'Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.'
-Wittgenstein

It's getting to that time of year when you actually want to do the dishes, because it makes you feel warmer. I have ideals of not acquiring a heater, but they are fading fast, especially in the new place, which is all floorboards...
Went to Healesville Sanctuary a couple of weeks ago. I hadn't been since I was pre-adolescent, and was appalled to observe that at the entry and exit point they actually have speakers hidden amongst the shrubbery, piping 'native' music into the surrounds. What is this, 1951? Maybe it is out in Healesville...

Flannels

One thing which I think ought to be popularised in Australia is the common practice in Japan of carrying around a small cloth or towel to dry your hands on when you use public toilets, it makes so much more sense environmentally and hygienically than paper towels or blow driers.
Just had to put that one out there whilst I'm thinking of it, you know...

Informal Rituals

Bit slow on the uptake with this one, but Alex Vivian and my show is on at TCB until 6pm Saturday, and it's killah - including work by:
Josh Petherick, Nick Selenitsch, Elvis Richardson, Andrew McQualter, Claudine Kraan, Starlie Geikie, Oliver Hextall, Sean Bailey, Kylie Forbes, Dan Bell, Mark Rodda, Spiros Panigirakis, Damiano Bertoli, Kate Smith, Matthew Brown, Helen Johnson, Laresa Kosloff, Kristina Tsoulis-Reay, Lucreccia Quintanilla, Jess Johnson, Jordy Marani, Jess Lucas, Madeline Kidd, Alex Vivian, Evergreen Terrace, Lisa Radford, Christopher L G Hill and Harriet Morgan with Alex Vivian.

Methinks if Rudd wants to discourage the yoof of today from binge drinking, he should resurrect that ad that The Commonwealth Department of Health and Family Services released in the early nineties which, disappointingly, I can't find on YouTube - 'how will you feel - will you feel - tomorrow?', that ad is an important historical fashion document, as much as anything else...

and some pieces of poems

And if the world were black or white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.

(Louis MacNeice)


I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes

(Theodore Roethke)

I had a laugh the other day, a friend Dan was saying he'd enjoyed the last blog post about indigenous mythology, and I was saying 'I can't remember writing anything about indigenous mythology - has it been that long?', then I went home and looked at the blog and realised I'd misheard him saying indigenous apology, and that yes, it really had been that long.
I'll be back properly soon...

Oh, and frohe Ostern, by the way.

McCahon:



Balson:


Munro:


Giant:


Indigenous mythology:
The Two Wise Men and the Seven Sisters
told by Josie Boyle

In the beginning of Yulbrada, the Earth, the Creator, Jindoo-the Sun, sent two Spirit men, Woddee Gooth-tha-rra, to shape it. They were from the far end of the Milky Way.
They made the hills, the valleys, the lakes and the ocean. When they had nearly completed their work, Jindoo the Creator sent seven sisters, stars of the Milky Way, to beautify the earth with flowers, with trees, with birds, animals and other creepy things.
The Seven Sisters were making the Honey Ants when they all got thirsty and they said to the younger sister, 'Go and look for some gubbee, some nice water. Over there, in the hills. Go in that direction'. The little young sister took the yandee dish and she went in search of the water.
The Woddee Gooth-tha-rra, the two spirit men, they were in the bushes and they were spying on these women. They followed the minyma Goothoo, the younger sister, when she went for the water.
This young sister, she fell in love with the two men. The other six sisters went looking for their sister, because she had been gone for so long. They wondered where she might be. They were really very thirsty and they needed their water. After a while, they found her with the two spirit men.
The Creator, Jindoo the Sun, had warned them that should such a thing happen to any one of the sisters, she would not be able to return to her place in the Milky Way. When the six sisters finished their work, they returned to the Milky Way. The two men and the woman remained here on Yulbrada, the earth. Their special powers were taken away when they became mortal. They became the parents of the earth, who made our laws and our people-the desert people. They live by these laws today.
This is why the people of the desert have such knowledge and respect of the stars in the universe.

Sorry

So, in half an hour Kevin Rudd will commence proceedings to formally say sorry to the stolen generations of Indigenous Australians - a sorry which should, one presumes, extend to all Indigenous peoples here, for busting in on their lands and declaring terra nullius.
It's not as though this sorry is going to solve the nation's woes or absolve anyone, but for the government to finally see its way clear to making this declaration, well, as I've said earlier, it's a start, and what a relief that the Howard government is no longer speaking on our behalf.
'Sure, it was Kevin Rudd who was man enough to deliver a long-overdue apology, and for that he deserves high praise.
But it was Howard et al whose mean spirits helped inspire a nation (or maybe one half of it). For without them, this event would not be so big.'
-Chris Graham, editor of the National Indigenous Times



"It was also important I think, on a day when thankfully more Australians than usual were actually focused on Aboriginal issues, to actually remind all of us, particularly those of us who frequently have little understanding or contact with remote Aboriginal Australia, of the desperate situation these people find themselves," [Nelson] said.

