Peppy?

I found myself at this entry on IMDB:

Intriguing.

It reminded me of this stuff. There's something about the correctness of the invention that just cracks me up.

Staring out of windows, whining about ducks going to Moscow

There have been fireworks let off in the park near my house this evening. This after a bunch of possums/cats had a party with lots of flamenco and brawling on the corregated sunroom roof. The other night there was a flying fox (bat? I do not know) hanging in the tree directly outside the sunroom window. I've never been so close to one before. It was having a go at eating something, upside-down. It looked all wrong, gravity-wise. Like one of those pictures that's sometimes a bunny and sometimes a rabbit ... wait; I think I mean duck. Anyway. With legs that have hands to hang with when your head's upside down.

Quite strange.

I've been working on my website tonight. I decided a while ago I was going to put everything on it. Everything I still liked, that is. I'm beginning to question that decision as the project spreads into its second year. Mind you, I haven't touched it for at least six months, so ...

Sometimes I really want to post on the blog but there's nothing at all to say, so I end up doing these la-di-da kind of nowhere nothing posts about the birds or the sunlight. It's like a little hand with nothing in it, reaching out over the interwebs, grasping for something to hold on to.

Banalities for Novembers

Blogs are tops. What did we ever do without them? In fact, life without the internet on the whole seems like another planet in another dimension.

In other news, my show includes subliminal nods to both Officeworks and Corporate Express. I don't think it's particularly significant, but there it is. Symbols abound.

Jemand musste Josef K verleumdet haben. Why can I not get this out of my head?

Trash patch

This is quite an amazing story. At first I kind of thought it might be a positive story about how ocean life is adapting effectively to this new, human-derived environment. But then I read about the fish with plastic in their stomachs and I thought, not so much. But how amazing is this? You can't tell how large it is from this picture, but if this quantity of small stuff is what's in there, how the hell could you clean it up? Size of Texas, they think this patch is.

Look how the fish are treating this area, like it's a coral reef that they interact with. The evolution of these artificial forms that find themselves with utterly alien afterlives fascinates me. It's like when you're little and you think your toys have a life of their own when you're not there; maybe there's something to that. Material things don't enact their own fates, but they're a part of the evolution of the physical environment, as shaped by all of our actions. This patch is like a garden gone wild (...and with toxicity in the groundwater).

More upbeat

I have these times when I want to do paintings/become a painter. That might happen, one day. But other times I want to become a writer (again). Both have the same problem in them; content/subject.

What of/about?

So silly. It's best just to do things, and not worry or anticipate or plan. You can always make it good later if it's crap at the start.

Anyway.

I'm feeling a little more upbeat now.

Here's a picture of something I made recently:



Just doing anything at all is usually the biggest problem for me. I think I need to do more that's messy. Precious schmecious (if you will).

Meh, and not even original meh

I just watched a bird on a power line out the window, after hanging out there for a minute, reach across and chomp down a spider from a web. I'm aware of the banality of this observation, so perhaps it says something about my mood that it made me aware of how casually a life can be chomped up by some external force. All this angst and worry and whatever, when you can be Struck Down at any time; what's the point? Rationally, you'd conclude that with this knowledge the best strategy is to be living each moment as happily as you can and not worrying about or planning for the future. The reality of your life means nothing to the bird that sees you as dinner (for a quick second, before ceasing to think of you at all), but that personal, petty reality is so strong to you; how can you overcome being so wrapped up in it?

Wherefore perspective?

I was looking at Facebook (it's all your fault, Facebook) because I read something online about someone from primary school who is now on the BRW Young Rich List. I opened the mail and got my credit card bill and thought: What am I doing with my life, and what for?

Day after

I don't feel in the least bit triumphant.

Best Picture

There's a William Eggleston one I've always rather liked. I'm not sure if it could be called 'best' exactly.


But that's a whole other discussion.

