More boring stuff about me

I’ve been tagged by Supamum, whose wrath is terrible indeed, so I feel I must submit lest she hurt me (when we eventually meet).

Accent – I’ve read that there are three basic Australian accent types, which vary only slightly with region, which is odd considering the country’s about as big as the mainland United States. There’s cultivated, broad and general. They’re defined mainly by class, but also other factors like occupation. Bricklayers, for example, are more likely to speak with a broad accent (with heavy emphasis on the vowels), than say, members of the Melbourne Club. My father speaks with a broad accent, which was very common to his generation. Mine is general, though I seem to get broader when talking to mechanics.
Booze of choice – For beers, I like Cascade Premium, and have recently started drinking Nastro Azzurro, which I discovered in Italy and for some reason is cheap in this country. I love good reds, particularly Cabernet Sauvignon. Scotch and Dry.
Chore I hate – cleaning the shower.
Dog or cat – Neither. I have children instead.
Essential electronics – CD player
Favorite cologne – Giorgio Armani that someone gave me.
Gold or silver – silver
Hometown – Springvale, but basically anywhere in Melbourne Australia.
Insomnia – Oh yeah.
Job title – Federal Electorate Officer (“staffer”).
Kids – two
Living arrangement – rent house with partner (female) and my two kids.
Most admired trait – I really have no idea. What a dreadful question to think about.
Number of sexual partners – Let me put it this way: there are priests who have had more.
Overnight hospital stays – one, after contracting an obscure bone disease when I was a young kid.
Phobia – spiders. In Australia I think this is called self-preservation.
Favourite quote – Asked whether he was an atheist by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Kingsley Amis replied, “Well, yes, but it’s more that I hate him.”
Religion – ex-Catholic, now agnostic, but with an interest in religion as a form of human creativity.
Siblings – a brother and two sisters, all younger than I.
Time I wake up – 7am, day in day out.
Unusual talent/skill – I have an unusual inability to click my fingers.
Vegetable I refuse to eat – cauliflower.
Worst habit – procrastination.
X-rays – many many of them on my left leg (see Hospital above).
Yummy foods I make – Omelettes.
Zodiac sign – Capricorn, like Jesus.

Please fight between the flags

Two of the best things I’ve seen on the Cronulla riots.

The disease of curiosity

I came across this quotation last night in Charles Freeman’s excellent “The Closing of the Western Mind : The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason“:

There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity… It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature; those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.

– St Augustine (late Forth, early Fifth Century AD)

Who does this sound like?

Every politician that seeks to silence the inconvenient with charges of sedition. Every leader that silences dissent with starvation and torture. Every cleric that calls the faithful to kill for God.

Fear and loathing in Swanston Street

I can say that I was there with the 500,000 who protested all round the wide brown land yesterday against the Howard regime’s iniquitous Workplace Relations laws. I don’t have to tell my children about it one day, as one of them was there with me.

The response of the media so far has been tediously predictable. Quibble about the numbers, call us all the Usual Suspects, make out it was only unionists and public servants (as in “a protest by unionists and public servants today…”), say it was a tiny proportion of the workforce, that the overwhelming majority of Australian workers stayed at home (despite threats of five-figure fines and jail), et cetera et cetera.

But you can’t pull that shit with me ‘cause I was there, and it was the biggest protest I’ve ever seen.

I was struck by the quiet of the crowds. Not angry or loud, but purposeful. The thousands moved off down Swanston Street without even the ambient hum that you would hear from a football crowd. That said something about Australians, I think, and about the emotions that accompanied the action on the day. Protest is essentially useless, as the Murdoch line dominates the media, and the assembled thousands know very well that no matter how many turn out, Howard still wins elections. That quiet was a symbol of the demoralised ‘left’ in the widest possible sense.

I should say, though, that the huge screen dominating my view of Federation Square had a Sky Channel logo on it. I’m not sure what that says. Maybe that revenue talks louder in the end than the boss’s editorial line.

