Horse and Carriage again

My dear friend Manky posted this link on FB recently along with Helen Razors recent article about the 'trash the dress' trend in big weddings lately. the jist of both being that Marriage is an institution already trashed by hetties, so there's nothing to lose in queers being allowed to share the party.

Manky has also shared articles which criticise the massive amounts of pink cashola and queer energy directed towards marriage equality campaigns. And it's a really toughie, because pink dollar politics aren't really radical, but dodgy, assimilationist and ultimately restrict queer activism to a 'tolerance' model, whereby the best we hope for is to be assimilated into hettie society rather than explore the really radical possibilities of queerness to challenge the really crapola basis of straight capitalist society which ties love and desire into a binarised model of gender and a privatised model of property ownership. Queerness fucks with both.

However, while I have a right on radical analysis of such things, I'm still negotiating how that works with the way I am in the world. Maybe the points I'm going to note below merely prove this analysis right, that Queer Marriage is merely a means to enable tolerance of queerness, and it's containment within hettie society.



The above shot is of the splendiferous cake that my mate Elyss made for our wedding last month.

I have many strong personal reasons for marrying the woman of my dreams. Like many queers in coupled unions and in polyamorous collectives we are passionately in love and committed to each other and our relationship. We also have a rapidly diminishing family unit consisting of one surviving parent (mine) as well as some cousins, aunts and uncles on both sides.

We had a wonderful ceremony in the garden with about 100 people present, including about 12 biological relatives (aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins). We were both given away by non-related older female friends, and we both had a range of chosen families of various ages and genders. For me this isn't a particularly queer thing, as my closest friends, the ones I call 'family' are straight. It is feminist thing though - because it derives from a particularly feminised experience of family - or alternative families that women are forced to develop when they break from the family structure.Both of us grew up with single mothers so we were both brought up by a network of family friends, and both of us have maintained and developed various non-biological families since. My Mum was too sick to attend so she sent a speech mentioning the biological family of Renaissance Girl and (typically) missing the point of who the celebration was for, and about.

Getting married this time was for me, a way of publicly and privately acknowledging our relationship as the foundation of our adult lives and the centre of the kinship networks of friends that we have chosen and continue to choose to be a part of our lives. Maybe I lack imagination, but I can't think of any other way to make such a firm public statement about who we are and how we 'do' our family, or make it, or how they make and constitute the fabric of our lives. It was also a significant healing moment as many of Renaissance Girl's mothers friends were able to come and enjoy the garden and home of Renaissance girl's recently deceased mother. Now it is a truth rarely told that death doesn't bring people together, but often drives them apart. people really don't know what to do with their own grief, and have no idea how to 'support' someone else who is grieving.

Maybe it's the Irish in my that thinks that if you want to bring people together it's better to hold a big party rather than a big funeral, but I also believe that grief releases a lot of love, and there has to be a space for that to be expressed in a positive and creative way. Asking people to make food or create a contribution to the wedding meant that we had a day that was profoundly social, in that it was something socially created and shared among a group of people. We had the world's best wedding cake, a wonderful CD, incredible food, a great sound system and playlist, a beautiful wedding album, plants, cookbooks, portraits, photographs and lots and lots of other things made by people we know and love, and who showed us they loved us.

The above is all easily palatable and I have no political quandaries about what we did, or how, or why.

It's been very weird though to realise just how 'straightening' marriage is in the real world. "I'm getting married" made coming out at work incredibly easy. A few of my colleagues blushed when I clarified that my betrothed was a woman rather than a man, but they all chipped in and gave us a wedding present. (I really love my workplace). Marriage is something that lots of people can share and speak about. the wedding rituals and the mention of a spouse all act to ensure that my identity at work is as a fully fledged adult and functioning member of adult society. As a single 'out' lesbian I would be aberrant, with the slippery status of queer desire not containable within the heteronormative conventions of straight socialising. My gender makes it easier because I am 'womanly' at work - I'm not really a 'femme', but I'm certainly not butch, and I do easily pass as straight in straight society. So by being married, my queerness is contentedly eunuchised, and I become a working wife. The fact that I am a wife with a wife shrinks into a minor detail.