Fuck it, I'm going to blog more

Anyone watching Mad Men (obsessively like me)? I'm even feeding the habit peripherally through re-watching movies such as North by Northwest, The Apartment, and reading this book:


It tries to show how much things were changing in the mid-late sixties via an in-depth study of the development and production of the five movies nominated for best picture Academy Awards in 1967. It's a really good read. Super-well researched. Anyhoo, I digress.

There's an episode where Kinsey has this great idea (supposedly; I'm sceptical) but he's drunk and doesn't write it down and thereafter continually regrets the loss of the (supposedly) best idea he's ever had. The 'moral' being, write it down. That's the moral I'm choosing to take in this moment, given that there was something I needed to write down, which triggered the memory of that episode, so I've retrospectively assigned that moral to the story. I can't even remember how it was needed for the narrative. Oh yeah, I think it was to show how good Peggy is relative to her peers at coming up with ideas.

My old friend Rommel said something once about not writing all those ideas down, and getting stuck in yesterday's stale ideas and re-churning them. Put them away (or something), he says. Go fly a kite.

I promise

I hereby resolve to finish my website and have it online before the end of 2009. This joint here is for ramblings, not for sensibleness. So I'm gonna flippin' do it, orright?

I've been looking at the work of Donald Evans. It's very interesting; that whole coming up with a pretext and limitation in order to produce a very particular kind of series of work thing; that whole classification and miniaturisation of a fantasy version of the world, naming as knowing thing; that whole mail art global connectedness international languages thing; that whole copying the signifiers of a certain genre thing.

It's pleasing to see someone find a project that's so clear to them, no matter how nichey.

Cakewrecks

I adore the literalism of this


Cakewrecks killed a good half of yesterday for me.

I love google-image-searching cakes. Trust there to be a whole blog about it.

When I was in Year Nine I took an elective class for one semester, cake decorating. I do not know why. It was with Miz Clee, the least liked home ec teacher. It was pretty awful, still I learnt a lot about marzipan. I made an ugly ugly cake with lots of pastel flowers on it. No sense of imagination or humour.

Perhaps I should just be a clock repairer. I think I'd be good at something like that ('what're the hours?')

The Crimson Petal and the White

Right now I'm reading this:


It took a while; initially I felt it was too cold or something, but I'm about a third of the way in and it's completely pwning me. It's a page-turner, to be sure.

The best part, now that I'm in there, is that I have some 500 pages to go.

Souvenirs of the apocalypse

It was apocalypse-tastic!

(The single most boring thing anyone could say after an apocalypse-esque dust storm is, it was apocalyptic.)

Often, when I see something I like, I want to drop all my own ideas, methods, habits and goals and just adopt those new ones.

I've got a short little span of attention(, and oh my nights are so long).

These days

I feel almost physically sick when I check my email these days. I would be really happy not to have to have it any more, except obviously I have to.

This feeling has been current for some time. One of the results of it is that most of my correspondents have pretty much given up on me, so I hardly have any emails when I do check. In one way, this is pleasing, as I don't have to answer any emails (which I don't know why makes me feel wrong sometimes - I think it's not my preferred way to interact with people: I'm reflective enough as it is); in another way, I feel sad because I'm losing touch with people. Which is very bad.

In other news, I was going to post the pictures I took from my vantage point high over Glebe and Annandale of the post-apocalyptic [-looking] orange dust storm that woke me up at 5.30am (something pounds on the exterior wall of the bedroom during gale force winds and it's not conducive to sweet dreams - and for once it wasn't the nightmare neighbours, more on whom later). But everyone else in the world already posted them. Here, look.

It was a very unsettling thing to wake up, not merely because I see that time of the morning perhaps twice a year at most, but because it looked like a mammoth super-fire was roaring in from Western Sydney. All the windows of our place were open, and in my sleepy state I couldn't understand why I couldn't smell the smoke. I had a flashback to the late eighties and thought the end of the world was nigh. And there were not yet pictures of red sky on the Herald website, so I thought maybe all the journalists had been liquified. Once I had looked up BOM and seen that the meteorologists were still living, breathing and updating their site, I relaxed a bit. Couldn't go back to sleep, though (see tree issue, previous paragraph).

