bodies, art & stuff

And who the hell am I to say thank you, and thank you for what?

2012-01-26T07:27:00.000-08:00

This is about memory, and guilt and art, and crying and memory and retracing memory and steps and stuff.

So I'm going to be quoting myself, and words I wrote 5 years ago, about a a work I saw 5 years ago, and then saw re-enacted tonight.

“Memory is bodily sedimentation of tasks accomplished”

am I quoting myself? or quoting myself quoting someone else? it's a drift from Pierre Bourdieu, contemplating habitus and imagination....

And before I drift back into my own old words and spaces of seeing and sensing, maybe I need to start with a story. About today

Today was boganday/invasionday/survivalday/Australiaday/holiday/horrorday/daybyday, today it was, and we had all of it.

A Leisurely brunch singing along to Bogan Love , interrupted by our Nepalese neighbours proffering gifts of dumplings to honour 'our' national day, and Lordy, let me not dwell on the awkwardness or the yumminess, but quickly segue onto Sharing the Spirit in the hope that the numbers were down this year because everyone else was in Canberra at the 40th anniversary of the tent embassy. Some familiar faces, friendly many hued, hippies of every shade, and every shade of sunlit skin and shady green trees and assado and masala chai and so much more civilised than the Queen Vic night markets, on a similar theme..... kinda.

And it got hot, and so we decided to quickly tram it down to St. Kilda for a quick dip, forgetting the bogan conflation of drinking in the sun, bogan-flag wallpapered pale flesh intensity in windsweeping sand in our hair/skin/eyes seaweed strewn waves crashing over my ankles, and no, not pleasant, time to get out, so we got on a tram. A noisy as hell tram crammed with young rowdy boys, been drinking all day and its nearly night and 3 drunken koories who... were...intense. an intense counterpoint to the blond boy bogans, staggering around the tram trying to refill a plastic cup with a goon bladder, and this is where the rub of sand/wind/colonialism.swaying drunken mixed race rowdiness all mixes up and after 45 minutes too long we got back to the city, and the civilised calm of cross cultural PLU (people like us) harmony.....

Bento Box before boarding the Brunswick tram. to POC the mike, a spoken word/dancing/singing feast of POC that's people of colour, and I'm calling it a feast, coz we paid the solidarity price of a pittance and squeezed onto the floor and consumed..... I guess. Many familiar faces, performers and audiences, and I'm flitting happily, smiling, laughing and feeling less lost in this city.

and then someone from the lands I know, north of here, way north of here, is announced. and there' cannot be two queer artists call 'willurei' in Australia, surely not, and so, yes, she has come down from sydney, and this is what I wrote about her piece in 2006.

But I felt that “Peel” was a lot bigger, and more evocative of how a link between place, flesh and memory actually FEELS.

“Peel” consists of a lingering crawl over Willerei’s body, onto which transparencies of topographic maps had been projected. So the colour and space is already a bit weird, and adds to the dreamlike sequences of other splices in the DVD.

There’s a funny voyeuristic tease – but it’s more dreamlike and weird. Bits of rain like viola’s ascension series, a disconnected floating hand, and the close audio thrums bring us deeply into a space where our own body feels in contact with the projected flesh in front of us.

The projection presents a profoundly bodily encounter with flesh, space and territory. With kinaesthetic geographies, how place is embedded on bodies. Willurei's scarred, wrinkled pulled lines of flesh, her pores, and hairs are mingled with the raised ridged contours of the topographic charts. These are based on mapping of magnetic deposits around western NSW, with magnetic lines echoing the striated scars along the flesh beneath.

This use of video projection as installation, something we step inside, transforms the cyclopean disembodiment of the camera into a deeply visceral kinaesthetic eye. The piece is not about representation or decoding –but creating an experience, an affinity and an empathy. Seeing, sensing flesh, the mapping of meaning and place and territory onto flesh. Feeling our own bodies sway and echo projected vibrations within, sensing our own unfamiliarity with space, with place, and our vulnerability, is REALLY RATHER NICE.

I’d recommend people go and have a seat, have a stare, feel your body and have a ponder. Those who prefer disembodied thoughts to wordless ambiguities of visceral affect can think of nice confining categories and explanations; that Willurei's family are Wiradjuri, that her flesh is encoded with connotations of territory and colonial mapping in western NSW, that she’s creating a nice resistive rereading of the terms by which kooris get contained, confined, removed, categorise by place, time, memory and history. But because cultural resistance to genocide and political defeat always seems like such nice remote comfort, I prefer to imagine the trajectory taken by feeling, by association. Even honky white mongrels feel bodily attachment to places. Settler cultures mask our own strange connections to invaded lands beneath the nasty politics of guilt and denial, but maybe, just maybe, allowing some bodily affinities between indigenous and non-indigenous, (and I don’t mean a rootfest) – but a space where connections between land, place, memories and bodies meet….. well, hell, I dunno actually, but I liked the video.

And rereading my own so nicely neatly butterfly flitting words, flitting around the meaning of the work, wondering why I didn't write it. My fluttering words, adding a layer of aestheticisation to the work, that Willurei re-enacted tonight. with her own words, and skin, flesh. Live art, body art, performance art. One of the best I've ever seen. I wish Carolee Schneemann - my favourite patron saint of flesh and words could have seen it.

Getting to the point. she stripped down to her undies, then made black texta drawings over her flesh making marks, thought lines, scar sites. Started with the anniversary; 1788. a cross over her left chest. Moved down to a waterhole on her thigh, and then.... other marks made with the incantations of histories' horrors; the marshall law in Bathurst, lynchings of HER RELATIVES, the first racist taunt at school, the last racist taunt in the street, and need I go on? I don't want to paraphrase her words within my own, when they were so very powerful. so I'll describe what that power felt like.

I fought back an almost uncontrollable urge to sob aloud, and wiped the tears away from my eyes, and couldn't meet hers, because there's a steely reserve performers need to rise above choking grief and speak words of heartbreak.

And what breaks my heart, is knowing the country, Wiradjuri, west of Sydney, where my friend sitting beside me grew up, where my father's mysterious miscegenated ancestors came from and travelled through, oh so very unsettled, unsettling this history of settlement, that refuses to open itself up.

And here I was tonight, seeing the scarring narratives as lines, given words, traced upon a body, speaking the stories of space and time and unspoken wars, and having this before me, before my eyes in real time, that these histories are scars under the flesh of colour, under coloured flesh, flesh coloured by these histories, in a way that I do not and cannot ever know, because my flesh, family ancestry, whatever it is, is otherwise, is of another colour/race... the other side of the frontier as Henry Reynolds put it - but oh, so terribly close to and bound up within it. (which is what he also wrote).

I posted the blurry picture above, snapped from the countrylink bus between Bathurst and Lithgow, by way of contrast. To show my own fleeting flying through connection to that particular country. It is fleeting, 2 centuries a blink of an eyelid/camera shutter/digital snapshot in comparison.

My little pounding heart, humming tummy, footsole thudding, skin crackling sense of Wiradjuri country inside my body comes from the blink of an eye time. minute time for this miniscule embedding of habitus.

and yet 40000 years of cultural ownership, or more, and 200 years of conflict, daily reminded, tormented worn by marked flesh.... cuts, vibrates, hums, sings so much deeper, longer and with a panoply of intensities flitting over flesh, voice, drawings words, lines, images, the scales of her skin.... and maybe here, viewing, I get another glimpse of what habitus really means, how it can be opened up and re-enacted, performed, shared in a shared space, in a room of bodies hoping to create something that is not quite as fucked as the sorry stories we share....

Apartheid without the D

2011-12-17T14:36:00.000-08:00

It was an amazing party.
Incredibly silly brain bending stuff - creations of all kind happening everywhere in every possible form.

the room scattered with giant crawl-through vaginas and sphincters as a a turd took a flying leap from a high ladder into a toilet far below.

Lots of bum jokes, wee jokes, a giant elephant and inside out man.

My kind of stuff. completely.

Except, well.... when the 'joke' came. From a 9 foot foam pith helmet caricature of itself.

"What do you call Aparthed without the D?"

"A Partay"

And then the words echoing back on the white bubble in which the party was encased, literally, mirroring back on the mostly beige laughing faces, or the beige silent faces, or on the handful of less beige, more brown faces - whom I knew all by name - literally in this city where I know almost no-one.

And I realised where I was. In another white bubble created against the dark night of this suburb of colour where I live.

Apartheid - without the D - the death, the state sanctioned violence - but a whitey partay none the less.

I bought a drink and stepped outside the white bubble to stare into the dark night. I had felt so happy to find something of a semblance of what I left in Sydney five blocks from my house, and then the nasty shock of who I was and where I was hit me.

The white hot air balloon sheathe encasing a room full of groovey artie pale skinned hipsters, walling off a suburb of refugees from Angola, Burundi, Mozambique and other nations copping the fallout of white South Africa in the 1960s to the 1990s, and walling off the still very much living pain of apartheid, to enforce a metaphorical apartheid - where alternative culture becomes a way that whites do culture, and culture does whites, where to be white here, ensconses us and I mean me into an urban colonisation of culturally and socially mobile whites into cheap popular suburbs of colour.

And I wondered how different is this to the high paling fence separating my Mum and her Ngarabal neighbours, and the border clashes (lost footballs, broken bottles and roaming dogs) she regales me with and the bodily habits in hicktown of being not black, not brown in a racist town. (White people do not walk the streets in the country).

and if this is where I've ended up after 22 years of leaving the country then why bother leaving?

Maybe it was a one off. Maybe I was reading too much into it.

A month later I went to another artyparty 10 blocks from my house, in the heart of cool coloured suburbia. I'd already come down in the morning to stock up on fresh fruit and veggies in my Nanna cart, meat from the "thiem thit" store, lychees from the "Pham" store, weaving between the indochinese elders doing coffee on the street cafes and the African women in dayglo burquas lugging kids, groceries and themselves along the street, and loving food and people and food and life.....

A few hours later, the suburb is transformed, shops are closed, families are at home, streetlife is minimal. I climbed stairs to a white box above the major shopping strip to support my local indie artspace, because this is what I want to do. These are the people I want to meet, to collaborate with, to show/perform with.

Everyone looks eerily like myself - only thinner, and with more facial hair. The women all wore dresses. Not exactly genderqueer, and again, 95% white.

the event is fun, people are friendly. The art is a mixed bag and there is an MC entertaining the supportive community crowd.

and he makes a joke, about the "Local triads" . In the same suburb where 2 blocks away "Footscray By night" reinvented Karaoke as community cultural development and Vienglish detournements of men at work songs IN THIS AMAZING VIDEO which is the best thing I've seen all year and was made right near where I work....

And I want to fall through the floor with shame.

and I don't know where to start challenging these people or these spaces. to insist that there is a different way of doing whiteness in suburbs of colour than in the ghetto model which seems to prevail.

Have I described the street of white picket fences next to where we live? or the 3 suburbs south of the train line where all the white people go? or the goldfish shopfronts of gorgeous gourmet or bespoke designerwear which demarcate the white bodies from the brown bodies in the adjacent restaurants and shops?

I'm sick of whingeing about Helbournia, and whingeing about the white middle class on which I so precariously balance on the edge of, because I'm implicated in it, I'm part of it, and it in me, and I have to own this and work to make whiteness something other than a displacing privilege of bad power relations.

This is still not my home, yet in making it my home, in settling here, I'm doing my best to be an unsettling presence. To break the bodily habits of how whiteys do whiteness here, but it is uncharted territory, so strange and so hard sometimes.

Space is the Place

2011-10-15T22:47:00.000-07:00

I could have stuck up a photo of my appendectomy scar, but decided this little sketch from our recent trip down the coast, might be a bit less abject.
It's hard to know how far I could/should take my exhibitionist tendencies (nothing exceeds like excess)

Anyway - for the record I inadvertently took my Deleuze and Guattari fixation a little too far and had an organ removed last Sunday. I've been on a synthetic morphine substitute for over a week, slowly but surely reducing my daily doses, and surprised how underwhelming it is.

This is always a hard and sad time of year for me. And I'd planned to spend the past week in Bathurst remembering Steve the best way possible: by painting, pompomming and hanging out with his partner in his increasingly dusty but still wonderful studio.

hell. instead of been at home. inadvertently extending Renaissance girl's school vacation at week - while she's stayed at home and nursed me.

the weather has been astonishingly beautiful, and I've spend much of the week lying around under the pergola gazing at our green garden. admiring the fernery, watching the cats frolic and Renaisssance wife do her corrections. (I guess I should call her 'sir' while she's in professional mode - even if it is under the fernery in thongs and shorts....)

And today I cooked a meal for the first time in... well - since the fish curry I made before I got sick.

And sitting together, eating calmly and smiling and chatting - I had a sudden flash of calm - as only intensely anxious and neruotic people on high levels of pain medication can.....

and I realised the flavour of happiness that I get to savour here. that we both do.

Our home is a place that is shared - where our differing posessions and territories move into and aroudn each other and dance together in something that is more like a weaving than a patchwork. not the cut and paste of a collaged union but the continuous weaving of different beings sharing spaces and lives together.

We have spaces in the house where our individual identities are concentrated - our 'rooms' - and then the shared spaces where books, art, toys, things.objects, shoes, fabric, pictures meet and mingle....

this patterning moves through the house and out into the garden areas. The pergola - where I paint and draw, where she potters and gardens and works, while the cat frolic through... the rooms where we meditate together, or nap, or go online, or chat.... and then the food.

Since being with Renaissance Girl - i've created a world of recipes that I've only cooked with her. I haven't deliberately changed my diet - as had the space to explore and enjoy cooking. I guess this has been the space of not living with a genius chef like el Veijo (who is the caterer at a Spanish for tourists holiday resort in Ecuador) or someone carrying the cultural weight of Le Cuisine du Papa-Maman into every meal.

also - since I haven't been oil-painting - that urge to make 'pates' - divine spaces of colour, texture and flavour - where love, dreams and other things emerge in the alchemy of handling has been channelled into the kitchen. Frustrated painters always - make good chefs I guess.

What it does suggest to me, though -is that I am able to live and create here, now, with her, as part of this thing called 'us'. the past four years have been so slow and hard and sad for so many reasons, that I have to remind myself of the good parts, and the magic spaces where life can and does flourish.

hmmm - morphia writing.... ghfljhjgrn tfnfgnmfmfmfmfmffmfmnmnfnnmnmnn zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

and

And then there

Feeding time....

2011-04-18T04:58:00.000-07:00

My brain is a bit schermuzzled lately, due to rigours of wjerking life and other stuff.
I've seen a bit of A R T - most notably Sarah Fields show (sigh) at Gallery Smith - not to mention Adam Norton's ghostly reminders of non-lieus past and present. I'm tempted to digress on a tangent of pataphsyics and nostalgia, but want to hold back, just a bit.
Recent delights included visiting the White Elephant Gallery garage sale and scoring a BAT SUIT! The perfect outfit for watching TV on the beanbag during a full moon! not to mention running around at night in. Once I work out how to cycle in it - BELIEVE ME I'LL BE UNSTOPPABLE!!!
And on a brief foray to my northern home, i had the joy of discovering PLUMP GALLERY, an artists' run space full of incredible delights. I saw the work of the running artist, Willurei Kirkbright Burney in 2006, and wrote about it here. So I was pretty delighted to see her running an entire space.

and oh! the divinity of sugar wax crystal dripping, chocolate doll music box turning, with freaky ninja dudes in background, multiply performative, hair in my cake, extreme delight was intoxicating and a perfect way to end my thirties.

Back in Melbourne I had the delight of attending the Peril launch at Hares and Hyenas. I wandered in just as Benjamin Laird started his poetry performance. I've linked to the printed version of the poems here, but I'm not sure how it conveys the richness of the words, shimmering and his voice's cadences and pauses actually worked to expand the spaces between the words, where meaning emerged and expanded beyond itself into other possibilities. My dear friends, this is the space of poetry, and probably the first time I've ever witnessed it being performed so eloquently.

Despite the lack of Schappylle Scragg stage birthing, this launch was mercifully free of pompous black skivvied white male poets driveeling stylised conceptualist xenophobic prattles. However there was a slightly similar beige shadow of cringe, passing over Rosemary's John's reading. I don't think I'm particularly enlightened on the racial front, but I'm regularly astonished by the continued exoticisation/eroticisation orientalist twang of other white writers. Is Edward Said really that obscure? or, you know, Belle Hooks? When pale hands type what blue eyes see about the bodies and spaces occupied by those with differently pigmented skin, surely it's not too much to expect just a little critical reflexivity? huh?

Funnily enough Lia Incognita's performed parts of her publish essay in a manner which did include a lot of critical reflexivity and aside from my ethnophenomenological gushings, made me wonder why it is that this attentniveness to positionality and the nuances of identity, and of self and others - only comes from those observers and writers whose position in the world is made so blatantly uncomfortable.

And Thuy Lich Nguyen's piece got me thinking about where I'm living and what I'm doing here. I wonder a lot about the Footscray whitewash, as I stroll scowling past the new wine bar on the corner - which looks like a weird apartheid fishbowl of white only clients, in a street full of south asian eateries, crammed with bodies of multiple hues and sizes....And as much as I like to laugh at the juxtaposition of Braybrook trailor trash and Yarraville gay boys rubbing shoulders at the central west plaza, or about the time I heard Parisian tourists in Braybrook Aldi, I look at my own pale skin, consider my own status and that of my professional partner in the home that we own, and I wonder about our own implication in the changes that are taking place here. hmmmm, but that is perhaps a story for another space.

Back to whingeing, I've witness a few celebrations of some of my Melbourne friends and aquaintances and connections; weddings, baby showers etc. significant emotional formal times - where biological and chosen families congregate to mark traditional moments in non traditional ways. And I wonder about this need for novelty, to break away from traditional ways of doing things, the ways parents or grandparents would have done them..... within contexts and social groupings that are entirely homogenous in class, sexual orientation and cultural/ethnic background. Renaissance wife were trying to discern the vomit factor in looking at the pictures of a straight white couple in a quasi Hindu Bollywood outfits for their straight white wedding. Not to mention the invocation of Hawaiian chants and singing among a circle of young white urban hetties - for god only knows what purpose. I didn't get to ask if any of them wanted to hold the party at Smorgys or in a Tiki Bar or some more established (and aesthetic) setting for white appropriate of Polynesian culture. and then I was totally bamboozled by THREE or FOUR references to gifts of African Beads as a way of honouring a woman's 'earthiness'.... Because, you know, I was in Australia at the time, with no Africans or clear reference to Africa or Africans that were evident, axcept for my random speculation that the referees thought Africans are dirt or dirty perhaps?

So - as my 2 year posting as a visual ethnographer among Culturally and Lingistically Diverse communities comes to an end, I'm still curious about how and where and why I am in the world as I am, and what kinds of connections I am/could be/want to be fostering, when so much racist inequality still exists and thrives.

Old ghosts or Why I missed Tom Cho's Midsumma reading

2011-02-03T17:10:00.000-08:00

Since posting my kitten video, I've decided that cutesy animal videos are the way to start blog rants.

For some reason youtube videos are harder to embed in blog posts - but hopefully any readers have already clicked on it and seen the birdy dancing to it's reflection- which kind of sums up my life right now....

Anyway - I've been provoked by recent things I've read (in LobOTL of all things) and seen on Facebook - and of course - having a moment to reflect on recent life events.

So I'll start with a story about last wednesday.

It was bogan day. We were at home hibernating from the bogan hords. doing a kind of weird passive mourning thing. Feeling too lazy to go to the invasion day concert and feeling too confused by the apparent disputed land claims around western Melbourne to put up our plaque acknowledging that we are on Wurundjeri land.

I think I was tidying my room for some guests to visit. Renaissance wife was catching up on some quality - end of the school holidays - snooze time, before our planned venture out to Kaye Sera's Bizarre.

Of course - we were vague and flakey and I faffed and Renaissance wife snoozed till 5.30 or 6 or something and then we were in a mad dash - driving across town at the last minute instead of having some kind of leisurely wholesome cycle along, across and around the Bay...Renaissance wife drove across the westgate while I texted to our friend to hold the tickets, or leave them at the door, or something,

We made it across town in 15 minutes flat, and cruised past the venue, counting the building numbers along St. Kilda Road while sussing out the nearest carspace.... I was in serious squinty myopia, and missed the screaming yellow alarm bells, but Renaissance wife didn't. We turned a corner and she pulled into a parking spot.

"that's _______'s car. shit. I just saw it, parked out the front."

"Oh shit! are you sure?"

"We can go past again, I saw the number plates. It's definitely her car."

"Shit" So I texted my friend an apology as Renaissance wife shook.

"Listen, I just can't be in an enclosed space with her right now. You can go in if you like"

"What? and leave you here?"

"Well, I know you really wanted to hear Tom Cho..."

I showed her my text:

Shit shit shit! We've had to abort. Renaissance wife (OK I wrote her real name in the text)'s psycho stalker wife-beating ex's car is parked outside. We've got an AVO out against her. If you see some ugly old white skank from hell drop a turd on her from us.

"Now babe, is this factually correct?" I asked.

"YEah" she said, chuckling, "but maybe you could still go in, it's just me that has the problem"

"Okay, but let's reverse the situation: I see some evil psycho stalking bashing ex's car outside a venue and don't want to go in. Would you let me go off and freak out alone while you go in along and sit there, looking at some monster, knowing that your lover is alone and upset outside?"

"No!"

"Exactly".

So then we went and watched the sunset from that funny mound between St Kilda and Elsternwick. And even though I hate Melbourne a hell of a lot less than before, and watching a perfect sunset over the water with a view over the bay is divine, I still don't agree with Paul Kelly that it beats Sydney Harbour, but that's another point.

There were young white topless youf blaring triplejay's whitest 100 from their radios, so we scowled on the edge of the hill with some Indian families, feeling grateful we weren't in Boganborough at least. And then we drove back to footscray and had dinner, delighting in the refreshing absence of bogan flags on flesh, raiments or edifices.

Now the point of this posting is not to make me look like some sapphic snag (or SNAD), holding and healing my poor recovering wife away from the horrors of her ugly vile ex. Not at all.

I just want to make a mention of how Domestic Violence does happen within queer relationships, and how it has massive impacts YEARS later. Renaissance wife's psycho stalker wife-beating ex is also known as Nurse Ratshit. They broke up 4 years ago after 6 years of hell, and Nurse Ratshit was still randomly turning up to Renaissance girls house 3 years later. That's why we got the AVO. Long suffering readers of this blog will know that I don't suffer stalkers easily.

So four years later - we still can't go out and enjoy ourselves without steeling our guts against some anticipated yuck factor from a freak with no boundaries. Queer social spaces are so few and far between - that it IS harder to completely breakaway and avoid an ex without moving cities.

Long suffering readers of this blog will know that I spent quite a few years battling my own demons in the ex department. Next month will be 5 years since we broke up. Woohoo! Bits of it still hurt though. Abusive relationships have a way of digging themselves into social worlds, that make digging ourselves out of them a hell of a lot harder.

A few things provoked my recollection of this, recently.

ONe was reading an ad in LBOTL for the inner city legal centre's Same Sex Abuse campaign.The ad shows two femmes wearing what look like castoffs from Raewyn Connell's wardrobe (but who am I to judge the fashions of young sapphists?) with the following bunny boiler narrative:

One Our first date she was funny.
On Valentines day she was sweet.
At Easter she told me I couldn't see my friends anymore.
On Mother's day she screamed at me and kicked my cat.
On my birthday she took my credit cards and didn't pay me back.
At Sleaze Ball she had sex with other girls and said it was my fault

Now this is a bit of a hyperbolic condensation of all the types of abuse that are neatly described in the ICLC resource on Same Sex Abuse. Renaissance wife said that seeing one of their posters at a queer event finally made the penny drop for her and make her see that Nurse Ratshit was a girls own Bluebeard that had to be escaped from. So she did it. Yay.

If only things were always so clear. When I think of my own story, there are many nasty feelings of yuck and discomfort and squirminess - about my own behaviour as well as hers.

So here is my Oprah Winfrey moment where I publicly confess that I was physically violent to my ex. The ex. The big fat married ex. I was physically violent on two occasions. One was in public at a Squatspace opening - where I grabbed her by the clothing and ripped a button off her overalls. The second time was in private - when I threw a punch at her. She defended herself in the latter case, but grabbing my wrist and telling me that she would leave straight away if I ever tried anything like that again. More kudos to her. She was completely pissed and staggering around, but was lucid enough to protect herself

Now I'm not even going to try to defend or excuse my behaviour. In both cases it was an unconsented, unrequested, totally unexpected, shocking angry outburst that completely distressed the other party. the victim. who was half my size, and financially dependent on me.

Even though the physical impact was minimal (mainly due to my incompetence)- these were physical acts of rage that were intended to control or subdue another person - no safe words, no happy slaps, none of the niceness that distinguishes a push of a grab made in anger from the loving fist of consenting kink.

Much therapy and anger management therapy later, I can say that I've learned to manage this monstrous part of myself, but it is still there. I manage it by not staying in situations that make me so enraged, that I do lash out. This part is hard. REally hard.

Part of that involves acknowledging that the previous relationships was really really bad and abusive, and that it shouldn't have continued as long as it did. Blind Freddy can see that. But a big part of this for me, has been about learning to acknowledge my own needs - in a relationship - and then learning how to articulate them to the other person, early on, and trust that they will be respected, or trust that I can state how I feel when they aren't and things will get better.

It's really really hard for any ex-catholic to acknowledge that we are entitled to anything. But I realise now that I need to insist on certain 'bottom lines' if I want to be in a trusting relationship with someone. Like that they aren't self destructive. that they don't get completely shitfaced. That they don't drink alone in our home. that we don't have sex while drunk. That neither of us put pressure on the other one to have sex - even if that means months of no pussy action. That they don't crack onto my friends, or end up in sexually unsafe/sleazy situations where their own boundaries come unstuck.

The other crazy crap that occurred in previous marriages like drunk driving, threatening to jump out high windows, running off in the middle of the night, yelling abuse at me - well - that is painfully obvious even to me - that it is not what I want. I just wish I'd walked away the first time it happened....

I've been looking back at old CD's of photos of us both and realised how often Abel recoiled while I was kissing her, and I wonder how I could have been so blind. So many brilliant words uttered in so many languages cannot disguise the fact that there wasn't a physical connection, there wasn't trust on my part or desire on hers. and that was nearly 8 years of my life. bugger.

And then there's the other nasty icky mudstick stuff that occurs still. Stupid old patterns of sociality that were built into how I did coupledom. Despite moving cities, leaving the commune that was my home for 10 years and breaking off contact with whole worlds of mutual friends and circles - I still have people that reinforce/trigger the way things were with Abel. The way I was. Friends who keep wanting to talk about her. Saying "oh... yeah, she was so bad you know.... you're much better off". Hmmm - bringing up my rage and humiliation about being with someone who didn't give a shit about me. Great stuff. Or people who want to get completely shitfaced in my home - with my partner - even though I've been pretty transparent about the trauma that living with an Alcoholic partner has caused me.

So - slowly, slowly, I'm learning how to set some boundaries - to ask for what I need. To be clear and straightforward with edge players rather than just running away from them.

With Renaissance wife - this has been a hard, challenging and yet healing time for us both. But we're slowly working on what it means to be together and build sustainable bonds of trust. The genuine support of our friends; the ones who aspire for similr things in their own relationships: straight/gay/whatever really helps too.

Feeding the hand that bites me?

2011-02-02T18:34:00.000-08:00

I've come to a rather banal epiphany. Possibly.

I'm going to shamelessly confess that I was one of those PhD students in love with Academia. Academia was my dream - being part of the ivory/sandstone tower of intelligentsia - discussing obscure things and sharing them in a kindly way with colleagues and hungry young minds was the dream that sustained me through all of the life disasters, writing blocks and sleepless nights of the TOME.

Now I'm finally out the other end of it, sitting in my not quite secure but not as precarious as most academic posting I'm coming to realise thatyes! surprise surprise -that Academia is not all it's cracked up to be.... I mean, it's even less of a space for contestation and intellectual challenge and engagement than I had thought.

I'm not dissing it entirely - and Sarah Ahmed's facebook updates about teaching AMAZING courses on phenomenology and identity at goldsmiths and how like hell I wish I was there doing something with or like or around that - are totally and incredibly inspiring... but....but.....

Maybe it was Tom Ellard's post that did it.

Maybe it was the 2 days spent by myself and another research fellow - printing, photocopying tidying, filing, arranging the research centre while our esteemed admin colleagues sat around at their desks doing whatever they do - or interrupting us to gossip about their daily lives that did it. Maybe it was the visit of the Provost, resembling just a bit too much the tour of Catherine the Great to the Russian Peasantry and her dissmissive comments about the research centre where I work - stressing quite rightly that the only thing that mattered were research outputs.

Maybe it is the agonising frustration of trying to generate any research outcomes in an institution that has a journal subscription level of a 3rd rate wester suburbs state highschool, the most unnavigable Website of an institution I've ever come across (try an find your's truly's name on the institutions website! I've been working there as a researcher for 18 months!), maybe it is the supercilious empire building approach of the vast majority of ancilliary - and yes - I am going to describe resource/HR/admin/management/PR colleagues in an institution ostensibly dedicated to teaching and research as ancilliary staff - where they treat academic work as a sideline activity, and academic staff and students as annoying obstacles to their corporatised dream world.....

Maybe.

Maybe it's the numerous stories of friends in Academia of the depressing, cut throat bitchy competitiveness of institutional departmental wrangling. Maybe it's the lack of smiles.

It's definitely the lack of time and energy I have to read, to write, to think about anything more substantial than a gant chart.

I don't regret my PhD. I don't regret allowing myself to expand and make it the unwieldy immense, interdisciplinary, unmarketable wrangling erudite 100,000 word and 6 year beast that it was. Six years is a DECENT amount of time to spend immersed in a PhD, and I'm so proud I did it in an immersive, process oriented, mind blowing way - and didn't get sucked into the absurd product oriented 3 year post-doc fishing research report model that we all have to dissimulate to anyway.