While I criticise this situation, in reality it's a great relief and makes my life easier. Marriage is a nice easy bridge into the straight world, and it creates a nice friendly space where straights get to be 'right on' and tolerant, and queers get to be palatable and contained and integrated, rather than single and slippery and seductive.

Is this what I want?

I've been thinking about this a lot, and chewing my nails, and.... I think that actually the question is not so much about queers versus straights, but a broader question of feminism. the thing that really shat me about interdependent relationships recognition was that it was based on a profoundly anti-feminist model of union - where ALL property and finances were completely merged. It was FUCKED!

I have a fantasy that Renaissance Wife and I will maintain our financial independence and continue to split bills and partake in groceries and household duties in a way that respects both our needs to remain as two distinct adults. We share our lives and our love, but we don't own each other and don't intend to. I believe that the feminist model of relationships that refuses the feminisation and disenfranchisement of one member of the relationship for the benefit of the other is a good one. Feminists are forced to create kinship structures because to be isolated in the world as a single woman or a single mother without the crutch of a masculine 'half' (actual or imagined) is almost unbearable. Maybe all the queer marriage movement needs is a strong dose of feminism. Maybe all the world needs is a feminist movement again. where did we all go?

ART BLOGS ARE THE BEST

I didn't think there could be man more hot than Renny Kodgers, but now there is
TINO LA BAMBA JUST CONQUERED EBOR!!!!

Meanwhile Jane Polkinghorne is challenging gender normative sartorial standards that insist on pink for girls by cominging denim with scowls - aka Gurns inspired by crap art opening goon.

Life is dandy

Telling Stories

What is Produced?

I'm afraid that this may turn out to be one of those hard-core full-on ghastly emo seguing into high theory kind of posts, so please forgive me, and I'll forgive you for skipping the scary bits and heading onto the next post which is nice lite social geography.

I went to an incredible conference the first two days of this week which is where the images come from. I have decided that Cheesy powerpoint slides are the best way to present the complex assemblage of ideas and themes in my thesis. Its either that or strip off and force my 'auditors' to actually participate in the life drawing experience......

It's not that I reject writing or listening to well formed papers, but I'm having big fat problems with my own issues of translating practice into theory, and what happens when a complex and multifaceted and often very individual set of experiences gets interpreted into a particular narrative, which is singular, and doesn't allow any space for other events, possibilities and experiences to be included.

What happens when the style of representation becomes so teleological that it allows no space for surprise, for change, for interpellation (a calling between names) - or interpolation (a calling between people)?

Sorry - it looks like I segued into high theory all too soon there.

I'll try to back track just a little.

the conference was one of the best I've ever attended to date. the range and quality of the presentations was stunning, and there were no multiple strands so we got to all hear each other. the topic was about applying creative research practice, and the applications of creative research and creative practice were mind boggling and soul warming.

Being a neurotic grumpy bastard, I'm going to pick on the only paper that gave me the shits, partly because I don't want to make people turn green at the gills reading about what they missed, and because I want to use this as a starting point to consider more difficult issues.

the things that shat me about the post are also intersecting with the stuff I'm doing in my day job as a qualitative researcher in an interdisciplinary team in Western Melbourne. We are working on participant action research in epidemiology, and my colleagues are biochemists, nutritionists, community psychologists and neuroscientists, CCD workers and community health researchers. I'm employed as the feminist ethnographer, visual ethnographer part of the project.

I'm not really in a position to start writing up my work issues here, because, since I'm working in a team, it's not my story to tell, but one that I hope we can work into some sort of communicable finding. But I mention it because I'm working within a methodology that emphasises evidence based research (ie the process of research is about collective various forms of information) and the thing I really like about this is it's transparence: we are very, very clear about what collecting information is, how we do it, why we do it, and the nexus in knowledge production between participants and researchers.



I find it interesting in relation to my art practice and the way I theorised it/analysed it in The Bloody Tome. ONe of the things that really shat me about art history involved the emphasis on interpretation of an art image as some sort of fixed immutable that was a metonym for the art practice itself: Art historical analysis of life drawing could only analyse life drawings and somehow try to interpret them into a nice neat narrative.