I took photos to show MW when he woke up but it was extraordinarily still completely orange when the proper day started about two hours later. Now there's a yucky film of dust over everything in my studio, because of the vents-I-haven't-yet-found-a-stepladder-to-climb-up-on-and-cover-with-plastic-or-paper-or-something-because-of-the-white-dust-that-blows-in-through-them-when-there's-wind. Fortunately all the fragile masterpieces-in-progress are covered in glad wrap (or as they'd say in Adrian Mole or The Young Ones, 'cling film'. [Cling film, heh]). Dustiness is a place my work goes to in its nightmares.

I've just been in the library so I'm all full of mental blurgh. I don't mean mental 'blah' like 'meh', I mean blurgh like 'urge to blurt things out'.

I so loved Adrian Mole. I always think of him when I'm sorting through 'the heavy papers' on the weekend.

Other things are progressing pleasingly. Time is always a problem; but if there was no time there couldn't be any doing at all so I suppose I shouldn't complain that it's passing.

Favourites

Two of the best films I think I've seen over the last twelve months are 'Happy Go Lucky' and 'Man on Wire'.

Goodness me they're wonderful.

I love Mike Leigh so very very much.

That's all I have to say about it for the moment.

Here's a little warning sign if you have a cocaine problem

You have this dream and you're doing cocaine in your sleep and can't fall asleep and you're doing cocaine in your sleep and you can't fall asleep and you wake up and you're doing cocaine ... bingo.

(Robin Williams, when he was good).
I remember being kind of addicted to tetris, you know, when you're falling asleep and the bricks start falling behind your eyelids as they sag.

Art dreams, too, there's that.

Jemande musste Josef K verleumdet haben ...

What Christopher Hitchens says to do with Kafka:

... When I went to Czechoslovakia under the old Communist regime one day in the '80s, I thought to myself whatever I do, whatever happens to me in Prague I'm not going to use the name Kafka, I'm just not going to do it. I won't do it; it's so easy, everyone else does, I'm not going to. I'll write the first non-Kafka mentioning piece. So I went to this meeting of this then-unknown dissident, Vaclav Havel and various of his Czech friends and Slovak friends in an apartment in Prague and we thought that no-one knew that he had these visitors coming from America, but someone must have given us away because it wasn't long before the door fell in and in come police dogs and guys in leather coats carrying heavy electric torches and truncheons and so on, slammed me up against the wall and said, 'You're under arrest and you've got to come with us.' And I said - I thought of saying 'I demand to see the Ambassador', and I said, 'What's the charge?' And they said, 'We don't have to tell you the charge'. And I thought 'fuck. Now I do have to mention Kafka'. Totalitarian is a cliché, dictatorship is based on clichéd thinking, on very tried and tested uniform stuff. They don't mind that they're boring, they don't mind that they're obvious, their point is made and I thought 'Now you've made me, I know you're going to make me do it'.

Flailing about in the dark

There's also this:

It's an exhibition. Don't try reading the little bits of text, they're too small and I couldn't be arsed mucking about with preparing images properly. You should know by now that that sort of thing isn't what goes on in these parts.

On the show, though, I was down on my work, but the parts that insisted on not being able to be fixed knew better than me how to self-actualise their constituent selves into a successful work.

I was battling every part of it all the way, and it beat me, and I learned that I was beaten because the work itself is superior to my understanding of what makes it good (when it is). That's a little scary. But it can be no other way. My little brain isn't capable of logically following through to the conclusions of its instincts.

This is what makes it hard to write artist statements, but at the same time is what is the appealing mystery of, like, yanno, art. It needs to reach for something slightly further than your own understanding. Maybe.

I don't learn something from every project I undertake but I have from this... I don't know exactly what it is, but it's there somewhere.

Anyhoo.

Tom Polo is awesome, btw. He's good people.

OMG generic post title

I made florentines.

They are freaking amazing. Hence, I am the best pastry chef ever. Don't bother arguing with me, because you'll lose.

ION, I'm back in the studio, finally. Freaking about time. Not much excitement is going on there, but I'm working, anyway.

