EXCERPT ‘House Fandango’ copyright, titled Room Boom here only. MJLatham 20 5 21

1. ROOM BOOM
EXCERPT ‘House Fandango’copyright, titled Room Boom here only. MJLatham 20 5 21
This ‘home’ is a global thing; Earth, locale & people in motion.
Don’t be self-centred, for a moment. An ordinary Sydney chap, Bobby Dazzler, lived
with his inherent inclination to enhancing an already superb environment. Looking
to facilitate & celebrate the magic of people in this world, he became aware of
unrealised potentials & heart-felt frustrations among people across the four-
corners. Bobby's house was pretty ordinary. As was his breakfast. "There's
something very special & global about these ordinary things,” he thinks in his
kitchen as he oils the pan. “Hopefully everyperson everywhere rises from bed &
swallows breakfast. But only I have this particular frypan, these fingerprints & ….”
Somebody had spoken; he'd gone into a dream. He grabbed his coat; grabbed his
hat; found his way downstairs in seconds flat. Stepped outside. Quickly tracked
through nature’s depleted vegetated surrounds. From the bus he glanced back at
his house. It nestled in the picturesque grotto with a backdrop of contemptible
suburban heater haze. He loved his home though, including his immediate
neighbours idyllically endowed in carefully photographed crisp modern houses on
small property allotments flanking his two acre nature nook in the suburban sprawl.
As he moved on, through the unecologic repetitive shambles he could see the
world collapsing - & the rich intrinsic beauties of the monotonous urban character.
Rare trees going to rafters, page paper & smoke – just part of the fact. Wide eyed
he dreamed of people in India dying of tuberculosis caused simply by the cow dung
haze in their otherwise quaint huts. Under their feet across the Earth, Mexicans
were clambering back to their slums in preference to alien modern buildings. All of
the characters on the bus were off to work with the loving compassion of their
mortgager as their first awareness. Bobby’s thinking, broadening from the egg in
the frypan, acknowledged the sullage drain & foundation trench, moved across his
1967 suburb & vehicular locale, across the coastal strip & majestic mountain spine,
drifted up through the stratosphere where looking he saw. Good earthy resources
are being converted into unsustainable things at an unsustainable rate. Beautiful
life-support landscape being eaten by the orthogonal dwelling things -
houselocusts. As well, the houselocusts were running out of this food & their bodies
therefore chemically mutating; less organic, more plastic.
Unaware, a fellow passenger began relating ecstatically to the dazed dreaming
Dazzler. About her partly finished new house. Rich, earthy brick, clear sheets of
glass, corners, shapes & room. Amenity, utility, surfaces, constructional handmarks
alive. Architectonic ‘beyond 2000’ in ‘82. It would transform her daily self into
accomplished freedoms. Open new vistas of personal life. He faced her with a
cooking oil stain on his shirt, knowing the house location. "It’s horribly good …that.
A fantastic abode for you. I hope we can find replacement rich local cropland for
our population boom. And is there room for the consequent increment of industrial
growth & road extension? I'll be designing a whole new suburb this week. I know
what you mean, absolutely fantastic, but …. I read the news today. Oh boy! It’s a
global tale - horribly good."
Bobby reeled as he sought options to throw effort to a "supremely good" scenario.
Fantastic. "Horribly good" is not real. Certainly an ecological scenario was a
minimum. His thoughts came together. A clearer than day bolt of truth. He would
have to leave his job. But he couldn't; his job was horribly important. It was indeed
perpetuating the melee but it was also paying his mortgage. He was hamstrung by
his own house. To hamstring, is no aim of the house builder. His tasks & priorities at
home with his companions had him snagged. Domestic politics must be done; the
family must weigh it up. Is it better to contrive your family’s lives around your
house & locale, or to bring your house around your lives - or both? Is there time to
HOUSE: A GLOBAL TALE
HERE ON THE FRONT PORCH