For what its worth, the sheer crappiness of life-drawings forced me to consider life drawing as a practice, and develop an analytical framework of visual art practice that included an evidence based emphasis of the components of that practice, however fleeting, ephemeral, subjective or invisible.

anyway, that's not what this post is about.

this post is about a paper that shat me completely.
The abstract gave me the heebeejeebees because the presenter mentioned the link between depression, child sexual abuse (pretty much diagnosing depression as a symptom of child sexual abuse), and then claimed that art could be a cure.

this sounded pretty emo and intense, but a reasonable enough claim. I'm never keen to go around picking at my own psychic scabs, but as my period at art school coincided with my 4 year therapy for childhood sexual abuse, I thought I would probably find it interesting to see how someone undertook research on what is a pretty intense situation....

(At the same time, I kept thinking of Paul Carter's discussion of polyhedral research and his discussion of the etymology of "hedra" as referring the rump and the saddle, and how this connection of seatedness was the basis on which people mapped paths over places and histories.... and my brain linked this to the bit in Michael Taussig's: A study in Terror and healing where he refers to the imaginative spaced generated between the sweaty arse of he that is carried and the sweaty back of him that carries, and that's a pretty wild segue but it's where my brain kept going, and I almost wanted to mention it......)

but

the speaker essentially gave an account of her interpretations of the figurative semi-expressionist paintings of an Australian (male) artist who had a bit of a depressive crisis, saw the paintings of Salvador Dali in Spain, and then 'came out' about being sexually abused as a child.

I'm not dissing him, nor the paintings, but this is how I received the account of his life and work as represented by the speaker. She showed large slides of each painting, and told a story about each based on her interpretation of a number of elements that were pictorially depicted, like a man, a hole, a pile of stones, a dog, a river, a field. there was nothing about colour, and shape, texture, form, size, thickness, sheen, and very little about composition. she could have been describing photographs, or films stills, or sculptures, or words written on cards, or words spoken, or a stage set. the fact was, is that she was interpreting a number of image components, but she was not, as far as I could tell, demonstrating any engagement with the paintings; merely applying her own narrative to a Freudian analysis of story telling.

I started to remember that bit in Deleuze and Guattari about little Hans and the Melanie Klein interpretation of whatever he was saying that insisted on a clear interpretation of his toddler babble that bound it within a Freudian doctrine of Oedipal angst, and the phallus, or something similar.

I felt like little Hans, I wanted to scream. I really wanted to scream when she said "Storytelling is the best cure for Sexual Abuse victims. If they can tell their story, then they can be healed of their depression".

I think I may have believed that for a few stoned moments in the early 1990's, but fortunately that belief was shattered when reclaim the night rallies started featuring redemption stories of born again christians recounting their stories of sexual abuse by satanic cults. Stories are important and powerful not because of the truth of what they say, but of the conversations that are allowed to happen around them . I believe truth is in the weird gaps between words, in the murky spots between images, in the fumbling for words, the stumbles, the spaces and the silences. The parts where they eyes mist and meet, where bodies curl or hands unfurl. I was lucky enough that my psychoanalytic journey was via somatic psychotherapy and it gave me the courage to stop telling stories, but to sit silently and feel, and sense, and wait, and open myself up to a discovery of what couldn't be described or told or narrated, but how living, remembering, grieving and healing actually felt, and feels like, and how it feels.

where Freudian story telling emphasizes the past, and reinscribing a new telos on an old one, I'm more interested in the future, in how the past suddenly appears in the present and what can be done with it, where it can go.

My own experience of depression is that it involves a vast fatigue, a deep anomie, and a shutting down that refuses all communication. At its best depression is a space where I've been able to rest, to stop telling stories but just mooch about sobbing and sulking for a while. At it's worst, it's utter fucking hell, which is why I've embraced biochemical solutions, to try to manage and contain the collapse into myself while still trying to let myself go numb for a bit, and retreat from the world.

I guess I found the paper offensive because the interpretations silenced other interpretations of the artists' paintings, except as narratives of horror, and from what I could tell, there was a lot more in them than that. It also silenced other interpretations of healing and surviving sexual abuse. Given the statistics, there would have been 20 other people in that room who had experienced childhood sexual abuse, and dealt with that on a daily basis in the course of creative practice. It just happens. we don't tell our story and get miraculously healed. Damage insinuates itself into every cell of our being, and it's something we have to learn to walk with, sing with, fuck with and breathe as we continue to move through life.

