk to meet with the thrill of discovery of a random piece that would transport me to heaven. An intrigue of an oil painting by an abstract artist. The solid of a sculpture by a realist. I began wending my way across a loch inside a castle on the island in its moat. I could not be far. I reached a lift door hidden in a blank wall. Art was in the air as a bespectacled youth with another bespectacled youth met the lift when I stepped out. The young people spoke to the silent lift as they stepped in. Their words whisked into the drone of words, laughter, giggling, sneezing, coughing, talking, whispering, rustling, but no footsteps. A spy could get a spy with polonium-210 in that place. People maintained their distances, walked singly and flitted with chairs.
Collage
Harrall Fletcher’s exhibition appealed to me for its title: The sound we make together (Melbourne). I did not attach to it thoughts about the initial cacophony of nothing and everything going on in my head and space as I defined it in the interior’s conclusions of edges of blocks of shadow and light and unlit corners. “Soundscapes” (an assumption) had lept out of a flame of interest to the forefront of my narrowing mind and I turned to looking for locational plans, a wall directory, signs. A sign after choosing the traffic of attendees going somewhere to trail after was obscure that appeared in a dark (I am sure) wallplate: ‘Harrall Fletcher’ I discerned and details. I chose the modest door and felt blocked by a screen with hanging on it a dark (I swear it) photograph that didn’t appeal as I wondered if it was lit or I unlit. ‘Collaboration and Participation’ was not what I was after and yet I chose a community-based project. I was more and more engaged in interest in the individual.
When I walked around the screen and saw the sea of floor, felt an immense separation of feelings I noticed stirring in instinct to bond them, from where I stood thus I undertook an honorary inspection of the room empty other than for its exhibits and decided…to leave the NGV for another visit to Melbourne. Outside, I saw a couple of enterprising men using the synthetic grass space next to the gallery to stretch and discuss the dynamics of their musculature. They waved their hands at each other. I thought that looked interesting. A thin young man in an ill-fitting suit sat on one of the clustered bales provided on the lawn. He lifted a pamphlet to read it and discretely scratched his top lip with his free hand. I recognized a Movember moustache as I did another and another inclusive of the same self-conscious gesture wherever I had walked through the streets of Melbourne that day. Art abounds in Melbourne city in the street, that seeming to be wherever it can be fitted and adorning its architecture.
Somewhere alongside the Yarra River I sat at a bus stop, changed into the Crocs I unpacked out of my possessions in my rucksack off my back and found a rubbish bin for my sneakers. I had over the course of two days walked my sneakers to ribbons and as well I needed to repack my belongings ready to catch my plane in the early morning.
Emmjay and I met at First Dog on the Moon’s book launch of FDotMs Christmas Book of totally scratchy (hilariously funny) text and cartooning, which is why I was in Melbourne and on that day we both were on invitation to attend. We had a delightful meeting. Emmjay (he mistook me for the woman in the grey dress) I learned was holed up somewhere earlier enjoying a pre-launch vino. I was sorting myself at my digs at the backpackers across the way from where the early evening event was held at the Trades Hall.
Although Emm had to leave to catch a plane home I could stay on for an evening of side splitting comedy of one after another stand-ups who followed the launch on a separate billing. The talent of the performers every one particularly the lack of pointless profanity I recall as a breeze on a summer’s day. I explored the corridors of the Trades Hall after the show.
Victorian workers won the first 8 hour day in the world in 1856. An original address for the Victorian Trades Hall was built in 1859 and the present building is result of upgrades between 1874 and 1925 (Wikipedia). The structure is magnificent from an architectural viewpoint of a monolith. The commodious space where the launch was held was comfortably filled later by the large audience that enjoyed the evening’s performance comedy and when I had arrived before the launch, I took a wrong turn and found myself in a series of meeting rooms.
I photographed the display of the image of Gough Whitlam on the landing of the magnificent Trades Hall staircase that has accommodated the tramping up and down its sweep of who can imagine how many workers.
From The Creative Review (online): 1965 poster by Ken Briggs
Story and Reading by Christina Binning Wilson
That asylum seekers are being sent to Papua New Guinea is outrageous outcome and destination. I wonder what outcome can be expected for Papua New Guinea. My heart bleeds.
The election is not only about boats, a flogged horse is still a horse of course, but education, electricity prices, energy use, environment, digital security, broadband and so on e.g. the dole that is starvation, homelessness, risk orientation, policy as similarly cruel and callous and retrogressive. It is about gender and how that is acknowledged. The election is about policy development and every other aspect of the administration. It is about parliamentary processes more than it has ever been, about who is rooting for who-how-whoever you are regardless whether you know the aforementioned poem ‘The Second Coming’ by Yeats* and whether we get it from Malcolm’s reading.
It might have a bearing. I don’t want any hope of Malcolm Turnbull becoming PM and think there is even less real chance.
What justifies Malcolm’s isolation, seeking to bond a pod, a cast at a podcast, of a concept that all the men in Coriolanus are very unattractive and we can suppose he means not very nice?
One of the important (all Shakespeare’s characters are important) characters of the male gender is, in fact, a baby, Coriolanus’ infant son and for all we know from Malcolm’s description he is not there. True, who said anything about the baby, about fair (or inclusion). True, it looks as if the kid does not have much hope surrounded by (ipso facto) these less than even half OK fellers (yuk! boy germs).
Playing a contemporary gallery. Nothing is more attractive to men and perhaps women an adviser said than a man who decries the behaviour of men.
Yet, the play has a significant component of domestic drama that is explicit and implicit. No reference to the plight of the war hero on a domestic and political and social front after returning home when the battle is won (I recall at University we thrashed the discussion about the feelings of our own soldiers and especially the effects on them of the cold shoulder they received). Yes, there are riots going down that are pretty severe because Rome in my own recall had emptied its coffers. The proletariat by whom he once was hailed as hero are laid low result of their starvation diets and bearing their fardels (can’t remember where that is, but didn’t forget).
Move in closer. A keynote speech is delivered by a woman in ‘Coriolanus’. Not a mention of it.
20 years ago, and it is 20 years on, I wrote the poem ‘Coriolanus’, considering what I witnessed in my life experience to the event of the 1987 financial collapse. What I felt. I would write a series of poems reflecting not the chronology, stories or a specific representation of characters, but a thought image about human behaviour that was direct result of thinking about loved Shakespearian images … where on my psychological map had I arrived.
Coriolanus *
Pulling the wings off butterflies
I am disappointed;
But I must persist.
Watching the butterflies
I am singing
Clear
Loud.
This is a song.
This is the recall.
Savagery has a gossamer thread.
I must paint it.
* cf the play by William Shakespeare; Coriolanus’ son is being reared by his paternal grandmother while the General is at war and [I made the error it was the grandmother] she is recounting watching the boy chase a butterfly, ‘mammocking’ them. She proclaims her grandson, with pride, his father’s son.
‘Coriolanus’ to me -not Shakespeare’s play, but my poem in this reference – is a signifier, a meditation, as much as a diary note. I wrote it equally as proof of my mind map and marker, of an interest in human behaviour and determination.
It was a friend visiting the family, Valeria, who declared (without reproof) the definitive speech revealing the child’s upbringing.