I was enormously impressed witgh the level of professionalism displayed by the ACTU’s presentation. It was sharp without being slick, and actually very moving. Tim Ferguson MC’d without getting in the way, John Clarke and Brian Dawe’s routine was very funny, and the emotional impact of seeing and hearing ordinary people give their accounts of the effects of workplace “reform” was devastating.

The real moment of clarity came, for me, when ACTU Secretary Greg Combet gave an impassioned speech which was articulate and quietly brutal to the Government’s case. He staked a claim yesterday, as the most thoughtful and articulate leader in the labour movement.

This also marked some key point in the history of the union movement in this country. (Would that be a key-turning point?). It has finally shrugged off the habit of a lifetime and completely avoided the divisive images of the past and started actually speaking to real Australians at work, not some romantic ideal from the 1930s. This impression comes across loud and clear in the ACTU’s recent advertising campaign, which makes the Government’s own bloated campaign look obscure and irrelevant by comparison.

I believe this new image began to register with the unions when little grey-haired John Coomb first faced television cameras during the Waterfront dispute several years ago and spoke with great feeling of the impact the attack on his workers was having on ordinary families. This from a man who was the head of the Maritime Union, a bunch of thug wharfies according to John Howard, his chief dog Peter Reith, and the shifty Chris Corrigan.

Something was wrong with the message. It didn’t fit the pictures, especially the one of a man in a black balaclava, as big as a tugboat, with an angry dog on a chain. He wasn’t a waterfront worker, but one of the hired goons the Government put there to break the strike.

The same sense of cognitive dissonance is spreading over the community now. The wider the smiles of the workers on the factory floor as they wave to the cameras in the Government’s $55 million advertising campaign, the wider the gap between ordinary Australians’ sense of what they know the Government wants and what they know is good for them.

‘Postsecret’: art happens accidentally

So I might be the last person with a computer to find out about this thing, but having found it, I’m afraid I can’t stop myself from talking about it here. ‘Postsecret’ is a site initiated by Frank Warren as a project in November 2004 for a Washington art exhibition.

He posted this simple request:

You are invited to anonymously contribute your secrets to PostSecret. Each secret can be a regret, hope, funny experience, unseen kindness, fantasy, belief, fear, betrayal, erotic desire, feeling, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything – as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.

Create your own 4-by-6-inch postcards out of any mailable material. But please only put one secret on a card. If you want to share two or more secrets, use multiple postcards.

The results have become an utterly absorbing archive of accidental greatness. Some are self-indulgent, some are downright disturbing, some funny, some scatalogical… and some are really good art.

It’s hard to qualify what I exactly mean by that. One of the most intriguing things about this project is the way it blurs or completely obscures the distinction between art made by a skilled person in a self-consciously aesthetic/expressive way, and naïve art or what is usually called Art Brut.

A given card might be an aesthetically powerful thing, but it’s hard to know whether that represents an achievement by an ordinary person who managed to produce a thing of great quality through the inspiration that emotion gave them, or whether it was the product of someone with artistic experience and resources who was merely attempting to contribute anonymously to the project. Some are simply too polished to be anything else.

When they work as art, and give the viewer a real jolt of recognition or a good laugh, they achieve a certain quality that is irritatingly hard to define but recognisable nevertheless. I think it’s close to what the Surrealists called ‘the marvellous’, that power and universality that made things can achieve when they possess a link to unconscious drives and motivations. When this quality is present, an object can reach beyond and outside itself and become a Symbol. Calculation is not a necessary part of it. In fact, it’s probably undesirable, in just the same way that Freud thought word association and other such games could offer up clues to what was going on under the skin.