One of my art school teachers said that "painting is a bout secrets" and I believed him. I believe it is these secret sacred parts ourselves that get embedded between our bodies and the stuff of the world where creativity lies, they do have the power to engender new sensations, connections, new possibilities for how life can be made marvellous, and not merely endured.

Les Jardins de L'eau et La Source du Caroline

That's the name we gave it, my colleague and I on the winding car journey from Footscray.

Footscray is the inner city compared to where I work. They have a tram there, and it's only 2 stops from the city, and if I go to visit my colleagues at the Footscray campus I feel like I'm working in the city, and can get in some shopping on the way back to the real 'burbs. The ones with massive parking lots, and more cars than pedestrians, and scary windblown train stations with no shelter and no trains.

Rather than describe the endless meanderings across a myriad of ring roads, that, as Marc Auge said, turn any place into a non-place, and that remind me so much of Paris, or Brie, that it's not funny, (actually it is very funny) maybe it is better to describe the journey by train.

Connex trains runs peripetatically out west, but somehow the random trajectory within a constructed metal box makes everything seem a bit more local, than the smooth gliding in a streamlined private freeway hugger. Maybe car rides as a passenger are too saturated with conversation to allow any other spaces to enter.

It starts at platform 5 of Flinders Street, an olde worlde jewel in Auntie Melbourne's Victorian crown. Like Lithgow, Platform 5 is one of the coldest places on earth at any time of day or year, but western line trains tend to leave from it, so that's where I wait. Werribee, Williamstown, Watergardens, Craigeburn, Upfield. All of them pass through the neo brutalist-baroque cavern (yep -it is a pastiche) of Spencer Street, and it's little brother North Melbourne. The first three cross the Maribyrnong into what is known as Melbourne's west. The Maribyrnong crossing is marked by a splendid golden statue on a lake near a temple under construction. It's a slightly more optimistic sight than the deconstruction of the Melbourne Eye in the docklands toytown.

Footscray station is an old station, and the last city stop for the Bendigo and Ballarat lines. Hence it has brick shelters on the platforms and working toilets. These are gradually being strangled by a myriad of hastily constructed platform interchanges. the first consists of a series of scaffolding straddling the station and flanking most of the streets beside it, which supports 7 foot fences and a series of sheet metal and ply ramps running up and down and around. This Buchenwaldish setting is occasionally broken by the odd electronic billboard relaying random information in bleeping orange neon. Alongside this structure, above the press and huddle and confusion of consumers running thither and yon you can catch glimpses of a series of baroque brutalist metal tubes, housing what I assume will be the new concourse, scheduled for completion around the time I reach menopause.

Now the term 'baroque brutalism' may seem a bit indulgent, but baroque was meant to evoke the calcified undulating frills on oyster shells, and I think it is the best word to describe the endless attention to surface effects of cut and sprayed metal spanning brushed aluminium and plexi-glass which reconstruct commuter spaces as profoundly discomforting, disconcerting and confusing and repellent spaces. These are not waiting spaces at all, and yet the trains are so infrequent and random that waiting is the one thing that we do in these spaces, which are Marinetti fantasies of speed and movement.

OK - so much for Footscray station. ON the watergardens line I head due west where the station decor shrinks to corrugated bus shelters on asphalt platforms, flanked by a speaker and a ticket machine. There's nothing baroque about this brutalism. The train stations are no-where hell zones, where waiting customers are scorched by the sun, and whipped by the wind. West and middle footscray feature weatherboard worker cottages from the early 20th century. There are also massive open areas populated by powerlines or flour mills and other factories.It's after Sunshine that things start to look a bit weird. Sunshine has a hospital and a couple of big malls and a cinema complex. There's also a commuter stream of junkies between Footscray and Sunshine, and once I heard a conversation between 2 blokes that sounded like a dialogue from "Dead Calm". I looked away and decided I was hallucinating from too much Muesli.

