Things 'n' stuff

I was asked to post about the thing I did today, and the request came in such flattering terms that I feel compelled to do it. Oh, now it seems too built up. Let's start again. This post contains spoilers for a certain Academy-Award-nominated movie, btw.

Today I went to what is sometimes known as a 'Mums 'n' Bubs' movie session. I mean how that makes the Dads feel I don't know. Don't get me started on the term 'bub'. Anyway, the idea is that every pram-pusher in the Inner West goes to a movie at the same time. And because everyone knows the theatre will be full of potentially-squalling babes, no-one is upset when they do, in fact, squall. 'Cause you're all in the same boat, see. Supposedly they have the sound slightly down and the lighting slightly up to make it nicer for everyone. Aww. [Have you seen Louie the TV show? That bit in the pilot where he goes on a date with Chelsea Peretti and he says he has two girls and she goes 'awww' and he recoils like, WTF, I didn't say they were cute or nothin', patronizing fucker. I wish I could find a link because it's all there in her intonation.] Anyway.

I have never seen so many babies in one place. You know that episode of the Simpsons that references Hitchcock's The Birds, with the babies everywhere? Kind of like that. Like if you see more than a few cats in one place, and you realise that if only they pooled their power they could kill every one of us.

Yeah, so, lots of babies. Including mine. It was actually incredibly cute. A sea of babbling little things, being soothed by their art-house-cinema attending mothers. The odd crier, whose mother everyone feels sympathy for. A few crawlers roaming free at the front bit under the screen.

It was The Silver Linings Playbook (don't bother. it's such a piece of overplayed fluff. mental illness? let's gloss over that. gambling addiction? fuggeddaboutit. let's have some hugging, learning, saving one another, and oh yes some gratuitous Jennifer Lawrence dance contest butt close-ups. did I forget to mention that this mental illness recovery movie has a dance contest? don't they all? anyway, so, yes, good test case for the Mum/Bub movie concept). Anyway, every now and then there would be a loud aggressive bit (thanks David O Russell), and all the babies' sounds would ramp up a notch and you'd hear all the mothers going 'it's all right, it's all right' haha funny.

My kid is five months, and he squirmed a bit, took two naps, and basically had a fun time jumping around and giggling on my lap and gawping at all the other babies. He also watched the screen from time to time, which he's not allowed to do at home (except the Bureau of Meteorology radar page, he loves that; hey, it's edumacational!).

So anyway now I've blogged about it. I can't blog any more because these days we have to go to bed early. See previous paragraph.

In the interests of maintaining some kind of content

Sauce

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In cooking, a sauce is liquid or sometimes semi-solid food served on or used in preparing other foods. Sauces are not normally consumed by themselves; they add flavor, moisture, and visual appeal to another dish.

/quote

That is, sauces and juices are not the same thing.

Um, I guess I'm back. Prepare for the worst.

Wait, maybe that was it already. What a relief. Now the only way is up.

You know what?

It's all about circularity. It always has been, and it always will be.

Here, look -

In relation to this, this:

In other non-sequitur news, I don't work hard enough.

Taking a stance (albeit small)

I am not ever again going to comment on Julia Gillard's hair or clothing. Even if I think she looks nice. If I think her new 'do is unfortunate I will not mention it. If I think she's looking better and better every day, I will not mention it. It is the least I can do. Yes, I know; the very least. When I notice how she looks I will notice myself noticing.

Coming up in September: Life Summit (unrelated).

*stand. not stance. Stand. I could just correct this in the title, but for some reason it seems dishonest.

Possibly the best-looking gift I've ever given

Promise

Not saying when, but.

My feet reluctant linger at the gate

I'm inadvertently getting into the olde American poets. All that New York Times reading of late, I guess. I wanted to post a picture of the new Firstdraft here but I can't find them on their website, despite what Will tells me. I'm so proud of all the great stuff everyone is doing.

Why does that paragraph want to indent itself? How odd.

Transformed the very landscape seems to be;

It is the same, yet not the same to me.

So many memories crowd upon my brain,

So many ghosts are in the wooded plain,

I fain would steal away, with noiseless tread,

As from a house where some one lieth dead.

I cannot go;—I pause;—I hesitate;

My feet reluctant linger at the gate;

As one who struggles in a troubled dream

To speak and cannot, to myself I seem.

Vanish the dream! Vanish the idle fears!

Vanish the rolling mists of fifty years!

Whatever time or space may intervene,

I will not be a stranger in this scene.

Here every doubt, all indecision, ends;

Hail, my companions, comrades, classmates, friends! 

signwriting glass window paint

I just googled 'signwriting glass window paint' and one of the first hits had this as the first line of the description:

"Sign writers no longer use paint. Traditional sign writing has been replaced by vinyl lettering"

I am aghast. I know it's a dying art, but I'm going to keep carrying the fire. Hand-painted signs ROCK.

I will miss them.

Magritte et al

Some artists' work seem to make it impossible to make anything new. You're burdened by their achievements, kinda thing.

Like this:

I never used to like Magritte (for he is in truth the author of said painting), I thought he was a big cheeseball, because he was popular and accessible in the same way Klimt or Dali are, or something. But I keep running up against him. Recently (in Tokyo) I saw a whole lot of his paintings in the flesh and I just yielded. They were great; he's great. But they are really like a complete circle that appears to close off that territory for the artists that follow (like Duchamp's readymades I guess).

I saw a poster made by an artist once that listed all the object-territories captured by various artists, like:

Beuys owns felt
Kusama owns dots
(etc etc)

I often think of it. There are territories I'm interested in that I feel that way about. Like, Magritte owns semiotics, Schwitters owns collage, Andrea Fraser owns institutional critique, Thomas Demand owns models, and so on. I realise this is an uber-reductive way to think about artists, but that doesn't stop it feeling inhibiting.

But anyway, one's own desires for worldly success aside (because obviously the PR-driven media, time-poor curators and confused audiences prefer neatly packaged artist oeuvres), who wants to inhabit a bounded territory like that? How boring. That's like having to write romantic fiction or something. It's a big fat trap.

/obvious

Indexicality

Joel Snyder:
When people talk about indexicality, they generally confuse photons with objects, and they think it is objects that are necessarily indexed by photographs. It may very well be the objects that are indexed, but nothing in the way of an object need be indexed by a photograph.

While I'm not here

This is what I've been doing with my time:

Kate Beaton: I love love love. I just keep coming back.

Asterios Polyp. Just read it, if you like comics.

While I was in Laos and Cambodia, I was digging Never Let Me Go. Also excellent.

The world is just full of stuff that's good. How are you supposed to find the time to do your own things?

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.