So glad.

And - now - I'm not going to jump on the ECR train. I'm going to look for quality of life in my own life, and return to pursuing oppen ended engaging practices - not a research 'career'. Not any 'career', just a life that may continue to be rich and rewarding.

Maybe the art-market versus art practice dichotomy is a more productive way of thinking about the 'tension' between genuine research and academia. Just as the 'art-market' forces the creative play of the studio into a goal oriented production that is NOT creative, so too finally and bluntly, academia can be described as something that does actively thwart research.

And hasn't it always been thus? I mean surely even in the good old days of free education and whatnot - the majority of lecturers (if not students) were white/middle class/straight/male, and the resulting epistemologies and knoweldges were prfoundly biased and narrow?

Intellectual creation is always contested and precarious. I'm glad as hell to see and support students of colour, women students, queers, working class people and ratbags have access to the learning. I'm still intending to do what I can to make the walls of the institution as porous as possible.

but I don't dream that this is where I can pursue my life's work or love work either. I don't want to lose my centre and chase a career dream anymore. I want to be present and ethical, but free enough to be genuinely creative somewhere.

Banality of Grief

2010-11-21T14:44:00.000-08:00

This is brief.
It's sunny, heating up to 32 degrees.

I'm indoors, skulking.

Mucus clogs my lungs, my nose, my head
is fuzzy
throat dry
eyes bleary and thick

Is this what happens when I forget to cry?

sitting slowly
stupidly
wrapping up precious nothings in tissue and bubble wrap

coughing

stacking my archives
the professional library
years of typing, reading, rereading,
squinting at enlightenment on photocopied A4
No, I don't want to forget

my mind is fuzzy
I don't want to make or dance or sing
just slowly breathe through the changes all around me

Day of The Dead

2010-10-31T19:43:00.000-07:00

Today I'm back in Boganborough and it's cloudy and I'm tired and I feel like I'm coming down with a cold, but I've had such an amazing weekend.

Renaissance Wife and I travelled north again to the NSW north coast for the "Love Day" of two dear friends. Because life is crazy we had a wonderful time hanging out with about 30 people from Melbourne who also travelled north for the same event.

I gave Renaissance wife a verbal tour of the beefy hinterland along the rivers where 5 generations of my mothers ancestors cut down forests and raised dairy cattle before heading up the hills to New England to get degrees and raise beef cattle. She was a bit freaked out by the parade of unpeopled roadside homesteads along the McLeay and Bellinger rivers, and the ghosting horror of Kinchela where stolen Aboriginal children were acculturated and abused for nearly a century. I persuaded her to detour over to South West Rocks and picks up some shells as a memento of where my grandparents honeymooned in the 1930's, and brought them as tokens of longevity to our marrying friends.

They called it a love day. Our dear friends waded into ankle-deep water where many of us stood in the afternoon sun and people's children did their best impersonation of putti frolicking in the sunlit shallows and it was so beautiful and heartfelt and momentous that we all cried. And then everyone swam and then as the sun set we drank, and ate and danced until midnight - to a local band who covered Astor Piazzola and finished with a Kolo and how incredible was that?

And yesterday we had a brunch of seeds, oysters, tofu and other leftovers by the water and a swim in the sun.

On the way back to the airport, Renaissance wife drove me to my brother's grave - after we got lost finding the cemetery - as I do each time I try to visit. I bought flowers and junkfood from woollies and sat in his grave hanging out with his headstone and my memories of him. Flowers were symbolic: poppies for... well, you know, Daisies aka Margaritas for me. Red Gerberas for the passion of grief, yellow Geberas for the joy of hope, and orchids coz they last for ages.

I felt so lucky to have been able to visit his grave so close to his deathversary. So lucky to have a place with sun, and seabreeze and ocean views and trees where I could sit and remember my brother and what he was to me.

Finally I felt so lucky to remember that the terrible pall of grief and pain that amputated me when he died, has finally changed into something warm and loving and tender, and that I've lived through all of this and gained so much wisdom and life force as a result.

Eulogy

2010-10-20T05:02:00.000-07:00

Heyall,

I decided to post this up for all the peeps who wish they could have been with us on Tuesday.

Steve Kirby was born in Somerset, England in 1956, the only son of a young woman living with her parents and sister Jan, with whom he was raised.
He died last week in Bathurst in the house he shared and help create with his partner, in the company of three of the many people who loved him dearly: his partner, his daughter, and myself.

In between those two events is a history not only of Steve’s life, but of all of the lives he touched in so many places across the globe and in so many inspiring, transforming ways.

In preparing this Eulogy I was wondering how I could represent the immensity of lives that are connected to Steve Kirby’s ‘story’. There is of course, his CV, available on the website of Watters Gallery, and there are the oral narratives from his families in England and Australia, or from a range of friends in Australia, who listened avidly to Steve’s anecdotes and insights from his rich life.

In the past few weeks, I’ve shared some of those stories with people who knew Steve, such as his family, friends in Bathurst, and friends from Art School such as Sharon, Anna, Heli, Elyss, Mignon, Kim, Mel, Jason, Ted, Doug, and others.

It has felt like piecework – a slow patching together of small, sacred fragments of memory that each of us have of Steve.

There are so many parts of Steve that many of us here today remember and treasure, and I cannot hope to fully represent who Steve was to so many of you, or how you will remember him into the future.

So what I hope to do, is bring some elements together in order to create a mosaic of fragments – much like the mosaic sculptures that Steve exhibited in 2003 and 2004. These were composed of small exquisite elements selected from larger experimental works of painting, drilling, gouging, staining, pushing, moulding and carving a myriad of coloured and pigmented forms: wood, canvas, board, ink, paint, clay etc. Steve would select small tile like elements from these larger works and then spend hours, weeks and months in his studio laying each fragment next to another, and another, and another…..

And Steve used to say that this mosaic piecework – of making a connection between two random shapes – that for some reason, be it intuitive or compositional or whimsical – just worked – he said that this work of cutting, moving and connecting was about relationships –about creating relationships – somewhere between choice and chance – that two elements would connect, coalesce and create another series of visual and imaginative relationships and possibilities.

So I’m hoping that in the words offered in this Eulogy, in the recollections of Steve’s English family, in the words offered by his daughter, in the words and image fragments assembled in the booklet created by his partner, in the poetry and music we are sharing with you today, that parts of your personal sacred fragment of Steve can create a connection and relationship with someone else’s that will help sustain us all during this time of grieving.

For now, I want to talk briefly of my relationship with Steve, who has been a dear friend, ever since we met at NAS in 1997. At the time, Steve had already lived in Australia for 10 years with his wife and two small children.

Steve said he was interested in sculpture, and had studied with Tom Bass, but wanted to explore the expressivity of hard materials. He described how visiting the Art Brut museum in Switzerland changed his life, and how he’d spent years walking around the UK and Europe collecting small fragments, carving on stones, creating shapes with clay, and how in Bathurst he ran sculpture workshops with kids with disabilities – allowing them to explore how ordinary materials such as newspaper, clay, sand and string could extend their bodies and sensations of being in the world.

After sweating it in foundation year formalism of casting carving and construction, both of us ended up doing majors in painting. I made a deliberate and strategic decision that I would probably learn more from being a student in the same classes as Steve Kirby than picking any particular discipline or teacher. And in fact, Steve was a great teacher and mentor to many of us at art school. Teaching us how to live with ourselves, our frustrations and our materials, and the unending maddening processes of making something new with a level of intelligence and integrity. Steve’s intellect was like oxygen to me – pure, clear and calm – and his capacity to link deep thought to the wordless mess of making to an emotional intelligence and integrity has been one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received.

Steve used to bring in books – he introduced me to Scott McLoud and to James Elkins. I’ll never forget Steve standing in my Studio reading the following description from Elkins’s book “What Painting Is”.

“It is important never to forget how crazy painting is… Painting is born in a smelly studio, where the painter works in isolation for hours and even years on end…. Painters have to work in a morass of stubborn substances.
For those reasons, the act of painting is a kind of insanity… even the most commercially minded artist has to wrestle with raw materials, and get filthy in the process.”

James Elkins, What Painting is: p147.

I think it is important to acknowledge that last Tuesday, Bathurst lost an incredible artist and philosopher.

After studying painting, I studied art history and eventually completed a PhD. As part of this I travelled the world, visiting art schools in the UK, New York and Paris, and meeting many of the famous international writers Steve and I used to read and discuss in art school. And I want to tell you, that even now, after all of the reading and talking and listening I’ve been lucky enough to have, that Steve Kirby continued to be an inspiring source of enlightenment, reflection and consideration. He could make this incredible links between creativity, philosophy and the daily business of making and breathing and feeling life. I have been so lucky to know Steve, to have so many conversations about life, art, love and ideas for years now. Steve was best man at both weddings, and best friend when I was heartbroken, answering the phone to my sobs at 3am on a number of occasions, and reading my theses, introducing me to trashy TV, and guiding me by SMS through his home city of Bristol.

Steve’s generosity extended not only to how he lived, but to how he died. I don’t ever want to romanticise death, which is a horrible, agonising tragedy. However, the way in which Steve faced his illness, the pain, the tragic implications for those who loved him, and the final terrible awfulness of his passing, was special and sacred, and ultimately profoundly generous.

Steve was curious about the world, and curious and critical about his daily life. We often discussed his illness in phenomenological terms, and the implications of reducing parts of ourselves and yet not shrinking away from the experience of life. Steve also discussed the nature of suffering with a number of friends. Tracey and Helen recalled the time he referred to the word Thole, an old Saxon word that was used during his youth in England about suffering. However, whereas we’re used to considering suffering as an affliction that we are passively subjected to, thole describes suffering as a type of conscious bearing, a deliberate, patient endurance.

Steve used to discuss the work of suffering, both in the pain he was experiencing in his illness, and that of his loved ones in witnessing his suffering and fearing his death. Steve spoke of thole as offering a way of considering the agency that we can have in the way we can experience suffering, to make it an experience, and to be able to live suffering well.

Steve criticised the common contemporary attitude to suffering as one of shock, as if we are entitled to never suffer, and a life well lived is without pain.

He said that People do not know how to suffer well.
To plumb the depths of suffering and taste it with all it’s senses.
To be in that space and not try to paint it a different colour.

Tholes implies a level of agency, it doesn’t mean putting aside our daily existence. It is about applying all of our resources, everything about our daily life in order to undertake the work of bearing suffering as part of the richness of our life.
We draw upon our daily lives and our resources in order to do the work of suffering.
Tholes is about a profound presence, and having all of our sense in the moment of suffering.
Steve said how this is a process not unlike the work of painting – in fact very much akin to the creative process itself.
This is not a simple analogy, but touches at the heart of the integrity that Steve brought to his life and his life’s work and creativity.
This means, being attentive and being present to ourselves, to others and to the sensations of the worlds in which we live.

In the past few days I’ve been numb, because I cannot imagine a world without Steve. The silent timbre of his voice, his words, so many words, have been part of the pulse of the way I am in the world.

We have another friend Heli who we knew at art school, and who returned to Finland in 2001. Steve and Heli haven’t seen each other for nearly a decade but they maintained constant SMS contact – especially during the crazy late night studio hours. Heli wrote an email back to me the other day, where she said:

“I started to think whether my silent conversation with Steve continues, as it has continued over these years, and you know Margaret I believe it does. The way he and his work inspires me is something like that cannot disappear. He is in all little things. Everywhere i look.”

I hope that the gift of Steve’s life and generosity continues in all our lives for a very long time.

Finally I’d like to end with a quote from the Nigerian English writer, Ben Okri:

“Don’t let grief kill you. You are not born yet. You haven’t painted enough. … you owe it to what you’re suffering now to make sure you survive. You owe it to us, your people. The Greeks have a saying that the Skylarks buried its father in its head. Bury this grief in your heart, in your art. Live, live with unquenchable fire. Let everything you’re suffering now give you every reason in the world to master your life and your art. Live deeply, fully. Be fearless. Be like the tortoise – grow a hard shell to protect your strong heart. Be like the eagle – soar above your paint and carry the banner and the wonder of our lives to the farthest corners of the world. Build your strength. Destiny is difficult.” Okri, Dangerous Love, p379.

DumbStruck

2010-10-16T04:44:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to pull together the words for a Eulogy.
And part of me thinks about mosaics - not the continuously pixellated patterns but the way that fragments come together in strange little meshes of possibilities.
Perfect tiny distinct fragments - juxtaposed by memory and time and whatever else was near them by the time.
and each new connection generates a starburst of further imaginative possibilities....

Of course I'm trying to skate over an immense awesome overwhelming tragedy.

And death is awesome.
It is immensely big - watching the agonising slowness of life slowly ebbing away from someone.
Staying with them - or whatever that is left of - leaving of them, holding them, holding courage, slowly watching breaths, counting time, counting minutes, doses, hours, counting the cracks on the walls, counting the final pulses......

I feel so immensely privileged to share in something so sacred and immense.

Away from the immediacy of tragedy - the proximity of loss - it would have only been loss - immense horrible tragic aloneness - but here, so many new things have burst forth - crazy laughter, tears, sobs, shreiks, bad food, bad jokes, and so, so, so much love.

We visited his studio today. I was wondering how hard it would feel - but instead - it felt like entering a familiar beloved book - I felt something beautiful surrounding us. A special glowing warmth that somehow emanated from the works or the space or the space between bodies and the bodily memory of being there with him.....

and today it was snowing - in October, in the sunny antipodes. snow and Wysteeria blossoms. A strange miracle amidst so many sad mysteries.

Writing

2010-10-07T09:32:00.000-07:00

Escribo. Escribo que escribo. Mentalmente me veo escribir que escribo y también puedo verme ver que escribo. Me recuerdo escribiendo ya y también viéndome que escribía. Y me veo recordando que me veo escribir y me recuerdo viéndome recordar que escribía y escribo viéndome escribir que recuerdo haberme visto escribir que me veía escribir que recordaba haberme visto escribir que escribía y que escribía que escribo que escribía. También puedo imaginarme escribiendo que ya había escrito que me imaginaría escribiendo que había escrito que me imaginaba escribiendo que me veo escribir que escribo.(Salvador Elizondo, El grafógrafo, 1972)

It's one of those nights to slowly pick my way through language, so I'm gonna translate the words above into English:

"I write. I write that I write. Mentally I see myself write that I write and I also can see myself seeing that I write. I remember writing already and I also seeing that I wrote. And I see myself remembering that I saw myself writing and that I remember seeing that I remember to write and I write seeing myself write that I remember having seen myself write that I saw myself write that I remembered having seen myself write that I wrote and that I wrote that I write what I wrote. I also can imagine myself writing that I have written that I imagine myself writing that I have written that what I imagine writing that I see myself write that I write."

Wish Like hell I could still remember all the conjugations in Spanish!

Anniversaries....

2010-09-24T21:00:00.001-07:00

Generally I regard September as my Menstrus Horibilis, but my periods are a bit late this year.... (LOL...TMI... erk)

It's a big month of anniversaries -many of them ghastly, but a couple being quite nice...

Anyway - this week has included:

Anniversary of KD's death (3 years ago)
Renaissance Girls birthday (34 years ago)
my brother's death (11 years ago - that's him in the piccy above with the trumpet)
Moving to Melbourne (2 years ago)

It's a big emotional time.
Plus my current work contract started 12 months ago
and we moved to the boganborough palace 12 months ago.

So, I've spent some time looking back, looking forward, looking around. This has been facilitated by the fact that Renaissance girl is on holidays and I've been commuting four hours a day to work.

I'm always relieved to look back and note that time passes, and horrible things move away fast - or I move forwards from them.

I'm so relieved that I'm no where near as tormented as I was 2 or 3 years ago, and that as much as I miss Sydney so much that it physically hurts, that here my life is a lot calmer, and that I am slowly, ever so damn slowly, putting down roots.

However, I was thinking this week of what a small closed snobby little town Melbourne actually is.
I defy anyone who says that Sydney is less friendly than here.
I've lived here for 2 years and have yet to be invited into the home of any Melbournians that I've met. (This excludes close relatives and close friends of my partner, and ex-Sydneysiders)

Even among the close friends of my partner, there are some who have invited her, but not me into their homes.

Reflecting on this is a bit shocking.
I remember in Finland how an East German woman I met, insisted on inviting me around for dinner, saying how it took her five years to be invited into someone's home in Turku, and how, at the time, I found this unimaginable.

Now, I can see how this happens and what it feels like.
Despite the introversion of Renaissance girl, and our cloistered life in Boganborough, we have invited and hosted numerous acquaintances and friends that I've made here - at work or wherever.
but the invitations haven't been returned.

Reflecting on this, I can see why I've stayed on antidepressants, why I've needed regular trips north and why I can't entirely blame Renaissance girl for my isolation here.
And I'm wondering when and how this will change.

Moving to Sydney was hard for the first 3 months. Then I did start being invited to friends homes, and spent the next 19 years fending off invites to dinner, to coffee, to drinks, to hang out in order to make space to accept so many more.
Melbourne portray this as 'superficial' - but I can't see how being able to quickly move into, expand and sustain a wide range of networks over twenty years is superficial. I call it sustaining.

Admittedly the friendships I have here seem to be closer, but I suspect that this is from sheer desperate isolation on my behalf.

Anyway - this is not just another hellbourne whinge.

Part of me has scarily assimilated. I now have my favourite laneway haunts, and can name the AFL team I support and have an idea of where they are in the competition. I know where the best coffee is is most parts of the city and surrounds (It boganborough it's at home), and mostly manage the thermic challenges of the hideous climate here.

There are some really, really good things here.

The first is that we are leaving Boganborough and heading west at the end of the year.
We've found a more manageable love nest on the other side of the Maribyrnong, surrounded by bike paths, sari shops, bus routes and olive trees, and within walking distance of people we've met - including some that have invited me into their home, and some that I hope, eventually may return the invites that I have already extended to them.

Life with Renaissance wife has continued, and it's been hard as hell at time - as both of us have faced and are facing major life changes - but we are both still growing individually, still holding each others hands, and laughing and cuddling and creating as well.

And my work - as maddening and precarious ad frustrating as it is at times - is also incredibly stimulating and sustaining. I continue to meet wonderful people, and find out wonderful things about the people I've already met.
Where I am, the academy feels much less like an academy - and more like a porous hub where a range of people get to meet and exchange ideas, and sustain active connections with local communities - of migrants, refugees and kooris.

I could never, ever imagine anything like this ever happening at ye olde sandstone camelot of my Alma Mater. It's not just the saturation of the sandstone universities with Lara's, Tara's and Sara's - it's their location, and the types of connections and affinities among the staff and students already present. Even the diversity of my old department always felt like a few stranded exiles from the working class, the brown or the not-quite-white, somehow being lumped together - but apart from the outside communities from which we came.

I'm also involved in crazy performance projects and other mad wild schemes of Mayhem. Creativity still manages to burble and bubble out of my in exquisite ways.

I'm not really connected to any visual arts scene here, and I miss like hell - the sustenance of the open, trashy diverse mish-mash of Sydney artists. In Sydney art always felt like an excuse for another party, or a meeting, or a conversation - something that was part of the daily breathe of crazy creative nutters getting together.

I haven't found that here. but I haven't given up hope, just moved my energies into other areas; performing, writing, laughing.

Art is always a relational activity, and expresses a moving towards, around and within circuits and networks that are profoundly social. Many of these circuits are imaginary, as they invoke a connection to come, or a community to come, but so many of them slip easily into a tired cliquiness of 'in-jokes', and internal references.

I always like how in spanish to 'create', or "crea" sounds so similar to the word for 'believe' or "creo". Communities that create are also communities that believe - or dream ourselves into existence, and work towards sustaining this dreamworld into daily patterns of sustenance.

Apologies to Banjo

2010-08-05T03:25:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Hairtales for this image

There was a lass in the Melbourne burbs; she came there from Newtown,
She wandered over street and park, she wandered up and down.
She loitered here, she loitered there, till she was like to drop,
Until at last in sheer despair she sought a barber's shop.
" I'd like you to trim my locks, I'll give anything a go,
Who cares if I'm a Newtown dyke up here in Gree'boro?"

The hairdresser was small and fat, as bogans mostly are,
She wore a Millers special dress, she drove an ugly car:
Maybe she was a humorist of note and keen at repartee,
Maybe she wanted to do a swatch, whatever that may be,
But when she saw our friend arrive, she exclaimed `How can this be?'
And asked if she was taking drugs and was off her bloody tree

There were many gilded ladies that hung out in the mall,
Their eyes were dull, their heads were flat, they had no brains at all;
To them the dresser sent a text, before her phone did shut,
`I'll give this try-hard trendy dyke a real discount haircut.'
And as she combed and snipped it off she asked with a bit of a sneer
'I can't believe you cut your own hair and shape it round your ear'

A grunt was all reply she got; as she snipped from front to back,
'Why do you cut your own hair? is it money that you lack?'
"I used to have dreadlocks" our friend she did reply
"For the next ten years I just played around, with lots of coloured dye
My hair's been pink, and blonde and green, and red and orange and blue
It was easy to cut it myself, I made sculpture with it too"
"Dreadlocks! how did you wash them!" the professional enquired
"I never bothered, not for years, but in the end I was quite tired"

"So what brings you here? why the change?" asked the lady in the shop
"Would you like some gel, do you want it short, and spiky up on top?"
Remembering her partners Mum and her spiky scary mullett
Our heroine's stomach did quiver, bile rose up in her gullet
This Newtown girl was wary of the suburban hair disease
"I don't use gel, I don't want spikes, just trim it simply please"

The dresser kept on cutting, and clippered behind the throat
She raised her pencilled brow, she paused awhile to gloat,
"Do you like this style, do you like this cut, do you like what I have done"
The customer replied, "Perhaps, Just let me put my glasses on"
She met the dressers eye and sighed, and quickly looked away
And agreed to the offer of gel that again passed her way

She struggled gamely to her feet, and faced the talentless foe:
"You've done for me! you dog, I'm beat! one hit before I go!"
Alas it was a dream, to rant and rave and yell
She knew the only thing to do, was quickly leave this hell

Our girl got up, and moved away, her wallet it was proffered
The dresser spoke, and quoted high, double what was offered
Her eyes did bulge, her throat went dry, she pointed to the banner
"It says here ten bucks for a haircut! or is that just for a Nanna"
The dresser said "Ten bucks for a cut, but you needed more, this we call a style"
Our heroine was flabbergasted, she could already taste her bile
Scared of spewing on the spot, she quickly left the scene
And cursed that nasty mall in the borough known as green

She would have liked a wild up-country yell to wake the dead to hear,
Dreaming of a loud revenge as she mumbled in her beer
"I only wish I had a knife, you hair destroying shark!
I could do better with a stanley knife, even in the dark!"
Maybe to the hairdresser this was a type of fun
destroying the self esteem and dignity of someone
Maybe cheap haircuts are just for gilded girls or those who just don't care
Who don't feel scared and stupified to sit in a hairdressers chair

And now while round the bathroom floor the final clippings fall,
She tells the story o'er and o'er, and laments her visit to the mall.
"Random personal experiments, oh God, I've really had enough,
What a crazy thought I had, why did I think I am that tough?"
And so she swore "never again, there's some things I cannot do"
And vows that forevermore, she'll cut her own hair on the loo

Non Spaces

2010-05-22T21:52:00.001-07:00

Today has been a completely magical, heavenly day in the burbs.
The doctors wife & I staggered into the sunlit garden with our coffees, to sit and watch magpies warbles, while Princess Fluffbucket crouched in the rocket, trying to stalk them.
Yesterday morning was very similar.
We are surrounded by greenery, birdlife, calm quiet delights. Inside our four white walls we make our own delights of puppets, vulvas, art, colour, games, books, dressups.
It's like heaven....

and yet, and yet.

I've had an interesting few days, showing a German Film crew around my life and the spaces where I work and play - rediscovering and re-presenting the invisible spaces of banality and daily life for a new audience.

they said that Boganborough reminded them of Stuttgart.... with a bizarre hitchcockian edge - as the hordes of Cockatoos swoop and screech and swirl at sunset......
They wondered why the beautiful green parkland near the lake was deserted, except for a lone figure out jogging (the doctor's wife) and the cluster of Wiggas on the skateboard ramp.

I took them out to where I work, by way of contrast.

The picture above is from Footscray, which is not where I work, but an inner city (hell! it's zone 1 and 2 stops from the city circle and they have trams) version of Melbourne's wild west. It's being colonised by well-meaning cultural tourists, who embrace the rub of queer and straight, the various shades of brown skin, the polylingual street signs and edgy fringe of junkies. Recently I met someone (at an art opening in Prahran) who described where I work as a 'wasteland'. I asked where he lived and he said "footscray". In fact not quite - turns out he lives in Seddon, which is kind of like a white-working class segue to middle class aspiring home ownership - without any tinge of new migrants or junkies, but close enough to both to claim some sort of affiliation.

Walking around where I work was weird. (how's that for alliteration?) OK - it was weird with a film crew, because my cultural tourist eyes were exaggerated by the presence of a camera. White Academic plus White Film Crew, walking in streets of small dark-skinned people - who moved out of camera-range, giving us baleful glances.

I felt -intensely - like I did in Vietnam. Suddenly, my skin was not neutral - but very distinctly coloured, and very distinctly out of place. Of course this was not only about the pinking bits of epidermis under a pallid autumn sun, but the short hair, the spectacles, the pants and leather jacket - the non-femme, queer female garb, that marks me not only as not asian, or not african, or not pacific islander, or not latino, or not koori, but as someone who can afford to be flagrantly queer, because I am white in a way that is consolidated by my baby-academic class, and my whiteness. Academic women don't do high femme, in general, because we apparently don't have to - we can afford a certain level of gender neutrality, or gender queerness. I know 2 queers living in the suburb where I work, but they aren't white, and they perform queerness differently, often subject to the verbal abuse from being queer and NOT WHITE. But outside the graffite-arted Cuel Caffe, I stuck out and attracted stares, and didn't feel comfortable about getting my fix of bubble tea.

The nature of this privilege became more marked as the camera followed me up McKechnie Street, past the bingo hall to the university. Baleful glances from other pedestrians, turned into supplicating smiles - as we got closer to the uni - my status as an academic was confirmed by others, as my androgynous white garb merged into the habitus of white privilege.Whatever the wildness of VU is, with it's feral rabbits, roadworks and gum trees - it is still a university, where queerness is whitened into a culturally acceptable and even desirable form of loucheness, rather than an alien trespass.

Anyway - from this, the camera followed me and my workmates to a community education session in West Sunshine. they captured my appalling slides between Spanish and English, captured the slapstick of four PhD's trying to load and unload a car, and captured the heartwarming compliance of a community group with university research. Many exquisite micro-moments. I forgot what language I was speaking. Language disappeared between the warmth of bodies, smiles, laughter and hugs.As much as I love this type of work, I'm aware of who we are, as academics, and how compliant the community are in allowing us to enter their world and 'educate' them. i'm also aware why. So many participants said, that they had maybe 5 minutes with a doctor, maybe once or twice a year, and only in English. So to be in a room with four friendly doctors for 3 hours, even if 3 of those are doctors of philosophy, and even where most exchange needs a translator, means they get some chance to speak about their bodies, and feelings, in an atmosphere that is half-human.

I guess what I'm trying to fathom - is how meaningful spaces are generated, amidst the anonymity of a city. I've lived in Boganborough for 7 months now - and I think I would be recognised by 2 shopkeepers - maybe? (funnily enough - at the chemist and the bottlo) We don't speak to the neighbours, nor even greet them, and aside from polite smiles to dog walkers during my morning scurry to the train station, I don't encounter any human faces beyond our fence.No eyes meet at the station, or on the train, or in the shopping mall. Boganborough is almost completely white, and so I wonder about my race, and racial affiliations, and what I'm trying to achieve by disavowing this. Am I only another cultural tourist - enjoying the frisson of entering non-white spaces where my class and race privilege isn't challenged? And what is it that I need to sustain and be sustained by the living possibilities of my physical surrounds?

The things I miss

2010-05-22T21:35:00.001-07:00

I spent most of the past month zipping between cities: Sydney and Melbourne.
Some reasons were good, like graduation and friend's parties.
Some were bad, like friends being sick...
zipping between two worlds - experiencing both cities in a state of flight and flux gave me a chance to have a lot of good coffee, and a lot of good takeaway, and to burn out my overdraft limit even more... as well as to see both places above and below, in moving between and within, finding new and old faces, to rediscover cities as spaces of chance encounters, new discoveries, new possibilities always emerging and subsiding.

Somewhere in the middle of this I discovered that another acquaintance/inspiration had been forced to abandon his mortal coil in an accident involving a bicycle and a stairwell.
Horrible.
How do begin to describe the loss of someone who was the centre of so many legends?
He's turned up to my first wedding in a Koala suit and overalls covered in red tyre tracks - giggling hysterically while claiming to be attending as "Road Kill"
He had been one half of the legendary duo "the 10,000 foot naked rock stars" who had done the first ever fully naked radio marathon on 2SER - inspiring my own Radio Stripathon with Daz Chandler for the 2SER fundraiser some years later....
I thought he'd done the street mural pictured above - below his house and next to the cafe where I'd see him serving coffee whenever I went for a dose of darlingithurts bohemia...

I asked where he was, and the guy serving me whispered "he died". The mural is a dedication, the ripped off heart sign regularly replaced.
So I sat, stunned, in front of a knitted cover for a sandstone wall, sipping my latte, passing my teddybear to a dear friend sobbing over the worst ever news about her partner, both of us feeling the cold shock of dread inching into our spaces of life and colour.....

So, flying back and forth, I've missed the opening of the biennale in Sydney, missed friends' shows in Melbourne, missed the cat, the wife, the calmness of weekends in the burbs....

but then so much life, light, stories and possibilities, and memories coiling themselves around new connections, movements and spaces, finding myself again, finding others, and finding at last that this new city has elements of familiarity and delight and feels like home again.