Such a Good Thing.

Sigh

I am the worst procrastinator in the world. (Or do I mean the best?)

I just made Melting Moments, and I don't even particularly like shortbread.

Photophobia?

Man, have I got a corker of a headache.

I looked at lots of art today

Not much of it was terribly inspiring.

I'm confused again. I was over it for a few days, but I feel a little bit of confusion returning.

It’s okay for artists to make money… no, really, it is.

The title is the same as a Harvard Business School paper posted by NAVA on their website. It's kind of timely, given this blog's recent self-flagellation about art and purposelessness and ... well, all that stuff. I haven't read it all yet so I don't know if it's any good. I'm posting it anyway... because that's what I do these days. I post!

Here it is.

In other news, I just baked a cake.

Unprecedented! It's cooling as we speak.

UPDATE: I read that paper now ... most of it. I got annoyed after a while and stopped.

There's four left in the box/Eureka moments

Direct quote from source:

"A single grain of sand is not a heap; that’s obvious. A heap is a collection of things, you need several things to make it up. Two grains of sand isn’t a heap either; a heap is a collection of several things, more than just a couple.

The concept of a heap is fuzzy, though; there’s no precise number that marks the difference between heaps and non-heaps. It’s not as though 37 grains of sand aren’t a heap but 38 are. Defining precisely how many things one needs in order to have a heap is impossible.

This is what gives rise to the paradox of the heap (also called the “Sorites paradox”, sorites being the Greek word for heap).

Suppose that we have a collection of a million grains of sand. That is absolutely, definitely, undeniably a heap.

Because there is no precise number that separates heaps from non-heaps, removing a single grain of sand from a heap will never turn it into a non-heap. If you have a heap of sand, and you take away a single grain, then you still have a heap.

If you have a heap of a million grains of sand, though, and repeatedly take away a single grain of sand, doing so 999,999 times, then what do we have at the end of the process? Is it a heap or not?

Taking away a single grain of sand cannot turn a heap into a non-heap. We had a heap of sand at that beginning of the process. All we did was take away single grains of sand. Therefore what we have at the end of this process can only be a heap.

What we have at end of the process, though, is a single grain of sand, and, as we said at the beginning, a single grain of sand is obviously not a heap. The single grain, then, both is and is not a heap."

Master and slave

It's a bit blurry. Also craply made. Text reads, 'master' and 'exhibition copy'.

Media art!

Do you ever feel it's all been done before?

This Tom Friedman thingy is made out of 30,000 toothpicks. I was prompted by AG's comment that she likes things that look like they were fun to make. I agree, I do too. I covet the having made them myself-ness. I like things that look like they lead out of something that was efficient or made sense according to some unspoken natural law (the tapered shape of the end of the toothpick). I like to think of his play with a thing and discovery of what the natural properties of that thing are and where it should go, and then he takes it all the way there.

Cereal boxes can also have natural properties.


This is, like, the seminal Friedman work (IMHO, obvs). This is just made out of several identical cereal boxes. It's the thing in itself only more of it and bigger, and because of that vaguer. Like, the accumulation and aggregation of many equals more volume but less specificity. The trade-off for scale is lack of resolution; this is like a 3d jpeg. Blur = dilution of exactness caused by excessive multiplication. Too much same = no longer separately clear.

You can get all this from a thing that simply looks (ie is visual. As in, looks like only without the simile). There's power in something that can be seen and not said, but you can't explain that power by saying, because it's in the seeing not the saying. Things that can only be known by seeing are everywhere, in graphics, in photography, images of all kinds. In the dialectics of streets and buildings and trees and the light from the sky. But how can you explain any of that without the thing that is seen that is the explanation in and of itself? (Eh?) It's like the difference between doing and planning.