The first few stations west of Sunshine seem to attract guys in trakkies, carrying plastic bags with UDL's in them, at 9 oclock in the morning. It's western melbourne's Heidelberg west. The train station at Furlong Street has a bottlo, a pharmacy and a concentration of some of the ugliest men on the planet, who are perpetually exposing excessive amounts of flesh and frightening facial hair. From here the houses are exclusively brick veneer and younger than me. At St. Albans, things improve a bit. The ugly men drive cars (I saw an Elvis impersonator in an old statesman), and LOTS of people of every different race, age and class are walking around. there are lots of shops, and a steady stream south bast the bingo hall to the university campus where I work. There are also a couple of parks, some schools, and even a community garden. It's nice.

Then things get weird. It is possible to get to Sydenham by train, but, like Las Vegas, it is best appreciated by car. If you do cathc a train, you get it to a station named after the massive shopping mall located there. Watergardens could only have been constructed in a drought stricken city and is flanked by a series of drive through fast food outlets, and the crowning glory of the LUXOR function centre, which is a neon lit palm tree and obelisk studded cladded concrete tribute to Egypt. Just down from the Luxor, someone has build a miniature version of the Hagia Sophia next to the Jehovas Witness Kingdom Hall. - You can see it from the train.I'm still not quite sure how to describe what Sydenham is. It's a sudden burst of rather abject opulence jammed up next to some really poor areas. Maybe it looks more start than the differences in the East because there are less trees, and more roads, and the roads reveal the garish architexture and the security gates around the clusters of idenitikit McMansions. They only have gated communities here. It's the wild west in a totally different sense. the houses are cut by massive roads. Children HAVE to be driven to school, to be driven acroos the road, even! It could have been so easy to make this pedestrian friendly, to put in bike paths, but in the past 5, 2, 1, years when this has and is being erected, it's been a cash fueled, car driven planning system. It's a nightmare.

Further south, things just get freakier. Half of Caroline Springs isn't even on Google Maps. Massive villas are springing up overnight in an antipodean replica of Orange County, and Tuscany, and Miami, and the town centre is a replica of the Docklands toytown. they were still peeling the labels of the windows of the Mercure hotel where we had a convention to attend. There is massive amounts of money and development occuring at a breathtaking place, and none of it has any sense of environmental sustainablity or community health. It is the pure anome of greed, a continuous denial of presence and place into the hyperreal imaginary of non-space.

And yet, I'm sure within this rendered concrete kleenwipe consumer circuit, there are some spaces of rupture and dissonance, as well as the many large spaces of contradiction rubbing up against each other. It's just that between the big roads, the big houses, the big malls and big houses there isn't a lot of space for small detours, fledgeling fantasies and awkward moments.

Troggling along

OK I'm going to write, I must write, I should write, I need to write.

Hot diggedy dang I'm FINALLY PROCRASTINATING!

I've got a conference presentation to prepare, and I've got to do it this weekend, and I spent an incredible amount of time sleeping today, and then I had to watch 3 episodes of the Sopranos, and now I'm here in my fluffy writing dreaming staring cave and it's the middle of the night, it's the witching hour, and I should be writing something tomish and bookish and decent but here I am and I'm writing on my blog.

And I haven't written in my diary for months and months and months, and haven't posted here for over a month, and I thought getting some email friendly phone would fix this, but it hasn't and I dunno why it is that I don't write, don't draw, don't create much anymore.

and the conference i'm meant to be writing for is researching practice, and Lucazoid is writing about blogging as a practice that is researched in the process of practice, and I'm meant to be presenting something about my thesis (my what?) that big thing I've got to tidy up and fix and bound and do something with, and I can't even bear to look at the book case where it is, and I'm not doing any life drawing at the moment anyway and haven't done for ages, and probably won't for ages so how the hell can I give and engaging presentation about practice based research when I've done a whole heap of research on something that I'm no longer practicing?

