whistlers, ghosts and ice

I’ve been interested (obsessed?) with whistling for a very long time and finally got to write about it here - even in a short form. My father was a fabulous whistler and so were his brothers. whistled an awful lot and so did his brothers. I have always loved a whistle and taught myself to whistle on the out-breath and also on the in-breath. One of my favourite things to is whistle at birds and I am probably never happier than when they whistle back. It doesn’t happen much.

When the boys were little they went to a childcare place in St Kilda. There was Russian childcare lady there who was lovely and loved the boys. One day I was there coming or going, and I was whistling. One of the beautiful things about the human whistle is that it is mostly sub-conscious, like humming. It just emerges from the whistler and in the purest circumstances it does this without the whistler even knowing anything about it.

This is how it was for me at the childcare place.

“Your whistling is very good,” she said. “You will do a whistling concert for the children.”

I didn’t do it. This was in 2003. My chicken-lips chickened out.

However, the incident sent me off into a deep rabbit hole of whistle-related research culminating in a terrible unpublished short story about a humble man who becomes a worldwide whistling star and, through his journey, finds himself enslaved in tortuous celebrity, unable to whistle and unable to find joy.

This recent profile of Normal People mega-author Sally Rooney sort of fits the vibe. A jail of fame and a hall of mirrors, and a plain-white Zoom background.

This is part of the story, back when everything was innocent, but was about to turn. My guy would go to an aviary in a public gardens early each morning to whistle beside the “…enclosure of birds. In it were eastern rosellas, talking budgerigars of green and blue, azure kingfishers and finches including some delightful zebra finches, laughing kookaburras and sulphur-crested cockatoos and also a red whiskered bul-bul which, until then, I had assumed extinct.”

A Professor of some sort (ornithology? Ancient history? Anthropology) stumbles across the scene one morning and takes my guy (Martin) under his wing (so to speak) as a sort of prodigy, or showpiece. But first the amateur genius needs to be schooled.

“…over the coming months he reinforced the need to whistle clean; that is, to whistle without sliding up and down searching for the right note. He repeated mantras about legato and staccato. And he began on the strict importance of the tongue. Eventually he showed me pictures of tribal elders in Micronesia, the whistling elders, with forked tongues. They, he said, more or less played the flute.

“He made me listen to and study Muzzy Marcelino, a Chicago whistler noted for his fusion of styles on blaxploitation films of the 1970s. I also heard his out-takes for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The Professor played me recordings from his computer - Arthur Pryor and The Warbler’s Serenade from the early 1900s, Whistling Johnnies by the great Whistling Johnnies and Black shirts Unite by the Beauport City Coal Band. I learned that during the Middle Ages whistling was considered the devil’s plaything and was banned but a vibrant whistling underground emerged which remains to this day in Poland.

“He took care, also, to play me John Lennon and Jealous Guy and in fact continued to play it on a daily basis for several months…”

So - it was very nice for me to speak with whistler extraordinaire Molly Lewis (and her father) to find out more about her story. Her record (which I love) is available to buy or suss out here - and a playlist of some of her favourite music is here.

One of the stories going around here at the moment is from a suburban Woolies and the staff member who continually eats ice while working.

She seems to be addicted and carries around a plastic bag of it while on duty out the back doing the vegies. It seems that she has discovered where the supermarket keeps its ice and refreshes her stash through the shift.

But she keeps it on the down-low. She’s furtive about it. She doesn’t do it in the open, and she disappears for periods of time to refresh.

It’s that shaved ice they put under fish or broccolini. Other workers at the store think that she maybe even eats the ice that has been under the fish or broccolini, but there’s no proof. Some think she’s maybe pregnant, others think she may have an eating disorder or some other kind of disorder? She’s in her 20’s.

No-one has actually straight up asked her why she eats ice. I guess this is in some ways the lore of the supermarket – don’t ask other people about their stuff. Don’t inspect their trolley and pass judgement on it. It might also be the lore of the world. Don’t ask too many questions.

Like everyone with privilege I’ve made a Lockdown playlist. It’s been a long haul; I’m writing this in Lockdown Six in Melbourne with the regions (“except Shepparton”) only beginning to slowly open up. Music has been huge in the house. Much more than usual. No surprises there. I’ve bookmarked a couple of dozen amazing online radio stations and bounce them around the house into speakers with their exotic announcers magically via the internet. I bought a new turntable too, now I have three, each with its own peculiar character. Woody at 4 on a Friday afternoon has become like an all-in ritual cleansing, or an uplifting, inside, on our own, either in front of the fire or with windows and doors opens. The virus knows no season.

The playlist’s name keeps changing because they have all keep being rubbish. It’s here. At the moment it’s called ‘pandemic jazz’ which is pretty stupid and despite having some jazz on it, it’s not that jazzy. It’s pretty damn isolated though, mostly. I see the first track added was on March 25, 2020. A year-and-a-half ago.

Ghosts, too. Obsessed right now. I read two books – The Believer by Sarah Krasnostein and The Ghost – A Cultural History, by British art historian Susan Owens. Both are crackers but very different and while the Owens book is all about ghosts, the Krasnostein one (she also wrote The Trauma Cleaner) is not, but it has fair ghosty component.

The Believer is a book about the things at the edge of credulity – she seems to ask ‘what is a ghost, if not our own deep wondering?’ Does there even need to be, in this house, the life, a ghost….is it not haunted enough?

The Ghost – A Cultural History, meanwhile, shows how all the different ghosts through history have been depicted in culture since this belief system emerged, before the Middle Ages - and how ghosts have always represented fear. Are we alone? Am I alone?

I started to get a few thoughts down, based on ideas such as:

“…I reckon my mother and father both carried ghosts of some sort with them; he was a fighter pilot and she was from a strange, isolated family keen on superstition and Mahjong. I think their way of escaping their own personal ghosts was to make jokes and deny any sense of God or spiritualism. They would laugh at the idea of church, and laugh and joke when I came home from church, but entertain small ideas from the occult: ‘she was never the same after that’, ‘he was a bad seed.’ Things like this…”

I feel like I struggle with the idea of what a ghost really is and why so many families or institutions lay claim over a ghost in the house or the shed or the building. I don’t believe in things that go bump in the night, but I do believe in the ability of something/someone/somewhere to be haunted.

“…We all have our own, I suppose? Apparitions and family in-jokes about something or somewhere, a haunted thing, the story about the wounded camper, the door that shuts by itself, great-Gran’s dark larder, the ancient relative from the clipper ship.

“I like the idea of a universal ghosting or haunting much better, where events or situations or encounters are haunted without involving a ghostly physical presence or a mirage of someone dead in their favourite chair. You walk through somewhere, or you return somewhere, you read something or hear something, and there it is. You experience something that might be supernatural – for me a derelict ballroom in a grand Singapore hotel, a murder scene in Mooroopna, a dying witch with dementia cradling a plastic baby doll. Rusted, ancient playground equipment squeaking in the milky quiet. The written notes of a person who – you know now – made you feel unsafe…”

I love the Sarah Krasnostein book, it’s an absolutely brilliant examination of improbable beliefs: aliens, a literal God, a literal afterlife. And ghosts.

“One of the lies writers tell themselves, “she writes in the introduction, “is that all things should be understood.” Write what you know, they say. But what if you don’t know anything?

Finally, a very nice short film about a tropical fish shop in the East End of London - https://aeon.co/videos/what-do-tropical-fish-make-of-the-strange-creatures-who-love-them-so

and The Crate curated/updated playlist, of course.