First as tragedy, then as farce

2010-04-13T21:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry to quote dear old zizek but it's such a good title, and recent circumstances have reduced my wordsmith skills to pastiche.

this blog has always been about angst , so maybe my recent writers block is attributable to the lack of disaster/tragedy torment in my life. Apart from the odd #$%$%^FIVE HOUR %$*&$#$# COMMUTE from the north east tip of Hellbourne to the North west tip, things are pretty cruisy at the sapphic love palace.

Aside from the mundane joys of birdlife, moonlit cycles, the cat, my wife, the garden, books, art, flowers, veggies, cuddles, love, sex, porn, fruit and vulvas..... I've had some exquisite epihanies of late - I finally got to meet Alphonse Lingis, and hang with him at a masterclass, and afterwards at a cafe in Carlton. He's brilliant, generous and amazing as ever, and we spoke about EVERYTHING, and he loves birds, and....tonight I'll meet my wife at the same cafe en route to hear Luce Irigaray telecasting too.

And then Michael Taussig gave a series of events hosted by Monash uni- mostly promoting his last book - which was everything I'd hoped and building on his work that he discussed at UTS in 2005 - about Malinowski and colour. He said that his latest book, 'what is the color of the sacred' explores not so much the history of color but the color of history. Now why am I spelling 'color' yank style? because Taussig quotes isadora de seville in linking color to calor and the lack of a u ras home this point. and because Taussig, the expat australian now has a lovely noo yoik twang to his accent and meter, and phrases slide from him like some kind of cool-arsed poet - which in many ways, is what he is.

I'm still delighted at experiencing the bodily presence of the writers of words that I worship - their accents, eyes, hands, their gestures, lips and their sweat. The memory of these sensations inflect the richness of the words I read later.

So. I could write more about Taussig, but don't know where to start except to say that the book is everythink I'd ever hoped for in critical ethnography - exquisite, poetic, critical, historical, brilliant. The book is hard to find in Australia. Renaissance Wife bought me a copy online - but it is worth the angst of filling amazon.com coffers. It is brilliant.

I had to pirate huge chunks of my own copy to give to a friend - my favourite coloursmith ever, who is now... gasp.... err - what's the best euphemism? Facing the immanence of mortality rather intensely right now?

Dying is such a long, complex and multilayered process, that I don't know what to call dying, and what to brush over, fingers crossed, hoping that silence will ward it off.

Is terminal cancer an easier term to swallow than dying?

Dying seems more like the last gasps, the death rattle, the agonising body wracking parts where the dyee is reduced to an incoherent mass of flesh. Where pain takes over and destroys language, or thought, or an access to anything beyond the immediacy of flesh, pain, breath.

And my friend is not at that stage yet. He is still so wonderfully life affirming, intelligent and funny. Still so generous with his time and energy. Still so keen to reach out and grasp at any morsel of colour, life, brilliance. He doesn't want to die, but says that if he must, then he will die well. Dying well involves constantly turning towards the light, colour, warmth, ideas.

I brought him a coloured crochet quilt, fruit he'd never tried before and taussig, de certeau, bachelard. We laughed together, and hope to laugh again. Later I went to the cliffs, letting the sea and sunset embrace my sobs as I cried and cried. Whenever I'm faced with tragedy I feel desperate need to grab at soul food, good fruit, fresh vegetables, sydney harbour, plants, art, philosophy & human kindness.

This is such a bloody hard time. So much like last year with Renaissance Wife's mother. I dunno why I've had to bear witness to so much suffering recently. Dunno why the Melbourne trains can't run on time either.

Hot art for a hot cuntry

2010-02-26T13:41:00.001-08:00

Awww, Thanks so much for all the comments on my last post - especially Melissa who I see as a bit of a post-thesis success story...
Maybe it is just in the nature of doing relatively unrecognised labour like art making and random theorising that makes it so hard - we work and work and work, and push out everything inside of us - and still.... it never feels like enough. Maybe it's just the nature of being a woman in this society?

I've been driven to ponder the gendered nature of work and recognition lately. My wjerk (the one that pays the bills) has been giving me the shits lately. Partly is the usual palaver of deadlines, stress, micromanagement, poor boundaries and poor communication, but times like these, the gender stuff really kicks in. Like, I'm amazed at how little work men actually do. Some of them seem to have no concept of what work is, and are completely blind to the frenzy of activity around them. Male colleagues and superiors will walk into a room or up to me or my female colleagues, assume we will drop EVERYTHING and attend to their tiniest little whim. Right there and then! Partly it's a relief, because I think , "well, at least the boundaries are clear. All I have to do is obey them; they're paying me, so they can take the rap if the particular brain surgery I was working on before clipping their nails falls arse over teeth" but then part of me thinks... "Ohhhhh God, not this again! why are so many men such a waste of space?"

Sorry about the mysandrony folks - but some peeps are such an easy target.

And I'm afraid this is also related to ART.

ONe week ago I participated in the opening of a group show in Hellbourne. The opening was fabulous, the show is wonderful, it is still up and on exhibit at the Victoria College of the Arts gallery somewhere on Southbank.

I do need to write about the wonderfulness of the curator, the concept, the space the work, the process...... I feel so incredibly lucky to have been involved. This is a fabulous art-debut in Melbourne, and as much as I whinge about this place, it has been incredibly hospitable towards me.

OK, so firstly the good bit - the show: Addition/Erasure is a group show of 4 poets and 5 visual artists. That's a lot of peeps. All of us were given the "brief" of installing work that crossed both fields of the visual and the verbal. So some of the poets were 'concrete poets' who worked with the effect of lettering in space, or in unusual spaces such as Classified Ads, and some peeps explored the spaces between words and images (Acutally that was a nice pairing: an artist drawing words, and making exquisite visual puns, and a poet drawing half images and words...). There were two large sculptural installations that incorporiated text into the piece: one through sound (a cutesy dada homage), and one through dramatic text, emblazoned on a banner, embedded into the materiality of the piece. And there was a video booth, coupled with an act of giving kitsch new age slogans on index cards. The index cards, and the birod words providing the link between the real, and the hyper-real - of the endless i-photo slide show loop of slogans emblazoned over kittens and puppies and other kitsch wonders.

And the there was Schappylle Scragg. True to form, I went completely over the top. Felt I had to prove myself as a real artist - even though I haven't had any sort of practice since 2007. And even that has been brief fleeting stunts, performances, photo shoots. I guess this is my practice now. I still feel a bit guilty that I'm not drawing or doing oil paintings.

So for Scragg, I sewed a lot of vulvas, incorporating beer cans and bogan flags.

I also mounted some Aussie Flag Porn onto a dozen tiny easel/stretchers which were arranged on plinths (thank you Emmy, Zoo, Jane for the images) so the space looked like an amateur art exhibition, or a suburban gift shop.

This may have been enough work: crossing the boundaries of art and craft. Appropriating second-wave feminist craft aesthetic for the sake of a bogan parody. But to hammer the point home, Schappylle invested in a K-Mart scrapbooking kit, and assembled a range of texts and images into her own scrapbook. This was about re-appropriating the rather suspect feminised contemporary craft movement of cupcakes and stitch and bitch into a cutting critique. Playing with the duality of "cunt" as reclaimed female genitals, and "cunt" as the perjorative term par excellance. I'm always intrigued with the investment that women have with the appropriation of our bodies and bodyparts into mainstream misogyny. what does it mean?

I decided to extend the theme further: by doing a "spoken word piece" literally blending poetry and visuals together. The visuals - come from Schappylle herself, and three days of bodily interventions to change the surface of my skin. To add raiments that I don't wear. Fake tattoos, fake hair, fake teeth - and fake (bogan flag) nails. Fake tanned tits pushed up into mammarian excess. Scragg re-enacted Schneemanns scroll piece. I'd transcribed the lyrics of 6 iconic Aussie Beer ads (VB, Fosters, Swan, XXXX, Westend, Tooheys), and arranged them into a continuous circular poem. I printed this out as a single column which I concertinaed into shape not unlike a tampon, and placed in my amenable genitalia. I decided to wear a merkin during the show. I wasn't sure if hellbourne was ready for scragg's shaved orange fleshcunt. I wasn't sure I was ready to bare my genitals in a new city. The merkin is funny. Big blond curly pubes. a little laughing derive.....

It was very funny doing this, and funny watching the audience. It was funny ... just to perform and be the centre of attention. It was funny when people recognised the lyrics, and funnier when people started nodding and cheering to scragg's bogan themes. This discrete performance could be described as a success.

the bits I'm not so sure about are including the wall collage of scragg's photos - roughly pinned up over a bogan flag cape. Maybe this was too much - although it makes a nice transition between scragg's crafty corner and the flat adhesions of:
E A C H
E A C H
E A C H
which was one of the concrete poems installed near it. Surprisingly these few words left me speechless.

We had a group crit the next day, and everyone glossed over it. The artist wasn't present, and... the words, blank, large, flat, with so much space.... seem to be repellant. The deflect engagement or entrance. I didn't like the shiny adhesive surface either.

I think most readers will agree with me that ponderous pretentiousness can be a little tiring. The think that strikes me is how gendered so much of it is. I used to laugh at "stylised conceptual minimalism", and yet faced with it - faced with a few flaccid conceits ensconsed in the miasma of a male ego... I was left... flabbergasted. silent. I don't know where to start.

Apparently one of the other artist didn't 'get' my work. He also has never been to a drag show, and doesn't 'get' drag. He asked how I would quantify the success of my work. He said "you could go for a walk but you can't quantify that". I said "Actually, quantifying walks is my day job. You use a pedometer." Metrosexual gender fixity is easy to gloss over, I guess.

Another wordsmith said the following phrase "Well, there was modernist man, and then there was post-modern man, and now there is contemporary man, so this is why I use the phrase 'contemporary man'" I strongly suspect that he hasn't read even Benjamin, let alone Lyotard or Jameson.

Okay, okay, I am an evil intellectual snob. Peeps who make pompous references to the zeitgeist without having done some critical reading on cultural time give me the shits. I think "what, apart from your ill-informed arrogance, gives you the right to take up this space?".

The other female artist, very quietly embedded a reference to Zizek in her work, illustrating part of the cover of "First As Tragedy, Then As Farce" - a nice touch which resounded off my favourite work in the show: "I told you it would come to this". this is a nice, humble, evocative way of making a critical reference, embedding the temporality of wading through the whacky world of Slavoj, in patient pencil lines... stroke, stroke, stroke, Helen Johnson, I love your work.

And then there was my favourite target of mayhem fury: a nasty little man who visibly recoiled at scragg's advances during the opening -no- they weren't sexual - but flesh was visible, and OTT as scragg handed out bogan flag stickers, and black armbands for those (too few) who protested. I had him picked for a misognynist - that weird cold deadness of hate, that tragic experience has taught me to smell a mile off. the next day I discover that he has edited an anthology of Gay and Lesserbeing Poetry. Fuck. and I thought my coalitionist aspirations couldn't sink any lower. His work? Execrable. A private world of endless solitaire, performed on pieces of paper. WHY NOT DO SOME PROBABILITY THEORY? I wondered, my silence clanging against the walls as he slowly mystified his process of verse selection, space selection, sticky tape, selection. He said that scragg's work made him feel better about his nationalism. A nasty catty comment, that made me flinch.

I guess that small games of chance work for small minds, who would collapse if exposed to the mechanics of algebra 101. I guess that small minds collapse around big ideas, big theories, big flesh, big personalities - the stuff of life, gulping gusts of air, screeching excess of creativity. Listening to the passive aggressive drone of soft voiced dullards, I felt irritated. these people call themselves writers? Do they read? do they listen? do they ever explore the silences outside of their own heads?

Art Yart

2010-02-15T07:07:00.000-08:00

This is one of those crazy posts that come out of disturbed sleep patterns.

In four hours, I'll get up, have a shower, make coffee, have breakfast, get a lift with the wife across town, go to the gym (gasp yes), and go to work....

Meanwhile I've been making work, preparing work, installing work for the show on thursday night...
(btw I'm in a group show called "Addition Erasure" that opens at VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery on Feb 18)

And part of me is so amazingly excited to be making work, and to see it come together, and part of me is tired as hell, and frustrated at how hard it is to sit down and spend HOURS and HOURS on making small crazy things, when I've got to get up and go to work, and maintain a life as well.

In previous shows, I've been able to drop everything for a week or two and immerse myself in materials. I've also come from a position of a sustained practice.

This time, I feel like I've hit the ground running - dragging my fingers and increasingly failing eyes to their limits. Desperately trying to catch up and create a body of work in a short space of time.

Once this is over, I go back to my regular "hobby" occupation of writing research papers!

and I'm wondering where I'm meant to find the time, and what I've done with my life, and what I'm doing with my life and what I want to do.

this is nothing new.....

but my day job is an intense stimulating research position, in a field that is different to my own, so my own PhD research is pushed somewhere to the background... and then there is my somewhat lapsed art practice/career which I'm still pretty invested in and ideally feeds into my own research.....

And I don't want to let go of these interests or this expertise, and I don't think I can be happy with art as a hobby (just noting my rapidly decreasing interest in drawing once it stopped being linked to anything else apart from the moment of its practice is proof of that)

and I wonder how I'm meant to be doing all of this when I haven't even had time or energy to read a book, for.... AGES

Is this standard post-doc dilemma?

Zoomemes

2010-01-02T05:07:00.001-08:00

Just faffing about online again... read a novel in a last ditch attempt at protocrastination while Mrs right conquered tittyraider and the cat conquered a purple ball of sparkle...

Anyway - I read zoo's posting about the past decade and pondered the significance of it all.....

still pondering.

thought I'd try to construct a bit of a 'Meme' about the last 10 years......

errr......

arrrr......

I travelled a lot
I circumnavigated the globe, and a few gloves
I learnt another language
I did another degree
I did a PhD
No one in my bio family died
Quite a few friends died
I got married twice
I had lots of good sex and a lot less bad sex than the previous decade
I had a lot of art exhibitions
I stayed in squats in 3 countries
I faced my fear of seaweed and slimey marine life and snorkelled in 3 countries
I swam in a few oceans, some of them freezing
I didn't take many illicit substances
I did not attempt to give up coffee (this is called learning to be kind to oneself)
I lived off life modelling for 3 years (and supported a partner)
I thoroughly explored the Louvre
I got to know 3 cities apart from Sydney very well.
I died my hair every shade of the rainbow
I still went to political protests (though much less than the previous decade)
I didn't do a single paste-up

If this sounds boring it may be a reflection of my voidoid brain at the moment (hooray for holidays!) or that memes are a pretty facile way of conveying the richness of life's tapestry

Horse and Carriage again

2009-12-19T17:28:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-13T03:52:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-02T18:03:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-28T06:37:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-28T06:21:00.001-08:00

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?

2009-10-22T16:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-15T08:21:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-14T12:23:00.000-07:00

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.

post-protodoctor purgatroid

2009-06-09T19:19:00.000-07:00

It is done. finally.

Five years, two months, four deaths, 107000 words, two volumes, five countries, 54 subjects, a messy divorce, two heartbreaks, two house moves, two departments, a stomach ulcer, lots of blogging, lots of chocolate, lots of codeine.

Submission was - of course, delightful - so was sydney - for the first 4 days - and then I came down with a chest infection, that kept me huddled over my laptop, slicing words off the enormous expanding tome, so it could conform to the faculty limits of non-insane theses (ha ha).

I spent the final week feeling weak and wet and overwhelmed, and regretting all the things I couldn't go to, all the people I couldn't see - and then I realised what a relief it is to live somewhere where the pace of life is slower than I am.

On my last day in Sydney - I did two wonderful things - going into AGNSW to sit through the entire Phil Collins (the artist, not the pop-singer) karaoke installation of "the world won't listen".

I don't think I've been as moved by something since hanging out in the Rothgo Room at the Tate Modern.
Inspired - I wandered lonely as a cloud through the botanic gardens down to circular quay where i caught a ferry out to cockatoo island to catch Ken Unsworth's grand piano tribute to his wife, called "a ringing glass".

The space itself is so enormous and overwhelming - it's hard to discern whether I was being affected by the site, or the work. the first four rooms were small, and contained discrete mobile musical installations: a dancing skeleton, a dream sequence, and then a series of miniature grand pianos, and angels - and then finally a discombobulated grand piano suspended from the ceiling.

After this, I walked through two enormous rooms: one set up as a large golden curtained salon with a baby grand in the corner, and the final being an enormous hallway - flanked by parallel sets of five elaborately curtained mirrors, and eight small chandeliers, up to a rather disappointing finale assemblage on the stage, flanked by two large monitors screening the dream sequence projection from room two,

This felt like an interesting translation of the experience of playing piano (the symmetry of left hand and right hand mirrored by the bass and treble clefs, as they span the 5 black keys and 8 white) into walking through a piano playing experience. but the whole thing was so nice and classical, it reminded me of being 10 years old, being a good girl, a docile, well trained, well managed classical music box fantasy of feminine musicality that at a certain point I found it a bit sickening.

Maybe the ghostly emptiness is supposed to evoke grief and nostalgia and the gaps between memory and longing, but I'm not entirely convinced. It's definitely worth the voyage out to cockatoo island - but I felt like I was being let into one man's rather indulgent fantasia - enabled by scale, status and cash, but without a dialogue with the materials or others that would let it transform into something more alive.

So now, I'm back in bleak city, feeling mightily relieved - but - mostly weird.
Lots of people say this is what happens - they describe an emptiness, a feeling of anti-climax, of let-down.

I'm finding it hard to string two words together, and trudge slowly through lukewarm fiction: jeanette winterson's boating for beginners, and gunter grass's memoirs. the weather has hurtled down to single figures and I huddle in bed in my thermals, heater blasting, wondering why I feel so cold here when I survived real winters in the northern hemisphere.

Feeling wary of my tendency to crawl into the study with my morning coffee and sit in front of the computer immobile for hours and hours, I dragged myself into the cold and wet last night to catch Lauren Browns installation at Bus Projects.

After negotiating the treck from the north western to the mid-eastern point of the city, scurrying along and past a myriad of melbourne's famous alleyways with other bay-whipped weather beaten sods, I saw a cluster of jackets outside a doorway, near some bright graffiti and the handpainted number 117 and so I climbed the stairs.

Imagine a stairwell somewhere between 'lanfranchis' and the old 'mop' gallery, opening into a small foyer not unlike 'knot', without the feeling of imminent collapse.

A small foyer, chugged with dark jackets and bare bobbing heads. white painted brick walls, covered with straight red stripes of adhesive velveteen, defining the blobby mob within. someone (the co-colaborator Gemma?) had the canny sense to wear a matching cotton striped top, and the bravery to remove lumpen woollens to display. I wanted to get a photo of stripes on stripes but thought it remiss.

I pressed through the bodies, proffered gold coins for red wine in a white cup, twisted arms towards catalogues, contact lists, and slowly edged my way inwards. Saw a black curtain on my right, and a darkened room on my left. headed to my left, and wandered too close to wear LED's and Bunnings power spots blasted into my retinas,embraced the scheining glare of glittering gold towers of spray painted monochrome glory from the Moreland hard rubbish month, all piled into shrines of mammon.

*sigh* this show was like a jewellery box already; red velveteen fuzz, lining the opening for gloriously glittering golden trash.

I tried to read a catalogue essay from the glint off a spray painted monitor and felt a bit overwhelmed, so I pressed on into the final curtained room, revealing an installation by Julie Traitsis & Rebecca Joseph of lots and lots of speakers and audio players, and monitors, all sequentially squeaking staticky fuzzbots of song fragments. It reminded me of the "guess that song" from triple m, and also of ricky's room in "American Beauty" and I got a bit spooked, and started wondering about cultural capital after I seemed to recognise most of the songs, so I had to leave.

Standing in the golden aweness I overheard one girl saying to another "Yeah... I dunno how someone can come up with an idea, and transform it into.... this, ay? but i guess that's what makes them an artist, and me not". I felt a little more relaxed about my cultural capital and crept on into Lauren's curtained room.

First thing: two death certificates. Second thing, the coffin from her blog, cleaved by white flouro light boxes. Third thing, the row of red painted jack in the boxes, lining the wall. I crept around, felt the objects in the space, wathced others interacting with the works, before winding the handles myself. I don't want to give the game away. It's hard to believe that installation art can have a plot, but sometimes it does...

Opening the curtains, peeking back to the golden room, I wondered why it was arranged like a proscenium, an alter, and why people were gathered around as if it was a stage. Two black clad figures walked into the middle of the set up and animated a couple of suspended golden puppets. To the chants of tibetan throat music, the artists, Nicole Dominic & Sarah Bunting, then garbed each other in golden raiments and latex gloves, and then kneeled at their floor alter, and started to perform a ritualised alchemy of dripping stuff into golden paint. It was so silly as to be exquisitely delightful, and watching the fuddle of the crowd, fumbling for objects that could be dipped and transformed from garbage into glory, spread an ineffable golden warmth throughout the space, of participation, relationship and play. I think that "saints of the apocalypse" is a bit of an OTT title for what was sweet, warm, shiny and funny, but the piece and the performance left me glowing.

Sydney, Here I come!

2009-05-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

Ohhh - god and there's so much happening I'm in a whirl just thinking of it!

fortunately some of it is in cyberspace too.

Jane Polkinghorne has just launched a new project - aka 'the year of denim' whihc is being assiduously blogged.....

and Carriageworks is hosting the laucnh of ' there goes the neighbourhood' the Keg & Zanny/squatsapce/redwatch collaboration.... its on friday night

versions of what its about are at redwatch

Plus there's stuff ant MOP, the red rattler, firstdraft.... and my last chance to cathc the MCA drawing show that has sparked all those silly reviews in the SMH... (which were a handy last minute motivation to finish the tome - on life-drawing, and all those silly debates about drawing and 1970s art schools - coz now, I can officially claim to have researched the matter thoroughly - and..... Peter Fuller died in the 1980s but art school drawing did not)

and somewhere in this I'll be handing in my thesis too. About bloody time,

Fernando Solanas - El Sur

2009-05-06T08:59:00.001-07:00

This is still one of my favourite films ever, though I'm losing my Spanish... the '90's was The Orb and Astor Piazzola

The Orb - A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain...

2009-05-06T07:51:00.001-07:00

Protocrastination can sometimes be taken a bit far...
(this one is for Renaissance Girl)

Death, Discourse... err... dahlias?

2009-04-29T20:36:00.000-07:00

At about 1.30 last Tuesday morning, I had one of those swirling vortexes of a moment in which time, experience and everything seemed to turn into the tunnel that runs during the credits of Dr. Who.

I was sitting here, at this desk, tippy-tapping away on the keyboard, editing my intro for the thousandth time, and chugging away, cutting, pasting and knitting together all the little bits of insight and exegesis with reasonably grammatically correct signposting sentences, and accurate footnotes.

then i came to the bit about feminist ethnography and cultural studies, where I'm meant to spend 200 words succinctly encapsulating why i shifted from Art History to Gender and Cultural Studies, and the value of cultural studies methodologies to my inquiry, analysis and findings. I felt a rather dreary sense of trudging back to 2005 and 2006, when i was reading/teaching/loving raymond williams, beverley skeggs, and lugging around Denzin and Lincoln, and the earnest optimistic afternoons in my supervisors office in the quad, as we sat on the carpet, and mapped out the great inquiry, which I presented in manifesto form in 3 papers at conferences and seminars... But this time it felt so cloaked in a haze of amnesia, and buried under so many other thrilling findings and meanderings, that I couldn't bring it up or face it.

I looked at the clock, and it said 1.48am, so I closed the document, and popped online to check on the blogosphere, to wind my brain down before heading to bed. Noting that Lauren had added another post, I popped over and had a look.

I hadn't really expected the image or the coffin, or the musings on death, or the netiquette of online notification and discussion. My eyeballs started swimming, and I felt blushings of shame, and a bit queasy in my belly. Ever the egomaniac, I feared that it might have been an insinuation directed towards my last post, and I wondered if I'd overstepped the mark, yet again. Kept reading, wondering, thinking, brain humming, belly churning.

then I heard Renaissance Girl wake up and head to the phone. Heard her voice on the telephone, asking if she should go back to the hospital. shit. I closed the document, mind reeling, heart racing. We packed bedside camping supplies into shopping bags and I sat with her as she drove to the hospital, sat with her, and her mum during the night, and the next day, and evening.

what happened during that time, is not my story to tell, much lest post here in this blog. If nothing else, Renaissance Girl is a writer herself, and could probably describe this most intimate, terrible and sacred of experiences with more courage, sensitivity and clarity than I could ever hope for.

If that is not my story to tell, then I wonder what is, and why I need to tell anything at all, and what point does it serve, and who do I write for? for me? for her? for the imaginary institutions of community enunciated, iterated and moderated by the discourses of blogging?

I've got a few passionate theoretical threads running through me, that somehow wind themselves between my work, my writing, my life, my feelings.

the first comes from ALphonso Lingis, who, in the introduction to my charcoal scrawled and tear stained copy of "Abuses" says:

"One only speaks for others when they are silent or silenced. and to speak for others is to silence oneself"

and then this takes me back to feminist ethnography - hell! to feminist theory 101 - which was based on the critical imperative of finding way to describe the indescribable, unmentionable, ignored and trivialised reality of women's emotional reality and daily existence. My own feminist journey occurred in the early '90's, where the ACTUP slogan "silence=death" coincided with a 3rd wave take on the "personal is political" and we believed, I believed, still believe, that the work of feminist consciousness involves facing the silent, visible, unmentionable horror of sexual abuse, pain, shame, death, and finding words to wrap around it, bringing it forth, making it a social issue, framed, visible, insistent; one that can be articulated as part of, but separate from us, so that we are no longer consumed by the wordless horror of private suffering.

And then I think of the tome, and the manifesto proclaimed in my Prologue, that I wanted to find a way of enunciating and articulating irritation as an epistemology, not pain as an instrument of torture or horror, but the grinding banality of minor pain, formed in a condition of work, that doesn't quite destroy language, but still remains outside of discourse, and still silences those that experience it.

And I'm thinking that ripped tendons, nerve damage and pulled muscles of artists models have no place of comparison to what I witnessed last week, and quoting Elaine Scarry just seems silly. Bad pastiche, bad opera, bad taste.

So my story, is one of witnessing pain, and not knowing how to bear that witness in an appropriate manner. I don't believe that silence is appropriate, but it is not my place to howl the pain of others. I bury myself in books, cloak myself in words, nestle in the gaps between elucidation, comprehension and understanding, allowing feeling to bubble up in between phrases, as my glasses fog, tears cloud my eyes and my thoughts meander between feelings, sensations and insights. Renaissance girl cries, we cuddle, make soup, casseroles, warm milk, and slowly breathe our way through this.

Plague

2009-04-16T19:02:00.000-07:00

Is it just me? is it just the universe? is it just bad timing?

One of my colleagues made a joke last year, saying 'hell! I'm scared to be your friend! Look what happens to them!"

Now i'm wondering if it's really funny. A close friend has come out of remission, and is about to go into the scary phase described by Predator 5 years ago, and quoted by me 2 years ago:

Cancer treatment is a stop/go journey.
Find something wrong, chop it out. Wait.
Find something else wrong.
Try and find someone who'll chop it out.
Chop it out.
Wait until, inevitably, something else goes wrong.
Can't chop it out this time.
Cry a lot. Get dead. Zzzzz.
My story has been played out in a million other abdomens and I've never heard about them.
Maybe it's like mine.chop it out, what do I do

but wait, that's not all! Over the past 6 weeks, or 8 now - during some kind of weird late feb, march, now april time slowing, spinning weirdness - the missus and I have been facing another Mack truck, creeping slowly, slowly, slowly forward, growing inexorably immense and scary (and I don't mean the linfox supplychain behemoths outside the front windows). My Missus's mum went into the Palliative care unit this week. the missus cries, cries again, and copes.

I never imagined the end of the tome would be dwarfed by so much... err.... ok cloaked in a miasma of anxiety, helplessness and grief. I started the tome as predator quickly succumbed to cancer, and now, as I finish, I'm watching people close to me wrangle with the implications of scary mutant organ eating cells.

The horror of this mutes my capacity to describe it, or to even try. I send kind messages, hug the missus, cook meals, chase up foontotes, consult my style guide and plug away at the tome, watching, waiting, working towards things that come to an end, even if I don't want them to.

Wrapping words

2009-04-13T01:52:00.000-07:00

A couple of my blogopshere compatriots have been going a bit of handwringing (if such a thing is possible while typing - maybe my crappy spelling proves that it is ).... and I've had my knickers in a know this afternoon - trying to devise a pithy exegesis of Foucault's anit-humanism - for a footnote.

while taking my eyeballs for a walk I came across the following and fell in love -literally:

[...] I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyong all possible beginnings. at the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an isntant, in suspense, to beckon to me. There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path - a slender gap - the point of its possible disappearance.

Behind me, I should like to have heard (having been at it long enough already, repeating in advance what I am about to tell you) the voice of Molloy , [WTF - no idea who Molloy is - but I know how he feels] beginning to speak thus:
'I must go on; I can't go on; I must go on; I must say words as long as there are words, I must say them until they find me, until they say me - heavy burden, heavy sin; I must go on; maybe it's been done already; maybe they've already said me; maybe they've already borne me to the threshold of my story, right to the door opening onto my story; I'd be surprised if it opened.'

A good many people, I imagine, harbour a similar desire to be freed from the obligation to begin, a similar desire to find themselves, right from the outside, on the other side of discourse, without having to stand outside it, pondering its particular, fearsome, and even devilish features. To this all too common feeling, institutions have an ironic reply, for they solemnise beginnings, surorunding them with a circle of silent attention; in order that they can be distinguished from far off, they impose ritual forms upon them.

