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Ma Boh​è​me

by Dean Kyte

/

about

Before the former Colonial Bank in Euroa, Victoria, the Melbourne Flâneur, Dean Kyte, confronts the image of himself in the form of a fellow refugee from modernity.

Watch the video on Vimeo:

vimeo.com/690805310

lyrics

Occasionally in mes flâneries, I meet the image of myself, bemisted in the palimpsest of signs. I turn a corner at random in that grey hedgemaze of clouds which is our labyrinthine reality and find an anachronistic icon reared high against the sky, holding itself aloof above the fog of everyday ways we stumble and blunder through.

I love the statuary that old architecture makes, these dépassé neoclassical deities mutilated by time. I remember seeing a painting by Russell Drysdale once—“Hill End”, painted in 1948, the portrait of a dilapidated bâtiment abandonné. Two storeys of wounded brickwork, a peeling plaster peau, two doors to nowhere and a wroughtiron balcon, like a jetty projecting into air, presented the proud proue of its profile to the pitiless chastisement des éléments australiens, a fulgurant hellciel of merdescent orange grimacing under the bloodmauve nuages.

Such is le flâneur, heir apparent to a vanished patrimony, un visionnaire de l’invisible. Rimbaudian dreamer in search of his bohemia, he goes, battered bateau ivre, réfugié de la modernité, holding the holes of his tattered dignity together, this aristocrat of the gutter, as he stumbles parmi les épaves, le nez en l’air, his eye anchored in the stars.

Undulant Ulysse, I port my only arm, la rame de la caméra, à l’épaule. And like Albert Ryder, pale cavalier and blue pilot across many a dark, moonlit bar, je vois—là-haut! là-haut! —my eternal home, au-delà des nuages qui passent, marvellous vagabonds like myself.

I remember being affected by the vermiculated detail of the end brickwork of the façade, abutting nothing, in the Drysdale, as though a whole row of these hôtels had formed un rue-mur parisien, a barricade against the barren Australian hellscape, and now only this last brick existed in that invisible wall, fort of imported European sophistication and tradition, an antique stumblingblock, a toe of that colossus, les restes melted into airy ruins.

C’est moi, la dernière pierre d’un passé dépassé.

credits

released March 22, 2022
1pjladd2: “Nightingale_near_street”
freesound.org/people/1pjladd2/sounds/155362/
(CC 0)

creativechick95: “Soundscapes » Soundscape of the Wind”
freesound.org/people/creativechick95/sounds/377010/
(CC BY 3.0, changes made)

HabloFame: “Wind.wav”
freesound.org/people/HabloFame/sounds/207443/
(CC 0)

kangaroovindaloo: “Castlemaine Station”
freesound.org/people/kangaroovindaloo/sounds/194367/
(CC BY 3.0, changes made)

Kharnnivore: “ambience » cars passing by”
freesound.org/people/Kharnnivore/sounds/558060/
(CC 0)

luminadii: “Car drive by 06.WAV”
freesound.org/people/luminadii/sounds/336757/
(CC BY 3.0)

meta4s: “Rings of Saturn Fragments » ROS_047.wav”
freesound.org/people/meta4s/sounds/502803/
(CC 0)

mikala_ouida: “Weather » Distant Thunder Clap_Gentle.wav”
freesound.org/people/mikala_oidua/sounds/347562/
(CC 0)

o_ciz: “Ambient » Wind_4.wav”
freesound.org/people/o_ciz/sounds/475451/
(CC 0)

o_ciz: “Miscellaneous » Cloth_1(rustle, fabric, clothes).WAV”
freesound.org/people/o_ciz/sounds/475440/
(CC 0)

Oneirophile: “Night traffic”
freesound.org/people/Oneirophile/sounds/142336/
(CC BY 3.0, changes made)

planethank: “SoundWalk Files » Car passing B1.WAV”
freesound.org/people/planethank/sounds/537101/
(CC 0)

slackwareslacker: “Old telephone switch(500 selector).wav”
freesound.org/people/slackwareslacker/sounds/352275/
(CC 0)

StrangeAcoustics: “Palm Trees in the Wind.wav”
freesound.org/people/StrangeAcoustics/sounds/346106/
(CC BY 3.0, changes made)

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about

Dean Kyte image

Dean Kyte Melbourne, Australia

Dean Kyte is a writer, filmmaker and flâneur.

His CD of prose poetry and literary crime fiction, “The Spleen of Melbourne”, is available on BC.

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