Yesterday I joined a small group of friends trying to help a collaborative pair of artist friends to workshop a long-running project they've got going on. Because of the kind of project it is (connected to a festival) with lots of planning time, they are researching and researching and trying to draw the work out of that. But they're blocked, stymied by what is a non-intuitive process for them. Can't make the leap from research to performance/work. From what it's meant to be about, to thing-that's-independent-of-all-else-but-itself-and-embodies-ideas-rather-than-illustrates-them. Which is what they normally do intuitively. We have so much to prove/explain all the time, it reduces our confidence just to do. It sounds so airy-fairy, intuition, but the thing is our intelligence as artists needs to be trusted (inc. by us) that we will be able to embody intelligentness (intelligence?) in the thing itself, in how the thing itself is executed, rather than in via how known a quantity it is before it is undertaken.

I'm struggling with this meself.

I seem also to be making a collection of works that are pieces of A4 paper.

I owe someone a nail. It's waiting patiently in my studio. It's actually nail plus these days. It's accrued interest. But not in anyway that undoes the inherent simplicity of nail as nail, fear not. It's just more practical now. Shall I show you? OK, hang on. Maybe next post.

More on this

A Goodreader's comment on the letters of Vincent Van Gogh:

"he was definitely not crazy, just someone who, sadly, was incredibly talented but got hit with an extremely severe mental illness:"

Heh. Not crazy; just had a mental illness.

It's like, one is medicalised, and the other means 'out of control'. But who exactly is crazy if not the mentally ill?

Anyway, whatever.

Procrastinatin'

I was cataloguing books on Goodreads, a task I allowed myself as a reward for finishing Dreams From My Father. A chance encounter with Spike Milligan on said site reminded me of how much I loved his war memoirs when I discovered them as a young 'un (teen). I mean to read them again, now. Soon praps. (Or not - I have to read according to the rules first). Anyway. I added a new category to account for his description of shellshock in the fourth of the trilogy (and his bi-polarness in general), which I called mental illness. Then I needed to go through all my 'read' books (I know, I know) and mark up the other books with that tag. This proved a problem; is (for example) The Virgin Suicides about mental illness? They all killed themselves - something must have been going wrong in their brains, right? Or what about American Psycho? Does he have an illness? Is sublimation an illness? Or nihilism? What constitutes a mental illness anyway? How about Louis Riel? Is going a bit nuts not a rational response to oppression? And maybe his vision was true, truly from god - who am I to say?

Anyway, the anti-climax here is that I changed the label to the more inclusive and unreconstructed 'madness_mental illness', which allowed me to tag tales involving things like depression and OCD.

This labelling thing is a lark, innit. In the words of Sandra Bernhard, "don't label me: I'm a people person".

If I gave up art

I could
* spend more time with my friends and family
* save money
* read more books
* learn (a) language/s
* be more interested in my job, which is not uninteresting, and do it better
* take up a proper exercise program
* cook more and hence eat better
* take up sewing, crochet, carpentry, or any other skill or craft
* be at peace


It's a theory, anyway.

Progress on Rules

Today I had to exercise some self-control. In keeping with the new rules, I did not buy either of the two books I was considering at Gleebooks second-hand.

I will probably long for them for a couple more days, then I'll be over it.

If not, I'll go back for them in blatant disregard of my commitment.

Our apartment is bitterly cold today, despite the sun outside. Studio calling! (There's a heater in there.)

Statistical negligibility

I just did a double take upon closing my Blogger window at the new tab, 'monetize'.

WTF?, I asked myself.

Apparently I can put ads on my blog. It claims:

"AdSense for content automatically crawls the content of your pages and delivers ads (you can choose both text or image ads) that are relevant to your audience and your site content—ads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful."

Curious, I thought. My readership is so low and my content so negligible that I cannot imagine what the ads would contain that could possibly make them relevant. I'm almost tempted to do it, just to see what Adsense makes of La Di Da.

It would like having the blog reviewed by a bot. Automated interpretation: intriguing.

OMG

Four. Days. Off.

This pleases me.

I must not waste the next three like the first.

My return to blogging has thus far been kind of banal, of late in any case. I suppose it was often like that in the old days anyway.

Tomorrow may well be a less banal day, as well as being at the very least another in the series. (Of days.)

Rules

I'm making some rules.