2. build, or is it better spent in some dolphinian way; is an unenhanced wooden spear
better than a microwave oven? This was an issue also for sociological & ecological
politics.
Bobby was perplexed by the complexities, problems, mysteries, lures &
misconceptions as the knowledge moths fluttered to his illuminating enquiry; the
politics of housing weighing against his love for his sunlit loungeroom & what it
offered. His mortgage was an integral part of his housing process.
Housing process. The getting of the house. The process is frustrated. Frustrated. He
was happy though - if he cared to be complacent. Bobby was straining at the leash.
He wanted it all. He wanted everybody to have it all – my shout, perfect dream
houses all round please. "But I was sure at breakfast I had it all," mumbled Bobby
from his haze. "I just can't wait to hang
the Picasso print,” retorted the fellow
passenger, basking blissful & lost in her
own interior. House bound, she looked
forward. “Housebound – hypnotised,
trapped,” reflects Bobby, on the
ambiguity of ‘bound’. “Utterly over-
cooked.” And with others they
continued in the bus. The driver's name is
Global Pale. His address was originally
Eden.
▒
There was some lemonade in his refrigerator.
“How do the Blackfellas manage without a
fridge?” he mused, imagining a familiar face
tanned from birth, cheekily asking,
“Now … what mean you say fridge, Global?”
Global eloquently replied in a voice of sand &
glue;
“The answer my friend is here in the drinking.
The answer … is here in the drinking“
EXCUSE ME PALEFACE … WHAT MEAN YOU SAY HOUSE?”
n the inside of her ethereal cerebral temple, Bobby's fellow passenger, like the
Building Inspector is crossing a threshold in search of a domestic future. Yet she is
locked into her preconception of what a house can be – glossy magazine, leading
trendy architect. Her word is ‘vogue’, which may well be correct for her purpose. But, like a
soaking of oil into a parched, sun-bleached door, her concepts may become enriched with new
awareness & that which she had forgotten or overlooked. For many a soul has been
unaware of even the air between us, despite its weight on our bodies, the sparkle it
gives to stars & the way it carries our voices. Until reminded, say, by some
‘persanal’ wind in a bus or small perfect room. There will most certainly be foul air
with the fragrant, armpits & off-key psychologies. Because; the house is our
product. Our useful rooms & streets are our product. It will take more than this
chapter to explain fully ‘what mean I say house’. Much is subliminal. Man's doings
are people's – brilliant but on average, not sublime. His architecture, in the generic
sense, is little better than his politics. You may wish to ventilate. Your medicine is
coming up.
Shelter. Object. Dwelling-arrangement. A house may be a lot to you. Both simply &
profoundly, to what are we referring with our word, ‘house’? A style, cultural
amenity, contrivance, contraption, a unified accumulation of domestic items. Some
built fabric being embodiment of molecular forces. Facility for dwellers. A box with
a pointy roof. Something in earthly synergy. Of social energy. Address. A major
aspect of home. Interior & alfresco. What is a house? Something we can dissect &
analyse.
Never on the bus, absolutely never, is a certain fictional grandfather named Albert
Gallopilong. He has been initially unnoticed from the stratospheric stroll; lost &
O

3. forgotten behind the urban blinkers of pitched roofs & street signs. His character &
energy are reminiscent of a hero of mine, the real world character, made city-
famous by his Acting, David Gulpilil - spearing roo for family in the country one day,
a dinner suit in Sydney the next. In a contrast to David, Albert has absolutely no
contact with anything Western … nor anything Eastern. An anciently traditioned
Aborigine, of a fictional Harmoninni mob central nor’west Australia, Albert resolves
his domestic needs in his traditional ancient ephemeral way – a minute modicum of
interior, some alfresco & a vast amount of exterior. Global Pale, the bus-driver-
cum-proud-entrepreneur of Western ticky tacky mediocrity, needs to know Albert –
to understand heart-in-house. I feel that another character here, sketched as a
modern Harmoninni, holds a key – which certainly is not a machine-cut Lockwood.
His name is Cheekyfella Talkabout. Zestfully, it’s Cheekybugga, but it switches in
mixed company, such as our Readership or his aunt’s friends in Sydney. It’s he who
coined ‘Albert’ as a nick-name for old Gallopilong. Cheekyfella works with our swag
of people, whose hearts command their dwelling arrangements, as does yours, to
spirit the waft of cultural intuitions, inexplicable by science, through the plaster
slurry & rooms of our domestic tapestry.
Domestic-arrangements, including houses, are very substantial generators of
civilisations & personalities; including indigenous civilisations & Harmoninni
personalities. A house is a romancer, a civiliser. A generator. “And it’s a fryer & I’m
an egg,” grins a fragmented thought. “Hmm,” affirms Bobby Dazzler, “it’s true; they
always say a house is merely shelter. There’s more to it. Amazingly, houses are not
properly understood nor valued.” It strengthened his desire. Somehow those
house-seeker frustrations must be resolved! “Though some may be proper, the
house by-&-large is not in tune with wholistically healthy societal development.”
For caveman, now-man & the progeny, what is a house?
Shelter – obviously it’s shelter.
Shelter, built where needed, is house. Only a romantic notion!
That could be a bus stop! The impulse to shelter, contrary to loosely popular
acknowledgement, is only part of the house story. From our perspective today
shelter is a necessary accessory - a technicality. Never-the-less it is romantic - a
pocket of safe, warm, calm air regains us some of the personal potentials that were
lost to walking the blizzard now buffeting a shelter. Shelter in this sense offers a
kind of gateway, back from the passion quashing storm,
to the growing personal future.
And it is a lure
… to the traps & delights of interior.
ROOM BOOM
It is true though that our dwellings are both practical & psychological
space – room. Room attached in the dwellers world by utility, fabric &
access. Room enhanced with intended expression added to accidental
expression.
Room
– if we can’t find it, we make it;
for cutting up vegetables or for ethereal explorations.
We find it. We adapt it. We make it.
Room in the cupboard, room for a loom, room on the spoon,
some room in the room under the moon,
making some more room soon one may assume
…. Oh stop it; please ease up, for the fever may grow … a choking
room boom.
“Room boom, … room boom, … room boom!?”
contemplate the Palaeolithics & the Gallopilongs, raking their
imaginations in the brief shelter of a foraged hut.
Rumours abound, among the homo superiors,
that it is the cause of
rheumatism.
JL : )