Malcolm has completely removed friendship from the play. I think it is difficult to have a lack of it without its important presence. Coriolanus has a friend who tries on the streets among the people to get information and mediate on his behalf. Not an unattractive trait. Menenius counsels the proletariat to fear what the power of the administrators can do and employs words of tact by way of contrast to Coriolanus displaying apparently insolent behaviour towards his countrymen in the opening scene. The setting is laid out for us to see civil unrest when the army of Volscians bent on invasion reaches Rome. The economy is already on shaky ground. Coriolanus is sent to engage the Volscians and defeat them.
We however are privy to detail of relationships that are rich between the soldiers of the army, and senators, patricians, between women and men, not one dimensional (whenever to anybody’s knowledge was Shakespeare one-dimensional) including inference again Coriolanus commands respect in banter and joking that is not malevolent. He has purpose, is pumped for war with a band of brothers. When he returns, anxious for his standing, he meets even with protestations in his defence of proletariat who declare him virtuous, worthy of honour and reward. Nothing is black and white regards all men being ‘unattractive’ implied as no other as Malcolm proselytises. Nobody’s descriptive powers could be stripped further from the pages of Coriolanus by Malcolm. A crafted thoroughfare of bustling activity, demonstrations, controversy, trouble; opinion and diversity are deleted from viewpoint by Malcolm’s implication not a man was worth a pinch of salt. Apparently clever remarks at the forum tick boxes. Might we be able to not titter, but instead rise to our feet discarding falsely shallow repartee and point to the emperors?
In Act 3 Volumina and her daughter Virgilia, Coriolanus’ wife, mother of the child are at home in surrounds we soon realise are opulent and comfortable. The signifier is the grouping; the play is a psychological drama about a man of standing because of his military skills and prowess, raised by a mother who values the characteristics of stoic forebearance and a war mongerer and companioned by a compliant wife; the crucial keynote speech is not the death speech by Coriolanus, but the attention the visitor, Valeria draws to the child and the child’s behaviour. Equally important is Shakespeare presents to us Coriolanus’ mother, Volumina discussing the mental state of separation from him with her worried daughter-in-law; her preoccupation is pride in his position as a war hero and the child’s mother’s concern for his safe return, but more questioning the mother’s viewpoint.
We are shown powerfully the generational and societal influences making the boy as it made the man.
Valeria, discussed at length in High School that she could be dispensed with out of the plot (I recall) bulks up numbers visiting Volumina, the mother and Virgilia, the wife with purpose in my view of stage presentation and story, to show the influences surrounding the mother of the baby, Virgilia, dominated by Volumina, their female grouping, their pasttimes not for trivia, not intended for deletion, but the scene is dark predicating the hopelessness of Virgilia’s position whatever it was she may have wanted for herself and her child … even trivial expectations to leave aside work (needlework) displayed by their visitor (the noblewoman, Valeria) of Virgilia, but she begs she will not leave her post loyally waiting for Coriolanus, her husband.
Heed Valeria, her excitement and pride in the destructive future she envisages in store for the small child.
VALERIA
O’ my word, the father’s son: I’ll swear,’tis a
very pretty boy. O’ my troth, I looked upon him o’
Wednesday half an hour together: has such a
confirmed countenance. I saw him run after a gilded
butterfly: and when he caught it, he let it go
again; and after it again; and over and over he
comes, and again; catched it again; or whether his
fall enraged him, or how ’twas, he did so set his
teeth and tear it; O, I warrant it, how he mammocked
it!
When Experience in a Limbo Haze* appeared in this august blog, some of the flattering words used in comments were “rambling” “layered” “amble” “frolic” and “amusing”. I referred at its end to the numerologist. Big M commented he looked forward to another instalment so where we pick up the story…
The numerologist was at the bus stop with his worldly shopping bags and bags of books, but not so laden to not seem freer in his concerns and with his replies than might be expected on a hot day. He seems to swing with the bags as if his fragile torso cannot resist the motion once that has begun. He is a repatriate who lived in India he has told me and wishes to translate and publish the Adelaide telephone directories as volumes of numerological significance and similarly, a key of a town street map and its addresses where he lived in India. We part at the street corner after a short walk of ritual when we disembark from our bus journey to the outer suburbs.
I did become dangerously involved. That seemed inevitable with great clutched handfuls of sentences tugging it appeared in his breast as well as mine (overlooking numbers). We shared the newspaper and documents when we met at the stop and rode the bus together like the aged social gypsy renegades we knew we appeared in our mis-shapen skins weathered by lives lived in the open. One thing was neither of us had the tell-tale evidence of excessive alcohol use so many did we greeted in that poor place and we trudged with our distinctive canvas bags and our exposed feet in sandals to catch the bus with the regularity of children going to school
When we walked together past the pub one day, patrons pointed as well as waved kindly acknowledgment. A cascade of the results of spiritual abuse showed in our eyes. Yet nobody could look keener about destination. Our eyes stayed averted from the entrance platform’s quashed blackened blobs of chewing gum extruded and spat out of the mouths of travellers and passers-by in some year past and added to, some of the originators I reckoned likely statistically missing from official summations about suburban population and housing growth. Deceased. Moved away. No longer travelling by public transport through the Transit Station.
He, Amin, travelled into the city where he would sit in ‘the cafe’ with the people who went into the city to sit with him there and I to ‘the centre’ where I could sit with the local people who came to that place to sit with me there so here was common interest. People heard us. People travelled to hear us.
Whenever I recall he bought me a pen I remember I hate it that Parker changed their pens to a universal filler and the pen is redundant. That’s the sort of thing the modern world does.
He began to give me photocopies then of articles about women writers like Kate Chopin.
“Here” he said with the greatest of urgency reaching into a calico bag of the many slung in one hand for the purpose of setting the other hand free, “I got this for you.”
Wads of sheaves of paper perfectly marked according to their page numbers and with a bibliographic reference on the final page were thrust into my hands with the expressionistic gesture of a friend. I barely knew him. I gave him a copy of Wordsworths text on the imagination. He mildly scampered on the spot in the process of transfer to me in return of one by Frances Power Cobbe and that was possibly frustration looking back with the hindsight of my own ageing at myself and the tableau we made. There was about him a contradiction posed by a sense of tranquility overlaid on urgency much was to be done. The planes juxtaposed uncomfortably. My movements were rapid and patience I knew I had in bucketfuls. Closer scutiny showed our detail
Page borders of newspapers he picked up from bus and train seats were filled with finely written numbers from which lines were drawn to circled words.
He may have thought he found an ally. He said he needed one and smiled a non-threatening smile of peaceful unity, however shocking whatever he had to say. He was converting every text as far as every text could be into numerological translation and rather like I imagine a one-person Gutenberg Project volunteer who believes without them we cannot convert to digital translation all the books in the English language and lives bent on seclusion to the purpose hurried. Nobody would casually know a sideways stoic’s shuffle to catch a bus laden with the weights of bags filled with books and documents on one hand and groceries on the other as languorous pendulum (sometimes to the ground) could be hury.
Numerological translation cannot seem on inspection like anybody bearing its responsibilities can be hurried. Ahmin to the eye of a passer-by performed every life movement with the same grace and at the same pace. I knew him just that much more.
In his residential unit’s living room Ahmin stacked freshly bought books higher in numerically marked and ordered cardboard boxes. Newspapers made a raised border around the empty inner floor of the one private room of the flat whereas he slept on the floor of his kitchen on a mat alongside a modest collection of personal survival items. Random numbers apparently were signifiers he searched for and between different pages in different books by different authors he understood their universal meaning.