Inclinations speaks out: 'I don't want to have to enter this risky word of discourse; I want nothing to do with it insofar as it is decisive and final; I would like to feel it all around me, calm and transparent, profound, infinitely open, with others responding to my expectations, and truth emerging, one by one. all I want is to allow myself to be borne along, within it, and by it, a happy wreck,' institutions reply: 'but you have nothing to fear from launching out; we're here to show you discourse is within the established order of things, that we've waited a long time for its arrival, that a place has been set aside for it - a place which both honours and disarms it; and if it should happen to have a certain power, then it is we, and we alone, who give it that power.'

Foucault, M, 'The discourse on language', Swyer, R (trans) Social Science Information, Sage Publications, April 1971, pp. 7-30, reprinted in Kearney, R & Rainwater, M (eds) The continental philosophy reader, Routledge, London & New York, 1996, p. 339.

the typos are mine....

It's been a tough week

2009-04-04T00:24:00.000-07:00

Mega thanks to Melissa Laing for sending this across the tasman.....
Miss Piggy doing peaches

Art Break

2009-03-23T16:12:00.000-07:00

I spent most of last week bed bound with a heavy cold. All I wanted to eat was tomato soup and toast. I felt like I'd been punched in the nose. My brain was too tired and blocked to write so I consoled myself with the Satanic Verses. Gibreel and Saladin's adventures were keeping me happily soothed in the half hour between the tome and my pillow, and I thought Salman Rushdie's most labarynthine work would be nice company for the end of the tome.
alas no. in a fug of sudafed and paracetamol, I consumed it all, then returned to the computer screen for a feverish read of the e-book version of Kant's critique of judgement.

It had been a hard week

On saturday, I decided to feed my eyeballs and, and so i staggered up to brunswick bound for a tea-party launch of Jessie Willow-Tucker's tea drawings.
The weather was a crazy 35 degrees, and I had airplane ankles from lying around all week, so I panted and sweated, scuttling along my now familiar shaded maze of bluestone alleyways. Refused tea, and sipped fruit punch, and eyed the cupcakes. (btw what's this weird deal with hettie girls and cupcakes - some kind of pseudo ironic stepford wives thing?)

not that Brunswick Bound was a hettie girl kind of cupcake fest - more like a generally delicious arty sugar fiend delight. yum yum.

Sugar sated I checked out the walls. and like what I saw. Jessie did a series of "tea portrait" drawings in graphite, watercolour, and tea..... each image based on a particular flavour of tea. Our Lady Grey was a red headed sacred-heart-tattooed virgin mary, sipping tea in the grey clouds, flagged by an electric jug and a serpent, her red cup and saucer glowing in the pit of her belly. Earl Grey was a Brian mannix style retro mod, that brought back the 1980's Decore shampoo ad-ripoff of that sixites song...... the drawings are exquisite, witty and warm, and are still on show upstairs.

Downstairs, I found a paperback of The Brothers Karamazov. I fear my thesis is going to be completed accompanied by abject images of Schemrdiyakov and his poor daughter. hmmmm......

I had planned on doing the full circuit of the West Brunswick Sculpture Triennale - but the weather was really hot and sticky. I came home and lay around for an hour, before venturing out to the base station launch party - which is a short stroll from home...

It's *weird* going to art launches in a foreign city - because I find myself looking at people and seeing weird anonymous replicas of the familiar faces I know in Sydney - only they are anonymous here, and so am I and it's kind of scary and weird, because I feel like a weird fly on the wall, wathcing myself - or at least my class (with a more middle class accents and designer clothes), and definietely my cohort - bright eyed GenX ratbaggers, greying into middle age.

Renaissance girl and I sat on the impeccable green couch grass, sipping execrable wine and admiring the mini hilsl hoist, and enjoying the shade. then we wandered through the "base station" which is someone's house, with a few rooms filled with installations.... which were mostly quite cold, (convenient on a hot day). and difficult to identify form the artists statements. Someone had a video loop taken from a rotating hills hoist in a backyard similar but not the same as the one where the house was. (replica, presence, absence, simulacra, rotation) tres nice, and I *think* it may have related to the following artists statement?

Regular collaborators Geoff Robinson and Jennie Lang have developed a new work for the wBST that is a visual conversation between the artists.

Created in accordance with geographic and recording parameters predetermined by the artists, this video ‘call and response’ uses spatial observations, arrangements, interventions and movement to establish an informal dialogue about form, light and time.

The footage was recorded within each artist’s local surroundings – more specifically their home boundaries - and the work was sequentially created in the months preceding the triennial.

Scary stylised conceptual minimalism aside, the looping weight of the camera/photographer, reminded me of swinging on my mum's hills hoist as a kid. Nice. And I loved Mikala Dwyer's hanging garden - bits of melted clear plastic sculptures - made into hanging baskets for budding succulents, offset the fibreglass verandah shell really nicely - and became something to walk through and appreciate while standing - much like the fuzzy felt pennants festooned around the driveway. the highlgight of the opening though was Lucazoid's entrance with a goat called Bob, who was also commemorated in a brown and beige fuzzy felt pennant. Lucas and Bob had wandered the baking streets of west Brunswick, avoiding the laneways (and the free fruit), but getting lots of attention from residents, including the former Mayor who asked for a photo of himself, Lucas and Bob in his front yard. My aunt made a comment about Brunswick summers, saying they made her wonder what all of the greek immigrants, arriving fresh from Anatolian goatfields thought of this strange flat gridded place. so i'm glad that Lucas and Bob did a bit of retrospective imaginative topography. I told Lucas that his entrance into the OSW launch, complete with Hat and sensational beast reminded me of Joseph beuyss. bob wasn't quite a coyote though - but there was a definite happening aspect. Bob also reminded me of Rushdie's character Saladin Chamcha, morphing into a goat in Bricklane - but I didn't share that with Lucas.

sigh.

I had more art yesterday when Stephen Mori flew into town, and insisted that I come along to him for the Modern Times launch at Heide. I hadn't been to Heide yet - and was astonished to see green grass, and green trees and slowly ripening tomatos. (most of melbourne is scorched brown). My favourite bits were the towel shorts and tops and woolen knitted swimtsuits that looked like flash gordon.

I saw Anne Dangar's ceramics and nearly cried (I've never really recovered from Helen Topliss's biog of Dangar which describes her miserable exploitation in the neoprimitivist artists colony in Moly Sabata. Poor Anne Dangar, only managed to create her work, in between slaving for Maurice and Madame GLieze, she was fired through the freezing neo-feudalist french winters by her disgust and rage at Australian provincialism).

Heide is a wonderful testament to the bravery and brilliance of the Reeds, fostering a rare vision that bourgeoise Australians could be more than crypto-fascist cashed up bogans, and could support and promote contemporary art, architecture, and literature. the modernist show is wonderful... *sigh* I walked past Dangar's glassed in plinth with a tear in my eye, and gasped at the room of Roy de Maistre's colourful wonders! ah! swirls! One wall had a series of high coloured landscape studies of Berry's Bay and other bits of Sydney Harbour. I imagined Datillo Rubbo sending De Maistre out to the harbour to sea and dream the colours that sing through the shuddering light, water and air of sydney (I'll admit I am still homesick). My reverie was interupted by a wrinkled version of Tru and Pru "err, yairss, this is ma feverrite arff orll, Ahh rarely lark thes warn" "Theers err the best" " Ahh rarely lark thes larnskepp, ther meyooted ternes, arr serr suttle, en ahh lark ther carmposishun" "Err yairss".

I felt a technicolour vomit coming on so I went outside for a glass of chandon and admired the sunset glinting off some big brush steel sculpture....

then went inside to fest on Narelle Jubilen's cannibal feast. this had everyting I love: sewing, a radical critique of primitivism, poignant ironic juxtapositions, found objects, and more sewing. I love how ever single component is rigorously catalogues. the obscure genealogies weaving together other richer histories.....

Big Butch Blush

2009-03-02T16:38:00.000-08:00

IMAGE © Deborah Kelly Big Butch Billboard 2009

My thanks and general admiration to Debora Kelly for creating the wonderful image and intervention above.
In the spirit of "Hey Hetero" and "Beware of the God" Kelly has done a nice detournement of Maria Kozic's bitch billboard of 1989 to drag around a very sexy image of a butch - on the back of the truck.

There's also gonna be a MArdis Gras entry - of butches and fans dragging alongside the billboard up Okker st. on Saturday night.

*sigh*

And i'm stuck in smellbourne, receiving freaky fire updates on my phone, trying to finish my tome (it's getting there, slowly, but surely)

It's not all bad down south. I've got my own butch icon at home, and she makes me blush and swoon, and sign, and giggle, and sigh some more.....

Big tattooed biceps, hairy musky armpits divided by voluptuous breasts. Real tits, real tats, a soft mo and softer lips. The brut 33 in the bathroom, the collection of cocks in the bedroom. The incredible infinite queerness of a woman who is big and butch and strong and so softly sexily female throughout.

I don't buy into the "butch femme thing" as some rigid sapphic category, but I *adore* having a buxum butch wench so much that bits of me involuntarily water on a regular basis. somehow with her, a lot of stuff seems to be resolved, and a lot more stuff made possible. I feel proud of myself, like i've grown up enough to catch the big fish I always dreamt of. She takes me, and lets me take her places where we both switch and sigh and laugh and fuck and sing across out many genders and many selves.

I desire and respect tranny boys, but the butch wench is what really gets me giggly and happy and exited.... so elegantly striding, sliding along the fence of gender ambiguity. calmly holding herself as a woman in the world, who is not a girl, not a femme, not a man in transition, but a strong, sexy, masculine and feminine, divinely ambiguous woman. Staying outside of the gender privilege of passing as a man, or slipping into the masquerade of closetted femininity, she is confronting, and yet so calm, and so incredibly beautiful.

As i get older, I'm more aware of the exaggerated femininity of young insecure girls, twittering in frills, frocks and shite shoes. Long hair, long nails, high voices. Part of me is tempted to blame the young, because I wasn't ever like that myself, and I feel like echoing the cliched chorus of old feminists "but we weren't like that when we were young"...... and of course I wasn't, and of course my friend's weren't, and fortunately most of us aren't "yummy mummies" either, pushing 3-wheeled designer prams between the four-wheeled drives and pilates classes.

To categorise all younger women as oppressed or unfeminist , ignores the enormous amount of deviation that does exist among younger women; which are still in a minority - like the young student radicals, the anarchists, the baby-dykes, the other young radical student feminists. Thing is - we are always in the minority... and its only when you get older that you see young people as an anonymous cohort; as separate, generally conformist and strangely sexualised, and so incredibly insecure..... It's great to see the variety of genders in dykedom - the differing femmes, the differing genders the variation from andro to butch, to leather daddy, from coy bois to T-d up transmen. My hazy memories of 15 years ago had 99% of dykes looking like bad KD Lang clones, so it's good to see women pushing our genders in all shapes and styles.

Butch women give all of us more space, to breathe, to desire, to walk and stand, and we all have to claim that space, to do our genders differently, more openly, more fluidly, more sexily. To happily and ostentatiously display the infinity of ways in which our bodies, our desires can be and become impossibly exquisite wonderful things..... to take the spaces we can, when we can.

Of course, I'm writing this having not yet left the house. I'm still in my pyjamas, and alternating between opening up the flat, and closing it, as cool cloudy breezes alternate with hot cyclonic blasts. Melbourne weather is more moody than a butch with PMT, and a lot less sexy.

If only

2009-02-24T22:19:00.000-08:00

I have my erstwhile colleague vicki Grieves to thank for this.
I read it while filling my face with bread and vegemite.
I eat too much, and move too little. keep typing/editing/cutandpaste.
i've had eye strain.

Noone ever mentioned the side of spending 12-16 hours a day on a tome.... my feet swell up! I've had airplane ankles!

Ring of fire

2009-02-09T03:21:00.000-08:00

I feel like *such* a wimp.

Yes - 47 degree heat was soul sucking eyeball frying hell - but given that 130 people have died in the subsequent inferno - in ways I don't really want to think about - my little squirms and sighs feel totally pathetic. and they are.

still - I feel obliged to mark the occasion by blabbing my own insanely trivial navel gazing version of events.

All week - the weather predictions were getting hotter, and hotter, and going up - and EVERYONE was talking about the weather. The threat of impending heat smoothed the path of my dole diary submission, gave substance to chitchats at the bakeries on the north side of town, and broke u the interminable muzak in the Moreland Salvation Army store (which I swear, has the kitschest music I've heard this century)

I'd also had 3 days of cluster-ridden head pain, and was dreading the compound effect of real heat - not this pissy 33 degree stuff. I wondered how the weather would rise from summery to hell in a couple of hours, and return.

OK - friday was warmish - low 30's, but it cooled off to 24 or something in the afternoon - heading into a nice warm summery evening, with a bit of fresh air. the brunswick love shack is a top floor sunny flat. It's great being 5 degrees warmer than outside for 9 months of the year - but during the last fortnight it's been hell. In the afternoon, the water from the cold taps comes out at a scalding 50 degrees, and the study cops all of the western sun in the afternoon - which is handy since our oven doesn't work, but a tad impossible to work in. So on friday night we opened up the Bruwswick love shack to get as much cross ventilation as possible and ate on the balcony, and slept on the loungeroom floor, with all the windows and doors open.

On Saturday Renaissance girl woke me up early - so we could plan our retreat to the nearest bastion of aircon for the day. It was warm outside but not evil - yet adn We had a lite brekky of fruit, with our coffee.

About 9am a hot wind started blowing. We shut all the doors and windows and did a load of washing and filled the bathtub with cold water. We then had cold baths, soaked sheets and towels and hung them on racks near the windows and closed all the blinds. We left lets of water for the cat, grabbed some cold water and headed out.

The wind was already hurling at us, and I was reminded of a windstorm in coober pedy. We staggered across the road to the tramstop and waited in the shade for the tram. We're lucky to be near the trams. they are airconditioned, and mostly people have the sense to shut the windows and blinds and lock the heat out. We tram hopped to the NGV and Rennaissance girl showed me the best view of the stained glass ceiling in the great hall. bliss.

Now ideally we would have stayed there all day, gazing at Rembrandt and Rothgo, (melbourne is growing on me, OK?) and completely forgetting the time or the temperature. but alas no. Renaissance girl had a violin rehearsal southside and when the weather was predicted to be a mere 34 degrees, I'd booked tickets to go life drawing with a mate, also southside, and also mid afternoon. so - at 3pm - when the heat was peaking at an insane 47 degrees - insetead of enxconsing myself in the darkened airconditioned corridors of the NGV I was gasping at flinders street station with my friend, slurping down a slushy trying to work out a non-connex route south of the river.

Hot dry air doens't feel like a sauna at all. It feels scary and yuck. none of this muscle softening embrace - more like a scary lung compressing, eyeball baking blast. I don't like heat at the best of times, so have to force myself not to panic.

anywya - we did some tram hopping and shadow scuttling and eventually found ourselves in a dark 2 storey terrace - which was amazingly cool inside (without aircon either).

2 hours later, the cool southerly wind arrived from tasmania and swirled around the leaves, and skirts and everyone's hair, and the street umbrellas. There was no sign of the fires alll around victoria, no clouds, no smoke, no smell of burning.
the sunset was a regular orange peachy glow - and not the stunning red clouded ball of fireskies. By then we were at St. Kilda, feet in the water, feeling relieved and calm.

Renaissance girl and I later went out and saw an opera singer do a Johnny Cash number. It's in too poor taste to quote it here, but it matches the crazy cavalry painting I snapped at the NGV.

Gone To Ground

2009-02-02T04:04:00.000-08:00

I think I'm meant to be in tomal lockdown at the moment. I feel like I've been in a hellish heat tunnel after last week's heatwave.
horror
horror
horror

the *minimum* temperature was 30 degrees some nights. I kid you not.
we shut up the Love palace like a little hot cave, covering all the windows in wet towels and took the computer out of the study where we could smell burning plastic.Each morning, we filled the bathtub and the fridge full of cold water as each afternoon the cold tap released SCALDING HOT water

the last time I'd been exposed to anyting over 40 degrees was in MAdrid in 1998. I went mad, and skulked in the basement of the Prado, staring at goya's 'black paintings' doing obsessive scrathcy graphite transcriptions.

remembering spain, I decided to adopt a similar strategy. Each day, after soaking myself and my clothes in the bathtup, I skulked across the road to the tram, caught the tram to Flemington Road, scuttled along royal Parade and hid in melbourne uni library each day.....madly reading randoms bits of Australian art history, obsessively checking my footnotes, and rechecking, and rearranging my chapter and slowly going mad.... and just mindlessly gorging my eyeballs on words, trying to forget where I was, when I was, where i am now.... so damn close and so damn far, and really hating everything.

At 6pm, as the library shut I'd curse the furnace of heat as it hit my lips and baked my eyeballs and scuttle back to the tram, come home, scowl and sulk at Renaissance girl, and curse the city...

note to self: must spend next January in Northern Hemisphere

Greatest Story Ever Told -in Sydney

2009-01-27T04:17:00.001-08:00

Profound displacement

Flying High

2009-01-27T03:47:00.000-08:00

We hid indoors on Boganday... after seeing some non-ironic Schappylle Scragg clones strolling around Parkville on saturday night -complete with aussie flag shoulder drapes, we weren't gonna leave the house.

Instead Boganday came to us - and we felt our innards tremble as the williamstown jet squad did their top gun style tribute... but forntuately it was brief... and coincided with the meditative morning coffee on the brown velvet armchair, which led me to ponder.....

what a bloody fitting memorial to Invasion day it was - I mean the weird air-borne military salute. Bogan day is based on the commemoration of a bunch of blighty's finest stepping ashore at circular quay and declaring it "terra nullius" or empty land.

Today I read in a book that the sesquicentenary of invasion day was commemorated in sydney by a re-enactment of the landing of Arthur Phillip & co - including apparently a made up speech by the actor playing ye olde governor..... since no-one could remember what he actually said.

It kind of reminded me of the crucifixion re-enactment at Darling Harbour - which i think is one of the most briliantly kitsch things I've seen in a long time.... I guess this is what happens when people buy too much Franklin Mint..... they cross the line of kitschness that goes straight into high farce.....

anyway - I'm trying to write my mini-definitive account of modernism - which is meant to be a deconstructive geneaology more than a neat narrative..... and I've drafted and redrafted and chopped and changed and gotten waylaid with endless searches for footnotes, and I still think it reads like a dogs breakfast, and I'm really sick of my thesis, and I'm sick of the heat, and sick of everything.

And my brain has stopped functioning like it used to, and I wonder if i'll ever get it back, and if I'll ever finish this bloody tome.

Endings, Exes, and Exmas......

2008-12-22T04:34:00.000-08:00

Awww gawwwd.......

it's a skanky night tonight and I'm not even in Adelaide - tho probably the closest I'll be for a while.

i'm heading up north to the anus for xmas and to introduce the Missus to excalibur's sword and the replica stonehenge... and my Mum. Renaissance girl will probably have the least culture shock of any of my exes.... she's even lived in a cnutry town so knows the code of socially acceptable closet baring...... and all the other stuff.

i'm not sure if I'm ready for it... I mean i was there only 12 months ago - and feeling kind of torn between having spent half my life there, and half in Sydney... and I still can't believe that i've actually left Sydney - or to be living somewhere that seems so strangely familiar and yet so different.....

and there's there's the tome - which I'm taking up with me to edit in corners......

We'll hang in sydney for a couple of weeks - to eat fresh seafood and sea real surf and cliffs and smell tropical flowers and feel sweat drizzle around suncream, and then it's back here for tome completion...

I'm really sick of my thesis at the moment. sick of writing, sick of having it hanging over my head, sick of not knowing how or what to do as a dole management strategy to ensure I have enough cash flow to keep me fed, and keep me sane till I submit. I'm sick of my own incredible inneficiency and the way it has bled into other area sof my life..... I ahven't even packed my bags for tomorrow! Everything has become a heaving chore of procrastination. Study is hell. I can't even enjoy a decent bit of theory anymore wihtout wringing my hands at potential footnotes...... and yet if I confine myself to lite words I go mad - ok not mad - just deeply deeply bored......

anywya - following Lauren's example - I'm going to include a summary year of 2008 - (also because i wasn't able to blog very much) . this year was a completely insane year for lots of reasons.... and yet really wonderful in others....

January
Fell in love with renaissance girl
drafted chapter 5
sensations: mangoes, ocean, couscous in pg-arc, quad at midnite

February
compound become disaster zone - horror horror horror
I fled to mates' couches
applied for a casual lecturing job
drafted a paper on bad drawing
started work on chapter 6
sensations: long phone calls at night in main quad, 2minute noodles in pg-arc, quad at midnite

March
found the mousecave and Moved out of the compound after 9 years
Started lecturing job at COFA. Read "the order of things" in an afternoon
turned 37. lectured in singapore
what Mardis Gras? what thesis?
sensations: renaissance girl's biceps, books on a the back of a truck, sore back, cockroaches, laundromats

April
scholarship OVER. terror! terror! terror!
compound being total arseholes: horror! horror! horror!
Lectured and tutored art history
no mobile reception, internet or phone in the mousecave, mousecave bloody cold and damp
brief holiday in melbourne
what thesis?
sensations: stripey shirts, cufflinks, pin striped trousers, ALFALFA HOUSE, buckwheat noodles, tamari, eggplant

May
Lectured in singapore again
bought glasses and electronica
Gave paper on Chapter 6 in progress
Moved my studio into a storage unit.
sensations: bourdieu, deleuze, podzilla, dumplings, sore back, acute financial stress, marking, COFA canteen cuisine

June
end of semester: marking, poverty, precarity
mousecave overrrun by mice
gave a departmental seminar on schappylle scragg
tutored blogging in penrith
did lots of marking at uni... scared essays would be eaten by mice
what thesis?
sensations: mousepiss, ratsac, mould, vacuuming, aircon, flouro lights, all-nighters at uni, scotch & stillnox

July
Mum's 70th birthday
Holidays with renaissance girl
Started working at ICE
Got the flu
Elizabeth Grosz's new book... hooray!
oh! thesis! if only!
sensations: pink scarf, black furry coat, damp lungs, manoush and potato scallops at Granville, green rat poo, vacuuming

August
Lecturing again, and working at ICE
finishing a rough first draft
when the going gets tough the touch get out: i gave notice on my flat
sensations: pgarc at night, the feel of 90000 words, manoush and potato scallops at Granville, bad corporate drag, COFA canteen cuisine

September
the return of spring! and Podzilla
filled the lanes with my kitchen, gave away/sold art, furniture, etc...
Nanna Madges Irigary singalong
Extreme sports tetris filling storage container with my books, art.... and that other stuff
garden party rained out and had to get friends to pack my house, shift boxes...
posted 10 boxes of notes to melbourne, sent 3 crates on a greyhound bus... I flew
sensations: white almond blossoms, sunshine, smiles, cuddles, not sleeping at all, then sleeping a lot, cat snores, black plastic, depot girl.....

October
moved into the brunswick love palace
unpacked boxes, started to work on the tome
sensations: smooth dry sunshine, skin on carpet, brown parks, Sydney Road, organza, muesli, coffee, holland blinds

November
More of the same
Moreland centrelink
lots of sewing, THE AGE

December
Rain, study, facebook, cuddles, cat, love

Anywhere but Here

2008-12-15T16:35:00.000-08:00

I've had a funny morning of non presence today....

Started the day reading posts on a british list aksing if drawing is a form of performance and then I read a story about an artists' models protest in Paris yesterday.....

Reading the bits in french - listening to earnest frog - my mind did backflips and I wondered what the hell i'm doing..... here..... slowly clarifying comments, replacing commas, editing footnotes....

I really liked one of the quotes from a news article on the protest.....

"Quand on me demande ce que je fais dans la vie, il y a toujours un temps d'arrêt. Pour moi, c'est devenu aussi naturel que lorsque vous vous mettez nu dans votre salle de bain. Pour tenir la pose, je dois rentrer en moi-même. Poser, c'est méditer, cela me donne l'inspiration pour des poèmes."

roughly translated - it means "when I'm asked what I do in my life, there is always bit of a pause. fr me, it has become as natural as for you to undress in your bathroom. To take a pose, I have to go inside myself. to pose is to meditate, it gives me inspiration for my poems"

Hmmmm ok - maybe not the poetry bit..... and ..... actually I feel quite self conscious undressing before getting in the bat - mainly because I remove my specs and grope around in a blur - whereas I always wore contacts when I modelled.

Bloody Hell

2008-12-10T16:27:00.000-08:00

After my last lite postings, I thought i'd better add something a little more readerly.

My favourite South Australians rightly observed that according to my wordle analysis - my posts seem to be punctuated with "bloody" and "Hell". i'm still a bit suss about the whole wordle thing - like why aren't prepositions included? Surely "the " "It" and "at" are important? not to mentioned pronouns?

Hmmm - maybe thesis editing is getting to me......

In the last 48 hours I've been struck by bloody hell of the painful variety. I was so proud of weaning myself off painkillers and chocolate, and feeling whole and hearty and sentient... and then the pain struck - in the back of my neck and left me tormentedly writhing and unable to sleep for 2 or 3 nights - save short bursts where I'd collapse only to be woken again by the pain.....the age bored me to a level of despair even greater than scrolling through the status updates of every single one of my facebook friends so I dug out Michelle de Certeau's the practice of Everyday Life to cheer me up.

It did... especially the bit about the brownian motion of tactics by which ordinary people embed a sense of agency and meaning in their negotiations with fairly large manifestions of institutionalised power. It made me feel happy about my own insistence on a stochastic framework for the analysis of power/culture/discourse/phenomenology/etc. in the TOME rather than a proper linear narrative.......

And then flipping through the blogroll I came across Jebni's latest post - whihc is more of a powerpoint-cast:
where things are at goes for 20 minutes but is worth every second,,,,, it is calm, mediated engaging delight......

Last Year

2008-12-06T10:39:00.001-08:00

I'm into this wordle thing.....

Last Month

2008-12-06T10:34:00.001-08:00

Maybe last month is more accurate.......

Word Salad

2008-12-06T10:22:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if this is an accurate representation of my most frequent blogged words, but it kind of matches the self referential theme....

click here to see the current wordle

ABCD DELEUZE A1

2008-12-03T06:38:00.001-08:00

A bit of a contrasting view on the 'companion animals'

Donna Haraway. Companion Species Manifesto Lecture 2003 2/10

2008-12-03T05:51:00.001-08:00

check this out.....

Rock n Roll!

2008-12-03T04:05:00.000-08:00

I couldn't resist posting this image from Alan Jones's current show . Ah! another reason to miss sydney - like as if I'd be doing anything anyway..... I'd just be feeling guilty rather than just isolated......

ho hum. bloody hell.

I wrote to my aunt (who is a writer) whingeing about writing - that it's a stupid hideous horrible occupation. and this is a *good* week - apparently.... After lying around and banging my head against the wall all last week and most of the weekend - I finally had a breakthrough.... and have spent each day slowly and doggedly plugging away on this chapter........

It's shaping up to be good, but bloody hell! I'm sick of the slow stagnant drag.... the procrastination cycle, the crazy eating, lack of sleeping constant guilt detachment vagueness all the time......

anyway - I'm being subsidised by the missus and the rock n roll. I fill out my dole diary and compliantly trudge up the hill each second friday... I can *almost* survive on newstart allowance and hope that maybe they won't put the screws on too hard before.... before.... I can..... and then I wonder why I can't do this any faster?

Blogomemes

2008-11-23T07:26:00.000-08:00

Despite the weather being a tad ARCTIC I had a great weekend but have headache and insomnia and am taking refuge on the brown lounge chair. the cat is keeping me company on the other brown lounge chair.

I just read the good weekend about bland beauty queen blog promotors, and it's got me inspired in a facebook application kind of way to follow on this little bit from Lauren's bit of the blogosphere;

I thought it might be an interesting test of how or if the viral nature of the internet still works for Blogs....coz I get the feeling that the blogosphere has diminished somewhat as lots of people have moved onto facebook or twitter or something..... the other big sign is that government funded community orgs are using blogs as community development projects (and here, I know I'm part of the problem/gravy train) - and the community sector is reputed to be about 5 years behind the times.....

Here are the rules:
* Mention the rules on your blog.
* Tell six quirky yet boring, unspectacular details about yourself.
* Tag six other
* Go to each person’s blog and leave a comment that lets them know they are tagged.

I'm not sure if there are 6 quirky yet boring, unspectacular details about myself that I haven't already posted on this blog or stated on TV but err.....

1. My second toes are longer than my big toes
2. I only drink black or very dark beer
3. I'm left handed
4. I'm really quite scared of and repulsed by octopus
5. I didn't wear underpants for 10 years
6. I gave up drinking tea in 1992, and it was very hard to do

As for the tagees..... I thought I'd pick a blog from my different circuits - to see what happens.

Lauren is part of the art blogosphere - so I only tagged one other art blogger - ie Skanky Jane

i picked two of my blogger contacts from the professional world of academia/cultural studies

Glen Fuller is a sydney academic cultural studies blogger and Nazanin is also a sydney academic cultural studies blogger but she's blogging and researching Iranian blogs

Just to further the international scope I included my favourite Eruotrash performance artist star Jesse and my favourite Ausie trash performance artist Zoo

Zoo crosses a few lines; being a firend/artist/academic and queer ratbag... whereas Norrie is officially a queer ratbag and activist....

a couple of people haven't posted for ages and a few may just think this is total spam..... so I'll see how this goes......

Bad Hair Days

2008-11-19T18:29:00.001-08:00

I found this image on the Museum of Bad Art website which I found on Lucazoids blog

I thought it was a fitting image for today - since I'm having my insane fear of going to the hairdresser being exposed on National TV tonight.... as well as what I've been doing with all my hairclippings for the past 18 years.

At the moment they are all banged up in a storage box in Sydney, along with most of my books and most of my art, and most of my dressups. I'm starting to miss all my clobber and feeling gloomy at the prospects of not seeing or touching any of this stuff for quite a few months into the future.

