Someone has been tying pieces of fruit together and throwing them, sandshoe-fashion, over the telephone lines, all the way along Abercrombie Street. I would have taken a photo except that I was driving and my camera was in the boot of the car.
I couldn’t tell if they were real or plastic fruit, but I appreciated the effort.
Categories: art
“I lean on a parking meter, and every time a beautiful girl walks by, I smile at her. If she smiles back, I invite her up to my flat for a cup of tea. I moved to New York City because there are so many beautiful girls here, more than anywhere else in the world.”
I’m seeing Tales from the Afterlives tomorrow. I hope Eno’s musical contribution is very ambient indeed, since it’s been quite a week.
Ever since a particular morning visit to a park with my daughters in St Peters in 2001, when I caught myself contemplating the layer of pine-bark soft-fall in the children’s playground, thinking how awful it was that the bark was just sitting there slowly rotting, and that it would eventually have to be scooped up and thrown away and replaced, and how futile this all was – and, yes, I was already taking antidepressants, they were working just enough for me to be aware of how ridiculous I was being – ever since that moment, pessimistic artists have, for me, been divided into two groups.
On the one hand, there are those artists who seem to be comically or grotesquely unaware of how much their mordant and penetrating vision of the tragic nature of existence is contingent upon their own outlook or personality. Examples include W G Sebald, most of Pynchon, Infinite Jest, the Joy Division of Closer, The The, Michel Houellebecq and H P Lovecraft.
And then there are the ones who I still enjoy: Beckett, Cioran, Kafka, Swift, Flaubert, Ballard, The Crying of Lot 49, most of the rest of David Foster Wallace, the Joy Division of Unknown Pleasures and The Smiths.
Straight after seeing Synecdoche, New York I wasn’t sure whether Charlie Kaufman fell into the first or second categories. I won’t be entirely sure until I’ve seen the film again, but I think he’s one of the good ones. It’s a shame that one of the film’s best jokes seems to have been lifted from an episode of The Simpsons. There’s an elegiac playfulness to the film which reminded me of Barthelme.
The question of how much of the action is actually taking place seems to be answered by the appearance of a zeppelin, following the Hindenburg Uncertainty Principle. In fact, this film made me wonder whether the uncanny and infantile weirdness of airships – at once breastlike and unaggressively phallic, dreamily floating – is why they are only possible in fantasy worlds. If the Hindenburg hadn’t been going to crash it probably would have been sabotaged by guerilla psychoanalysts.
Alternate reality tv
Part 7: Twilight of the Ovipositor
In this week’s episode, our two families dress as Vikings and battle the fearsome False Unicorn armed only with footballs made of frozen Vaseline. But watch out for the Membranes!
Special guest stars: Jeff Koons, Michael J Fox. Rated PG
It’s a Knockout! with Matthew Barney, Uncut and Unseen – The Penetralia
It’s all the footage they wouldn’t let us show you in our special adults-only special at 9.30. Not for the squeamish!
Categories: alternate reality tv · art
[EDIT This is now my most popular page. So: Hi Googlers, and, No, I have no idea if it works, I'm just here being a smartarse about the ads. Although if you do want the opinion of some random blogger, I'd suggest giving up smoking, doing more exercise, doing whatever you can to reduce your general stress levels, and trying not to wank as often, because that's really just like training for shorter lasting sex. And see your GP, rather than relying on a doctor who's trying to sell you a nasal spray or some random blogger.]
Last night we saw Steven Berkoff’s lecture at the Seymour Centre, where he said two things: Art can have No Limitations! and Pornography is Destroying Us!
In the Q&A, a bunch of Berkoff fanboys who all looked exactly like you’d expect Berkoff fanboys to look (overweight versions of Bernard from Black Books) got up and completely failed to ask him to resolve this seeming contradiction. They just moaned about Quentin Tarantino.
He also did a pretty funny Peter O’Toole impersonation, and complained about cellphone users. Never mind pornography, what about the pernicious cultural influence of Grumpy Old Men/Women?
And will the people who defended Bill Henson come out in defense of the LONGER LASTING SEX ads? I was celebrating their being withdrawn yesterday, but the fact that it’s being done under the same ’sexualisation of children’ banner as the attacks on Henson, combined with the hectic confusion of Berkoff’s lecture, has got me wondering.