He was a teacher. Being one grew out of circumstance that embarrassed Ahmin. Where he lived in India people came to ask for his teachings even though he declared he had none. He humbly waved his hand towards himself in slight reference and said because of the way he looked. Numerology was a by-product. He was informed by the philosophical search for the numbers of the universe. His face suffused with a tender-pink flush. All that was left was for someone to copy the key he had written on the cover of each newspaper and book and do the calculations.
He gathered the universe. The work would require a scribe to complete when he was gone. He uttered ‘gone’ as if the inevitability was an ascension of no return
I knew he believed he had been a presence for years before his choosing his place of maternity and birth.
I knew the contradiction. Tears and years before when I was a neighbour in a community where I shared mugs of tea and coffee at kitchen tables with visitors and vice versa I might otherwise have forgotten in some part were ever equally part of my life with its own different signifiers (however many since proven false) I was informed by a woman her unborn had searched for her and chose her. She was special and her picky child was an old soul.
He was moody and agitated over a cup of tea he had made, having made one for me with apologies he had no milk, but that you didn’t rightfully drink tea with milk and slumped. He sat on the floor in the way of someone long accustomed to living on linoleum and others sat in chairs that in his home he had especially collected for them from the sides of roads, outside houses, from friends’ verandahs and their rubbish collections.
We shared an understanding of rubbish collection. Collecting useful rubbish suited our mutual ends I can see in the retrospect of continuing experience (of rubbish) and acknowledging the expensive garnishee of philosophy behind our non-contributory gestures to economic pedals we did not want to push for them to go round and drive the industrial Big Wheel. Our educations had cost us dearly, mine in the corridors of uncertain power where the work was mundane in a position as an middle manager and his in the slums of India he had been discarded out of eventually and sent home. We ought to have developed into the greatest of friends. We were equally marginalised. We equally claimed we had no answers. We were searchers
We equally stood to gain from having an ally.
He bought me a cup. I could write he brought me a cup or gave me, but that would take from the meaning of the stated relationship between the cup handed to me and a cup he bought for himself I assume out of sentiment from the same shop display and batch order. I see the cups in an aisle. Two for $2.00. Two for four. Two, anyway, selected together.
“I bought a cup and I bought one for you too. They’re the same.”
The cup, a slender mug, had the word ‘COFFEE’ stencilled into its decoration and did not match in my thinking the persona of the gift giver. I understood the pen. My response to the cup remains an awkward misfit to the meaning of gift. I said pragmatically ‘Thank you’ and stood up from the round table in the living room end of the unit’s kitchen utility and living area where I eventually hosted meetings shared with a select group of aged writers and walked with it past the overhang of kitchen display joinery to the sink at the kitchen utility end where I washed it and returned with it. I filled it with coffee from the freshly assembled pyrex jug of the brew that inspired when I had placed it on the table the transfer to me of the gift. I continued backwards and forwards for the relief of movement it gave me as I had begun getting cups from the collection I had previously assembled from where I could buy them for little expenditure. I poured an allocation of coffee into each. The writers sat uncharacteristically silent and watched me.
I think they were admiring not critical. They had the giving to me of the gift to reflect on and maybe, as I had adopted for focus, its design and decoration. I wonder can compressing so much information show what happened detail by detail and result of the later experience of time
Thinking on the gift I remembered in a reflective moment I had an ageing ghetto blaster with an adequate radio that could replace a radio Ahmin had announced in a tone of despair was broken. The radio plays on ABC Radio National were his greatest source of solace and the classical music programs. We were able to talk a little about classical music. I carried the machine up the hill to where he lived and we transferred the wire aerial he had attached to the defunct and abandoned radio he had listened to for the previous 15 years since his return from India he told me as we set up the replacement. He felt the loss of the radio keenly. He converted the sense of loss to an adoration of joy at the first utterance of sound when we had completed the installation. We sat round the ghetto blaster (as much as any two people can sit round anything on a chair and linoleum) and lent forward in silent appreciation of radio. We unusually were able to listen to a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor played by Rachmaninoff himself. He made at its end tea as he often did on a spirit stove.
Ahmin held his head and grimaced in the middle of one meeting. He insisted he felt no pain, but that the sensation was terrible and he rocked holding his head. I gestured to the other writers they stand and each took their coffee and gathered on the lawn at the back door. I imagined the residents of the neighbouring units alarmed by an aged coven of strangers. I was able to move the table out of the range of the rocking man whose appearance was ashen
Nothing would pacify him. Nothing would alleviate the symptoms other than he would be better for the company. He stroked his lobes with his lengthy bony fingers. No, he refused an ambulance. I reconvened the meeting. Would it be better I asked if he saw a conventional doctor. He vouchsafed he saw a Chinese herbalist and the compound he was taking had little effect on the condition he exposed for the first time. For months he suffered these sensations in his head and he craned his neck with his eyes closed indicative of anxiety and now a sense of betrayal. I was reminded how deeply he had appeared hurt when he reflected he was deported from India as an overstayer after residence there for approaching 40 years.
Is the viewpoint a glimpse of the vivid complexity of a wildflower placed under a book for preservation? How can we understand something anew we did not ever completely know. I may have been collecting perfect specimens. I believed I had damaged one if not more than Ahmin. Ahmin was distraught. I suggested strongly he attend at the hospital. He was more like a wilted hothouse bloom that ought to have shed pure light for its adoration. He finally told me. He had a problem once with a doctor that was one of the main reasons he had gone to India when he was a young man to escape the society of who he was raised and where he was raised, certainly from his transfer to a position as a clerk (yet he hadn’t minded his job as a clerk, he had said). His delivery of his compelling news was simple and directed. He had vowed he would die never having attended at another office of a doctor trained in Western medicine. I was only silent considering the issue insofar as it affected my vulnerable status as hostess and responsible for the group first. He never meant to stay in India. That was what happened. He returned once and left feelings of discomfort again.
He subsided meekly with his hands with their long fingernails clasped in his lap. I knew the pose and saw it more and more frequently as the weeks went on alternating with head shaking and declamation against his needing the attention of a doctor if anybody shared their inevitable thought. His slender frame seemed to have shrunk inside his simple cotton trousers and the shirts he wore with plain collarless round necks hung loose, crumpled where their opening was buttoned in an attempt when the air was chill to stave off that influence. We met on the bus. He wore a light cardigan now that was grey and hung neatly on his bowed shoulders. I asked him his destination. He had a small calico bag slung over one shoulder and none of the usual paraphenalia of books and documents he travelled with to my knowledge in any direction.
Ahmin had a sister. He was on his way to stay with her. I knew of her and met her one summer on a train journey between the suburb I was staying at for a holiday and another I was visiting. The University where Ahmin was sometimes a guest speaker was closed on a holiday break that time and he was taking his sister with him to a celebratory meeting of the Society for Krishna Consciousness. She was a surprising woman with an open charm and countenance. We are only people when the day moves its round for wherever we seek our knowledge and our ambitions, pretensions. I was pleased he was in family charge and ill at ease and uncomfortable seeing him this time, alone on his journey and frailer than he had ever looked. I said I was pleased he was welcomed into the home of his loving sister for his soujourn. Would he stay long.
He had sold and given away all his belongings. He looked downcast. He was going to live with her and her husband. I felt the sense of betrayal again and as I had so many times in associations with confidantes who I disappointed. I knew that my urging Ahmin to go to the hospital to seek medical advice was the undoing of his trust. He had told me he would never be released and shrunk from me in fear. Here when we met again he looked at me with the caution of a man who supposed I would betray him eventually. We greeted each other, mutually cautious and both curious and farewelled each other with a sense of gentle wistfulness. Where was the other going we had both asked. I was visiting my daughter. Her garden was thriving and she and I had long agreed I would visit her and select some cuttings for my newly struck herb garden.
I fulfilled long anticipated travel plans the next spring and left my unit in the care of my daughter with instructions for her knowledge of who might visit me, who was friend and our relationship. Ahmin did not visit and he had not left a forwarding address so that when I returned in the middle of the intense heat of summer when the Adelaide plains turn harsh and brown I felt among a listed review of my contacts and friends a strong pang of loss to consider he was gone from the place he lived and where for my part was pleasure in the simple experience we had shared cups of tea. I hoped we might meet at a central point of engagement or on a journey on a bus or a train, but we never have.
I was visiting within clear sight of Mt Taranaki and the closest township to there is Inglewood, the regional centre Mt Plymouth.
One version of Maori history claims Te Maunga o Taranaki (Mount Taranaki) once lived in the centre of New Zealand’s North Island with the mountain gods: Tongariro, Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe.
Pihanga, another mountain, is incriminated at this other location, called ‘a lovely maid’ who was desirable to all the mountain gods.
A great conflict arose with geophysical consequences.
The face of the earth was pretty well re-arranged and changed.
There be dragons. Watch a dynamic skyline day and night and the centricity to culture of mythological creatures that appear in transitional forms. I knew of the taniwha from previous experience living in New Zealand where its importance as a powerful element to maintain order is paramount in children’s literature and written in the history of the British invaders who were told of of places of its alleged presence by Maoris exploiting superstition.
I became childish and disingenuous intellectual texts had ever been published in my excitement observing these beasts and faces of leering gods as if they were entirely a matter of my new discovery.
Pihanga gathers her mists and veils around her and I observed that occurs in many forms. Taranaki is veiled and weeps.
Taranaki is cast as masculine gender.
Taranaki seems all things rather than an imagined monotheme and masculine.
Taranaki, a living god but the mountain as a natural phenomenon of geoscience has been made by subsequent explosions each separated by many years, but a great upheaval that fell into itself and caused a depression before it rose again on its momentum. I looked out to the saucer-like rim caused at its surround when I walked across farmland made available to my use and to not be conscious of the living god, Taranaki, is to be unaware.
The story of the mountain is displayed in the museum in New Plymouth, Puke Ariki, where nothing else was I found other than the local dilemma of the Occupation. The attempt by the British to degrade the Maori and Maori history is its story.
Around this corner of Marsland Hill once a British garrison I have walked to by a bitumen road, now descending in the footsteps of the redcoats I eerily recognise, I find Charles Brown, mentor and friend of Keats laid to rest in this perfect place.
New Plymouth was once gated. The view of the White Hart Hotel is taken from the base of the New Plymouth clock tower.
I visit places, see sculptures New Plymouth seems practised at installing as if possessed of infinite will to display sculpture or perhaps the environment with its blue sea not far from any point is ideal.
The façade of the City Council is magnificent stainless steel.
I return to where I was living to reach again to the mountain. It was hard to concentrate on anything in its vicinity, but the interrelationship of clouds and light through them and on the peak of the cone that begs the story of a dramatic yearning for unity and rejection. The lyrical balletic dancing of clouds that scud and their shade come from the mountain; it governs weather.
A blue sky and a hot day and I went walking to the mountain.
This dinner trout seems fierce, menacing. It was fished from the stream that sourced in Mount Taranaki flowed through the property where I stayed.
I photographed on a day Taranaki was crying creeks with dark places I could look into over their bridges and coils of the great fern, the cyathea dealbata, the ponga; it is the silver fern in pockets of sunshine and its full shine that causes a characteristic shimmer of silver in roadside verges and fields it has hold over. Everywhere I look I see Taranaki, the living god of an ancient regime of story telling.
I saw the foregoing image through the window on my way from New Plymouth to Auckland on an early morning bus. The bus slowed to accommodate traffic and the corridor of the mist – as I saw it – was Pihanga whose presence between the mountains of Taranaki and Tongariro is still said to dissuade people from the locale lest the rumble start up between these jealous and aggrieved suitors.
I supposed conflict between the environment and dairy farming.
The image (above) is a photo of the wire of an iron frame wire gate, modified by intensifying the colours, by cloning and re-pasteing onto it selected areas of the view through the wire to highlight the wire and converting the resultant image into interpretive forms using Photoshop.
In other words, folks who don’t know, I altered the original photo until I stopped on an image that ‘pleased’ me insofar as it illustrates the meaning (for me) in an abstract form that I derive out of the photo I started with.
Only short of the conversion of it into a kaleidoscopic form, I posted the photo of the gate wire this morning on a social network site I recently began to contribute to, blipfoto. For those who do not know about ‘blipping’, blipfoto allows a subscriber one photo a day. ‘Blippers’ sift through a daily diet of individual’s photos as they choose and comment in return. Try to upload a photo that was not taken within a recent time frame and the blipfoto programme will deny it entry. Assume a photograph from a few days ago will ‘do’ for today and the programme allocates it a position if you have one available on the calendar day the photo was taken, if you hadn’t already uploaded one that day, and labels it ‘backdated’.
You cannot on any given day qualify for that day if you did not take a photo and you are asked to not fudge it.
Instructions are easy enough to follow, uploading a photo takes no time, the level of my subscription attracts no charge and some people write text to go with their photo.
Not very different from the pub really in some ways, blipfoto, except emphasis on the Pig’s here is not exclusively photography, does not ask for anything that is an identifier other than an email address, lacks some discipline as any self respecting pub does in Australia packed with writers and artists, the inspiration of causal and casual cooks and chefs and totally, talk.
Sometimes we turn up and sometimes we do not, who knows turn tail for a while or forever, barrack for the proprietor.
Writing and posting contributions on the wall of the front bar, the Pigs Arms, The Window Dresser’s Arms, Pig & Whistle does best. This ever changing exhibition happens according to how fast the next person’s expression of their eccentric inner self gets posted and the list of contributors cycles. That’s valuable work alongside, leastwise, housing Granny and her dubious brewing equipment, Foodge, Merv the Barman and the twins and their mother, the characters all who have developed within the walls – and allegedly leasing commercial space that is at present always available in the vacant rooms of the pub, its outlier buildings for more characters if they are thought of, more mythology such as has grown around the carpark and when the plumbing blocks ,the emergency long drop left over from when the night truck collected the excreta and council workers clanged cans on purpose underneath the guest wing.
The Hell’s Angles keep an eye on security, although Foodge is a Private Dick.
The older the history of the Pig’s Arms the more layers of the story are told,.
The contributions of the barflies and casual contributors are inside the folders on the RHS of the page. A commenter can jump in anywhere but if they want and comment and contribute to the story of the bar itself without following the trail. Gosh, it doesn’t take Einstein to understand the premise keeping these premises open 24/7 is home spun, feet on the ground brawlin’ and fightin’ and spittin’ and… wrong story line, sorry, I was reading the wrong instructions. I’m a copywriter. They paid me to…
They didn’t!
Sorry. I maintain a dedicated loose grip on the truth. No-one gets paid.
Truth, honest, Mike Jones regardless hasn’t been awarded the Order of Australia yet for the Pig’s Arms even though he made it to the cover of Rolling Stone …
He didn’t! That was Seniors magazine!
… sent me an email a while back and suggested I send in a piece for the birthday party. I’m onto it.
Happy Fourth Birthday, Pig’s Arms at The Window Dresser’s Arms, Pig & Whistle.
Dog most nights slept in the front room with Isobella facing an open doorway onto a verandah and beside the internal doorway that had no door against the Castle’s central room even though Dog was not Isobella’s, Isobella in trust asleep on a divan, Dog slung low on the giant sandstone blocks that made the floor interesting. Between the blocks had not been filled with grouting and sometimes one of Dog’s paws dropped into a chasm in her sleep. Dog re-accommodated herself with a deft twist of her leg.
Dog sidled in like a comma into Isobella’s room in the evening. She had a way as if worried what would happen to her tail if she stopped watching it. She was a break in a sentence, but the opening announcement of a trial by jury, fearful and hopeful. She was a squat dog and showed her hard life by her habits, devoted and pessimistic, intelligent and naive.
The owl native to New Zealand, Ruru, the Morepork, Ninox novaeseelandiae, a Bobuk was out all night long almost entirely silent. Ruru has special feathers.
Etia anō āku mata me te mata-ā-ruru e tīwai ana
Me te mata kāhu e paro noa rā kai te tahora!
My eyes are like morepork eyes turning from side to side,
Like the eyes of a hawk who soars over the plain! 1
Margaret Orbell, Birds of Aotearoa. Auckland: Reed, 2003, p101.
Editors Note: Many moons ago, ‘Shoe and I discussed the story behind the story of the making of a now famous (some might say infamous) shaggy frog joke about a frog going into a bank and asking for a loan. I first heard the joke told on radio by none other than Kerry O’Keefe as an alternative to commentating on a major cricket match played at the Gabba.
By way of introduction to this major work, proudly published by the Pig’s Arms, here is Kerry O’Keefe’s retelling of the joke – the joke that was written by Christina Binning Wilson (Sandshoe to the interweb tubalists or ‘Shoe to her mates at th Pig’s Arms).
So get yourself some pleasing refreshments and a comfortable chair, settle back and begin our odyssey …
Part 1 –Owning (up)
Story and photo by Sandshoe
Acknowledgements
It is not easy being pink. Yet fortune itself I threw in my lot with the Pigs Arms and became a piglet. Thank you,Mike Jones, proprietor and editor-blogger for your kind encouragement responding to my enquiry you are happy to publish this Special Feature at the Arms.
To Astyages, the troubadour who posted the shaggy dog ‘Herbal T for Two’ at the Pigs’ Arms.1
That was a while ago. I was living in Adelaide. I said I wrote one of those. I said I would post it. This is its story.
I do really get the joke
The half-a-dozen perhaps people who I originally read my joke to laughed. I had supposed they thought I gave it my best shot.
Now, when I find a version of it again to send it off to the Pigs Arms, I get it. My friend, Wojciech, comes by. Now, convulsed with laughter I read it to Wojciech.
Wojciech laughed and laughed, possibly at my laughing.
I rewrote and wrote it again, teased at it to make it topical and meander, wrote an introductory reference given it was address to astyages, his “shaggy dog” and I chortled. The pseudo-truth tickling my funny bone no end was that soon it would be revealed “a shaggy frog”.
Before mailing finished copy to Mike Jones, illustrations, and a link to information about the natural history of a local frog I chose to promote, I settled to search online might anyone by an incident of synchronicity have spun a yarn like it and I supposed–surely–I would find “a shaggy frog”.
I grouped and googled key words out of the text:
frog
bank
loan
My blood ran cold. I added:
shaggy frog
rolling stone
It is an extreme sensation feeling mortified.
When I found its original replicated near faithful word for word online, bloody icicles instantly formed in my veins I swear and began to counteract immediately–somewhere in the pit of my stomach– an inferno of heat I felt drain from my brain. Blood coursed the extent of my body from my head to my toes and back again. A WHOOOOOSHHHHHHH.
I read it first on Page 9 of Charismatics, Articles of Spiritual Enlightenment for Christians, Charismatics, the Halo on the Internet, at http://www.sfSpirit.com, San Francisco, Volume 9, Number 6 June 2002
The Golden Gate Breakfast Club newsletter in San Francisco – ‘the nicest people in the world meeting each week for breakfast, friendship and enlightenment. Since 1946!’ –reported (link archived):
‘Marty Mijalski was able to deliver his joke postponed from last week this morning. It was the frog applies for a loan joke. The punch line: knick-knack, Patty Whack. Give the frog a loan. His old man’s a rolling stone. Alan Garber told that joke five years ago.’
FIVE YEARS AGO!
My stomach knotted.
Self conscious anxiety is a debilitating condition.
Three failed and abandoned computers with files I hauled around until I could afford to no longer are scattered. I saw in the bowels of the world’s computer parts dumps or reassembled into recycled metal toys for small and larger boys and girls. I do have Apple floppy disks that might have on them a file of the original text. I have the rudiments only of the vintage Apple computer and software in unsealed packaging I bought on eBay in the last year attempting to put together another system.
I have not got in my possession any of the original email or files–and no original hard copy.
I did write one comment only on a website, Author Culture, and not hearing a word from that site I felt embarrassed at my naivety and little did I know how naïve, not even half. I shelved all thought about it as best as I could and didn’t search it in detail any further beyond recognising it was feral. I felt overwhelmed with a sense of loss. Astyages asked once how I was doing with it and when would I present it. I think I mumbled ‘Tell you soon’. I confided in no-one other than Wojciech.
Having moved from Adelaide to accommodation in Bordertown last year, I was ill from overwork and circumstances previous to my deciding to move from Adelaide to housing I could afford, from the hardship of moving house and home and having to abandon possessions to do that. In retrospect I can see a complex set of circumstances not overlooking I dealt with a struggle to rebuild an existence in Bordertown on my own. I was in hospital for a while and recovering and I took a case to the Tenancy Tribunal as the piglets will recall. I was busy as people get. I eventually confided over a shared meal with a newly-met local friend I had written a joke. I was flattered yes, but acutely self conscious and I showed her online.
Christine was empathetic. In a matter of days, I heard the news from her I would, she said, never believe, but she “heard thejoke on the radio” and that she yelped in recognition, “That’s Christina’s joke!”
RADIO!
Over my head.
I missed who exactly the fellow was, although I was entreated he is famous. Something something you know the cricket. He travels all over the world doing his thing, she said, looking a little disconcerted I did not seem to understand her meaning.
I was–instead–in shock again. I begin feeling excruciated. Isolated, particularly isolated.
I do not have ABC Radio National reception, neither local ABC radio reception that is reliable, but neither can I use my online download internet quota playing radio all day and meanwhile, not a hint even of the NBN. No SBS reception. Media is a sensitive issue for me out of all life’s niceties I do not have living in Bordertown and I’ve a list.
Fancy excruciated. I have never used the word, but I vacillated between the healthy stirring of curiosity, feeling tickled pink and miserable.