I'm feeling gloomy about everything at the moment; the weather, lack of sun, sultry cloudy fug, my own voluntary isolation and it's effects... and just a lack of motivation to do anything....

this is despite sticking to my tome targets and having a nice departmental interview, and getting my tax return and being able to do a headstand in yoga... i want to hide indoors and not move until this feeling goes away......

i wish some cliffs were only a bus ride away, I wish there was somewhere nicer to walk to than flat parks with burnt grass, and flat trees with flat grey buildings and flat grey cars

It's been a slow day of trawling friends blogs, doing random facebook quizzes and eating really shit food......

I slept crappily last night and there are roadworks outside so I can't sleep today... I feel jetlagged, slow, sad, stupid... infernally useless, indecisive, dysfunctional, disordered.

i'd better stop. it's not that dire - just one of those days

Blogosphere....

2008-11-16T03:25:00.000-08:00

sometimes I lerve the world on the poota screen..... zoo quoted my blog, and I've been having an 'awww shucks' mutual admiration moment with the red one, and an ex-PhD student has just publicly whinged about excessive weight gain, and it all makes me feel so much less alone and freaky.....

which might not be such a good thing.

I had a hideous week last week - I got stuck on a paragraph (yep - just one) for 4 days or something horrendous... maybe longer.....

It all started to come apart on monday.... I'd left that paragraph the previous friday for a weekend of domestic frolics, and facing it on monday, I cut and pasted and then I wrote a lot of paragraphs around it......

tuesday... ditto..... followed by a trip to yoga.....

On Wednesday I saw a counsellor, then tried a rousing trip to the NGV . I thought ART would cure me of my hiatus, but.... well..... actually it kind of did, but then I bought and art magazine, came home, read it and felt like I'd eaten a double pack of oreo biscuits... kind of sickly sweet and nauseated but incredibly empty.....

OH GOD. It was so hot by then that I hid in the bath...

thursday - I hid in the bath, sweated, typed a lot, cut and pasted a lot. It was hot.

Friday - I hoped the cool change would help.... I felt nauseous, started typing a hell of a lot, realised I was getting NOWHERE fast... sighed, wrote a grovelling lettter to my supervisor, banged my head on the desk.

I got a headache.

during the week my eating disorder indulgence had been tempered by the heatwave - though I experimented with dreamy creamy cafe con nelo variations..... and ate a lot of salad..... but my arms felt too big for my t-shirts, and I realised I couldn't zip up any of my summer frocks. shit.

Reduced to black t-shirt and black jeans, I decided to trek over to SAVERS to seek out some flimsy coloured raiments in size 16. SAVERS reminds me of the last white trash corner of brooklyn... (or brown trash maybe....) or even more - the Keskutori shops in finland. Racks and racks and racks of polycotton cast offs sorted according to colour, and lots of people jostling in the aisles looking for a bargain.... and there's so much stuff you think that there *must* be something, but ultimately the whole effect swamps you in a morass of discarded consumer fads that the eyes glaze, and everything looks beige.....

by this stage, the sun had returned, and I was feeling grumpy and so sick of the sight of second hand stretch knits that I decided to head down the hill for new stretch knits in airconditioned comfort. OH GOD. The K-Hole of Brunswick is one of those scary portals to hell that crop up in the weirdest of places like Chastwood and lithgow. I went into Kmart, and spent 2 hours trying on 10 different variations of ladies/girls t-shirts, and support singlets, before deciding that shopping mall gelato tones didn't actually cut it as my kind of bright. THE ONLY pants in my size were MATERNITY faecal coloured capris with drawstring waists. the shit trifecta! what a way to cover the arse..... hell. I went home and decided to hide naked in the flat till I lose weight or wait till the weather cools off.

fortunately renaissance girl took pity on me, drove me to some cliffs and we romped on the sand and ate chips..... today I printed out the big scary bit and cut and pasted and rearranged it and DECONSTRUCTED every trace of that evil paragraph line by line, with my trusty stanley knife......

More on Obama

2008-11-12T00:45:00.001-08:00

I won't do the whole cut and paste.... but here's another titibt from academic e-lists........ apparently a response to butler.

click on this to read it
btw - weather for smellbourne is HOT.

It's SO HOT MY EYEBALLS STARTED BAKING ON THE TRAM.
I texted my mate in Sydney about it for sympathy but he's he's got mouth burns from having Radiation therapy on his throat....

Kind of puts my discomfort to shame really

Uncritical Exuberance?

2008-11-10T17:46:00.000-08:00

Here's another yankee guru discussing the regime change.....

by Judith Butler
Wednesday Nov 5th, 2008 7:19 PM

This became most salient in the emergence of the counter Bradley-effect, when voters could and did explicitly own up to their own racism, but said they would vote for Obama anyway. Anecdotes from the field include claims like the following: "I know that Obama is a Muslim and a Terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway; he is probably better for the economy." Such voters got to keep their racism and vote for Obama, sheltering their split beliefs without having to resolve them.

Very few of us are immune to the exhilaration of this time. My friends on the left write to me that they feel something akin to "redemption" or that "the country has been returned to us" or that "we finally have one of us in the White House." Of course, like them, I discover myself feeling overwhelmed with disbelief and excitement throughout the day, since the thought of having the regime of George W. Bush over and gone is an enormous relief. And the thought of Obama, a thoughtful and progressive black candidate, shifts the historical ground, and we feel that cataclysm as it produces a new terrain. But let us try to think carefully about the shifted terrain, although we cannot fully know its contours at this time. The election of Barack Obama is historically significant in ways that are yet to be gauged, but it is not, and cannot be, a redemption, and if we subscribe to the heightened modes of identification that he proposes ("we are all united") or that we propose ("he is one of us"), we risk believing that this political moment can overcome the antagonisms that are constitutive of political life, especially political life in these times. There have always been good reasons not to embrace "national unity" as an ideal, and to nurse suspicions toward absolute and seamless identification with any political leader. After all, fascism relied in part on that seamless identification with the leader, and Republicans engage this same effort to organize political affect when, for instance, Elizabeth Dole looks out on her audience and says, "I love each and every one of you."

It becomes all the more important to think about the politics of exuberant identification with the election of Obama when we consider that support for Obama has coincided with support for conservative causes. In a way, this accounts for his "cross-over" success. In California, he won by 60% of the vote, and yet some significant portion of those who voted for him also voted against the legalization of gay marriage (52%). How do we understand this apparent disjunction? First, let us remember that Obama has not explicitly supported gay marriage rights. Further, as Wendy Brown has argued, the Republicans have found that the electorate is not as galvanized by "moral" issues as they were in recent elections; the reasons given for why people voted for Obama seem to be predominantly economic, and their reasoning seems more fully structured by neo-liberal rationality than by religious concerns. This is clearly one reason why Palin's assigned public function to galvanize the majority of the electorate on moral issues finally failed. But if "moral" issues such as gun control, abortion rights and gay rights were not as determinative as they once were, perhaps that is because they are thriving in a separate compartment of the political mind. In other words, we are faced with new configurations of political belief that make it possible to hold apparently discrepant views at the same time: someone can, for instance, disagree with Obama on certain issues, but still have voted for him. This became most salient in the emergence of the counter Bradley-effect, when voters could and did explicitly own up to their own racism, but said they would vote for Obama anyway. Anecdotes from the field include claims like the following: "I know that Obama is a Muslim and a Terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway; he is probably better for the economy." Such voters got to keep their racism and vote for Obama, sheltering their split beliefs without having to resolve them.

Along with strong economic motivations, less empirically discernible factors have come into play in these election results. We cannot underestimate the force of dis-identification in this election, a sense of revulsion that George W. has "represented" the United States to the rest of the world, a sense of shame about our practices of torture and illegal detention, a sense of disgust that we have waged war on false grounds and propagated racist views of Islam, a sense of alarm and horror that the extremes of economic deregulation have led to a global economic crisis. Is it despite his race, or because of his race, that Obama finally emerged as a preferred representative of the nation? Fulfilling that representative-function, he is at once black and not-black (some say "not black enough" and others say "too black"), and, as a result, he can appeal to voters who not only have no way of resolving their ambivalence on this issue, but do not want one. The public figure who allows the populace to sustain and mask its ambivalence nevertheless appears as a figure of "unity": this is surely an ideological function. Such moments are intensely imaginary, but not for that reason without their political force.

As the election approached, there has been an increased focus on the person of Obama: his gravity, his deliberateness, his ability not to lose his temper, his way of modeling a certain evenness in the face of hurtful attacks and vile political rhetoric, his promise to reinstate a version of the nation that will overcome its current shame. Of course, the promise is alluring, but what if the embrace of Obama leads to the belief that we might overcome all dissonance, that unity is actually possible? What is the chance that we may end up suffering a certain inevitable disappointment when this charismatic leader displays his fallibility, his willingness to compromise, even to sell out minorities? He has, in fact, already done this in certain ways, but many of us "set aside" our concerns in order to enjoy the extreme un-ambivalence of this moment, risking an uncritical exuberance even when we know better. Obama is, after all, hardly a leftist, regardless of the attributions of "socialism" proffered by his conservative opponents. In what ways will his actions be constrained by party politics, economic interests, and state power; in what ways have they been compromised already? If we seek through this presidency to overcome a sense of dissonance, then we will have jettisoned critical politics in favor of an exuberance whose phantasmatic dimensions will prove consequential. Maybe we cannot avoid this phantasmatic moment, but let us be mindful about how temporary it is. If there are avowed racists who have said, "I know that he is a Muslim and a terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway," there are surely also people on the left who say, "I know that he has sold out gay rights and Palestine, but he is still our redemption." I know very well, but still: this is the classic formulation of disavowal. Through what means do we sustain and mask conflicting beliefs of this sort? And at what political cost?

There is no doubt that Obama's success will have significant effects on the economic course of the nation, and it seems reasonable to assume that we will see a new rationale for economic regulation and for an approach to economics that resembles social democratic forms in Europe; in foreign affairs, we will doubtless see a renewal of multi-lateral relations, the reversal of a fatal trend of destroying multilateral accords that the Bush administration has undertaken. And there will doubtless also be a more generally liberal trend on social issues, though it is important to remember that Obama has not supported universal health care, and has failed to explicitly support gay marriage rights. And there is not yet much reason to hope that he will formulate a just policy for the United States in the Middle East, even though it is a relief, to be sure, that he knows Rashid Khalidi.

The indisputable significance of his election has everything to do with overcoming the limits implicitly imposed on African-American achievement; it has and will inspire and overwhelm young African-Americans; it will, at the same time, precipitate a change in the self-definition of the United States. If the election of Obama signals a willingness on the part of the majority of voters to be "represented" by this man, then it follows that who "we" are is constituted anew: we are a nation of many races, of mixed races; and he offers us the occasion to recognize who we have become and what we have yet to be, and in this way a certain split between the representative function of the presidency and the populace represented appears to be overcome. That is an exhilarating moment, to be sure. But can it last, and should it?

To what consequences will this nearly messianic expectation invested in this man lead? In order for this presidency to be successful, it will have to lead to some disappointment, and to survive disappointment: the man will become human, will prove less powerful than we might wish, and politics will cease to be a celebration without ambivalence and caution; indeed, politics will prove to be less of a messianic experience than a venue for robust debate, public criticism, and necessary antagonism. The election of Obama means that the terrain for debate and struggle has shifted, and it is a better terrain, to be sure. But it is not the end of struggle, and we would be very unwise to regard it that way, even provisionally. We will doubtless agree and disagree with various actions he takes and fails to take. But if the initial expectation is that he is and will be "redemption" itself, then we will punish him mercilessly when he fails us (or we will find ways to deny or suppress that disappointment in order to keep alive the experience of unity and unambivalent love).

If a consequential and dramatic disappointment is to be averted, he will have to act quickly and well. Perhaps the only way to avert a "crash" - a disappointment of serious proportions that would turn political will against him - will be to take decisive actions within the first two months of his presidency. The first would be to close Guantanamo and find ways to transfer the cases of detainees to legitimate courts; the second would be to forge a plan for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and to begin to implement that plan. The third would be to retract his bellicose remarks about escalating war in Afghanistan and pursue diplomatic, multilateral solutions in that arena. If he fails to take these steps, his support on the left will clearly deteriorate, and we will see the reconfiguration of the split between liberal hawks and the anti-war left. If he appoints the likes of Lawrence Summers to key cabinet positions, or continues the failed economic polices of Clinton and Bush, then at some point the messiah will be scorned as a false prophet. In the place of an impossible promise, we need a series of concrete actions that can begin to reverse the terrible abrogation of justice committed by the Bush regime; anything less will lead to a dramatic and consequential disillusionment. The question is what measure of dis-illusion is necessary in order to retrieve a critical politics, and what more dramatic form of dis-illusionment will return us to the intense political cynicism of the last years. Some relief from illusion is necessary, so that we might remember that politics is less about the person and the impossible and beautiful promise he represents than it is about the concrete changes in policy that might begin, over time, and with difficulty, bring about conditions of greater justice.

Jumping on the Bamowagon

2008-11-06T16:51:00.000-08:00

I read the newspapers with glee last night and again today, and noted the numerous happy facebook comments. thought i'd post up something that arrived in my email inbox.....

Ohhh -how I love to float on the waves of digitally mediated delight......

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
Friends,
Who among us is not at a loss for words? Tears pour out. Tears of joy. Tears of relief. A stunning, whopping landslide of hope in a time of deep despair.

In a nation that was founded on genocide and then built on the backs of slaves, it was an unexpected moment, shocking in its simplicity: Barack Obama, a good man, a black man, said he would bring change to Washington, and the majority of the country liked that idea. The racists were present throughout the campaign and in the voting booth. But they are no longer the majority, and we will see their flame of hate fizzle out in our lifetime.
There was another important "first" last night. Never before in our history has an avowed anti-war candidate been elected president during a time of war. I hope President-elect Obama remembers that as he considers expanding the war in Afghanistan. The faith we now have will be lost if he forgets the main issue on which he beat his fellow Dems in the primaries and then a great war hero in the general election: The people of America are tired of war. Sick and tired. And their voice was loud and clear yesterday.

It's been an inexcusable 44 years since a Democrat running for president has received even just 51% of the vote. That's because most Americans haven't really liked the Democrats. They see them as rarely having the guts to get the job done or stand up for the working people they say they support. Well, here's their chance. It has been handed to them, via the voting public, in the form of a man who is not a party hack, not a set-for-life Beltway bureaucrat. Will he now become one of them, or will he force them to be more like him? We pray for the latter.

But today we celebrate this triumph of decency over personal attack, of peace over war, of intelligence over a belief that Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs just 6,000 years ago. What will it be like to have a smart president? Science, banished for eight years, will return. Imagine supporting our country's greatest minds as they seek to cure illness, discover new forms of energy, and work to save the planet. I know, pinch me.

We may, just possibly, also see a time of refreshing openness, enlightenment and creativity. The arts and the artists will not be seen as the enemy. Perhaps art will be explored in order to discover the greater truths. When FDR was ushered in with his landslide in 1932, what followed was Frank Capra and Preston Sturgis, Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange and Orson Welles. All week long I have been inundated with media asking me, "gee, Mike, what will you do now that Bush is gone?" Are they kidding? What will it be like to work and create in an environment that nurtures and supports film and the arts, science and invention, and the freedom to be whatever you want to be? Watch a thousand flowers bloom! We've entered a new era, and if I could sum up our collective first thought of this new era, it is this: Anything Is Possible.

An African American has been elected President of the United States! Anything is possible! We can wrestle our economy out of the hands of the reckless rich and return it to the people. Anything is possible! Every citizen can be guaranteed health care. Anything is possible! We can stop melting the polar ice caps. Anything is possible! Those who have committed war crimes will be brought to justice. Anything is possible.

We really don't have much time. There is big work to do. But this is the week for all of us to revel in this great moment. Be humble about it. Do not treat the Republicans in your life the way they have treated you the past eight years. Show them the grace and goodness that Barack Obama exuded throughout the campaign. Though called every name in the book, he refused to lower himself to the gutter and sling the mud back. Can we follow his example? I know, it will be hard.

I want to thank everyone who gave of their time and resources to make this victory happen. It's been a long road, and huge damage has been done to this great country, not to mention to many of you who have lost your jobs, gone bankrupt from medical bills, or suffered through a loved one being shipped off to Iraq. We will now work to repair this damage, and it won't be easy.

But what a way to start! Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of the United States. Wow. Seriously, wow.
Yours,
Michael Moore
MichaelMoore.com
MMFlint@aol.com

Teletopia

2008-11-05T15:37:00.001-08:00

the brunswick love palace is pretty light on the white goods front.......

I was strolling around the northern edge of brunswick yesterday after dipping a toe into the remainder of the welfare state, and wandered into a whitegoods warehouse clearance thingy.....

NBC was on the tube near the till and I could hear an endless content free monologous drawl......eventually I asked the attendants what was the ACTUAL ...err... RESULT.......

they were taken aback at my whoops of joy, and asked if I'd actually "been" to America. I cracked the Aussie keeping it real cred and went "yeah, mate, I was there last year. Loved it. the Yanks hated Bush. My sister in Law is getting a green card. this is good news."

I wans't quite sure of how political to be to 2 blokes that had just sold me a blender and a toaster oven on credit. After the above, the guy looked at me and said "Make sure you keep your receipt for the warranty"

I strolled down Sydney road under the baking fug of november clouds, feet shaken by the throbs from the street machine noise factory; started to parch out at Franco Cozzo's and started sniffing around for for some water. Inner Suburban Melbourne is very different from central amsterdam and doesn't really do the small takeway snack outlet thing. (Oh, Febo where art thou?) Most of the hot bread shops are 'bakery cafe's' and most of the el cheapo cuisine joints are pizza parlours or some kind of restaurant experience... I'm still a sydney gal who likes to swill as I stride so I had to think about my habits, and my needs and what was around me.....

I saw the retreat and I caved in...... Went and ordered a "Schooner of Pub Squash" at the bar. the barperson looked at me and said "you're from New SOuth Wales, aren't you?" and showed me a pint glass. "Oh, yeah".........

sitting, sipping a pint of lemon squash outside, and rearranging my shopping I pondered the strangeness of the so almost familiar. Same language, same culture... bt these tiny little points of spaital difference, the minute topographies of a flat city gridded into tramtracks, train lines and baking asphalt, bright flowers and wrought iron on parching lawns and nature strips. Ubiquitous utes and technicolour boganmobiles with bodykits and mag wheels... An infinite ecotopia of cute girls on bicycles, (the sporty, the girly, the skinny, the curvy, the butch, the boho..........) tho I still haven't found a site to collect the queer rags in my poundable circuit...... (surely they have gay and lesbian venues northwest of fitzroy?)

I repacked my white goods, lugged them home, grilled some capsicum, made some hummous and toasted some manoush with Zatar, it was all good.

Loving the Nags

2008-11-04T16:08:00.000-08:00

I'm back at my desk peeping out the window for touches of blue. Sadly all I can see - is the shiny bonnet of some car in the carpark......

Melbournia seems to mainly consist of 2 variations of clouds: heavy grey sodden cold ones - or scary baking paper style sky coverings - on sweltering humid days that have no rain......

Anyway - at least yesterday was a beautiful sunny basking kind of a day....

Rennaissance girl and I hoofed it over to a mates BBQ where we sat in a backyard dozing and murmuring and giggling - and then briefly entering the home to 10 minutes of adrenaline fueled GLORY.....

Well - not quite.....

I love how horse race commentators alsways sound like OZ CRawl on Speed completely insanely speeded up slurring.... punctuated by "round the outside" and a breathy intake......

Kind of reminds me of Malcolm McLaren's "Buffalo Girls" - only with a different accent and different metre... but essentially it's a rhythmic spoken word soothe - accompanied by the drone of flies and that wonderful climactic ambiance of the last stretch....... as the crowds sigh and start roaring.......

I dunno why I'm trying to recuperate something that I basically think is fucked on every single level. I'm up there with Mahatir and Mohammed on the gambling thing....... I reckon it's a worthy tax on those who can't do maths, and a hand cutting offence for those who profiteer from it.....

and the whole bush bogan snobbery factor makes me puke.......

Anyway- cup day was a worthy conclusion to another breath holding feat of manic screeds.... doing crazy 6 hour shifts - then other 6 hour shifts.... tapping away - writing/editing/compiling/composing........

Sometimes I think it would be nice if writing wasn't so bloody INTENSE.

I had a vague hope that doing a tome would force me to be less insane about writing and my undergraduate habits of procrastinating into a feverish wallow of self loathing before bursting into a mad-panic flight of adrenalin fueled insanity - would be resolved... and I'd become one of those earnest dogged rational types.......

I mean wallow/panic/boom/bust/collapse cycle works well for 1500 word rants - but not for 90 000 words surely..... alas - and this is a very sorry admission....... It hasn't changed - just intensified........ My mental "sound bytes" now consist of 10 000 word chunks - imagined in an instant and executed in a sleepless sweaty mania......

I eat too much, don't move, don't wash, grunt at Renaissance girl and trip over the cat......

Having realised that writing is rewarding but insane unhealthy and unsustainable, I'm kind of wondering what I should take up next as a rational form of income sustenance........

So i'm off to ye olde dole shoppe to see what vestige of the welfare state I can call upon to feed my eating disorder and pay the rent while I keep tippy taping away......

OHHHHHH GOOOOOOODDDDDD

2008-11-01T03:05:00.000-07:00

I'm having SERIOUS procrastinitis issues

I've been faffing around in extremis dodo avoiding writing up.reediting/amending some article that I wrote AGES ago for some publication.... and I've gone beyond a point of such abject stupidity where I can't even write a sentence and I've been facebooking myself stupid, and sewing gratutious vulvas (Last night it was gratuitous pink & silver Kylie minogue faggot vulvas in tribute to the repressed selves of Jake and Ines coz we were watching Brokeback Mountain) and indulged EVERY SINGLE eating disorder I can mention (icecream, tim-tams, cheese singles, cheese spread, peanut butter on toast, dahl, duck, 2minutes noodles, brown rice, finnish licorice, wasabi peas, blueberries, silverbeet, etc... etc... etc......

and I havne't seen any art, and I haven't done any exercise, and I haven't done any writing, and I didn't go to reclaim the night, and I haven't had any beer, and I haven't seen any friends except that one friend I randomly ran into by chance, and I'm got the PERFECT PLACE to work hard and not be distracted.... but fuck o fuck - life sans horror crises pressure is..... WHAT?

Boring

It's TIME to pull my finger out

but...... my brain is stifled, stuffed, stupid, slow

Leaving the Cave

2008-10-17T13:09:00.000-07:00

Racked by insomnia and deprived of industrial strength bleach, I've decided to take out my makeover tendencies out on my blog.

After subsisting for 3 months without the internet at home (gasp!) I've finally returned to the land of the undead, and so - hope to resume more regular posting......

I'm also a bit scared that I've let facebook take the place of blogging - and - it's so dodgy, really.....

and it's been a BIG year so far...

In brief - Renaissance Girl dragged me south and I now find myself happily ensconsed in the Brunswick Love Palace. Much conjugal felicity ensues and - we even have a cat. It's so sapphicly blissful I could.... well.... smile! A lot. and i do.

Melbourne is *weird* - and I can't quite believe that I've left my beloved blue city of cliffs and seagulls for wide flat streets and endless grids of wrought iron brick bungalows......

and the weather is truly shite - I'm glad I spent a full 15 months in sydney - basking i temperatures of the low to mid to high 20's for most of the year. Melbourne doesn't really do weather in the 20 degree range - it kind of veers from the teens (11, 14, 19 degrees) right up to the low thirties. In a single day.and back again. they blame the weather on Adelaide.

No one ever warned me about melbourne heat - so it's quite a shock to realise that i've moved somewhere that is often scorchingly hot. There's been a drought here for the past decade - so it ain't really green or gardenish - and watching the spring flowers wild and fry in the slowly emerging summer is a bit depressing..... I can hardly bear to look out the windows when the tram passes through the browning savannah of Parkville (and we're still in spring) - and sometimes I glumly muse that Melbourne veers from all grey to all brown - without the vivid blues and tropical floriade of sydney..... and I sigh.

I discovered another other source of chromaporia just down the road.... In trying to reinstate my bookish habitus, I got a tram down to melbourne uni and went to an art history seminar..... which - content wise was pretty bloody amazing actually - but I had a moment of blinding horror and near hsyteria..... err.... wathcing the audience memebers enter - and witness ALL THE ART ACADEMICS WEARING BLACK. I don't just mean the odd pair of faded jeans, a t-shirt, or a jacket - but the fully fledged raven look; muted hair, tailored flowing robes of fine light absorbing garments around the small wraith like forms of the females, and impeccably tailored, impeccably noir shirts and jeans for the menfolk. I'd joked about this in sydney - washing ut the last of the orange dye from my hair, and buying a black leather jacket - but here confronted with a monochrome swarm of screaming class conformity I shuddered and quickly slunk out the back of the lecture theatre.....

Such traumas make it a bit hard to stay motivated for my tome completion - but that's what i'm here for - the final sweaty slog of editing, reshaping, structuring...... all in the absence of distraction from teaching, parties or bright colours......

I went and bought bright pink curtains for the study

Weeds from the Popes Garden

2008-07-17T20:08:00.001-07:00

got this from the eggs benedict site - delightful! delightful!

Sadly the swarming morass of hypocritical humbug has left my throat in a pus-filled sore, red swollen hell and I've been confined to the mayhem cave all week.

Extreme grumpiness ensues

Bourdieu and Nietsche

2008-06-14T00:48:00.001-07:00

An Unlikely combo, surely!

but I've had both on my mind lately (among many other things... it's been a hectic few months)...

I guess it started with the cartwheels I was performing for my students trying to initiate them into the joys of Pierre- and particularly his notion of habitus as this great little sticky sociocultural phenomenological prosthesis between us and it/the other/stuff... what spewtown bohos used to call "aura" - the sticky mire that enables us to be socially mobile, or mired in our own socially deforming crust of......psychic fixity

….and that's where Nietsche came in - or at least Deleuze's take on his idea of ressentiment which is frogophile for Resentment - kinda.... oh and so much more....

Anyway - somewhere between the cartwheels and dodgy powerpoint lectures on habitus in 2 countries, and peripatetically slaving away at the tome, and moving house, and packing my studio into a box, and throwing away a heap of stuff, and falling in love.... I seem to have hurt my back.

My yoga teacher recommended AdhurVirasana - which I always want to call Adorno Virasana - which is such a lame wanky pun that only about 3 people in the universe would understand and they would all moan, so I won't attempt to translate my feeble grasp of sanskrit here - but, in any case, it's not eliminating the pain - and I haven't got the time to spend all day with my toes together, knees apart, buttocks resting close to my heels as I stretch my arms and hands forward, and take pressure off my back, coz I still have STUPID amounts of work to do- and that's not even touching the sides of my thesis.....

So - I'm left with a minute re-imagining of pain, the specificity of pain, how it shapes me, shapes my thoughts, my movements and being in the world......

I find migraine (the blinding headache bit at least) a kind of euphoric pain - it's SO INTENSE that I end up staggering around in a kind of haze - sort of blown away by the intensity - and forced to be vacant and calm, gliding around feeling detached and wafty....... It's excruciating - but harmless so I've learnt to relax into it and moan softly, and try and stay upright till it passes.

Whereas back pain - or this precise digging between my spine and shoulder blade is a stiffening, slowing, irritating pain -with about the same intensity and irritation of period cramps - so I can't concentrate on anything, and hunch my shoulders further, and dream of being at home alone with unguents and muscle relaxants......

this particular spot of physical torment has a very precise history. My year 2 teacher was a sadistic Nun who terrorised the whole class, and hit us on a weekly basis (this was in 1978). Generally she'd whack us with a ruler on the right hand , which would consequently turn red and swollen and throb too much to hold a pencil and would consequently get hit again. (It made me pretty glad to be left handed). I was never really sure why we got hit (we were 7!) and always too scared to ask. I was also too scared to ask to go to the bathroom, and used to spend the entire day trying to control my bladder. As my classmates unfailingly still remind me I failed twice.

There were worse things than getting the ruler on the hand though. One day we were going over the results of a spelling test in class, and she came behind me to ask me how I'd spelt some word, and discovered that I didn't have the sheet in front of me. (I'd missed the test because I'd been away with the mumps). THUMP! She struck her fist into my back, driving her ring into this precise point between my shoulder blade and spine and winding me in the process. All of us would try really hard not to cry - but that day - tears involuntarily sprung to my eyes, and I went red. The pain, powerlessness and humiliation were mixed into this one bruising sensation. I held my breath, and spent the next few minutes swallowing the lump in my throat, feeling ashamed that I couldn't demonstrate my ability to spell (my nerdiness started early), helpless that I'd missed the test, embarrassed that I was about to start crying in class, and physically weak and tired (I'd only just returned to school).

I'm not just trying to earn people's pity from blabbing sob stories about my own child abuse - because I'm more intrigued about how corporeal punishment actively shapes our subjectivities. Particularly when it is performed in public settings like schools, and becomes part of a collective social memory - such as among my classmates, and our families. Corporeal punishment didn't get phased out of catholic primary schools until the 1980's, and only recently has become acknowledged as a form of child abuse - and some of our parents admit that they didn't challenge the practice of one none terrifying, beating and abusing their seven year old children because many of them had also been physically and mentally abused by far worse teachers in their own childhood.

In terms of class, culture, society and habitus - the proliferation of child abuse within the catholic system actively worked to create docile humble bodies, that experienced systemic power as something external and uncontrollable. It happens much less so now - but I'd say that up until 20 years ago - you could almost smell the difference between recovering catholics and others - particularly in sites like universities - because this sense of powerlessness, being hard done by, and ressentiment - was so fixed in - not only to the psyche but the very physicality of our being. ressentiment - is not just resentment - (which is a feeling) - but according to Nietsche - it becomes something that is essential to the ontology of 'slaves' - or those intrinsically neurotic, powerless, subaltertan, reactive 'non-monadic' beings that incapable of confidence or change.