It’s probably logical then that my perception of what is good, or funny, or moving in some way, is likely to be influenced by my own experiences in an unconscious way. I mean that someone with a history of an unhappy childhood might be disturbed by this one:

Many allude to a great deal more than their ostensible content. Like this one:

I presume that the sender is a woman, mainly because the warm red cleft down the centre of the picture is so suggestive. But what was this mother/daughter or father/daughter relationship if a 10 year old child can’t spread her legs occasionally? What was going on in that domestic background that a grown adult carries around this memory so vividly?

Many allude to complex and rich back stories, which we can conjure up because they touch on universals in a particularly powerful way. We all know what a difficult adolescence is like, even if ours wasn’t this bad:

The rising hot air balloons in the background are probably collaged additions to the photo, but then again maybe not. Fantastically appropriate, though, they most certainly are. An uncannily good metaphor for a disturbed child’s idea of escape.

This next card is the visual equivalent of one of Freud’s case studies, and I think the good doktor might have found it interesting. For some reason, I find it very disturbing.

Themes can be discerned easily in the contributions of only a single week. Sexuality is the natural first, since it’s by nature secret and subject to intense feelings all round, whether they be shame, or regret, or desire for revenge, or just plain old showing off, like the kid with two raised fists who asks “which hand?”

The next most common theme is obviously childhood. Bad childhoods, on the whole, whose dark residue has settled in the mind and continues to distort the sender’s adult life. I suppose the experience of sending a stranger a memento from yesterday’s unhappy childhood is cathartic for many people. Certainly, on the evidence of the written messages of thanks Frank Warren sometimes posts, it is.

TerrorChoices

Coutesy of Daily Flute, one of the best of the growing ranks of alternative cartoonists to be found in Blogland.

‘Subterrain’

The wonderful Barista has alerted me to the fact that Ozanam Community Centre and the City of Melbourne are launching a new anthology of writing by clients of the Community Centre.

The anthology is based on writing workshops Simon Sellars did with clients at the Centre. Simon says:

‘Subterrain’ will also feature interviews with (and contributions by) artists and professionals who have initiated similar projects, including Martin Hughes, editor of The Big Issue; Melbourne writer Arnold Zable; Sharon Jacobson, founder of Plan B, a theatre project working with recently released prisoners; and Nadja Kostich and Jeremy Angerson, directors of Sweet Dreams, the acclaimed play written and performed by Big Issue vendors.

The launch will feature readings from special guest, Melbourne poet Kevin Brophy, plus readings from Subterrain contributors.

I have never forgotten my experience as a volunteer at what was then Ozanam House. It would have been 1985, I think. I’m sorry to say I was dressed in Mazenod College uniform at the time, which was keenly embarrassing, but the men there didn’t appear to mind. In fact they didn’t appear to give a toss about anything at all except their meal, which was fair enough.

These memories are always acutely in mind whenever I read George Orwell’s vivid and humane writing about homelessness in the 1930s in ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ and essays like ‘The Spike’. Which is something, if you haven’t done before, you should do.

Seven things

So Supamum tagged me. I’ve never done one of these meme things before, and if the length of time this took me to do is any indication, I might not do another one. It looks easy, but I found getting seven things down about myself actually very hard, and telling the truth was even harder.

Seven things (I’ll admit to) that I want to do before I die:

1. Spend a significant amount of time in Italy.
2. Become fluent in Italian.
3. Have a solo exhibition in a commercial art gallery.
4. Publish a book.
5. Play a professional gig on my own.
6. Own a Vespa.
7. Make a film.

Seven things I can do:

1. Play the guitar
2. Draw
3. Paint
4. Juggle
5. Argue a point of view without losing my cool.
6. Describe every scene of a movie I’ve just seen.
7. Raise kids (if I do say so myself).

Seven things I cannot do:

1. Keep appointments in my head.
2. Go on scary rides.
3. Play the saxophone.
4. Pick someone up in a bar/nightclub.
5. Jump off (or out of) anything, including bridges, planes, etc.
6. Ride on public transport without something to read.
7. Watch anything where children are hurt or threatened.