The full text of the Advertising Standard’s Board decision is available and it makes for interesting reading, particularly the AMI’s justification of their product:
Unfortunately, premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction, if left untreated, can lead to major medical and personal catastrophes, which can include severe depression, alcoholism, violence, sexual abuse, marriage breakdown and suicide in extreme cases. The reason these conditions can lead to these serious concerns is that sexual health is a core component of male self-esteem and can a very major impact on a man’s relationship with his spouse. Similarly, as was widely reported in general literature last year, erectile dysfunction is often a precursor of serious cardiovascular disease as has been confirmed in a number of leading medical studies.
In other words, male sexual health fundamentally affects male self-esteem and can lead to extremely serious general health and social issues and concerns.
Actually, my sympathy for the advertiser completely dried up at the point where they get all socially aware with an undercurrent of bullying: you must let us hawk our willy pills or the boys will get violent.
Categories: art · drama · literature · sex
I’m very fond of this album: recordings of Peter Sculthorpe’s Sun Music I and Irkanda IV, and Dorian Le Gaillenne’s Sinfonietta by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, with a beautiful Albert Tucker painting for the cover art. No release date on the sleeve but from the liner notes it seems to have been around 1967. It was released by World Record Club, which label should be a whole nostalgia trigger of its own for readers of a certain age whose parents or grandparents collected classical music, and was “a special presentation of the Foundation for the Recording of Australian Music.”
I bought it – from some second-hand store – because of a state music camp I attended in year 10. We performed Sun Music I in the orchestra, and as third trombone, I thought it was great fun, especially the big glissandos at the works’ climax. The reception of 20th century works by the players depended on where they were in the orchestra. Strings and woodwinds seemed to grumble about anything later than Brahms, but we brass and percussion were happy with the modern repertoire, if only because they gave us something to do. Trombone parts in early 19th-century works are basically exclamation points at the finales separated by 105-bar rests.
So while I could talk about how it represents an earlier time – a sort of earnest nativist modernism – I can’t really see it as dated, because it feels too much like part of the cultural background of my own childhood.
In other modernism news, the Modern Times flickr group is being dominated by photographs of the MLC Centre and the El Alamein fountain in Fitzroy Gardens.
As part of their upcoming exhibition Modern Times – the untold story of Modernism in Australia, the Powerhouse Museum have created a public Flickr group and invited the public to post their own photos and images.
Which is pretty untold.
Categories: architecture · art · australia · design · history · photography
High-end cuisine is the only art form* with a non-specialist audience** in which avant-gardism is still encouraged. Or even really bothered with.
*maybe theatre, although I don’t know enough about it to be sure
**meaning, oh, say: the majority of people who are into it aren’t also practitioners
Teenage boys on the bus this morning:
– The first half is it’s like gold. It would be a good CD to listen to on like, um, a tape or something, you know with two sides, so you could just -
– Listen to the first half and then -
– And then, coz the second side, you know, CBF.
I was puzzled by the last phrase, but impressed that he could think of any form of media with two sides. Then, a few blocks later, discussing a show:
– Tickets are like a hundred bucks so I’m not going. I mean at that price I CBF.
That’s when I worked it out. This is an impressive development in laconic contempt: he not only couldn’t be fucked, but he couldn’t be fucked actually saying ‘couldn’t be fucked’.
So that it’s not all apathy and me whinging about it, here’s an optimistic story from earlier in the week about Kensington Street, next door to the old Kent Street brewery in Chippendale: the developer wants to make the derelict terraces and warehouses available for free to artists while they are demolishing the offices on the other side of the street.
I lived in Kensington Street from 1994 to 2001, in the terrace above, which hasn’t been re-let since I moved out. It had very high levels of lead in the paint and dust, which is why we moved. The whole street belonged to Carlton United Breweries at the time, and although they were good landlords, they really CBF doing anything with the properties beyond routine maintenance. So once a building got major problems, like lead, or the single-story terrace up the street which had begun shearing in half whenever a truck went past, it was locked up and abandoned.
Although this policy of neglect was what had allowed me to move there in the first place, I thought it was a shame that the street was falling apart. I guess the extremely low rents were a sort of arts patronage: my wife’s film business depended on it and there were a few other artists living there. I am very happy that someone actually could be fucked to do something creative and interesting with it.
The terraces are heritage listed; the developer is planning to turn the street into a bar-and-restaurant precinct. I have a reflexive response which tells me that this will be ghastly but I know that it comes from the same place that makes people say they couldn’t be fucked. So I’m ignoring it.
Categories: architecture · art · sydney