I go a bit queasy when I start reading or thinking of the essences of things - so rather than giving an ontological account of ressentiment and slavishness - I'd much rather consider it as habitus - a deeply encrusted mode of bodily becoming - often defined from without and within which our very mode of being in the world - our capacity to encounter, apprehend and challenge it - becomes fixed or limited. One of the reasons why I love the habitus , is that it makes those sneaky ephemeral bits of bodily becoming that contribute to essentialist ideas of selfhood and agency (things like charm, ease, confidence, charisma, aura etc) actually describable, traceable, articulated and changeable. Good old marxist that he was, Bourdieu cannily linked such material facets of social relationships to socio-economic analysis, and I still love him for it. the habitus can be articulated, and modes of being - can be isolated, altered and instructed. there are ways of appearing to be at ease in ones clothes, or one's room, or one's class, that can make a transition from being a shiteating scum of the earth to a schmic meister of monadic deterritorialisation a fairly transparent and accessible possibility for a lot of people.

I am on the very last leg of the transformation of subjectivity that is the completion of A TOME. Tomes are not just about writing a ninety thousand word essay - but involve an intense process of 'self-making' and negotiating our own formation as high-functioning subjects of the knowledge economy. It's not just about wearing a puffy hat and getting letters before your name instead of after it, but an enormous amount of complex psychic negotiation of upward social mobility conducted in the absence of financial and consumer reward.

In the real world - we get to negotiate our social mobility through the acquisition of consumer goods that convey our status. In PhD land - you stay fairly poor - and stuck in some weird adolescent limbo of university grants, and odd bits of teaching/research work proffered like delightful glinting carrots designed to egg us along towards a possible future as a tenured academic. So a lot of the appeal is in our heads. As is most of the work. It's the nature of the beast. A heady mix indeed.

I've reached that last little bit where the nice eternal sunshine of the spotty mind is coming to an end, the scholarship is over, and I'm having to undertake payable work in exchange for the cash I need to pay rent and eat. The end of my scholarship coincided with the end of my 9 years of VERY cheap rent and tenured housing. Extracting myself from the compound (where Abel still resides) was a hideous, drawn out and painful process that took 3 months and left me feeling persecuted, powerless and paranoid for most of the autumn. I put my head down, worked hard and hid myself away.

About 6 weeks ago - I started feeling REALLY OVERWHELMED and started to involuntarily hunch while I walked - clutching my cramping gut, which felt like it had been kicked in. I was going from my performing monkey act in front of students to my monastic setting of my flat, facing the tome, various books, lots of cockroaches and complete silence.... It was a pretty weird space to be in. My mobile phone was dying, and I have no landline or internet access at home so I felt completely alone there - mostly in a good way, but it was still uncanny... My mornings were always blissfully peaceful - but I was staying out teaching or writing until 10pm most nights, so home felt like a weird cave where I’d cower and hide, until I felt I could face the world again. Mind you, it’s a pretty cozy, fruit filled, book-lined cave with a backyard and nice but unobtrusive neighbours, so I’m not exactly slumming it.

But I’m intrigued by the gaps and contradictions within and between the various facets of my new adult life. Like being sent overseas and given a daily living allowance equivalent to my weekly living allowance here, and working out how to cover my patched underwear and homecut hair with enough clean second hand clothes so I could fit in as an authoritative member of the cashed up university community. And trying not to scream at tenured colleagues for delays and misestimates in my pay, while wincing at the extra interest accruing on my visa debt as I wait to be reimbursed for work I’ve already done, and look for more work, in order to earn more money to keep my overdraft fed, my bills payable, my fridge full.

It is at the tail end of my PhD, when I’ve been released from the security of a stipend, that I’m resenting my colleagues and my life the most. I’m resenting those admin and academic staff who have their own office, or who have a fixed position and who aren’t surviving semester to semester. I resent the vagueness of senior lecturers who haven’t worked out academic calendars or timetables, and I resent the Byzantine machinations of university administrators. I resent colleagues who aren’t studying as well, resent my students who aren’t studying enough, resent friends who work but don’t study and ask me When are we going to catch up? I want to scream at them NEVER!!!! This resentment is pretty much about me having a bit of a tanty, and feeling a bit tired and scared about everything, really, but it’s interesting what it does to my body.

Feeling precarious and persecuted in one area of my life, I started to hunch my shoulders and cower generally, and how this habit of hunching and cowering has strained my back... which leads to more hunching and cowering because I'm in pain, and stiff and sore. Bent back, hunched shoulders, cricked neck; I can’t see properly, can’t focus, can’t walk, can’t breathe. I stagger around lugging bags onto public transport, not knowing where I’m going or why. I jump to attention responding to things, I feel pressured, and tired. I feel I haven’t got enough time, and I feel like I waste the time I have; because I’m not writing, and I’m not painting, I’m not exercising enough and I’m not doing a lot of things that I wish I could.

Part of me wishes I was 12 months in the future, living with my squeeze (the summer romance has definitely blossomed) instead of squeezing study and work from my tired brain and exhausted body. A big part of me wishes I was in some imaginary fairy land – of those fleeting pure moments of writing – just writing, of feeling calm, and focused and inspired and capable. These times exist beyond the circumstances of material security or temporal pressure – but come and catch me in the strangest of places, and at the oddest times. Like most crazy nutters who study or create big things like Tomes, these fleeting moments of ecstatic absorption are why we give ourselves over to the impossible.

Universities are interesting because they allow space to imagine that such states could exist on a regular basis – even while doing everything possible to restrict and confound such intellectual creativity. I’m trying to find a form of paid work that gives me enough mental space to keep seeking those moments of bliss, but that won’t deaden me away from being reminded that they exist. Teaching is incredibly exhausting because it involves constantly working to convince students of the possibility and delight of learning – but those moments where they do make discoveries and challenges are almost as rewarding as when I make them in my own work. Academic work also gives me a bit of a boost to my imagined sense of cultural capital, even if I do have patches sewn into my socks. There are many places where I don’t even know how to move, because the habitus of entitlement, of prestige, of social aspiration and intellectual vacuity is so completely alien to the way I know how to make the world bearable. My habitus is linked to a form of ressentiment , and paranoia, but also to a naïveté and joy, in a delight in new people and new ideas, and a visceral disgust with the dead hand of competitive advantage, increased turnover, and coercing people to do something that they don’t want to do. It’s why I can’t work in retail or promotion, and why I’m scared of hairdressers and sales assistants.

Back to my back, and breathing into this sore point, trying to twist and turn and cursing my inability to pay for the 5 visits to a chiropractor that would probably solve the problem, I’m trying to discover different ways of sitting, standing, sleeping. Trying to find a different way to be in my body and in the world, trying to find the physical ways to negotiate an ever shrinking psychological space between what I need to do, what I should do and what I’d like to do. Bodily learning is slow, and I find myself mouthing incantations from yoga at the strangest of moments, where I surprise myself at my ability to discover a pose, to find the words in Sanskrit, and ever so fleetingly to find the prahna, the calm, balance and poise of being in my body and my mind. Discovering my limits and my capacities is exhausting, but exciting too, but letting go of old habits, moving out of my habitus into zones of discomfort and unfamiliarity is often just hard.

Not drowning waving

2008-02-20T23:40:00.000-08:00

She has a moniker even more Shakespearean than my own. Incredibly feminine, which she is not; indelibly literary which she is. Like the sage progeny of a mad king, she has a feminine grace, strength and calmness. And she came out of hell and madness, took me by the hand and now leads me to the light. Am I smitten? Yes. She swept me off my feet carrying me into oceans of sunlight glistening, green water swirling, her mouth grazing mine, her eyes holding my own desperate stares, and this time I’m not flailing in my needs, my desires, my fantasies, but sensing something else growing between us.

While desperately hoping that this mashed up thing in my chest doesn’t get mangled again, I’m quietly trusting that it probably won’t, and if it does… well… I haven’t respected someone this much for a long time, at least not someone I desired, and maybe somewhere between desire and respect there’s some form of trust. It’s a very odd feeling but a nice one.

How do I write of the textures of our encounters, clambering, clutching, crawling… discovering our insides and edges and fine smooth surfaces? Can I write in colour alone? Without the slow crumplings of velvet, the gossamer of fine threads, the slick of honeyfucking, mango juicing sliding coloured coming? She is the mystery of dark brown corduroy, the musky thrill of black leather, the softness of emerald velvet, the reassuring firmness of polished metal, the warmth of wood. She’s the madness of tangerine pulp, the brilliance of cerulean, the fearful intensity of yellow, the passion of burgundy, pink blushings under our cheeks, caramel wrinkles between our thighs… I’m seeing colour, smelling colour, sensing singing sighing in colour.

Like she says, it’s all good.

Rat Running

2008-02-11T03:05:00.001-08:00

I've seen the main quad at midnight too many times this summer.
I think I know all of the campus security guards
My broken hairs are scattered over the desk
Layers of my scum are building up on the edges of the keyboard

At times my mind races incredibly - I skimmed through foucault's the order of things yesterday, digging in, foraging bits, throwing them together in some crazy soup.

At other times I feel like Lautreamont's character in the chant du maldoror... welded to this desk, I feel accretions of this space, of me, are slowly fusing into their own (gasp) becomings.

Maybe I should have gone to yoga tonight.

I have spent so many hours here, mouth shut, fingers splaying, dancing fits across the keyboards.... pulling my hair, pissing, drinking a lot of water, timing myself by my bladder, my my mouth, the rhythms of the air conditioning....

I live off fruit, muesli, 2-minute noodles, choy sum, couscous, tinned tuna, cheese singles, peppermint tea.

I've given up coffee.

this is terrifying, exhilarating, delightful, delirious intensity. Somewhere in the middle of this i've fallen madly in love.

the tome. the end. it's not far now.

I won't be finished by the time I'm 37, but hopefully before I'm 38.

chapter's writhe their way out of me, squirming strange delights - of schlonky typing, poor referencing, footnotes trailing off into half thoughts... to many conclusions! not enough signposting! so many openings, endless openings opening endlessly up before me.....

and now I have found another book roughly in my area - which I have to repudiate in order to hedge my little piece of scholarly turf... which is one of the strangest amalgams of conversational philosophy and catty critique I've ever come across.

I remember looking at my paintings 6 years ago and thinking "christ! they are as idiosyncratic as the wrinkles on my vulva!' and here again I'm confronted with my own insistent subjectivity... madcap adenoidal ramblings through skeins of ideas, conversations, propositions.... seventy five thousand words and counting.....

so... yeah, slowly... so slowly it's chugging along

discount dreams

2008-01-19T22:38:00.000-08:00

things were getting pretty dismal for a bit.

I knew I'd reached completely new lows when i found myself inadvertently cruising the manager of the local two dollar shop. I'd been standing around, with my newly shorn neck exposed as I flipped desultorily through the discount CD's.... and she came up to me, asked if I needed some help, and said they had more CD's under the counter.

This had never happened before, in a two dollar shop. she had a toned down version of the dykey patchy foiled up tortoiseshell hairdo, and she looked at me and I looked at her, and blushed, and selected a generic compilation of miles davis. Met her eyes as I made my purchase, scurried home to wank over torrid fantasies of fucking to bags of glitter and ribbon and feathers fluttering around us... A TWO DOLLAR SHOP ROMANCE!?? Unlimited dressups for scragg... - the stuff of tinsel and dreams.

The next day I went back, courage in my throat... lurked in the aisles again eyeing off bottles of discount soft drink... she faced me head on and asked what I was looking for. "Err.... bubble Wrap?" I stammered. 'We've got none here" was her curt reply. Damn. I scurried off. Sulked, sadly and stupidly wondering who I was trying to fool.

At the real home for xmas, I collapsed, felt myself on the verge of losing something of myself. No, I mean, really. It was the first time for ages that I had really big doubts about what the hell i'm doing with my life.

At night, stalking around at sunset, I wandered past the best christmas lights in town. The house, a magnificent Mcmansion single level bungalow, could have come straight out of the shire, or the US midwest. big house, big car, big roly poly family. Cosy, comfortable, secure. I recognised the matriarch, and blushed, scurrying around the corner. thirty years ago she'd been the object of my torment. I'd found her impossibly stupid and thick and dull and compulsively bit and scratched her, only moderating my torments after being given a demonstration stroke of the cane. I'm finding it hard to articulate what my 5 year old assessment of her intellectual prowess was given that neither of us could read, but she was like a slow old cat - and I was a hyperactive myopic maniac. (So little has changed - I still experience similar levels of visceral rage around really slow, stupid or stoned people that I have to walk away fast so I don't bite them on the face). So – she inside, ensconsed in consumer luxury, a loving hubby and kiddies, and the same job for 20 years.. and me, outside, half mad, heartbroken, alone, and childless… trying to reinvent a world that I often don’t really feel like being a part of.

I had really big doubts about EVERYTHING at that moment.

Like why Do I react, and rebel, and fight and squabble and grumble against everything? Why can’t I be complacent and content and happy? I don’t think I’m that much better off for having so much insight into everything? Or so many books? Or degrees? I went home and swallowed phenergan.

The next day I got up, and walked up to the local bottlo. “How ya goin?” they asked, “Can we help ya with anything?” “I’m Crap” I responded. “I’m tossing between a slab of UDL and a bottle of spirits… what do you reckon?”. They looked a bit surprised and remained silent. I got the disco themed bottle of Absolut and took it home, to wash down the Phenergan with some DVD’s.

Sometimes I wonder if the chinese calendars are correct after all. I hadn't spent time alone and single back in the cnutry for 12 years, and it was the first time in 12 years that I'd gone out alone drinking, facing faces familiar and strange, trying to recite the old stories of why i'd left.... make my life into something that could be recuperated into the verbiage of respectable rural australian values.....

And I passed, really well. Scored an interview on the local radio. Nice expert. And I managed to go out and not score myself any attentions from local lads or the Sappho of Bilo. I spent xmas eve on the verandah of one of my old friends, joking about the joys of living in a redneck inbred rugrat farm with her hubby, and sinking stout from a tallie around the Barbie, and trying to feel half human. And xmas was OK really and I came back to Sydney, and didn’t meet any more jailbait on the train thank god coz the seven hour monologue by the last escapee from silverwater had done my head in, and I was back here home safe at last… and I don’t often seek refuge in alchohol, but lately I have, coz things got really really bad for a while, and alcohol numbs the brain, shuts up my head, kills the cells that make me such a fractious neurotic miserable shit, and when I’m alone, all alone with this, with me, with my thoughts, and everyone around me looks calm and content, and slow and stupid, I think… “fuck, WHY should I try to be different?”

That’s when I have to get out.

The country nearly kills me sometimes… the endlessness of neatly mowed, fenced off contained smug LAND. With cows and trees and tractors and electric fences, and it’s all owned and proper, and it goes forever and there’s nothing at the end of it. You look out and see you future, wind up and circle back to where you started. Here is Nowhere. Here is hell.

Back in Sydney, where even the air feels like a skanky teenage armpit, I feel freer, like there’s a reason to fight for breathe among the fug of flowers, sweat, traffic and humidity. Catching buses to the edge of the land – to strange littorals between sea and water, on the edges of cliffs, watching waves hurl themselves against rocks, heaving and smashing themselves like my mad ambitions. I love it, I feel alive, delighted, so incredibly calm by comparison……

After the hell of last year, something miraculous happened, and it has given me just enough hope that maybe things aren’t as fucked as they seem. I’m not just talking about Hunt Coward being ousted – but about something else, that has made me feel that being a reactive neurotic fractious bastard doesn’t sentence me to a life of isolation and torment. That there are decent people around, and I don’t have to pretend and play and put up with shit. That I don’t have to play dead to survive, or put up with people who do. That I can speak and write and act, and some people will eventually listen and respond with something more than superficial syconphancy or terror. My rage feels less mute, my heart less smashed up.

cordiality

2008-01-04T21:59:00.000-08:00

That moment when it all unravels, when word becomes flesh, when thought processes collapse alongside boundaries, when you can’t see and can’t stop and blindly throw yourself forward into the firing line or the abyss or the sky or the sea or the oncoming traffic and there’s no way to tell what is coming next but only that it is inevitable. Propelled by a force somewhere between epiphany and complete breakdown, running to or possibly from, a safe space to shed skin and share scars, coming to in a puddle of sweat, hurt and scared and distressed and mute and shaking and bewildered and above all grateful. You’re not the girl you think you are.

the above bit comes from zoo who hadn't posted in AGES but it was well worth the wait

I've got some great friends innit?

Is it just me who falls in love with people from their words? who reads philosophy with tears in my eyes? who shudders with excitement to meet other writers? who finds the mad midnite reading of others words almost as intimate as staring into a lover's eyes?

We burnt Lang's diaries this week. two of her closest friends. two friends who fell in love with her words, and ideas and dark secrets. two people who she showed them to. words to make your hair fall out. words that burn into you eyes and leave a dark sad stain on the soul.

she'd read one section to me nearly 12 years ago. We sat in Tamana's North Indian diner and her voice hardened as my eyes filled with tears and I shook. I don't know what book it was. I didn't want to look, didn't want to open up her secrets if she wasn't here to offer them.

She begged us to burn them. We promised we would if we had to.

I wish we didn't have to, wish we didn't have to sit, drunkenly, sobbing silently into the night, tearing out each page, not daring to look as we scrunched them one by one,feeding them slowly on the barbeque.

Half way - the skies opened and pissed down on the fire, the soggy balls of paper, our sodden faces. I bought more beer, we found vodka and sat in the rain and kept tearing. The rain stopped. we swilled vodka and splashed it on the paper, relit the fire and kept burning.

book burning.

how many books unwritten, sclerified in her crippling limbs, murdered by her pain. Her body choking on it's own memories, seizing up and finally killing her, her dreams, our dreams. sodden sobbing misery.

today we wandered down to waverley cemetery. the ocean was crazy, cliff crashing waves, thundering and spraying us beneath a rare slate sky. We threw the ashes down into the water. Let her words follow her flesh. Let her words follow the sanctimonious lies of he who cannot be named, we let her words follow her flesh, burning brilliant words, cleaning and being cleaned by that beautiful heaving beast of the sea.

Salt spray met my tears and I smiled. this was a fitting sendoff.

At home in Old town

2007-12-07T22:22:00.000-08:00

I've got 2 places that I refer to as 'home' now.

Curiously enough election night emphasised that division and connection really well. I'd agreed to spend the day polling with the 3 Glen Innes supporters for The Greens. So I hung out for few hours at the local uniting church, chatting convivially on the hustings, amazed at the ability of the local independent to entice One Nation supporters and Kooris to poll for him, while chatting to old schoolfriend's parents on the Nationals stall, or minding the stall for the ALP - whose supporters are close family friends. Two of the greenies were ageing hippies who'd only been in the district for 25 years, and only found acceptance with 3 generations taking root in the town.... so the nationals supporters were strangers to them, previously hostile political and social opponents - whereas most people at school knew I was left of Gough Whitlam (I hadn't heard of Che Guevara then) so me coming out as a greens supporter wasn't a big surprise. Even thought it drives me nuts - and I *can't* really live there, there is a familiarity and ease about the place and my contrariness feels grounded and accepted. But there to be educated, to be queer, to be an artist, *is* contrary and eccentric; an oddity to be tolerated, or a phase to be ignored like a bad haircut perhaps.

Even though there was an election night party planned at a house of some family friends, I'd felt an incredibly strong urge to be surrounded by a large amount of like minded people. I think the last minute polls promoting a swing to Howard were the clincher. I knew if he got back in that I'd need to get very very drunk and commit harikiri with a large group of like minded people, rather than silently sob at home, and share my hopeless gloom with the 25 lefties in town. Mum - bless her - agreed to drive me 100kms to the airport so I booked a ticket for the night time.

Armidale Airport is even more desolate than the Ryanair terminal at Pirrkala in Finland, and with a downpour - things looked hopelessly gloomy. but In the sky - somehow I had a strange sense of joy - which could have been from the weird clouds, or the complimentary wine, but by the time I got in a cab home - Barnaby Rudge was already calling defeat, and I could barely keep my mouth closed with delight.

At home, with the sun setting, I could hear people calling to each other in the streets of Erko - announcing results from cars and house windows. I looked up the results online and let out a shriek of delight. I ran downstairs to tell the neighbours but everyone was lost in a weird cloud of..... collective bonhomie; a common state for the compound which seems to be oblivious to the world on a number of levels (Ah dystopia such a bittersweet opiate!) So I frocked up as SCRAGG and ran up the street. Briefly saw Abel and her Mum - and blabbed delightedly in french. they were also oblivious to the result, but were convivial at least...

Up at Newtown Bridge, someone had erected a large screen and set up decks, and a large gathering of multigenerational rif-raf were standing and swilling and cheering with delight as the results came through. This was fucking perfect. I saw a lot of old friends. I saw the tom cat who ignored me as studiously as I ignored her (sometimes I'm REALLY sick of being a lesbian). Then saw a lot of new friends and forgot the sapphic angst. I lost scragg's 6-pack of bundy and bought some Guinness. then found the 6 pack. I got woefully drunk. Had a bit of a nostalgia moment, ostetatiously spraying my piss over parked cars with some old feminazi mates.... then tried to negotiate getting to the after-party with various drunken mates. We were all to drunk to read a street directory, or direct a cabbie. Finally made it as 3 vanloads of riot cops seemed to be screeching around the corner determined to use up the leftover APEC budget. It was 2am and there were people EVERYWHERE. This felt like home.

today, checking facebook, I came across yet another tiny group that a few friends had signed up to. The OLD Newtown (Sydney) 1992 - 1999 currently has 124 members, mostly comprised of the white thirtysomething creative class that typically sign up to facebook, and like to flaunt our subject formation as much as a series of affiliations, aspirations and lifestyle choices that denote the kind of social mobility, intellectual flexibility and political cosmopolitanism to which we like to be identified with.

true to form, I've joined numerous minor groups including reunion societies for student politicians, and even a tongue in cheek fanclub for a DJ mate... actually 'DJ' is an understatement for a luminary of ye olde vintage raver project of the Temporary Autonomous Zone of sound and silly arm waving, but I'll leave that for another time...

Meanwhile something about The OLD Newtown (Sydney) 1992 - 1999 was making me feel a little queazy.

I think one of my earliest posts on this blog (3 years ago, sigh!) was about the changes to Newtown as it moved upmarket, and cranky old codger that I am, I continue to lament the increasing impossibility of sustaining an oxymoron even in freeform writing like weblogs... err... I mean the increasing discomfort I feel around my olde barrio as it shifts upmarket. I CAN'T AFFORD to buy food there, let alone clothing. the cafe's look tacky and frightening and so do the pubs. there are maybe 4 places that I'd even consider going for a meal, and I do largely consider King Street as a convenient and well lit stretch between my home (the compound) and my work (the uni) - for which I'm so incredibly lucky that I feel like a total wanker for whingeing about having to get a train to buy groceries.

Maybe I just have a probelm with the dates. In my half life of sydney residencies I've lived in the following suburbs:

Homebush for 3 months
Dulwich Hill for 6 months
Camperdown for 6 months
Erskineville for 18 months
Enmore for 3 years
Randwick for 1 year (shudder)
Petersham for 3 years
Ultimo for 3 months
the Compound for 8 and a half years (interspersed with about 18 months overseas)

the compound is on the edge of Erko, Newtown & St. Peters so even it's not actually IN newtown, and since I've only lived there since 1999 then how can I claim to be a vintage newtown resident?

from 1992-1999 I didn't live in Newtown, I didn't shop in Newtown, and I could barely afford to go to cafe's let alone eat out in Newtown (except for family dinners when Mum came to town). Until 1994 I did a lot of pasting up on King street, and from 1993 I did quite a lot of getting pissed, but does this make a local or a blow in? and what were the criteria?

Is this a society for THE NEWTOWN PRECINCT? Or for visitors to Newtown? and if it is for the latter, then how am I meant to differentiate myself as a legitimate boho visitor from the tourist wannabe scum that have apparently ruined the place since?

Of course I do play the game of Spewtown authenticity, and have played it sickeningly well for years. I was a regular at the Sando in 1989, I used to do my study in the empty front bar of the Impy back in 1991, fornicated with different genders in Camperdown cemetery in both decades of last century, Inserted people, objects and substances into various orifices in the dunnies of that pub that got renamed and renovated FIVE years ago. I used to have dreadlocks, and I shared a house with an old communist who'd lived in the Barrio in the 1950's. thanks to the Department of Housing we're both still here.

I was whingeing about the place going to the dogs (yuppies) in 1991, and screaming at Eastern suburbs 'types' sometime... well, many times, but moreso when I was living in Randwick and working full time and feeling insecure and defensive.

So, true to form, I'm going to indulge in a little bit of projection, and wonder what people are trying to hide or ignore about themselves by this need to blame a suburb for echoing the destinies of it's boho luminaries and going upmarket? I don't know many people who've stayed as poor and 'hardcore' as we were 10 or 15 years ago, but I know LOTS with full time jobs and mortgages and kids and new clothes and salon haircuts. Change happens. And I’m also a bit suss about assuming that boho students, or temporary beneficiaries of Centrelink are somehow more representative of a suburb than the other residents or consumers, like people who have worked there, old residents from before it was trendyville, kids who grew up there, the yuppies who bought into the place early, and, heaven forbid… the kooris who I think might still OWN the place.

Maybe it was the anecdote from a friend in London who’d gone out to dinner with some old student mates – who were basically a bunch of GOTHS, whingeing about now newtown had changed in one breathe and speculating on their mortgages in the next. WTF???

I DO really believe that cultural and social viability do come from the capacity of spaces and suburbs to facilitate a certain amount of socio-economic flexibility. I don’t just mean ‘diversity’ – and dumping housing commission flats in bourgie ‘burbs, but having a variety of land use and land occupation and retail development so that wonderful seductive beast of entrepreneurial capital can flourish – with or without large amounts of dosh. If an area looks like a space where lots of peeps can indulge in a variety of dreams or ideas or fantasies – then even if 80% end up being boring opportunists on the make, then even the visibility of movement, of cultural activity, of social change and mobility can offer a broader challenge to the deadening stranglehold of monopoly capital.

Shopping malls aren’t just depressing because of the low ceilings or flouro lights, but because they present and reinforce a view that the only way to buy or to sell – to get clothed and fed and have contact with people HAS to be mediated by large scale industrial capital. Big buildings, carparks, chain store franchises, mass advertising. Organised, renovated, remote, insinuating itself at a molecular level into our bodies, our eardrums, our minds…. It is spirit crushing HELL.

I resent the fact that I can’t buy my groceries along a shopping strip in my suburb, and I refuse to by fruit in a supermarket. But I can still jump on a train to indulge in my consumer preference for fruit markets and small shops, whereas most Australians can’t. In Bathurst and Glen Innes there were no fruit and vegetable shops, and fresh produce was double the price of Sydney. This change has occurred in the past 18 months, and I imagine it’s the same everywhere.

My generation of thirty something bohos have witnessed the massive increase in fossil fuel consumption in the past 15 years, and incredible decline in any semblance of sustainable agriculture or food distribution or water conservation practices. While I like the fact that I can buy 5 different brands of organic tofu within walking distance of my home, but I think that this does nothing to change the fact that my mum can only buy vegetables that have been driven two thousand kilometres, when she lives less than 300 kilometres from major fruit growing areas of Australia.

Maybe I’m lucky to regard 2 places as home – so I’m NOT insular but always looking outside, or outwards, or looking away, wondering what’s happening to the other half of my world, while simultaneously maligning or eulogising the one where I live. This means that I can’t ever see a place as purely good or bad, or see the changes that occur in one place as separate from the changes to my own life, or the changes that occur elsewhere. Maybe it’s why sometimes the political disengagement of the compound drives me nuts. I believe creativity involves actively moving outwards, responding to changes and challenges by seeking new possibilities and fighting for them, rather than sinking into a safety nest of shared values and lifestyle choices.

I find Newtown delightful and frustrating as hell, and lived through a lot of heartbreak as well as had some incredible dreams come true. I think I still love it because it has this combination of disgust and delight, and irritates me as much as it seduces me. Maybe I’m just glad that I haven’t seen window displays of pyjamas and slippers. If a Katies opens up on King Street, I’m outta there.

dlyskeisa

2007-12-07T21:56:00.000-08:00

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too
Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it

I wish I could access facebook from here

2007-11-21T03:33:00.000-08:00

It's 10.30pm and the infinite calm of a country evening is being pierced by some neighbour shrieking out "erin!" repeatedly at the top of her lungs.

I managed to write 2000 words today before the heat and incessant drone of lawnmowers drove me out into the late afternoon.

It was a perfect New England day... sunny, dry, and not too many flies.

It took me 20 minutes to walk from the southern end of town (where Mum lives) to the final street on the northern edge. I used to think it was WullaMulla street, but discovered that if I head west, that another funny little street has been created "donnegal Avenue", just off coronation avenue...and I wonder if it some kind of weird POMO gesture to reconciliation in Northern Ireland, or just another weird POMO gesture to local weirdness, like the "Welcome to Celtic Country" sign in the Aboriginal Cultural Centre, and the local Kamiliroi dude who works at the tourist centre and dresses up in a Kilt and plays the bagpipes during the celtic festival.

Things like this remind me that NOTHING I DO could ever be as eccentric as the place I grew up in, and that I am but a pale shadow of the weirdness, folly and contradictions that filled my childhood.

I think I've gone completely stir crazy. I spent a considerable amount of sunday sobbing, and then all of yesterday with THE MIGRAINE FROM HELL. I remember soaking in a lavender bath and various muffled grabbings at my pharmaceutical collection, and wanting to cry at the intense yellow of my old lunchbox, and looking at some meat in the fridge and wanting to throw up. I remember my amazement at 2am this morning when it was finally gone, and I felt human, sort of.

today I saw a couple of miraculous things that made me smile -
1) a pack of stallions running along the train line in the late afternoon sun
2) a perfectly pale blue fibro house against the bush on Wilga Street, with a perfectly bare lawn save for a mathcing white and blue caravan in the bakyard
3) a flock of rosellas in the gum trees near Mum's house
4) the wild slates and oranges of another batch of storm clouds swarming at sunset

the skies here are magnificent and *almost* match the delights of waves crashing on sydney cliffs... maybe not almost, actually, but they are pretty good. A clear sky here is a dark cerulean, amost cobalt, and the greys here are dark slate and indigo... Brittany (in france, not spears) matches them in Autumn but they are pretty special....

and I like the cacophany of bird life in the mornings, being woken by kookaburras, and seranded by plovers, those weird cuckoo things, willy wagtails and legions of lorikeets, parrots, rosellas, magpies and the odd mad screeching cocky outside my window, makes a change from the Noisy Mynahs of Erko.

I still wish I was getting the train on friday back to a crazy weekend in my crazy city, but I've planned to hang out in town for the weekend. I promised the local greens that I'd help out on saturday, and it looks like my writing is FINALLY starting to flow. I'm trying to treat this as some kind of durational endurance exercise - but... 3 weeks is a bit too much, even with a thesis to focus on. Maybe I need quality distraction.

wouldn't it be nice if this was my last blog entry under a Liberal government?

Cold Turkey

2007-11-16T02:21:00.000-08:00

woohhh Man, It's been full on, and I don't think I'm over the worst, yet.

I'm trying to break my facebook addiction.

I'm in a very strange cyberhole... as in I have *limited* connection with the outside world, and I'm trying to focus on the tome, on reading worthy books, on meditating, yoga, self improvement, reflection, walking, writing, drawing.....

On mum's dialup connection and 1990's computer I can read text of web pages but not see any images. I can open and read my facebook account - but can't reply to any messages, use any buttons, post any text, or see other peoples images let along videos....

My first feelings are anxiety - not being able to approve friend requests, or RSVP to events that I can't attend... and my feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and a desire to be acknowledged and approved of - but not contacted - are being thwarted. so I feel frustrated, and then I feel bored, or alienated. so I log out.

Email seems to be a comparatively limited platform lately - as most of the chatter I'm familiar with is occurring on the more ostentatious platform of facebook -where everyone one knows can see who one has been contacting.... exhibitionist mayhem likes this somewhat....

Maybe that's why I've gone back to blogging (hah1 as if I ever left it!). and most of my emails have been with friends OVERSEAS rather than in Sydney - sydney ffiends has mainly been about organising stuff rather than conversational exchange...

The other fallible portal has been my phone - whose reception is really dodgy here. when it works - texts still go missing or bounce - and that's just at my end. Lucky we have a landline and the post office is only 15 minutes away or I'd be freaking out.

anyway - I ran away from home to avoid the distractions of sydney and be able to exclusively focus on the tome. and, shock horror (not) I've found that the distraction is really inside my head - and without the pressure cooker sense of fighting for time to focus - without the sense of having peers around me... without a sense of immanent communication, my ability to imagine sentences, to maintain a headspace devoted to streams of thoughts about the tome - is almost impossible.

what to do?

Part of me is really loving being here. It's a nice break from everything and I'm enjoying my mum and meals in front of the TV and reading the herald and having earnest D&M's about the intricacies of social life. I'm enjoying being a daughter and bending Mum's ear with the endless processing of the Abel debacle and the endless permutations of my eggshell heart, while cooking and cleaning and squabbling about her admittedly "margaret Olley" kitchen (decorated china and potplants EVERYWHERE.... the uber clutter aesthetic of antihousework feminist working mothers in their dotage…).

I love being in the only non drought stricken part of rural NSW - seeing all the multitude shades of green that remind me of the joys of blighty back in April (and with the similar weather).. only here - the sky burns into a deep cobalt and the hills in the distance are slate and rust, wiht granite rocks and eucalypts. I like finding my way, finding my habitus back in my old home - in a similar way that I found my habitus in such foreign places as brooklyn, Manhatten, and finland earlier this year... how do I get the foods that I want? how do I set up my computer? meditate? sleep? find clothes? I've found a great masseur - probably the best I've ever visited, and attended a really crap yoga class - but doing these adult mayhem things in the town I left 20 years ago is like discovering myself and this place again.

It's strange feeling so connected to a place that I have ardently believed for 25 years to be UNLIVEABLE for me, and so remote from a place that i've called home for nearly 20. Being away for Sydney I've realised how few of my close friends still live there, and how little contact I have with people, and how little I am actually missed, when I'm not there. Partly it's the tome - I do spend lots of my life trying to isolate myself from people so I can work... but it's also a structural thing. I've had a 'partner' for most of the past decade, and so most of my friends receded to acquaintances and colleagues... 'network members'. Lots of my old peer group have moved OS or interstate as have my art school friends. It is also a fact that living in a commune means that I've rarely had to go far for company - or call friends if I want to see people - since as long as I'm not fussy, there's always people on my back doorstep - literally.

I think I'm having a big mid-life crisis or saturn returns or something (Actually I think I have those every year... call it the burden of a reflective life). A good foucaultian, I should call it a crisis in subject formation - or an asymptote in my trajectory of becoming. This isn't that surprising innit? I mean, allegedly the *thing* about PhD's is that they are a process of subject formation - the formation of a particular type of self regulating high functioning fodder for the knowledge economy - and one is meant to acquire the skills to negotiate an identity which is entirely subsumed into the performance of an intellectual labourer -without going stark raving bonkers....(I just wish I could learn to type).

This point - the last 6 months, the waters breaking moment, the gravid point of the tome - is when it's all meant to come to a head - I'm meant to be able to *let go of the past* - dump my possessions, my old friends, my roots - and devote myself to the tome, and emerge as a free floating completely mobile servant of the creative uberclass - hell! wow! gee!

Glistening prizes dangle on the other side of that screen...(which reminds me of the simple minds LP from the 80's....) travel - working interstate or overseas, a lifetime of conferences, publications, teaching, packing up and moving anywhere - anytime chasing more opportunities and possibilities, meeting amazing people, having amazing conversations, writing amazing books....

do I want this? Well, yes of course... or coarse perhaps, since I put it so crudely. Is my cynical wavering a kind of recovering catholic mephistophelean conceit? I have very little sense of entitlement to any of this (ohh god the aspirational angst of the departing working classes... big yawn)

My life right now is ten times more brilliant than anything I could have dreamt of 12 years ago - which probably shows how boring my dreams were - but also I feel more like I did twelve years ago than at any other time. I feel absolutely in crisis. Like I don't know who I am, who my friends actually are, who I can trust or how I am meant to negotiate the world I live in.

One of the nuttiest paradoxes is that my internal dialogues are trying to work on a sense of integrity… I’m trying to envisage my self as a singular subject that doesn’t split off – or divide other people into the bits that I like and don’t like. I’ve got intense passions towards an ideal of integrity – wholeness – sustaining a personal ethics of continuum – where my being, where my sense of awareness and communication with others can be continuous and honest… letting go of the ‘no go areas’ and avoiding people where there are unbridgeable gaps or no go areas.

At the same time – I’m engaged intellectually with Deleuzian philosophers who abandon notions of ‘the subject’ and emphasise the fleeting, the temporal, the molecular. Death to the subject! Tear down the kingdoms of the I! The idea of a ‘self’ to preserve is a Freudian Fallacy that traps us in endless internal spiral towards and ego that is only ever a figure of speech – that puts up walls to our possibilities of contact, movement and life…

My urge for a sense of ‘self’ protection and sustenance can only work with this other model if I abandon this conflict and think more about the spatial metaphors. If my urge for a ‘self’ stops me from having contact with others, from communicating and expanding and growing , and forces me to stratify the spaces around me so that my ego doesn’t collapse, then … it is ‘bad’. Hence I try to be egoless, and then I just hide in my room all day.

OK try again. If the spaces in which I find myself, if the relations around me are rigid, and striated and fixed in such a way that I can’t move, can’t communicate, can’t flow, then there is a problem and I need to get out of them. The bucolic delights of the cnutry don’t hide the fact that here – I’m incredibly self conscious of what I can and can’t do in order to participate in this society with some level of physical safety. I left schappylle in sydney. I’m not meant to swear in front of my friends kids. I could NEVER do a strip tease at the local pub, or have sex in the toilets, or flirt with women on the main street. If people here knew that is what I did, there would be a scandal. Sex belongs in relationships, in beds, in homes, in couples, in secrets. Sex is fixed, not fluid. The sexual constraints are emblematic of wider dilemmas with how impossible it is to be queer or ambiguous in any sense at all. Here, my own miscegenated angst is starkly regulated into binary relief; I am white, not black, and whites don’t talk to blacks, or socialise with them, or visit each others houses. Whites don’t usually walk places, like the 10 minutes to the shopping centre, the 20 minutes to the yoga hall, the 25 minutes to my friends farm, because to be a citizen here, is to be white, and whites drive in cars, socialise in houses, not walk on the street or drink in parks or on porches.

So why am I here? Is this awareness of external constraints choking me out of self expression? Is the sustenance of familiarity suffocating? Even at its worst I find sydney madly joyous – and place where I can have delirious release and play with EVERYTHING. There’s always an audience for mad laughter or wailing sobs – even if it just the cliffs at coogee – but so often I find the mad whirl too much, too exhausting, and I do just want to run away and hide…..

So there is not ‘answer’ – just a continuous to and from –a movement between different worlds where I am constantly ill at ease, into myself where I’m completely ill at ease most of the time – and then occasionally fleetingly content. I’ve brought philosophers with me for sustenance: alphonso Lingis ‘the imperative’ on how perception can engender ethical becomings; where the world itself makes us responsive to it; and Sarah Ahmed’s “Queer Phenomenology” whose spatial model for queerness and miscegenation made me really happy as I sat in a snow bound hut in Finland earlier this year… and ultimately her model of ‘the self’ as a motile, agitated, responsive, rather than an atomised element on a singular trajectory of social mobility.

So I’m trying to think of the tome as having enable a lot of agitation, a lot of movement sideways, obliquely, and random connections and possibilities that are, mostly incredible, and incredibly life affirming. Trying not to think of it as a step on a career path –but as, an intense process which is transforming me, but hopefully will allow for more fun impossible things to be created. If I can allow myself to feel, to imagine to create and to desire through this, then maybe it’s OK.

Misrecognition

2007-10-24T20:53:00.000-07:00

In my valiant and eternal attempts at procrastination I have just translated a letter I wrote to an Australian friend living in France - originally written in a phonetic spelling of a "fairy seek foran ucksonn" into my incredibly imperfect French.

When I read my French I can read my accent into it - it's not just the lack of punctuation, the absence of accents, or the continual reversion to imperfect past tense as a default position to disguise my complete incapacity to absorb volume two of the BLED guide to French verbs (dspite many hours of cheese inspired toilet reading).

and - I do get increasingly scared that my French will end up as disused and strange as spanish. this sounds tragic in a way, but then I wonder just how much of language - or appparent coherence in language is built on faith... we recognise what we expect to hear, what we want to hear. Language is acquired as a habit of familiarity and trust - which falls apart as soon as that trust is broken - or the familiar suddenly seems incomprehensible.

I said goodbye to 'el viejo' on the weekend. He's moving back to South America to live. He says he'll return to visit his kids, but I'm not expecting to see him again. He returned my tresses that I cut in the 5th and final year of our relationship, so I now have a complete collection of my hair for the past 17 years.

. He also gave me the photo left - which is a tiny print - which he insisted was of me and my brother - which my mother had given to him.I tried to tell him that it was not of me or my brother, but he refused to believe me.

This was really strange. I asked him which child he thought was me, and which one was my brother, and where did he think it was taken, and he said "I don't know, but your mother gave it to me". This was the sort of moments that my childhood was full of. My dad telling me continuous endless tales about myself and my family that didn't make any sense.

In Dad's favour (perhaps) he was also obsessed with mimetic technologies, taking photos and recording our voices and cutting scraps of hair. these would be brought out and displayed and replayed each time he came to visit. They were some of the very few things about the visits from my father that made sense. Mum didn't buy a camera until we moved into town, so almost all of my childhood photos before the age of 7 were taken by Dad, my aunts and uncles, or the pixie photos in town.

I remember most of them being taken, and remember hours spent looking at them, recounting the stories of when and where they were taken. It's incredibly how scarcity of images produces an embellishment of words, or rituals, stories sensations and memories around the images, so they become attached to ourselves - not merely through the punctum of the image itself - but in where and when they have been viewed, reviewed, explained, touched, maybe destroyed and forgotten and then remembered. I wonder if kiddies growing up in the digital age of excessive images - will relate to photographs. I see my own relationship to photographs changing as the amount of images of myself multiply - but mainly on virtual platforms - disconnected from me, my hands, from paper, my room, my family.

the photo on the right was the first pixie photo that I and my brother had done - and I think it is likely that Mum gave a miniature copy of this one to el Veijo. I think he's recognised the dark curly hair, the spotty jumpsuit as indexical elements to this image and then decided that this other photograph was identical if not the same.

But I remember the photo - where it was taken - and the past 30 years of walking past that particular pharmacy since, and remembering 'that's where we had that photo taken when I was four' It's next to the pub where I threw my t-bone steak bones onto the street - coz I's assumed there'd be dogs wanting to eat them. I remember the clothes we were wearing, and seeing them on the clothesline, and in other photos since. I remember looking at that photograph repeatedly since, and remember what I thought, what I said, what I felt - as I do with all of my other childhood photographs. I aslo recongise the features of my brother and of me. the facial gestures, my mouth, my hands, both our eyes - which I don't in the other photograph.

I tried pointing this out to el Veijo - "neither of us has eyes that far apart - we both had curly hair as kids - his eyes were black not blue - we were nearly the same age" but el veijo still wouldn't beleive me. I was incredulous that someone who'd slept with me for 5 years and lived with me for 8 couldn't see recognise my features enough to tell me apart from some other child in a photograph, and I wondered what sort of relationship I even had with him.

I still wonder, and I wonder about representation, and what happens when it doesn't work. Derrida's work breaking up representation - it's a re-presenting, but then it's also a redoing of a pre-sending - a weird kind of repetition of an act of interpretative anticipation. Derrida - recalcitrant beast that he was - tried to read more sympathetically into Martin heidegger's disdain for the detachment of representation from reality, the act of anticipation and projection of a preconceived idea of reality as a way of avoiding an engagement with it. Derrida (I think) envisaged to re pre sent as a series of temporal shifts and movements. Derrida's emphasis on temporality is deadly serious. His use of 'differance' is not a semantic game -but a passionate insistence that difference, that reality, that what we encounter as.... anything that is, is founded on a deferral - a shift in time between what is familiar and what is strange. What we know as 'us'is never given but comes to us through a process of becoming, of differentiation - and the moment of this differentiation is intricately linked with memory - a movement back and forth in time, between what we RE - cognise, what we REmember, and what is formed as memory - through a process of anticipation.

Can I admit here how much I LOVE this idea of embedding the notion of time moving forwards and backwards as we - as the world, as our capacity to apprehend, to articulate, to describe it - also involves a distinctly temporal quality? for me, it's a reminder of why history is so precious and so fragile. We cannot apprehend the present - and any attempt to do so - to represent it involves memory, projection, moving backwards and forwards between what we think we know or thought we know, anticipating what we might know, and being startled so often by our encounter with what is. My idea of myself - bound up in industrial beige consumer fetishes for mimetic technologies - for technolgies of representation aroudn which I have an accretion of habits, of words, of exchanges with others that has become my life. My memories, linked to indexical elements in childhood photographs, is still embedded in relationships and the language that I am using now. this is what forms me.

However, so many friendships or affairs seem to fall apart based on a dispute over words, or their meaning - and I find - I feel that as a soon as I find myself haggling over words, phrases and nuances in words, trying to tease apart, re-read, restate, clarify, qualify what i've said to someone - or as soon as I find someone picking apaprt my words and twisting the remainder back around my recollection of an event, my emotions, my reactions, my feelings - or my confusion - that i lose interest in saying anything at all. words seem absolutely pointless. words exist to embellish an affective connection, a weird strange sense of a shared project, or plan - or something... but they don't work as bandaids over nasty gaps in faith or feeling -but drop away.

It's the sense I had in my last conversation with my feline friend - who curled up and spat in a furious dispute over 3 words in a text message. Can an affair really fall apart over three simple words? An affair built on crazy desires, unstated needs and mad flights of fantasy probably can, and did. I was silly for ever tring to call such a fleeting thing 'friendship'. Ho hum, mayhem's judgement swayed by une belle cul yet again. One day I'll learn to walk with my head raise a bit higher, I promise.

Tormenting myself over the spiteful missive from the cane toad - I'm impressed by the power of misapprehension to allow for meaning to twist between words,and turn back again, becoming something else. My words, misheard, mistranslated doubling over themselves, as meaning trips and stumbles. I spoke to her in two languages, she wrote to me and spoke only in one. Her command of English almost as appalling as my French, using the misrecognition... yelled became yeild, and my cries of pain became distorted into an accusation of violence.

She said she could press charges against me... for what I wonder? "Yielding and crying"? Australian police have a history of harassing and incarcerating aboriginies for being in a position of vulnerability and disposession in the face of colonial invasion, but I'd hardly describe indigenous marginalisation as 'yielding'. So is 'yielding and crying' a crime? And was I yielding? or yelling? I'm not sure that I raised my voice that much, but I could be wrong. One of my housemates described my requests that she turn out the lights when she left the house as a "bollocking" -so maybe I am more forceful than I realise.

Where images failed, now words fail and have failed, and yet here I am, circulating the images, and surrounding them with words to somehow make things alright. words and images, becoming like some sort of fetish to ward off the evil eye - or the evil spirits, or just evil. In the misrecognised photograph I felt undone by doubt - I doubted my childhood - then doubted my relationship - and then in the cane toads posting - her differing account - again I wondered if I'd made everything up. If I was just acting after all. am I acting, what am I playing at? and why would I bother. Is "yeilding and crying" such a compelling fantasy for me?

and why the hell is it, that when I move away from an impossible relationship with a French Language Teacher I end up immersed in the work of those French intellectuals who are lauded among anglophones but barely known in France. does their work only work in translation? and what does that say about me?

Dirty Laundry

2007-10-20T01:15:00.001-07:00

Sitting here at uni trying to feel less hatred for my abject lack of productivity for the past 4 hours. I've managed to go over some readings and half spellcheck the summary of some book and check my email and facebook about 3 times and eat a whole heap of sugary stuff and have a micro sleep on my desk and drink a pot of coffee and.....

I had 3 days of quality doona time, on the tim-tam meal replacement diet, unable to get the motivation to clear away the clutter of clothes and books and papers that were accumulating around my bed - actually around my body that was confined to my bed while I popped pills, passed out, gorged on books, gorged on chocolate, getting up occasionally to piss. Bribing myself with chocolate in order to force myself out to do basic things, post a letter, pick up some scripts.

Then when I woke up with a dark brown smear over my back and across my pale green sheets, I decided I had to act. fortunately it wasn't shit - just a bit of chocolate that i'd rolled over in my sleep. (really! I promise!)

So I washed my sheets, dragged myself out to yoga and back to bed for another 12 hour slumber. today - I got up, meditated, showered, cleaned and vacuumed my room. Forced myself to walk to uni wiht the promise of 4 tim tams when I got here. I havne't been able to work. Just survive. Just subsist.

Maybe I should have let myself scream hysterically at my friend's funeral instead of quietly self medicating into this slow fug of gloom. Maybe life is just a bit shit right now.

a comment from the cane toad beneath my last post - only added to my dissonant relationship with reality. Last week I somehow replied some sort of light polite response to an email from Abel's mum - who's visiting the compound in 2 weeks.... saying 'yes, I'm in the last few months of the PhD, yes i've been a bit down because a close friend died'... not "your drunken daughter and that vile cane toad she wrecked our relationship for have driven me stark raving bonkers" because it didn't seem *polite*.

Maybe I'm more english than I thought?

Maybe not. I sent some replica turds in the mail to my favourite blighty boys - and have heard nothing since. I thought they'd *like* a festy missive.....

I can see now how academics become complete aspergery freaks.

Bright young thing enrolls in PhD
Life randomly falls apart around their ears. Friends die, go mad or turn turdish
Primary relationships turn turdish
Bright young thing starts hiding at uni, burrowing themselves in obscure theory
Bright young thing decides world is completely scary
Bright young thing loses all contact wiht reality and loses basic social skills from lack of practice
Bright young thing eventually becomes a freak and gets awarded a doctorate.

the last time my life decided to become so intensely shit - I decided that acutally there was a god and I was being punished for sodomy. At risk of making the readers of this blog puke with TMI (helll when has that ever stopped me in the past?) I will now admit that I have been playing wiht pooholes this year - and now fully accept the consequences - and will try to refrain in the future - If I get through the present.

Danny Boy

2007-10-09T05:36:00.001-07:00

Time for some light relief! for some reason this reminded me of zoo!
Maybe its because she recently had a white night in the beige confines of a postgrad computing room.

Nosferatu

2007-10-06T15:56:00.000-07:00

Nosferatu

One night back in 1994, el veijo lashed out and bought a crab which he made into an incredible soup for the two of us. Crab filled the flat and drowned out the stench of the neighbours constantly fermenting vats of ngoc mam next door.

Perfumed fishy sweetness filled our noses, dribbled down our arms, filled the air, perfumed the garden, drifted up and met the fug of jetfuel wafting down from the flightpaths above.

We drank, we smoked, we ate. We were trying hard to be happy in our new 2 bedroom flat, trying to hold hands as we drifted apart, trying not to look like a couple to centrelink who’d dropped in for a home visit. I had cut my waist length hair short, looking pained enough so they could guess why we weren’t a couple. El veijo just look pained.

After gorging ourselves on crab meat, we stuck the licked fragments of shell in a bag on the back doorstep. A few hours later, still up, we heard a caterwaul. It was autumn and this was odd. I went to investigate and found a slender young ginger tom, miaowing plaintitively on the back step. I undid the bag and offered him some crab flesh, but he seemed more interested in rubbing himself against me. I invited him in.

My previous feline “Pulgato” had mysteriously disappeared during my birthday party a few months earlier, so I was glad the universe had found me a replacement. El veijo wasn’t. “Cat’s are worse than rats” he declaimed and then launched on a rambling lecture on the evils of those weird four footed furry familiars that people have around. I hadn’t seen such odium until watching Deleuze and Parnet on youtube… checking out the “A” section of ABCDE as the old emphysemic Deleuze coughed and shuddered and his gravely voice expounds on the repugnance of rubbing, miaowing plaintative pathos of pets, especially cats. “c’est odious… comments ils frottent. Non. Je n’aime pas ca, je ne support pas les chats.” (It’s hateful, the way they rub. No, I don’t like that, I can’t stand cats).

Back in the past, as el veijo declaimed, the ginger tom was already on my lap, rubbing himself against me, my face, and my hands. Some cats settle quickly into a furry lap snuggle, but this one was intent on rubbing himself all over me. I guess you could call it heavy petting, and I think it fuelled el veijo’s odium. I think it gave me hives. I didn’t care.

After some time, the ginger tom paused and looked deep into my scratched spectacles, where my eyes met his. I had never seen a look like this from a cat. Especially one I had just met. I stared back. I was definitely in love. This cat was seducing me. Red welts appeared on my neck, my hands and face were stinging, my eyes watering, my throat itchy. Still the cat stared and I stared back. The cat was in love with me. His eyes drew my watery gaze back into his and my hands on his back moved down to his tail. He moved forwards, but mercifully not to rub against my face… but then sunk his teeth into the side of my neck.

I kid you not! As his teeth broke my skin I reached involuntarily for the scruff of his neck and I had to pull hard to wrench him off me! I cried out and flung him away from me with a shudder, and he stood on the floor looking at me. Looking kind of hurt, but still quite loving as well. No actually I don’t know how to describe the look. I stared back in bewilderment. “Eso es!” el veijo declared “El gato culiardo es Nosferatu”. (that’s it, this bugger of a cat is Nosferatu – the famous german expressionist vampire).

I reluctantly put the cat outside, but he hung around for a few weeks – he’d come in, act incredibly affectionate to whoever would let him on their lap, then he’d stare into their eyes, and then try to bite their neck. It was uncanny, but fascinating. I was reminded of anecdotes about animals seducing their prey. I felt like a mesmerised little bird in front of a serpent. I was seduced and terrified at once. It was creepy but exciting, but still creepy.

I was reminded of that look more recently in the eyes of an equally seductive affectionate young tom… and I still can’t quite find the words for it. Other lovers have trapped me in their gaze, and I’ve felt my eyes drifting into theirs and my language drifting into an infinity of bad poetry… such delicious swooning delight! But uncanny for someone I’d just met, a playmate, light sweet and salty sex, no shit, no ties, no games, apparently.

It’s easy enough to fuck up in casual sex and slide from fornication into lovemaking in the bat of an eyelid. (A vampire bat perhaps?) I’d even venture to say that the thrill of a casual arrangement is largely based around toying with the knife edge of seduction – seducing her or being seduced…. Drifting so far in, and pulling away… testing, toying teasing with the limits of our desire, our bodies, our stamina, our hearts… certainly the thrill of succumbing to a lustful embrace is that vertiginous swoon of affective collapse. No words here, my dear. You eyes meet mine, your fluids fill each pore of my skin and stain my sheets, your smell fills my nostrils for hours. I drench myself in our fluids and drown inside your stare. Your eyes have eaten my soul, sucked out my lifeblood, sucked out my secrets, and mine shed tears, and my fingers scratch out screeds of swooning indulgence in black bic biro, etching my lust, your flesh, your taste scrawling itself along my tongue into my favourite silent language, carrion words, hidden on paper, on which I feed, and refeed and savour for weeks and months to come.

Obviously none of this is particularly healthy, and most certainly feeds into my own pathological relationship to writing. Words! I love how they swoon within me, I love to gorge on them and vomit them out, I love to swim in them, feel them enter me, hurt my insides, digest and break down and pulse throughout me… and then I love to feel the end of words…. Knowing that there’s bits of me they can’t reach…. I touch the darkness and draw back…..

Back to the tomcat. Who still gives a strange flicker of soul sucking stares in the strangest of places. My own eyes water and flit and I rub toothpaste on the coke bottle lenses, hoping to shelter behind a few more scratches. Myopic watery pools. Made for scrutinising pores, for focussing on the eyes of a lover, while their mouth meets mine, but little else. Prosthetics protect. Protect my own sad stupid little heart, from flying out again to be hurt and crushed and dropped and crushed, and… no, actually they don’t protect me at all really.

There’s a fleshy pad between my thumb and wrist. There’s a stretchable pocket between my thumb and index finger. On my right hand, which is not my writing hand, though I’m typing with it now. This part of me aches for tomcats…. Impels itself to burrow in their fur, to smear itself on their haunches, soaking up their scent. Neither inside nor outside, the tentative hand fucks that aren’t quite five fingers, rubbing against the edge, as my fingers move inside my palm remains here, where lips and folds are both inside and out, strange hesitating incessant rubbing…. Are you with me? The base of my thumb, the hard wad of muscle wants to meet feline flesh, to rub up and down the fur, feel the fur rubbing itself into my wrinkles and pores, along my fine tracery of warm veins rising to the surface. When I see that stare… I look away, because there’s a lump in my chest, a little reserve, as the blood rises to my face and I blush. Nosferatu can see my vessels dilate, wants me to open up a little more, coaxing me forwards….

Right now, retreating, hidden, safely snuggled under layers of fabric and words, I wonder if Nosferatu is something I’ve just made up. Something I invented, projected out as part of my own desire – my own need to collapse onto something – someone else, my own desire to collapse over my own projected need. As I drag people towards me and push them away, as I hide myself away feeding off my own emptiness, as I sit in the grey fug of my own crushing doubt, noises, shapes, people, conversations, oppress, suffocate me. I feel my life blood ebb. No colour here, only graphite scratchings across an infinite sea of mundanity. To face myself is to face boredom, incredible boredom, counting freckles, squeezing blackheads, noting the increasing greyness emerging from each pore on my head. I haven’t got the energy to flee into colour, the sea wind chills me, and I wonder where my life blood has gone. Why am I so cold all of the time? Why can’t I think in colour anymore? I don’t know who to trust, who to believe, I barely trust myself, I trust barely, I trust myself barely. Naked in the bath, barely naked, strange pale flesh streaking past the mirror, before I hide myself in clean clothes. Is this the same body that stripped, and swaggered and seduced a few short months ago? I can barely touch myself now, and the thought of other flesh renders me nauseous. Maybe I need to go back to life drawing, but I’m enjoying melaleucas, whose stripped peeling bark, gnarled forking forms evoke my own dreams of Daphne…. She retreated from flesh, from flight, from rape, into stillness. Her limbs wooden, her feet rooted to the soil, her hands sprouted infinite leaves. Reset in Erskineville, her skin pushes outwards, splits itself as multiple layers of protection, inscription, traceries. Her skin became paper, her skin begged for writing, to be written on, for the stories her mouth had silenced to finally appear, to be heard only by eyes and hearts. There’s no words here, my dear. Only desperate sheafs of blank paper, multiplying pushing outwards, peeling, folding, splitting, reminding me of what hasn’t been written yet, what can’t be written, what can’t be spoken but could be written, if only I could find the words. I trace my finger across the soft bark, trace my soft pencil across paper, remembering flesh. Bloodless flesh.

I go back inside, retreat into the darkness, to the edge of words, where there is little more than darkness and fear. Trying to make friends with this space. Not to fixate morbidly on my own frailty, but to realise there is something inside of me. This aporia, murk of hell is part of…. Part of me, and part of life. This aporia, murk of hell is deadly, it is my own fear of death, and yet I carry it within me. I don’t need a vampire to suck my lifeblood from me any more to feel it. It’s here, behind my heartbeat, and yet my heart continues to breathe over the top. My chest expands, I breathe, quickly, from an aversive terror, or slowly and I, slowly exhale, settling down into the fixation. I sense the delight of my own collapse, and sense my own inexorable movement away from this. My life is a constant sensing of this, the awareness of hell, and the flight from pain, from death. I’m tyring not to flee so fast, so far. Trying to move a little more cautiously, holding my self as I sense the world around me – not as a fixed entity, but as what I move into, what moves into me, what becomes me and me it. I am merely a species of momentum, a set of movements in a rib cage, senses pulsing down into limbs, extremities, eyelids, pulsing, pushing forwards, connecting, calling, crying.

Rabid Puma Bitch and Shnookums

2007-09-24T02:57:00.000-07:00

I wanted to start with something light.

Today I woke up and typed out a well-worded piece of spite about psychic vampires. It wasn’t only catty, but entertaining and admittedly rather eloquent in parts. I even spellchecked it.

It will have to wait.

I wanted to start with something safe. Funny stories of hapless bioboys and their hapless texts to mad brilliant women who laugh hysterically, and run into the light.
I’ve taken the title from textepithets written to me and a mate, who were comparing notes on the consequences of biocock. Bad poetry. We try to laugh at men, because it’s easier than screaming at them.

Right now, I can’t laugh. Though the thought of my gentle femme friend, a soft feline creature playing out the role of rabid puma bitch in some str8 boy’s porn script is… almost as silly as me being coaxed into some slippered shnookums wifelet role - and does still bring a curl to the corner of my lips…

But the rest of this entry isn’t light, can’t be light, is horribly horribly dark and sad and I didn’t know what else to write and maybe it’s a fitting follow on for Derrida who said that he wrote half asleep in a trance, he wrote half aware while fully awake, so fully awake that he was as yet half asleep – and when he was half asleep, he found himself horrified at his bravado, writing, attacking, saying what hadn’t been said, what shouldn’t be said.

Writing is treason

I read it on La Pelouse’s toilet wall and tears sprung to my eyes.
I copied out the quote in my diary:

Writing is treason to your nation, your family,
your gender, your class, your majority.
Above all, writing is treason to writing itself.

The credit cited Gilles Deleuze and Clare Parnet and I spent a week scouring Dialogues in English and french and then transcripts and fragments of ABCDE trying to find it in a citable form…. But ain’t had no luck yet.

So is this treason? Who am I betraying when I write ? what right do I have to tell stories of others, however much they are linked to and form me, and move me and become me?
How do I write this?
Where do I start?

OK, I’ll start with Saturday. It has a crazy narrative with cracks of madness showing through.

On Saturday a close friend who I hadn’t really seen for a while, hugged me too hard. She meant well, and I didn’t tell her to stop, and didn’t know if I wanted her to stop or not. But afterwards, as we chatted and ate, I felt words dry up in my mouth, and my mind vanish elsewhere. The food was inedible, but I ate it, and my friend eventually left – and I can’t remember saying goodbye, but I remember closing the door.

I walked out of the house with tears streaming under my sunnies. Randomly sobbing and not sure why. Shaking, cold. It was cold. I felt very odd. Glad to breathe, glad to walk. I walked to Enmore, and caught a bus. I was dressed as an abject sleazy middle aged monstrous man, so people smiled at me. My sobs held back by my teeth, my streaming eyes hidden under black sunnies, my rictus mask looked like a smile of sorts.

If you put on a mask you are safe. You can be whoever you want in a mask, you can say whatever you want. Masks are magic. The Brontes believed it as children. Too scared, small and shy to speak until their father gave them a mask to speak from. It must be true. All writers are cowards at heart. Our hearts are broken at birth.

Changing at Petersham, I bussed it to Balmain – ostensibly for a friend’s booklaunch. I needed words, needed some salve – something. Her magnum opus is exploring a ficto critical mythology for the smashing of language and the self at birth… ohhh it’s too long to describe here. I hoped the latest book wouldn’t be too intense.

Buses irritate me at times – as did this one. I got off on the edge of Leichhardt and went wandering north, up the hill towards Lilyfield – meandering through streets… past a street of funny little close set split level semi detached houses, up to Perry and Balmain streets…. Looking at the street sign I saw where I was, where I had walked past, the house I’d lived – been born into, brought home too… was that living?

And is this my story to tell?

It was a time before language, a time which language has wrapped itself around like a wound – and the stories aren’t mine, but stories about and between grown ups. Stories grown ups told each other, and taunted me with, and part of me was there, but it was very small, barely a witness to something much larger and nastier, that I was a part of and so maybe it’s my story after all, but I have no words for it yet.

Just sadness and horror, and occasionally blind rage.

Back to the mask, and the books and nice things, which I move towards, which enter me and feed me and let me move in the world.

Later, walking home, I felt as if my body was flying apart. I couldn’t feel my legs, was scared I’d fall over. My head swam, my left nipple started aching, my stomach … my sense… was cold, and strange, and scared.

I kept walking, went inside, turned on the heater, put on all my clothes, hid in bed, reading soothing sapphisms, breathing. Eventually able to text the Rabid Panther Bitch who also specialises in mercy missions to desperate dying and disaster prone friends. Thank dog.

So I self cared, calmed down, found care, safety, support, security with loving flatties friends and neighbours. Was reminded why I’ve fought to stay in my home and learnt a little more about my own points of frailty. And trucked on as usual for the rest of the weekend.

And today, I got a phone call from an ex of an old dear beloved friend and I knew why she called – coz she has never called before and…..

My friend Lang died last night. In her sleep I hope it was her heart or the drugs or some accident and not some suicide but she had been suicidal before and ok it was peaceful and we must tell each other nice stories because the nasty ones hurt too much and if we start telling them we’ll never stop our screams.

I wish I knew a way to tell this story, to talk about this stuff in a way that wouldn’t make me or other readers flinch.

I flinch when I hear stories like my own. I flinch when I hear them in public. I go cold and I turn away, I wish I didn’t have to hear it, I wish I didn’t have to tell it.

Writing ANYTHING is easier than this, and yet writing ANYTHING is often so damn hard.

You know this story. You’ve heard it before. Some of you might have lived it. Lots of you might have lived it. I’m sorry if you have. It’s a horrible way to have to live.

Men who fuck their daughters or try to and men who tell lies to their daughters break apart our bodies and our language. I can’t speak for other genders or gendered becomings or possibilities. This scenario feels like a specifically sex based binarised gendering.

The men who do this, split themselves apart in order to do it. Different selves do the hurting, others do the judging, the speaking…. And there is no continuity between the words, between the different scripts, the different faces to the world, the actions, the stories. Hypocrisy isn’t an epistemological flaw, it’s a fucking poison that makes any attempt at connection completely impossible and drives apart the bodies and minds of those who come into contact with it.

Am I a hypocrite? After all, we all have contradictions. Nobody is perfect. And I am my father’s daughter after all.

I remember the shape of his lips, his teeth, his hands, how they felt on mine. His knuckles were calloused smooth and I remember the timbre of his voice, his knees like mine, the birthmark on his thigh. Bits of his body are in me, bits of his mind too.

I don’t think my brother could stand it. He died five years to the day after Dad. Slow dragon chasing on the edge of an iceberg. He wasn’t the first of my father’s sons to suicide. I can’t speak for them. Maybe none of the above is true.

This pain feels implacably gendered. It’s in my breasts, and my vulva, which I’ve tried to masculinise but can’t. Packed and bound, they insist on their own femaleness, and demand that I accept mine. My becoming woman began with a very specific act of destruction, by a man, against my sex, my sexuality, my being, my becoming.

So to my friend, my dear dead friend Lang, who I'm now crying for because it beats the fuck out of crying for myself. who I knew when she was whole, when I was falling apart - when we were both falling, but clutching, dreaming talking, finding reason and brilliance and bravery, and love.

So I’m going to tell another story, for myself, for my friend, my lover, my sister. For whoever else reads this, and knows what I’m talking about.

“sisterhood” sounds like such a hokey ‘70’s feminist word
So if I say my sisters are sacred I’ll come across as an abjectly lavendered wench and my pomo gender studies queericon kudos will be ruined.

Spawning from my patermonster, my biofamily is a bit of a source of shame, horror and tragedy, on the whole… but there’s another story too.

Today I rang my mum, and today she was my mum and she listened and spoke and we laughed and cried and talked for ages. And she said how she wished that women would write honest graffiitti about the men that abuse them instead of stupid abuse about other women. I’m taking my texta to uni tomorrow.

I remembered that my family is composed of women who have known unspeakable pain, but dared to speak it and we share it, and continue to live with it, and hold our anger, limping, laughing, struggling along, stuttering, speaking and living.

The only people I really trust are people who know pain, who know this pain, and yet can live with it – and I don’t just mean a bare life of mad subsistence but a great gulping force of nature. These people are my flesh and blood. These people share my flesh and blood. They are my religion, my family, my reason for living, and my sustenance.

I have one sister living in new york. She loved my brother, and they could have married but they didn’t and he’s been dead for longer than he knew her anyway. She’s my sister because she lives, because life is in each cell of her body. She cries, she laughs, she sings and life is a breathe that flows continuously through her – no gaps, no hidden secrets, no lies. She’s beautiful.

And Lang was my other sister, and her beauty and her tenderness and love is one of the most sacred and wonderful things I’ve ever come across. She was whole. Can I scream it from the rooftops? She was whole! Entire – the same person, integrated, honest, generous, so generous, in so many ways, with so many people, even with her horror biofamily. And they are horrors. Nasty smug xtian hypocrites. They disapproved of her lapsed xtianism, and ignored her suffering for years, as if it was just punishment for not being a good child of god. Her pain is so horrible that it dug inside her, sclerosified her joints, broke apart her mind numerous occasions. She moved, found new words, ideas, people. She surrounded herself with books, with friends, with new families, with new ways of feeling and showing and sharing love. Still tried desperately to reconcile with her family, to give them some way of sharing love with her, someone who shouldn’t exist, someone who embodied their shame, the refuse of a hypocritic life.

And it worked. She said her patermonster came close to apologising the last time he saw her. She said he stammered out something along the lines of.. “I’m sorry, that your childhood was so painful”. Note the separation – the distancing of the self from action, from agency… how do we acknowledge when we cause someone actual harm? How do we reconcile it within ourselves? OK the above is not really a happy ending – and hardly fits with my idea of redemption.

So I’m going to remind myself of the brilliance and beauty of fighting for feeling, for sensation, for connection against a body and a self that has been broken apart. My dear sister Lang – you did this to the very end. You were beautifully alive and connected and whole and you remind me still of the brilliance and possibility of living fully with the immanence of death, of pain, of annihilation. I wish like hell you could have finished uni, or a novel, or so many dreams you had. I wish you could have written the story you shared with your friends. I wish I could find words for your pain, I wish I knew the incantation to take it away from you, and to make things better and whole and easier for us all.

I don’t of course. And moving towards language is a daily movement away from this impossible space before language. Spaces of pain, horror and terror within me. I touch the edges, feel my own panic in the dark. Try to pause, and breathe. It is possible to sense this, to carry it with me, to hold my impossible self, the destroyed sad little hell, to breathe with it and move slowly towards living and writing with integrity and courage. I’m not trying to tell anyone else’s story here. I don’t have the right. Only to sense that in sharing stories, sharing pain, I am reminded of my own imperative to keep on living well, to find a voice that can breathe life into my being and the world around me.

Jacques Derrida - Fear of Writing

2007-09-12T04:34:00.001-07:00

It was one of those days.... does watching videos of philosophers on youtube make me impossibly tragic?

Refuse what we ARE: http://www.bumsnotbombs.org/

2007-09-06T01:41:00.000-07:00

"Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are."

I'm quoting from Judy Butler's grappings with foucault, subjectivity and power.
I'm grappling with subjectivity, grappling with my own confounding sense of the impossible, the imperative of impossibility, of acting, sliding towards spaces where I hope gaps open up. I'm spending a lot of time reading theory - sometimes I even write a little
"the conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate us both from the state, and from the state's institutions, but to liberate us from the state and the type of individualzation which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries"
(JB: Between Freud and Foucault in 'the Psychic Life of Power, 1997 , p101)

I, as some of YOUSE may have noticed, tend to treat philosophy in an epicurian sense - no I don't mean gourmette olives - but in a stoic sense - and I don't mean biting my lip and eating porridge either...

I see philosophy as a means of considering how it is possible to actually live. how is it possible to reflect honestly, critically and imaginatively upon my desires, my actions, and those of others around me?

How is it possible to get out of bed?

today has been a shit day. My coffee was bitter, the milk oily and coagulated, there were no bananas in the house and insufficient dunny paper for my exploding entrails....

I meditated, I checked my emails, I walked to uni under the fallen sky, i'm here - still trying to work, and not doing very well. I've munched on junk food and painkillers. anything to stop me feeling, stop me shitting, stop me, ohh oh oh stop me, stop me if you think that you've heard this one before....

so. the life.
tomorrow Schappylle Scragg is heading off to take the piss out of the idea of an 'australian public'.
Hysterical flaunting mimesis anyone?
I'm hoping the rain holds off enough so the fake tan stays on, and then i'm meeting up with some earnest and estimable colleagues to discuss judy Butlers take on Foucault and subjectivity, and power....

and my life is so divinely silly sometimes I can't help but smile.

and thank god for this, because I am still so often so damnably hellishly fucking sad.

today has been major lump in chestitis. zits on my face, zits on my scalp, a yucky tummy, an aching body... I woke up wiht a headache but it went away, but I still feel so shite, physically shite, emotionally shite, and I can't think my way out of this, can't steer my whirring mind around to some ohter way of looking at the situation... I just try to distract meself, seal up lips, block off ears, bury myself in assiduous tomeness and hope that time will take me away from this.

Even YOGA ain't helping at the mo... I feel unbalanced, uncoordinated and exhausted.

anway - my committment to slivers of possibility means that I *will* be doing bits and pieces to protest the APEC security circus.... Overpaid, stir crazy cutlery confiscating coppers make a mockery of any notion of citizenship that is not fundamentally bound up wiht really full on coercive relations...

I *am* feeling a bit scared of all the shit about rubber bullets and tear gas and water cannons, but my mind got changed in yoga last week.

I was standing in tadasana, across from an aquaintance who I *KNOW* will definitely be marching on saturday... and I thought - 'fuck. how can I stand here, saying 'Aum' and breathing the same air as someone who is likely to to get the shit beaten out of them this time next week?'

and i decided that I have to go to the march - if only to bear witness to what the stte is, and what it does to it's citzens. I *know* the media will report nothing of this side of the protest; of the dignity and power and beauty of marching, as a public, as a group of people into the city, just to say - hang on isn't this society meant to be ours?'

I *know* that the overpaid, stir crazy cutlery confiscating coppers will do anything they can to provoke violence - even if it means dressing in civvvies and chucking a couple of rocks at their colleagues...

but the whole Apec security circus, the war on terror etc. makes a mockery out of any ideas of the state being anything but a ludicrous spectacle of enforcing invisible power of capitalist speculation - and all we are meant to doo as subjects is play the role of passive compliant consumer... then... well.... hell1 i'ts time to take the piss!

I love the chaser, and I love the greens, and Schazza and Dazza are going out to be 'ordinary aussies' tomorra - doing their bit to fight the war on terror!

I'd rather die laughing than crying

my favourite thing I've seen all week is this: http://www.bumsnotbombs.org/
hope to see some pretty cheeks at 3pm tomorrow!

Alien Invasion 4

2007-08-28T06:30:00.000-07:00

Rally at Sydney Town Hall, 10am, Saturday September 8
The Stop Bush Coalition has decided to organise a rally at Sydney Town
Hall, 10am, Saturday September 8 to protest the APEC meetings. more info

If you don't want to protest in the city there are a HEAP of other events and actions in which you can join other people pissed off at th neoliberal paranoid syconphancy of our city leaders....

Counter-APEC events

#6pm, Wed 29th Aug
Trajectories of Dissent Exhibition Opening: Little Fish Gallery, 22 Enmore Road Enmore

# 6.30pm, Thurs 30 Aug
The People vs Bush - put George Bush on trial
Parramatta Town Hall. Prosecution witnesses include: Mamdouh Habib (former Guantanamo detainee), Kamala Emanuel (Socialist Alliance global warming spokesperson), Ninos Tooma (Iraqi activist)

# 5.30 for 6.30pm, Fri 31 Aug
APPEC public forum
Sydney Masonic Centre Banquet Hall, 66 Goulburn St, city. Featuring: Sharon Burrow (ACTU), Don Henry (ACF), Yuri Munsayac (Philippines)

# 9.30am-4pm, Sat 1 Sept
Asia Pacific People for Environment & Community (APPEC) conference
Guthrie Theatre, University of Technology, Sydney, Harris St.

# Tues 4 Sept @ 5pm,
George Bush is NOT welcome here
Sydney Town Hall. Action to mark the arrival of George Bush in Sydney.

Wed 5 Sept
# 8.30am,
Anti-war court action
Waverley Court, 151 Bronte Rd, Waverley. Support action for anti-war activist Peter McGregor who was arrested in connection with his citizen's arrest of Philip Ruddock for war crimes.
# 1pm,Walkout Against George (student walkout) Belmore Park.
# 6pm,
Exhibition Opening and Activist dialogue
Mori Gallery, 168 Day Street sydney, with members from the Asia Pacific Research Network.

# 11am-2pm, Fri 7 Sept
All People for Environment & Community Festival
Hyde Park North.
# 6pm, Fri 7 Sept
Convergence meeting
Venue to be notified. This meeting will include a briefing on the latest rally details and will make any final decisions about the Saturday rally
# evening, Fri 7 Sept
Ghost dance Hyde Park North.

# 10am, Sat 8 Sept
Stop Bush - Make Howard History rally
Sydney Town Hall. Protest to end the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan; stop global warming; & defend workers' rights.

# 3pm, Sat 8 Sept
Rally de-brief
Taylors on Central, 84-86 Mary St, Surry Hills. Regroup and discuss the day's events before the Stop Bush gig!

# 4pm, Sat 8 Sept
Protest gig
Taylors on Central, 84-86 Mary St, Surry Hills. Protest gig with Chaosmaths, Social Progression System, Wire MC, Jakalene Xtreme (and more)
Other counter-APEC events

Alien Invasion 3

2007-08-27T07:15:00.000-07:00

Protestors

Will people be allowed to protest during APEC?
Groups and individuals that choose to express their views peacefully can be assured they will be able to do so.

There is no objection to people expressing their views through the lawful and democratic means of peaceful assembly.

The NSW Police Force is actively involved in a mediation process to provide liaison between potential protest groups and APEC security officials. People wishing to protest in Sydney during APEC should contact the NSW Police. You can attend your local police station and obtain a notice of intention to hold a public assembly. This is generally referred to as a Form 1. If you can't attend a police station, you can call your local police for advice.

back to top

Will the police lock up protestors?
Groups and individuals that choose to express their views peacefully can be assured they will be able to do so.

However, demonstrators must also respect the right of others, including representatives of both foreign and domestic governments, to get on with their business in Australia free from violence.

Those who encourage or participate in violence or criminal activity, and put the safety of themselves or others at risk, will be apprehended by police and dealt with appropriately.

Alien Invasion 2

2007-08-27T07:10:00.000-07:00

Sydney Peoples Alternative Rally & Festival
Friday September 7, 11am-2pm

Hyde Park North
YES for a nuclear-free, peaceful, and democratic
Asia-Pacific! Fair Trade not Free Trade!
NO TO APEC!
performances, speakers, information stalls, food
no marching to or from the peaceful rally / festival

Many thousands of people in Sydney do not welcome the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in our city. Their alternative view will be expressed at a colourful festival to be held on Friday, September 7 in Hyde Park North from 11am to 2pm.
The official APEC is treating Sydney citizens as suspects and evicting them from beautiful parts of their city.
The official APEC is here to push nuclear power, free trade with all its privatisations and deregulation, and to assert that big business can run the world better than democratic citizens. That’s also why APEC promotes repression in our region.
That’s why we are protesting and projecting an alternative people’s agenda.

The Peoples Alternative Festival will promote the values of peace, security
and harmony, and the use of diplomacy and dialogue to replace force as a
means of resolving conflicts.

ALL WELCOME!

Men from U.N.C.L.E; Bolivarian Band; Korean drummers
Scenes from previous APEC protests:
clockwise - Manila ‘96, Kuala Lumpur
‘98, Manila ‘96, Vancouver ‘97
Organised by: All People for Environment & Community: Anti-Bases Campaign;
Sydney Peace & Justice Coalition; Migrante Philippines Australia; Bolivarian Circle;
Chilean Socialist Party / Oceania; Construction Forestry Mining & Energy Union;
Australian Services Union; Maritime Union of Australia (Sydney Branch); SEARCH
Foundation; Korean Resource Centre; Communist Party of Australia; Inner-West Your
Rights at Work; Aust Fair Trade & Investmetn Network. Contact: Peter Murphy 0418
312 301. Jane Brock 0410 453 459. Email: pmurphy@search.org.au
Sydney Peoples Alternative to APEC
All People for Environment & Community

All People for Environment and Community, a wide coalition of community
groups who have come together to organise the Peoples Alternative Festival,
is creating a venue for the views of every Sydney citizen who puts the rights
of people and the environment before the interests of corporations.
Music, performance, speakers, and information and food stalls will combine
to offer an inclusive peaceful people’s vision for the future, in stark contrast
with the secretive, repressive big business agenda of the 21 APEC leaders
behind their concrete barricades.
Our Festival will promote the people’s alternative of fair trade, real action on
global warming, genuine development to alleviate poverty, opposition to war,
and respect for the labour rights and human rights of all the peoples of our
vast Asia Pacific region.
We oppose the presence in our city of Sydney of United States President
George Bush. He is the architect of the brutal invasion and occupation of
Iraq which has cost so many thousands of human lives and so much pain
and misery.

Alien Invasion

2007-08-26T06:21:00.000-07:00

I was pondering the doom and gloom of the impending APEC circus and wondering if I should maybe offer myself up lemming like to the spectacle of state sponsored terrorism - or if I should somehow miraculously organise a mass mobilisation in CROYDON - and then the missive below landed in my inbox.

a bit bloody full on.... err... anyone got any media /pollie contacts?

It also reminds me that being able to choose our exposure to police brutality is a bit of a privilege innit?

> > Subject: house raids without warrants in NT

FYI- This has gone to the 7.30 report and several newspapers. please circulate.

Dear Kerry O'Brien and 7.30 researchers,

I have just returned from the Northern Territory. I want John Howard to explain why house to house raids without warrants are being conducted by the AFP in all the Alice Springs town camps.

I also want to know why at least two of the senior women who toured major cities speaking out against a uranium waste dump on their traditional lands have been raided by the AFP on warrants issued by a Federal Magistrate in Canberra, their furniture slashed with knives, belongings damages, laptops and mobile phones seized, and phones tapped. I was told by one of the women that the warrant gave 12 hours access to her home, and that she was told that the measures were justified because of the security crackdown for APEC ministers. One of those women is an elderly grandmother.

I have also been told by town camp residents that the AFP has set up surveillance on all households in the town camps,and have photographed without consent, every Aboriginal child in those town camps. In the 1990s the AFP were successfully taken to court for exactly the same violations in Redfern.
Please report on this disgraceful conduct, and pursue a full explanation from the Howard Government.
regards,
Jennifer Martiniello
Member, Advisory Board
Australian Centre for Indigenous History,
Australian National University

Lost in space

2007-08-19T16:39:00.000-07:00

the universe is telling me to focus on the thesis.

for some random reason - my yahoo email account wouldn't accept my password for most of yesterday...

I spent an hour doing enforced 'heartmath' meditation to avoid intense panic attacks. i'm so addicted to email - I always imagine my dying words if I passed on would be my email password -

hoo hoo WHAT A DRAMA QUEEN.

Decided this year must be the year that I'm meant to learn NOT TO Be SO ATTACHED TO THINGS. Realised for most of yesterday that I'd be fine without my email address... but... i'm still relieved to have it back.

anyway - I'm still finding it hard to focus on the thesis. Still haven't done any work today - spent the afternoon on the phone and on the internet - and nhow I'm off ot yoga to stretch the impossible stretches, and forget about pain, heartbreak and misery.

Vintage GD: sense in the logic

2007-08-10T17:23:00.000-07:00

Alcoholism does not seem to be a search for pleasure, but a search for an effect which consists mainly in an extraordinary hardening of the present. One lives in two lives, of two moments at once, but not at all in the Proustian manner. The other moment may refer to projects as much as to memories of sober life; it nevertheless exists in an entirely different and profoundly modified way, held fast inside the hardened present which surrounds it like a tender pimple surrounded by indurate flesh. In this soft centre of the other moment, the alcoholic may identify himself wit the object of his love, or the objects of his “horror and compassion,” whereas the lived and willed hardness of the present moment permits him to hold reality at a distance.

The alcoholic does not like this rigidity which overtakes him any less than the softness that it surrounds and conceals. One of the moments is inside the other, and the present is hardened and tetanized, to this extent, only in order to invest this soft point which is ready to burst.

The two simultaneous moments are strangely organized; the alcoholic does not live at all in the imperfect or the future; the alcoholic has only a past perfect (passé composé ) – albeit a very special one. In drunkenness the alcoholic puts together an imaginary past, as if the softness of the past participle came to be combined with the hardness of the present auxiliary: I have – loved, I have-done, I have-seen. The conjunction of the two moments is expressed here, as much as the manner in which the alcoholic experiences on in the other, as one enjoys a manic omnipotence. Here the past perfect does not at all express a distance or a completion. The present moment belongs to the verb “to have”, whereas all being is “past” in the other simultaneous moment, the moment of participation and of the identification of the participle.

But what a strange, almost unbearable tension there is here… this embrace, this manner in which the present surrounds, invests, and encloses the other moment. The present has become a circle of crystal or of granite, formed about a soft core, a core of lava, of liquid or viscous glass.

From Gilles Deleuze, the Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester. (Columbia university Press, New york 1990) p 158

Becoming intense, becoming animal

2007-08-08T02:46:00.000-07:00

Goddam!
sometimes things get so shit that all you can do is steal chapter titles from Deleuze and Guattari.

things are so shit that I've forgotten how to talk. almost. I managed a couple of tear sodden phone calls and booked a doctors appointment - but mostly I've been hibernating. subsisting off chocolate, codeine, wasabi peas. trips next door to empty bladder and refill water bottle.

no this isn't a plea for phone calls, offers of events or distractions. And please no phone calls. Please! No more demands of 'how are you?'

I'm shithouse.
I'm heartbroken
I wish I'd never met abel. I wish I could erase her memory. I wish that by burning her photographs, letters, and any objects I could find that reminded me of her that I could have burnt 9 years of love, of attachment, of fantasy, of desire.

I wish I could burn, or bleed or vomit or breathe or shit out my feelings, this horrible feeling of being kicked in the guts, of having some kind of spike lodged in my thorax.

and people don't seem to be able to help me at all. The sounds of people, of masticating, rummaging - these little human sounds, echo like chainsaws inside... scrape along my skin. Each touch - each offer of touch feels like a blow.

I would really like to run very far away from this.

After 5 hours in shittyrail purgatory yesterday (don't ask - it was a failed attempt at escape) i retreated to my doona and whatever atavistic dysfunctional coping mechanisms I could summon. Eating disorders, pill popping, novel reading, thumbsucking, compulsive masturbating....

I don't know where to go from here
I don't know where to escape to.
I don't know what to do
I don't know who to.... I don't know what to say

Alcohol doesn't work, most hugs feel like a vacuum pump applied to my soul. the thought of fucking makes me want to vomit, I'm frightened of words, of voices, of my own words, of other words, I don't want to hear anyone, anything, anymore.

I assume this will pass eventually.

When I was in London I was having a great chat with an old friend about heartbreak, and we were quoting bits of A Thousands Plateaus to each other, and I thought "What kind of nutter reads Deleuze and Guattari as Self help?"

A desperate one obviously.

Ok. somewhere deep down - I can regard this as not *me* and not happening to *me* so much as a condition of sheer total hell whih is completely consuming and overwhelming, but temporary.

at the moment i'm experiencing an intensity, some form of acute pain and misery... but not all of me is experiencing it even - I mean I don't have haemmorhoids or cancer or even thrush... just a broken heart and a migraine.

and even the migraine seems to be wearing off...

2 weeks ago - i staggered into uni in a similar state of stricken emotional meltdown - and someone gave a lovely talk on derrida's ideas on the animal, on hospitality, on admitting the unknown, and possibly fatal, and the knife edge of risking complete annhilation, of losing the self, and of (de)fin(d)ing the self in the act of self defence.....

that to open up to becoming, to the other, to face the other, means to face monstrosity - the sheer terror of being taken and transformed and lost within a new encounter, and new becoming - and in using academic jargon this already sounds like a like a cliche doesn't it?

I was terrified of Abel when we first met, terrified of my desire and what it would do to me. With good reason I might add. Bioboy breakups never did never could come anywhere near this level of total fucking hell. Bioboys usually don't have me singing arias after sex though. And now - the thought of fucking most of my bioboy exes makes me laugh.... 'you call that sex? that's not even touching the sides!' Queer sex isn't just about size, or duration or gymnastics. Queer sex doesn't fill the box so much as smash it apart. In fucking women I've lost my head, lost my centre and felt like we were reinventing the world.

ADD tends to make me an optimist. I just don't have the attention span to be depressed for long periods of time - and I do believe deep down in my own capacity for surprise - for the world to be bigger and stranger and better than my understanding of it at any particular time.

but sometimes I just don't think I have the courage to face it. to get out of bed, to look past my own prejudices and habits and safety nets. To move beyond my old reflexes of caring, of being nice and open and listening to others instead of myself. Of letting others words fill me until I'm choking on my own silence. And so often I do find myself letting others words fill me until I'm choking on my own silence.

so i retreat. to my own space of dumbness. hollow silent hell. familiar pain. unspeakable tedium of sameness. My own monotony, my own script. My own smell makes me sick, each cell disgusts me. I lie still and I breathe.