Seven things that attract me to the opposite sex:

1. The ability to drive a tractor
2. A sense of curiosity about the world
3. Sense of humour
4. A good and generous heart
5. Common interests
6. The usual… (you know)
7. An ability to do something I’m terrible at.

Seven things I say most often:

1. No idea
2. Who can say?
3. Apparently…
4. Darling (when about to be patronising)
5. Mate
6. Where’s my (keys, phone, glasses)?
7. What do I want? (when looking at a menu)

Seven celebrity crushes:

1. Audrey Tautou (played Amelie in the movie)
2. Mary Kostakidis
3. Rose Byrne
4. Alison Wedding (jazz singer)
5. Louise Brooks (silent film star)
6. Rachel Griffiths
7. Monica Belucci

The best movie about an artist?

Recently, the art life asked its readers to come up with their suggestions for the best movie about an artist. While some of the results were alarming (“Empire Records”?!!), I got thinking about this, as I’m invariably annoyed when movies feature artists as characters. They’re always psychopaths and murderers (the original “House of Wax”, “Bucket of Blood”), or pretentious wankers, or monstrously egotistical (“New York Stories”, “Immortal Beloved”), or borderline insane (“Amadeus”, “Lust for Life“, “Pollock”), or all of the above.

On the other hand, probably the best movie about an artist I’ve seen is “La Belle Noiseuse” (1991) by Jacques Rivette. It reflects the artistic process more accurately than any film I can remember by simply allowing the camera to linger over the page in long takes while the artist makes mistakes, rubs out, alters, smudges, gets angry, rummages around in the studio draws in frustration, and finally begins to edge carefully towards something we can recognise as definitive. What’s more, Rivette never shows us the final work, but instead allows our imagination to conjur it up from the difficult creative process we’ve already witnessed.

Now that I think about it, it’s great because we witness a creative process rather than a final result, and thus we see an artist’s mind literally at work. Oh, and Emmanuelle Beart in the buff doesn’t hurt either!

An honourable mention would have to be “Stealing Beauty” (1996), centered around a young girl (Liv Tyler) as she visits relatives in their house in Italy. The uncle, who is actually a minor character, is a sculptor and he announces early on that he will make a bust of his neice, a decision which provokes complex reactions among the other characters. Unlike every other artist we see in movies, he doesn’t spend his days anxiously staring at an empty canvas, or chain smoking, or having it off with the servants; he just gets on with it. At different times during the film he potters around and we see the work evolving as the action develops. To him, the girl’s sexuality is just another fact to be observed and noted, not something to be exploited.

In a different way, “Le Picasso Mystere” (1956) should be mentioned. This is a short documentary that mainly consists of long shots of a blank screen, on which Picasso paints. Picasso is unseen, and the page fills the frame, so we only see the marks being made, but not the hand at work. The results are hypnotic, as we see a line make its way across the screen, become a face, which fills out and becomes a horse, a horse and rider, a horse and rider in a circus, which becomes something else until the picture is “full” and he simply starts all over again. He never hesitates for a second. It’s as if his hand has a will of its own and simply knows what it wants to do. Ever since I saw this film I’ve never had a moment’s hesitation in recognising Picasso’s majesty and deeply mysterious power. “The Picasso Mystery” indeed.

Suggestions welcome. I’ll post more as I think of them.

Found things

As I revealed in a previous posting, I have a passionate interest in found things of all kinds, and the artistic and poetic potentialities there can be in accidents.

One of the sites I look at habitually, at least since Michael Leddy turned me on to it, is Found Magazine, which catalogues found objects, especially notes and photographs. I came across this one recently, and it struck me immediately how similar it is to a well-known poem by William Carlos Williams, who in turn was attempting to capture the unwitting poetic resonance these kind of objects can posses. This is a nice circularity that I find very telling.

The poem, written in 1934:

THIS IS JUST TO SAY

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold