Postcard from... the Concrete Footpath

It is like one of those riddles that begin something like this... There is a dead man, lying in the middle of the desert. Between his fingers is a broken match. What happened here?

On the concrete path, in the marshy, semi-cultivated edgeland, I come across this scene. Two pairs of wellington boots and a disassembled rake. No sign of the boot wearers, or indeed the owner of the rake. It was a moment to stir the imagination as I paused on the path and the question to the riddle came quickly to mind. 

What happened here?

Lo Sound Desert

Watch LO SOUND DESERT here: www.losounddesert.com/order LO SOUND DESERT is a documentary by Jörg Steineck about the rock music scene in the Low Desert of California. What was started by revolting punk rock kids, hidden from narrow-minded authorities of sub-urban desert communities in the early 80s, gave birth to bands like Kyuss and Queens Of The Stone Age.

Long time followers of Elsewhere here on the blog will know that we flagged this project last year during the crowdfunding campaign to bring the documentary film ‘Lo Sound Desert’ to completion. We are extremely happy to announce that following successful festival screenings, premieres around the world and some great reviews, ‘Lo Sound Desert’ by Joerg Steineck was officially released last month and is available now to stream, download or for purchase as a DVD.

Beyond the music, ‘Lo Sound Desert’ appeals to us here at Elsewhere because it is a documentary about a specific scene at a specific time in a specific place. The Coachella Valley music scene in California began as revolting punk rock kids, escaping from the narrow-minded authorities of their suburban desert communities in the early 1980s, jamming all night in the middle of a surreal desert landscape. This scene gave birth to bands such as Kyuss and Queens Of The Stone Age, and the ‘desert rock’ would soon spread through the underground music scene until bands such as these were headlining European stages.

'Lo Sound Desert’ was inspired and created by the same sense of autonomy inherent to the scene it portrays, self-financed through a ten year production period that has resulted in an intimate insight into a unique music scene that, like the film, is framed and coloured by a very unusual environment. The film is narrated by Josh Homme, Mario Lalli, Brant Bjork, Alfredo Hernandez, Scott Reeder, Sean Wheeler and many more from bands such as Kyuss, Queens Of The Stone Age, Yawning Man, Fatso Jetson and Mondo Generator.

This is a story about music and place, and is one which has never before been told.

Lo Sound Desert website

Postcard from... Lake Mungo

By Nick Gadd:

The most immediately striking aspect of Lake Mungo is the dunes. At the eastern edge, on a crescent-shaped fringe of sand and clay called a ‘lunette’, extraordinary natural sculptures appear, carved by the wind and weather. Once they were covered with vegetation, but after European settlement sheep and rabbits quickly disposed of much of it, and these days only a few trees and bushes remain, clinging photogenically to dunes that resemble scenes from a fantasy landscape. 

There’s no visible water.  Before the last Ice Age, 20,000 years ago, this was part of a huge network of fertile lakes and rivers in the south-west corner of what is now New South Wales. Today it is a vast dry bowl, vegetated mainly by saltbush and criss-crossed by kangaroos, though Aboriginal oral history tells us that the lake filled again within the last few thousand years.

If that was all there was to Lake Mungo, it would be remarkable enough. But the really astonishing discoveries are below the surface. The wind is blowing the dunes eastward at a rate of three metres a year. As they move, the sands are giving up their secrets, including human skeletons, tens of thousands of years old.  

It was here, in 1969, that archaeologist Jim Bowler discovered the bones of ‘Mungo Lady’, followed a few years later by ‘Mungo Man’, the oldest human remains found in Australia. Both these bodies showed signs of sophisticated burial and cremation practices, pointing to at least 40,000 years of unbroken human occupation and culture at Mungo. Since then there have been many more discoveries: bodies, fireplaces, axes, mussel shells, the skeletons of megafauna – even, poignantly, a set of footprints, 20,000 years old, baked into the soft clay by a group of running men, walking women, and a wandering child. 

Walking across the dunes today, we leave our own footprints, the indentations of our boots intersecting with the tracks of a kangaroo that passed through a few hours ago. It inevitably leads us to wonder how many more ancient ancestors lie beneath our feet, and what might remain of the destructive culture of the West in 40,000 years.

You can read more from Nick on his website Melbourne Circle: Stories from the Suburbs and follow him on Twitter. Nick was a contributor to Elsewhere No.02 where he wrote an essay on the ghost signs of Melbourne.

Exploring Place: Along the Outskirts – Marc Atkinson and Ken Worpole

There are many ways to explore and document place, and we wanted to draw your attention to a project that captured ours from the United Kingdom. For a year the artist Marc Atkinson walked the surrounding edgeland of his home city of Peterborough. The result was a collection of photographs, films, catalogue and website that reveal the hybrid new landforms and erstwhile woodlands that can now be found encircling the rapidly expanded city. Along the Outskirts combines material that Marc gathered with interviews with local walkers, residents, itinerant travellers and edgeland workers.

From the project introduction:
 
“Peterborough like many English cities, has a complex relationship with its surrounding landscape. The project highlights the multiple uses and evolution of a terrain, that appears to be in constant transition. The outer edges reveal the alternative experiences and histories of our cities, whose identities are usually projected from touristic, fixed and centre based perspectives. Through reflection and recollection, our landscapes can still be easily read and reveal to us the traces of our past, the issues of the present and the possibilities of the future. 
 
It can be argued that there is an increased urgency in the current climate, to highlight these ‘uncharted’ areas, in order to consider the impact both positive and negative of town planning, housing developments, migration and increased geographic mobility on our landscape, heritage, wildlife and communities.”

A series of the photographs from the project are presented in the limited edition catalogue for Along the Outskirts alongside an essay from the celebrated writer Ken Worpole, who writes:

“Banishment, or self-withdrawal, to the margins of the city is a long-standing trope of English history, though it is found in many other cultures.  It is there in the fable of Robin Hood, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in a myriad of fairy stories, as well as in modern horror cinema. What may be different about the modern version of this trope is that where there was once a strict boundary between city and country – especially in the walled cities of medieval society – today that boundary is much more porous, giving rise to a deep anxiety or ambivalence over what can and can’t be allowed to happen in the urban edgelands, as they are now most commonly called.”
 
The catalogue is available from the project website, and a selection of the photographs and a 60 minute film are being shown as part of an exhibition being held at the City Gallery, Peterborough until the 28th August. To find out more about this fascinating project of place, head over to the project website here: Along the Outskirts.