Fuck

and I'm wondering what kind of practice do I actually have at the moment, when I feel that I'm really quite content just to get up and go out and do stuff each day, and I enjoy my work and enjoy the people at work, and love having stimulation and a challenge that is structured and renumerated and rewarded rather than the long slow drudge of solo bloody thesis writing, and god it was so hard, so bloody damnably difficult.

and the other thing about research, and doing this as a career, is that the practice of writing, of thinking, the hard slow grind of paper production is STILL DONE out of hours in the spare time, in the secret hours after dark, working from home, or working on other stuff, and every academic will tell you this, and we all look forward to xmas break SO WE CAN DO OUR WORK - because our work only happens when the university is shut down, and that is the craziest contradiction in the world, I don't even know where to start 'unpacking' it, but I wondered at what point did I make the shift from artist to academic and start seriously dreaming of how I cold fill my hours with words, more words, and deep slow thought, and papers and books and stuff?

Meanwhile I can barely bear to think of reading a novel, let along a book of theory, and GOD - why didn't anyone tell me I would be this tired?

Not that I'm a total braindead voidoid.

I take stuff in each week, each day. so much stuff.

Western Melbourne is Crazy in lots of wonderful ways.

hell. it deserves its own post

Is my blog dead?

I couldn't really think of a proper title, but I just noticed that I hadn't posted for over 3 months, and was wondering if I ever would post, and what about.

the last post was pretty depressing. and I was really exhausted and really depressed. and after this, I started taking happy pills, and a friend gave me a bicycle so I started rolling around the flat streets of Brunswick, and instantly felt a hell of a lot better.

So.... a brief recap.

I was unemployed for 3 months. By that I mean, I was actively, intensely DESPERATELY looking for work:

I diligently applied for 10 jobs a week as specified in my mutual obligation diary. No luck.

I even applied for 10 public service jobs. No success (but probably quite a bit of luck in not ending up in the public service)

I cold canvassed every lecturer in every university in any field vaguely related to anything that my crazily erudite brain could teach/research/work in.

I received a lot of rejection emails.

and I received a tiny weeny bit of transcription work, which kept me from slashing my wrists in desperation.

I rang up friends whingeing long and hard, and some wonderful friends gave me little freelance jobs to stave off the last final limit of my credit card.

I did a scary freelance job for a nasty little man, who posted something on an academic e-list and got my fingers nastily burnt and my face nastily slapped.

I finally got a woefully underpaid part-time job in the arts-sector (after being a volunteer), and was feeling so desperately grateful after 2 interviews and 2 months of grovelling to have something-anything to separate me from the rest of the Moreland Centrelink dole queue, that I was prepared to overlook that fact that the pay was less than life-modelling, and started to apply for NEIS schemes, just to buy a bit of state-supported time for me to find a real job.....

And then.... something came up.

one of the jobs I'd applied for, randomly, unthinkingly..... they invited me for an interview. So I went. And I discovered that it was a hell of a lot more interesting than I'd anticipated.

And so.... I've got a job. doing research in a university for 12 months.

and it's not in art, art history, cultural studies, design studies, gender studies, performance studies or anything else I'm officially qualified for..... but in community health/epidemiology. but it's an interdisciplinary project and they were looking for someone with strong qualitative/visual ethnography skills.

Hence I seemed to have breezed into a field that does seem to fit every single one of the random things I've been involved in for the past twenty years.

aharrr... the vast and tender freemasonry of useless erudition has finally furnished me with a little nook.

So - I'm not involved in 'ART' and have lost interest in the art world for the moment. I found the inner city melbourne art world too white, to familiar and yet too foreign, too self conscious, too cold. Maybe if it was 'my' art scene I wouldn't notice. Maybe if I didn't already have an art scene that I was desperately missing I would notice it less.

But I desperately loathed almost every single opening I have been to so far. Even on happy pills.

Meanwhile the missus and I have moved out of brunswick up to the burbs. our home and garden is like a palace. there are no restaruants, and only a mutiplex cinema inside a shopping mall, and the only shops are inside a shopping mall. It's bloody scary. very pedestrian unfriendly.

we live in a leafy, hilly, four-wheel-driven zone of bland, beige blissful consumerism. Fat white people in fat shiny cars, crawling between hillside bungalows and the shopping centre parking lots. Physical exertion is confined to the purda of Fernwood, or cloaked in the burquas of brick veneer home gyms and wii boards. I'm finding it hard to lose the 15 kilos I gained while finishing my thesis.

Each morning I take a detour along the river and cricket fields to avoid the tangled snarl of parking-lots and freeways, to meander for 20 minutes on shanks pony to the train station, where a 40 minute train ride gets me to the city. I'm spending a LOT of time on trains, eating my muesli with elbows pinned to fellow commuters, or shivering on Flinders street cursing connex.

I try to tell myself that it's like the lower blue mountains. I try to think of the bird-life and ignore the roar of lawn mowers.

fortunately I am working in Melbourne's multicultural heartland and have INCREDIBLE asian supermarkets and fresh food markets. I lug shopping bags to work and back home again, and we fill our fridge with fresh greens and frozen fish, and try to like supermarket bread.

So my life has become curiously content. I'm still to tired to write, to reflect, to read anything more challenging that Mx and the junk mail catalogues. I've unpacked my studio and arranged a mayhem nest in the basement. It's pink and sparkly and warm, but my paints are still in milk crates.

I've paid off my visa overdraft, and am paying off my mum. I bought my first pair of non-second-hand shoes in 4 years. Our loungeroom is a large book-lined bourgoise showroom of every aspiration I've ever had. this is it. I'm a grown up. this is the life I dreamed of in many many ways.

in one month I'll have a wife and troph of our betrothal.
Shortly after, I hope to have made enough corrections to be able to change my title.

things are coming together. strangely. finally. wonderfully.

Hoping in Hellbourne

I've been scared to write this, in case all of my procratinating protodoctor comrades catch sight....

but it's been a bloody hard and horrible month.

there was the night I woke up sobbing at 3am, and renaissance girl found me 10 links on post-thesis depression... all this while she was managing end of term reports/exams/psycho colleagues/psycho students... oh - and her own personal tragedy which is makes my thesis completion comedown feel like a broken nail being compared to a ruptured spleen.

I wish i'd had cash or foresight or non scary mutual obligation frights to take some time off and go and swim/meditate/walk/weep for a couple of weeks somewhere cosy and quiet.

instead I returned south and tried to establish some sort of post-thesis life. Part time work? very very difficult to find. I've looked, public service, academia, public service, temping... lots of places. Ten rejection letters from Public Service jobs is even more crushing than writing thirty serious job applications.

the deck chair shuffling at the CES/JSP/JSA titanic hasn't helped. Just when I'm gung-ho about getting a job - i've got no official support to help me get one.....

finally after weeks of major soul destroying commando style cold calling, I have scored a teensy weensy bit of part time work. It's casual, precarious yet miraculaously in an amazing area that i'm interested in.

at times i have tried to pursue ART in the great southern city. and had little success.

The other day I made my tenth attempt to enter and be entertained at ACMI. why? because I like cinema, and REALLY like video art. You think this would make it more appealling than dragging myself plus John Brack's grim canveases or the horrors of Dali's lugubrious onanism.

hell no. the first six times I entered from the Fed Square entrance, and the last four have been from the Flinders street entrance. Each time I've been incredibly repelled, confused and simayed by the interior and had no idea where to find ANYTHING. including info on what could be seen, when or where. Actually I tell a lie. The 8th time i attempted an entrance, I found a staffed counter, with a person issuing programs. I took a few. the foyer was dark, the print was small and pale on a dark background, so i took them home to read them.

It appears that acmi runs cinematic festivals according to themes, where they screen particular movies at particular hours and days for particular fees. this information is available aone the website and wihtin brochures that are occasionally made available at a front desk, when it isn't being renovated. i have yet to encounter any signage within or near to the premises themselves that explains this.

this may be due to endless random renovations that have marked my last two attempts at entering ACMI and from which I have beat a retreat - often to the more endearing and engaging temporary public sculptures set into the foyer area of the NGV Australia.

On the other hand, it may be a deliberate conspiracy to scare away the Bev's and Kev's visiting Fed square from entering the hallowed halls of Art DOM.

I wonder if anyone has actually entered ACMI and experienced a Moving image Experience without the benefit of initiation and hand holding by a local cognoscetti. If so, please leave a comment with directions and advice to the wary.