I'm not allowed to buy any more books until i read at least a third of the ones I've got waiting. Opportunities to buy graphic novels or illustrated art books at highly discounted prices (ie in an op shop) don't count in that rule. No more novels, or Amazon and its ilk until I get through the backlog.

What else?

No more spending without reference to my new Financial Priorities list. Food and drink and the like are exempt from the rule. Also art supplies.

I will turn off the power at the wall in our lounge room whenever I think of it and it's practicable.

Because the rules are public I will have to stick to them.

Don't make fun of my rules. I know they're small, but they're a start.

A start of what, I hear you ask? I do not know.

Lazy and bad

Places I'd like to do residencies in.

* Libraries
* Shops
* Warehouses
* Factories
* Attics
* Greenhouses
* Storerooms
* Anywhere well-lit

I need to learn some new skills. Meh meh and meh.

Last word for the day

I'm finally really stuck into this book.


It's totally doing it for me now. I'm about a third of the way through.

I can hear the Fleet Foxes in the other room, so I'm going to read some more.

Aussi, parce qu'il pleut.

More on Martin Creed sort of

I quite like this one. There's a kind of art where you get painted into a corner by the history and possibilities of art, and it's so inhibiting that all you can do is something very simple or small.

Are we running out of possibilities, though? Surely not. Perhaps if you have fixed ways of thinking about things, then that might happen. A radical shift isn't so easy. maybe MC's work is not any kind of shift, but it's a kind of narrowing of the field.

I feel a bit like that sometimes.

Sometimes also I think I like works based on what I imagine making that work to have been like. I would like to have made this. I would have enjoyed it, I would also like to be confident enough with my practice to make such a work and classify it thusly (a work).

Maybe it's just about getting rid of all the limitations. But thinking is a discipline, you develop your own way of doing it, and without that limitation, I don't know if art is possible. Without limitations. Therein lies the paradox.

That's something to work towards: the courage to strip things back further, further and further.

OK, it's definitely leave the house time.

Circular Post About Miranda July

I've been reading Miranda July's blogs and interviews with her and watching YouTube clips from her movie all morning. She's a great character, just very honest and real. Not that she's a 'character' like someone who's made up, but I don't know her so I can't exactly say she's a great person. She has a kind of earnest lightness, or a light earnestness that makes me feel good.

When I first saw You Me and Everyone We Know I thought it was just OK. I liked certain things about it a lot, but I found it a bit self-conscious, or found the pace a bit forced or something, just in general. But taken in the context of her whole work, you figure out a bit more where she's coming from, and it becomes a whole lot more likable. A long narrative like a feature film I guess, when it's made by someone who's perhaps less of a 'pro', comes out as different, uses different narrative techniques and different scales of events, and less conventional structures. I guess I was just being conservative in how I looked at it.

Like, OK (bear with me), when I chatted with TP and said it was hot here and I was wearing a skirt and t-shirt, and he commented about how cold it was there and he wished he was wearing a skirt, and I went ha ha boys in skirts. MJ probably would have said, yeah, boys should try wearing skirts because it's light and airy in summer and they don't know what they're missing. Whereas I had a small-scale knee-jerk conservatism. 'Haha, you're a boy and you said you wished you had a skirt, haha'.

Which brings me to an astute observation made by my ex-pat host the other day, which is that here (Japan) there is no concept of the 'tryhard' such as in Australia. We had seen some wannabe (see there it is again!) like boy band/girl group j-pop kind of singing teams practicing in the park, and thought that no young people would do that in Australia, because they'd be laughed at. She reckons that in Japanese culture, people respect people for trying hard, at whatever it is, and would not judge you negatively for it. She claims there's an absence of cynicism about people's aspirations and actions here (I'm wildly paraphrasing), and that people are hence more encouraging and experimental. She called it an absence of irony, I think. She said she'd miss it when she left.

It's a fairly appealing quality. I imagine I'd have trouble shaking my sense of irony. Probably a balanced approach would do. We yam what we yam, a bit.

Anyway, Miranda July's movie blog has a post from Paris about spending the day in looking at antique lace in a store. She picks four bits and buys them and makes a lace collar in homage to the Viktor and Rolf clothes she will never own. It made me feel better about what I've been doing here. And also like today might be the day I go and buy the curtain fabric.

I'm so impressionable!

[Meta-moment: OMG, this means I can reuse that post label I thought would never ever come up again!)

I was looking actually at the YouTube clips (it's all about Miranda) to find that part of the movie where there's a visit to an artist's studio. The visitors try to get rid of the artist's trash and he's all 'don't touch that sculpture!', and when they get stuck into admiring another work, it turns out to be his coffee cup or something. I couldn't find it. This happens to me all the time with my work. I was reminded of it because I went to a Martin Creed exhibition here a couple of days ago, who I bet this happens to all the time. He probably enjoys it. It happens to me, and I get frustrated, thinking 'does this mean I'm a gimmicky one joke artist like Martin Creed?'. (Disclaimer: I don't know anything about Martin Creed's work really. I'm sure it's complex and interesting. Most things are, even a screwed up piece of paper.)

The show I saw had that work in it. It was in a small side room. I started to go towards it and the gallery attendant stopped me, explaining that it was the office. I guess they don't feel it's important that people can get close to that particular piece of work. I encourage you to look at that work. I guess I was thinking of that when I made this. What a hack.

When I gave my newly developed short spiel about my work the other day to a friend of my host, she asked me 'but why?'. I mean, what can you say to that?

I'm going to take this opportunity to find out about Creed's practice properly.

Blog til you drop

You wouldn't know Japan was in financial crisis. Shopping is like a religion here. It's almost sexual to buy things. The smallest purchase has a hint of luxury, because of the attention they pay to each item that you buy. They bag and wrap things so beautifully, so you feel you're taking home some of the elegance of the inevitably well-presented stores. They take branding to an art form too, everything has a 'look' and conforms effortlessly to it. Many people's fashion sense is very thematised; they're 'summer of love' or 'victoriana' or 'ethnic baggy'. But this is probably how fashion works; it's just that they're good at it here.

It's raining a lot today. Only the second day that's lived up to my 'rainy season' expectations.

Did you know in Japan the year is 21? That's all I know about it.

Edit: I don't mean shopping is a religion. I mean it's very ritualistic as an action here.

Melange du chose au deux jours

Yesterday I tried to find fabric town, but got lost in 'normal people live here' town. It was lovely, actually. Lots of tiny narrow streets. I found a shopping street that I decided was functional and not uber consumerist and paradoxically went a bit buying things crazy. The ceramics they have here are to die for ... I still want to go back and buy the $50 red mug ... today I managed to only spend money on lunch and entry to a parky thing. What a star! Such restraint!

I've seen no art yet, I keep wandering on foot and getting lost in neighbourhoods or shops, or getting lost on a bike. Tomorrow I am totally going to see some art.

Today there were iris fields, which were frankly a little bit overrated (or perhaps it made me nostalgic for my Mum's garden). It was full of Japanese couples of a certain age, which is nice, and many were doing watercolours of the flowers. Yesterday I bought these dried banana things and they are so amazing that I've now looked up whether I'm allowed to bring them back to Aust (I think so, if I declare them) ... soooo goooooood.

What else happened in Tokyo? My charming host took me to a beautiful bookstore, full of gorgeous books on the twentieth century avant gardes. I can't tell you how pleasing a second-hand bookstore can be made to the eye in this country. I just can't. I exhibited great restraint in not buying the book of photographs of Morandi's studio in Bologna, or the Fluxus artist's book wherein all the contents of a table are described in great detail.

Oh, curry is ready! I'm being so well-looked after.

What a lovely day

Today's experiences included, but were not limited to, the following:
- ate raw chicken (chicken sashimi!)
- rode a bike through lots of places I can't name
- ate charcuterie
- withdrew cash (yay for functioning ATM card! - long boring story)
- bought a fancy pencil
- looked at seven floors of fabrics
- ordered udon from a machine, which was then served by a person
- drank a beer brewed in Brooklyn
- saw crickets for sale in a little cage box thingy (like guppies!)
- sat on a heated toilet seat (how can I ever go back??)

(no particular order)

Can barely keep my eyes open.

snotty

So I should post because I'm bad with the posting at the moment and my New Second Half of 2009's resolution is blog more. Give the people what they want, I say.

So, still, I am in Tokyo. I've been here just a day. Bliggedy-blogger, who I can't link to because for some reason things look DIFFERENT on computers here, took me out with her to a distant suburb where a lovely friend taught us how to do colographs in her gorgeously lovely Japanese apartment with her many many yen printing press. Which was a nice change to spending the first day shopping.

I think I am going to go and wander around now. Get some lovely things (that was spoken like Edina in Ab Fab when she goes to Morocco to acquire things for her shop. Lots of lovely *things*). Some of which may be photos or ramen.

Um ... arigato? No, wait, what I mean is sayonara, a bientot.

Post script: I forgot about the title. I have a rotten cold. Apparently you're not supposed to blow your nose on the street in Japan (you should use a tissue! har har har). Um, so, like, that explains the title, and allowed me to slip in a bad pun. Hooray!

Things be happening

This is my abode-to-be:





I think it's big, but I can't properly remember. We are at the back (obviously I can't have a mansion to myself, der. It's a flat). Plenty of space for both to work at home, though. The rent isn't that cheap but it's manageable and it's not in outer woop woop, which is a nice surprise.

I'm expecting lots of guests, all right?

In the meantime, I have a week off between jobs and will be packing up the ol' house. I completely don't know where to start with anything at all.

Meh

I am losing my fabulous studio.

It was enormous, fabulous, free, and mine.

But I knew it wouldn't last forever.

Here it is, in happier times (detail):

I also haven't found a new house yet. I hope this will happen soon. I will have to do some major purging.

I'm trying to write an artist's statement that somehow says everything. It's hard.

I think I will post more often. Will that please you?

Update

It’s been a really interesting day today that seems to be summing up lots of the stuff that’s going on.
1. MW and I went to see a house (apartment) that we really liked and it was before the proper inspection and a private rental so maybe we can even have it! It had a big kitchen with gas and a bathtub and was in Summer Hill near all the shops and 2br and overgrown garden. But it’s likely the saga of looking for a place will continue for some time. That’s just how it is, full of disappointments and rallying and so on.
2. I had an interview for a new job that could be very good and is actually perfect for me right now, with an academic art and critical theory publisher. It’s part time but only just, which makes me somehow feel constricted and tight in the throat like Diane Keaton’s character in Love and Death where she says ‘can’t breathe, open a window, no, the other one, the one in the kitchen’. I don’t want to work jobs at all! But anyway, it would beat the shitkickiness I’m engaged with at the moment, which wants me to become permanent in three weeks and be paid 30% less per hour for the privilege of losing my flexibility (which is the point of that job).
3. I went for lunch with MW and chose the salad over the omelette with chorizo. It was the healthy choice, and I still want that omelette now, but I exercised a discipline uncommon in my general life, hence felt powerful.
4. Had a hair cut. My long curly locks are now a short short bob. My hairdresser is six months pregnant, something I didn’t know was happening. I felt all peaceful and relaxed and had lots of head massages and they brought me tea and it was all luxurious. And now my head is all 1920s, which is good.
5. A blur … I have a lot of follow up work to do on the exhibition I have on at the moment. Emails, images, opportunities to grab … lots of pressing blah better get on with it …
6. Went to a nice opening and talked to good people. People I haven’t been talking to for months because I’ve been locked down working on my show, and now I can go out. Solved some of my worky problems in a nice social environment. Sometimes these things look after themselves.
7. Came to MW’s house, he is making lasagne and listening to his iPod in the kitchen. As I type, I can sometimes hear him singing along. Warm feeling.
8. I was sent this link, thoughtfully. It made me want to write this post, so I did.
In conclusion, life is good and change, although it can be stressy, makes you feel alive. You know you are alive because you are in your life, living it. Currently.