Jim came down to potter around the cottage doing odd jobs and I referred the matter to Jim. Jim is my landlord. Jim knows about stuff. He might know about cricket. I braced myself.
“I wrote a joke a few years ago.”
“U…huh.”
I describe the gist…a frog…um…he goes for a loan and that I am ridden with guilt…because I owe the joke to the Pigs Arms…but…online…multiplying…like rabbits. I hang my head on the inside.
Jim and I had never exchanged an opinion about joke telling. Neither had ever told the other a joke.
“Oh,” says Jim, as he worked, “I know that one. Is that the one…
THE ONE!
…about a frog who goes into… I start to feel hysterical… a bank and wants a loan?”
“Yes.”
“My son has it on his phone.”
PHONE!
“He’s been carrying it around for a while now–PAUSE–That’s an old joke.”
I have an ear for nuance. I sat up out of the mud of embarrassment.
“It’s a fair age now,” I agree to showI appreciate a duty of care.
“O, yes, it is” Jim says, glad we agree on that.
“I wrote it,” I say as calmly as possible. I saw consideration I wrote it dawn.
I mumble and dash off, “I remember the day I wrote it… formula… can’t find the original… sigh… never mind… I wrote it.”
I did ask Jim who ‘the cricket chap’ is. I find a recording of Kerry O’Keefe, broadcaster and the commenter lisabella’s reference added at 10PM AEST on March 12, 2006 on the whirlpool forum online where she posts a link to a recording–
‘When Kerry first told it, the joke took nearly 3 overs of cricket before he finally got to the punchline!!!’
If lisabella is right, putting to the universe a month earlier, on 19 Feb 2006 at 11AM she was hoping for ‘an audio link or does some one have it on their hard disk’ to provide her for her brother, the broadcast by Kerry was at the Brisbane Cricket Ground at Woolloongabba (the gabba) during the ABC’s cricket coverage Tuesday 14 February 2006 at approx. 2pm on the 3rd One Day final between Australia & Sri Lanka.
Of all the versions, Kerry O’Keefe’s meticulous reading is as close to the original as any. The ironies are out of sight. No irony as mind bending that it was not unlike from my viewpoint as a former facilitator of a writers’ group listening to a writer read to an audience in a community centre (cfThe Making of that Joke. Part 6 – Creative Writers) except they’re reading my stuff.
fstx posts on the same forum as lisabella at 11AM on Feb 20 AEST, before saying ‘Not that it makes the joke any better!’:
‘I’ve heard a version where it’s a chocolate bar and the banker’s name is Caddyshack, so the punchline is…
“It’s a Kit-Kat, Caddyshack…” ‘
It was kicking around as it turns out well before Kerry’s choice to broadcast the joke at the cricket in 2006, not intending to detract from Kerry’s choice or performance of it–to the contrary.
On the forum of DFWStangs.net selling Mustang Fords, where the page loading near rolls over from the weight of flickering animation and advertisements reckoned to disappear out of sight were I to become a registered user, it is called ‘The Frog and the Elephant’ uploaded 05-30-2002, 03:58 PM by the contributor whose location is listed as Las Colinas (Texas I assume). A commenter, lilgeezy, at Irving in New Brunswick, Canada writes 07-06-2002, 02:11 AM–in reply to a query ‘were its origins Sesame Street’:
‘that WAS on the disney channel when those lil kids go out and tell their favorite jokes… not that i was watching it or nething, i just … heard….
The Independent Daily is the English language newspaper of the Island of Mauritius. The joke is published in Vol. 1, No.250, Port Louis, Thursday September 2, 2010, Section 4>‘Listings’ viewable through the website of Stanford University, headed with the caption ‘J USTINJEST BY HILAMA’ and illustrated with a cartoon frog.
I feel substantially queasy about my impoverished status when I view in a bottom left hand quadrant the glossy colour ad for ‘LM Live Jokes in your Daily Life’ in which a beautiful young woman naturally laughs at her mobile phone in hand. The contrast between the status of her clothing and the implied delight the lovely lass is provided by her subscription is in marked contrast to my own circumstances when I imagine a customer’s laughter may conceivably be at my feral.
I wonder, I cannot help but, that the $50,000 amount the frog asks for, and not the original $30,000, might inspire enhanced donation to the church building fund where, for the pastor at Willingham Church, Cambridgeshire, UK it fits illustration of ‘a case of mistaken identity’.
Harry Mooring of Leeds submitted it to The Parishioner magazine of the Kiltarlity Church and Kirkhill Church where it is published on P 17 of The Parishioner Newsletter Issue 57 – November 2012 alongside The Moosie’s Prayer’ described, ironically, as ‘This anonymous, humorous poem…clearly aimed at children …lends yet another twist to the story of the “poor church mouse” –
Greg Jones, a pastor at the Church of Brethren, at Bunkertown, McAlisterville, in Pennsylvania, USA published the joke and the comment Dialegomai (see below) in the Bunkertown COB newsletter. The analytical method of Dialegomai interested me considered from the viewpoint of the method I used to construct the joke (cf. The Making of That Joke. Part 2 –Building the Joke)
Dialegomai
By Pastor Greg
1 Corinthians 7:1-11 April 11, 2010 Bunkertown COB
Chances are that your mind was racing ahead trying to figure out how all the things in that story would fit together. Why a frog? Is Patty’s name significant?
What’s up with the little pink elephant? The answer came when we viewed the whole story, not just the little bits and pieces along the way. I want you to keep this in mind as we turn once again to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian Church.
My best advice to you continues Pastor Greg, is to keep your eyes focused on the whole story. Look at the big picture. Don’t get hung up on the individual events that are happening in your life right now. Think and reason.
The Pope features alongside in the adjoining column on P 4 of The Knight Register of the Newsletter of Knights of Columbus Council No. 13072, St. Mary Parish, Vancouver, BC, Canada
The member pladecalvo in Valencia, Spain posted the joke on the July 2007 at 09:31 AM in the City Data-Com Religion and Spirituality Forum that demands Let’s Hear Some Nice Clean Jokes!
Received by the MoonlightBlue blogger from Ricky in Salò in the Province of Brescia, Lombardy in Italy and so they seem to know it in in Pembroke Dock in Pembrokeshire in the UK in 2007.
Recreation and hobby clubs have adopted it including have called it their own from hunting and fishing to flying and service clubs among which is Probus in Deloraine in Tasmania and from Rotarians in America to Kent in the UK to ‘Snippets’ (from club bulletins) at the Rotary Club at Diamond Creek (Melbourne, Victoria) where its contribution is attributed December 5th 2012 to the Rotary Club of Rosanna (Melbourne).
Just to give you the idea: the Tourist Information Centre website of Yea, ‘situated at the junction of the Melba Highway and Goulburn Valley highways approximately 100 kms from Melbourne’. includes the joke in The Humour File.
How did I not guess it would be recounted by the Queensland Frog Society. O course I had supposed it would appeal to environmentalists who love frogs. They were my main target group. It is introduced by the editor as follows: Oldies are the best.. I think we have had this before but for anyone who has not heard it here it is again. Thanks Trish (I love it).
Tombro at Lake Macquarie, New South Wales said on the Glasgow (Scotland, UK) Guide Board on 31st Aug 2009, 10:03am thank you to Brian of Maitland, New South Wales for posting it (the day before) because [Tombro] ‘had a bloody great laugh and…sang it out loud. Whoops, he said, now the neighbours know I’m an absolute nutcase ! http://discuss.glasgowguide.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=17189
Bozo in Perth who was met with enthusiasm by GSX in Shed has uploaded it rightly or wrongly on a site called ‘a Dad joke’ on January 3 last, claiming the frog hopped into the new HSBC Bank Branch in Subiaco
September 2005 in Darwin it was enjoyed by a commenter who thought it was very funny when it was posted on the Gold Coast and Milano in Kiev, Ukraine, said ‘Witty, witty stuff’.
Oldershaw and Co Chartered Accountants Newsletter in NZ March 2005 published it on Page 3 under the title ‘Smiley Bit’ above an article on ‘Spicers Wealth Management’ promoting the availability of a review report generated on reccommending finance company debentures.
I couldn’t resist this lesson in choosing character names. I’m serious here. Really. Use care when naming the folks who populate your stories or your masterpiece may become just a bad joke . . .
Linda Yezak May 28, 2010 11:55 AM
I got a kick out of it myself. Of course, I had to stretch to make it fit into a writing site!
Why did someone make up ‘nick nak patty whack, give the frog a loan, his old mans a rolling stone’? don’t ask me why I want to know, I have no clue. But, if anyone has any Ideas, just type them here please
LiveJournal Inc denounces it as an an unwanted house guest under ‘punnybusiness’:
Please don’t post the story that ends in “It’s a knick-knack, Patti Whack. Give the frog a loan. His old man’s a Rolling Stone.” – we’ve seen it way too many times. If you post it, I’ll delete it.
If it is published in the volume quoted (please see link below) using the language represented on the webpage, I would be plain disappointed. I know beyond any question of doubt the mother of the frog did not ‘croak’ as is suggested. My research of variations so far of the joke shows this one is unique that extraneous information has been written into it couched in language generally considered by English language speakers sensitive to the language of death and dying across the board of different cultures to be unsafe language to use, disrespectful, rough. The context is made sad. I think a child will identify it is not a joke made happy by introducing the death of the frog’s mother and will fix that.
You cannot believe everything anyway. Neither did the bank manager ‘scowl’ at the teller. Neither does Patty roll her eyes in any version I had read. Elaborating details of body language as well robs the audience of their individual interpretation which is an element of the humour and the strength of the writing.
Christine on 7 November 2011 on the BB Fans (Big Brother) forum says: This is a joke, which was on one of my Birthday cards. It’s a bit corny though I’m afraid:-
The joke is #7 of 7 chosen for publication by the columnist, Greg Heberlein for the Seattle Times article ‘Who’s Standing Next to Bubba’ Sunday, December 19, 1999 under Wall Street Recap. Consider it [the column] suggests the journalist a holiday gift for putting up with the conventional ramblings. This intro is already too long – our joke cup runneth over. But we must thank all the sources: Steve Leuthold’s clients, who submit jokes for his monthly investment newsletter; Eric Miller of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, who collects witty stuff for the company’s semi-monthly publication; Don Gher of Bellevue’s Coldstream Capital, who missed his calling as a comic; and, your loyal scribe’s firstborn son Tom, who scoured the Web for every funny story it had.
Sent in an email it seems originally by Personal Growth Concepts which included the following disclaimer:
The information provided in this email is presented for educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for the advice and treatment of a licensed professional clinician, doctor, coach or pastoral counselor.
…and uploaded by blogger mom at frog parenting blogspot who posted the joke on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 under ‘Frog Humour and today’s stuff…Not for Profit but for JOY!’ and her baby born on April 29, 2009 ‘at about 8Amish’.
Earliest References
While one earlier may still be found, the earliest reference I have found is on the website of ‘Silicon Investor’ where it was uploaded on 6/24/1998 8:12:00 AM by Henry Volquardsen. Note the date reads 24 June, 1998 because the date sequence is m/d/y. No, I do not know Henry as far as I am aware, regardless Henry may have known my name at one moment in history in 1987 and I his by sheerest chance just by it passing in front of his or my eyes in a fax or other document, but lucky I am to have a beautifully written text online on Silicon Investor that recalls a Henry Volquardsen from the memory of a colleague.
His friend writing in 2008 says of Henry:
‘And then, of course Henry Volquardsen, was a very dear friend who was on the long dated FX desk in NY. He was a big guy (like me) who started out as a file clerk and was on Citibank NY’s long dated FX desk at 55 Water street I believe. He would hang around in the New York evening to watch our currency and interest rate markets open, some days it was slow and he would talk to the bond dealers the AUD dealer and me as he was trying to get indications in to local market sentiment. Henry and I talked for hours on end about history, he was then studying the 100 year war in Europe, mass psychology, Ownership of central banks…. etc.’
Unmistakeable I am sure, the same. And I might as well have known Henry given insight and experience of the finance industry I have when I based my own methodology as an accounts executive on my training in History and Politics, primarily choosing to telephone dealers and traders I could engage in conversation to appreciate different points of view, and always an AUD dealer. I trained and listened intently and learned and understood the market in this window of time watching trading lights skipping across and up and down in heart stopping patterns on a Reuters screen. Thus far remarkable enough.
The joke was, remarkably, posted on the site Roots Web Ancestry on Tue, 3 Nov 1998 22:51:04 EST
As follows without prejudice the discussion ‘Donna Richoux’ provides her associates in apparent good faith (please see the link below).
‘Donna Richoux:
[nq:2]”It’s a knick-knack, Patty Black, give the frog a loan.”(snip)[/nq]
[nq:1]It’s a knick-knack, Patty Black, give the frog a loan; His old man’s a Rolling Stone![/nq]
That’s lovely but the version I learned didn’t have it. Now I’m wondering whether it was part of a strain that lost the Rolling Stone line, or whether it never had it, and Rolling Stone was added later.
A Google on “give the frog a loan” plus “rolling stone” gives 553. The same phrase with a minus -stone gives 291. So it’s not just me that stops at “loan.”
Okay, here we go. The Google Groups archives show the “Rolling Stone” version only back 1998, with several references to it having been on the Muppets with Kermit the Frog (long before?). I can’t call up the entire posts because of a technical glitch. But the version minus “stone” shows up in posts each year from 1982 to 1986. So I think the very appropriate addition of “Rolling Stone” was a professional addition from the Muppet crew.
Patty Black sure gets a lot of variation.
I appreciate the energy and attention given the frog goes to a bank for a loan joke by Donna Richoux and her associates (please see link above).
The content of the text written by Donna is speculative and based on then incomplete research result of a failed internet connection – as can be derived as was clearly intended by its author, but the speculation is inaccurate that the Rolling Stone addition online is a professional addition by the Muppets team and the content is inaccurate ‘that it shows up in posts between 1982 and 1986’.
Only researching what Donna advises concerning the Muppets did I know the Muppets had a story line in one of their early films that refers to a bank, which might be the source of confusion. I have not seen the films.
I am sure however the Muppets research facility may accord me, as I do the Muppets equal respect if question arises by referring to their archival record of published material to identify the frog goes to a bank for a loan joke is not in their archives as a published article of theirs.
Patty Black I knew nothing of until my recent discovery of the reference only as result of researching the frog goes to a bank for a loan joke; ‘Patty Black’ as a play on ‘Paddy Whack’ is not as far as I can determine in popular ascendance over my original adaptation of ‘Paddy Whack’ that was ‘Patricia Whack’ aka ‘Ms Whack’ and ‘Patti Whack’. I do have a fictional character whose name is ‘Black’ which is coincidence.
Again remarkably posted in rj-jokers Teresa’s Jokers RJ List on Sep 15, 1998 at 1:51 pm
As a source of interest, I note amiright.com makes no claims to copyright of jokes permitted, only their presentation. All jokes are assumed [by amiright] to be public domain.
Preben Ormen telling the joke on Thursday, September 8th, 2011 at 14:14 under the heading ‘Give the Frog a Loan’ prefaced it as follows:
Apropos nothing, I just remembered a cute joke that riffed on a nursery rhyme. What made it all the more funny at the time, was the fact it was told by a biker on the run from the California cops that we met while swinging at anchor in our 32 foot Westsail cutter “Ibis” in Mazatlan, Mexico. He arrived late one afternoon in a terrific downpour in a beat up old Columbia 29 sloop. I watched him anchor and silently reassured myself he had just the right scope out so he wouldn’t swing into us when the tide or weather changed.
When done, he sat under the main hatch and lit up a smoke. We exchanged hand waves in greeting and a short hello and welcome, but the rain was so heavy and noisy we couldn’t really have a conversation. You got to see a tropical downpour to believe it.
We got to know each other better and one day the story rolled around.
…please see the heart these children invest in the acting including a fabulous frog costume and support actors. This is such a lovely video and I hope the children and their responsible adults are happy I post this link here:
Small variations occur telling the joke from only recall, but the adherent loyalty shown the story line is indication of the genuine fondness people feel for the joke.
Variations include the delightful and delightfully satirical and fans have made changes to the name of the teller and frog by way of personal preference and innovation.
The frog has been variously named by his fans Kermit the Frog, Kermit Jagger, Wally… while the inclination seems obvious I had no intention to name the frog Kermit which was to avoid potential copyright infraction although in an edited version I do have the teller, Patricia Whack, refer to the frog with a note of derision as follows, once, when she addresses the bank manager that the frog wants a loan.
‘Kermitt out here…”
The frog has been overly called Kermit, and he truly did not ever say to the teller his surname was Jagger as occurs in the re-telling, but there you are, and that’s I suppose society too, running along on assumptions and getting stuck on earworms, but in this case a fond one. However, just because a frog can talk and goes to a bank to raise a loan is no reason to assume his name is Kermit. Neither because he claims falsely his identity is Mick Jagger’s son is it a logical conclusion he will claim his name is Kermit Jagger.
A frog is neither automatically a Muppet. Frog mothers have been around. They know the score. The kid probably won’t like the attention.
Anyone whose work uploading and adapting the joke as a genuine contribution to joke sites is not included by a link I regret in almost all cases that has to have been the case and I apologise I cannot individually acknowledge it.
I could not include every link to the friends and included a representation of the foes of the frog who goes to a bank for a loan joke.
In one case I did not link very purposefully because the material that is revealed is not suitable for a general audience and younger children supervised by their parents.
I admire the odds have fallen very much in favour in this regard of the frog who goes to the bank for a loan joke that it seems the frog somehow speaks to beused for ends that are good; leastwise has been treated kindly, whimsically and generously. The popular, regardless flawed frog is a phenomenon and the philosophers of all sorts who got and get the joke and have run with it have paid the frog – and the teller and the bank manager– a great compliment.
The trinity is in the wings as I write. When we create with a healthy perspective we invest magic and our creations become themselves. Take a bow: the frog, the teller and the bank manager.
To the people who don’t yet and might never know or understand or even accept this is true that the pleasure they have found in this joke and the frustration of its detractors are directly proportional to the affection I feel for the fans, the kind loyalty and controversy shown the frog goes to a bank for a loan joke, sincerely, thank you.
(Continued Part 2 –Building The Joke)
FOOTNOTE:
1. the wildly wonderful shaggy dog written by astyages that sent me in 2011 on this journey finding my frog.
The landlord where I boarded and my meals were cooked and dishes done, my clothes washed, ironed and jazz played incessantly was enchanted with the line drawing (1988). Could he have a copy and frame it so I secured a good copy he sent to professional framers. Nothing was too good for the cartoon that he would simply go to the cheap shop and buy a frame for a few cents.
It was duly hung in the narrow space between the corner of the wall meeting the living room area and the frame of the door into the kitchen from the dining alcove. I mused on it curiously from my seat at the dining table opposite the landlord’s. His back was to it where he sat ready to exit into the kitchen to service meal times, wonderful concoctions of meals it felt to me eclipsed every time until the next evening’s meal by the breakfast that was his sourdough bread and home made marmalade … I pause as my mouth waters … spooned into a presentation dish out of a jar labelled and inscribed with copperplate calligraphy he attended at the local library with the mums to learn for the purpose.
My curiosity remains how extraordinary it is that simple depictions made by single lines communicate across space and time so we recognise imperative, movement, personality and so on.
I was pleased to have allowed flights of fancy at previous lodgings attempting minimalist line drawing.
He showed me his recipe book.
When he had been Sales Manager for a major paper firm in New Zealand before his retirement, he suggested to his management that agreed he design a recipe book to be distributed in parts clients were awarded each time they purchased consignments of paper per bundle and collected in a holder the company supplied.
I felt honoured that the cartoon was regarded so well. The recipe book was beautifully presented and illustrated with stock drawings that were classic 50s of the sort muted with a brush of random wash.
Author’s note: I scrawled Aba Roc on no foundation other than reflection on original Arabic culture insofar as less and less as I understood it Bedouin lived free of compromise that meant they lived in urban settings and their existence was made complex by contemporary market stresses particularly, themselves frequently inclusive at the centre of power mongering and side-lined, depending on class and gender, geographical location, situation in hierarchies, victims as well as perpetrators.
Now the success or otherwise of the Arab Spring as we generally refer to it is centre piece.
We quantify the losses now in deaths amounting to tens, hundreds of thousands of citizens and military personnel. The situation remains heartbreaking for the women and the men of the Bedouin.
I designed the image in the early 90s and printed it onto a business card.
An elegant and charming Italian woman I sat next to on a plane out of Brisbane a year or so later told me she was a fashion buyer. She had come to Australia “for the parades”. She had been to one on the Gold Coast. I showed her the design. Did I…maybe…was this shown at the Parade, she stumbled. There was a cloth very like it, she said, that she liked a lot.
There are a number of fabric design programmes on the current software market. I came up with my tattered remnant of cloth playing with the Clarisworks programme on my old Apple Mac.
I do love this design.
I imagine it woven in a light merino wool fabric or with a mix to make it a little heavier and a coat pattern draughted with pockets to reinforce and mould its shape into a curve – when a model wears the finished garment, bell-like. The sleeves of the coat are raglan, comfortably straight and not cuffed.
The skirt is a plain straight skirt darted at the waist with four conventional darts, two front and back, with a side zip and a front kick pleat. Its length is only just below the knee.
A second mix-and-match outfit is a trouser suit that has a narrow legged trouser with a lightly reinforced cuff, a side zip and four conventional darts. Its alternative suit coat is waist length and darted only from the front shoulder seam of each shoulder. Reinforced and lined the coat provides a box effect above the narrow legged, cuffed trouser.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 