Brunswick Cassoulet

WARNING: THIS IS NOT VEGAN FRIENDLY POST

It's not an anti-vegan post - but is about the gratuitous consumption about the flesh, fat and bones of fellow living creatures... hmmmm,

Ducks are one of the few animals I like living as much as I like them roasted and succulent and sliding down my gullet.

Last week Melbourne faced a big fat chill that had everyone grumbling in public, fumbling with woollies and thermals and rugging up.( I know Sydney is miserable in winter but it isn't actually cold). I spent about 3 days in thermic misery before my New England cellular memory kicked in and I started feeling ok with the bracing feeling of cold pores and goose flesh wherever my thermals or polar fleecy had slipped...

It isn't that cold either - hovering around ten degrees, and 6 at night... but the feeling of cold and a deep need for slow snuggle food, reminded me that unlike Sydney, melbourne does facilitate the cooking and consumption of one of the great northern European comfort foods..... hmmmm..... cassoulet.

Cassoulet sounds like french for casserole - and it's kind of what it is, basically beans cooked in duck fat. My gallstone rotates just thinking about it, and my arteries harden..... -oh - but it is so unbelievably succulently wonderful, that....

My first cassoulet came out of a tin in Belle ile en Mer, about 8 years ago. I'd been sitting on a cliff face, doing my standard hypothermic plein-aire in ski gear act, when I heard a strange low moan howling around me, and realised it was me, involuntarily groaning as the wind gushed and ocean pounded and roared beneath me, and salt spray rose and stung me on the face.


At the time, I wasn't sitting on the exact cliff face shown in the pic above - but I have sat there before and since, and this pikkie gives you the general impression of intense cold and wind.....

Anyway - after catching my moans, I packed up my oilsticks and canvas, and staggered back to casa abel, were I gulped down some whisky while she opened a tin, and poured it into a pot on the stove......

In france - even tinnned food is gourmet - and this was an amazing revelation of the divine power of fat, to warm, soothe, comfort and tantalize the tasetbuds.

The key to cassoulet is 'confit de canard', for which the crude translation is 'duck jam'. It's a way of preserving the duck thighs in a generous amount of duck fat and salt, somewhat akin to corning beef. Our local deli sells confit style prepared duck legs for $5 a pop - but the proper ones are still almost raw, and need to be cooked slowly with some exquisite grease absorbing vegetable or bean...

I was inspired to buy some tinned confit de canard, combining them with fresh toulouse sausages and the special type of haricots blanc, that in Chili are called "porotos granados" and that you can get fresh once a year in long grainy red bods..... so that was how I learned to make the mayhem cassoulet.

Back in the antipodes - it never got that cold, so I'd never bothered, till now.

I took the tram into vic Markets and wandered over to the gourmette deli section, asking for duck confit. the french stall had some Perigord confit for $52 a tin (note to self, I thought: must stock up on 11 euro tins of duck confit if I ever go back to Europe), but after my eyebrows ascended my chrome dome in flabbergastination, they directed me towards the gourmette fowl stalls on the other side - where I could procure ONE confit thigh - shrink wrapped in vacuum sealed plastic for a mere $12.50. It would have to do. I wandered around the various sausage stalls till I found the nearest continental approximation of Saucise de toulouse ( Chorizo and Karakowska don't quite work for this), and picked up some dried canneloni beans, got the tram home, popped the beans in some water to soak overnight, and went out and got drunk.

Fortunately I'd had the foresight to prepare some stock a few months earlier from a peking duck that we bought from Footscray late last year to share with Renaissance girl's mum. We've also inherited her crock-pot - so this seemed like a fitting tribute, as well as a cosy entree into winter.

One saturday morning, I plugged in the crock pot, extracted the confit duck leg, and plonked it in the bottom, with the duck grease. I chopped up an onion, and some garlic, and put them in the fat. I then threw on the four italian sausages (which kind of doubled as a bouquet garni) and the drained beans. I then hauled the block of frozen duck stock and fleshy bones out of the freezer and banged it on the top. then I went back to bed for 12 hours. (OK - I turned the crock pot down from high to low after 7 or 8 hours)

When I recovered from the hangover, Renaissance girl and I filled our bellies and our souls with soft, creamy, beany, meaty goodness. Yum Yum.