He also said something about challenging the people who thing Indigenous people get a good deal to visit their communities and say you wish you were born there.
What a thing to say during an official apology!

Opposition Indigenous affairs spokesman Tony Abbott defended Dr Nelson's speech and called some of those who turned their backs "radicalised activists".

Pfft! So we are a nation of "radicalised activists" for turning our backs on Nelson.

'Rudd inspired. Nelson tried to divide. Rudd will be remembered. Nelson won't.'
(Graham again)

I feel a tiny bit sorry for Brendan Nelson. I don't think he was trying to divide. He's just not cut out for this. He's compromising his own values, he's failing the croneys, he's inspiring resentment and disgust in a lot of people around Australia.
As for this:
'At her home in the central Victorian town of Shepparton, Lyman, 57 a Yorta Yorta woman, says the Liberal leader's speech, which angered and distressed many Aboriginal people, was "a toxic speech" and accuses him of misusing her story of removal to undermine the Aboriginal case for compensation.' (from The Australian
Well, you can't pity him for that.

I have been trying to watch So Yo Think You Can Dance Australia, trying to enjoy the brief snippets of actual dancing which they show... of course the standard is going to be different in Australia, drawing from a population of 21 million versus 300 million or so in the US, that doesn't matter, it's still lovely to watch people dancing... what makes it hard to bear is that it is even more despicable in its emotional button-pushing than the US version, as Matthew coined it last night, So You Think You Can Cry, keeping the contestants up all day and all night doing hard physical work and then critiquing them not only about the dancing which they're performing with exhausted bodies and minds, but about their clothes and then drawing their life tragedies out of them just to finish it off like middle-school social worker type of stuff, that judge who is like Mr G with Rod Stewart's hair, ugh, awful. Showing these poorly edited jump-shots of incomplete dance routines and then zooming and holding as each successive contestant breaks down into tears, really there should be laws about this sort of thing being exercised in the name of cheap tv, it's like a particularly cheap and nasty brand of prime-time pornography.

'United Arab Emirates 'green city' to cost $22 bln: State-controlled Abu Dhabi Future Energy Co (Masdar) said it would cost $22 billion to develop a "no-carbon" urban district it is planning in the United Arab Emirates. The district, Masdar City, on the edge of the city of Abu Dhabi, will eventually be home to 50,000 people and 1,500 businesses, Masdar said in a statement. No cars will be allowed.'
(The Guardian)

Double Helping

Our new food blog, established by the luminous Saskia, is here, and well worth regular visits, because it is already filling up with recipes for delicious things, and reports of London food from Bianca and Amsterdam food from Annie, and a backlog of Trondheim food from me.
Yummmmmmmm......

Did the double-opening smackdown on Friday night, a good way to begin the new art-fancying season.
First Elvis Richardson at Utopian Slumps which was an at once cool and heady celebration of incompatibility, the technological dinosaur, new breeds of which are forming faster than you can say anthropocene. This big fat four-stack VHS DNA helix spiralling up to form a pillar hoping to help support the roof-beams as it admits defeat and tests out new sedentary possibilities, it being like a core-sample of the eighties-nineties experience of the box, it sent all sorts of colours and images through my mind as I made my way around that coil reading the spines of these black boxes like 'Diana's funeral 1997', 'Splash', 'Eat Carpet', the ubiquitous 'shit tape', any number of Michael J Fox films... Then the old school animated adoration of the even older school test pattern, mainstay of childhoods, the pulsing, throbbing stillness of it all, then the televisuals anagrams like 'sit level USA', 'Sat eve we ill', 'Salute Elvis', like, what can we do with this thing now? Ought we to listen when told it's defunct, you can't get that any more, they don't make those cords now, but it nonetheless still means...
Flitted in and out of Murray White between a heineken and a cigarette, once again appreciating ipod shuffle choosing an opportune moment to play New Order as I entered the mouth of that industrial yellow and clean-surfaced alleyway which leads to MW, and then everyone seeming extra specially glamorous for first opening of the year. My favourite was one of Pat Foster and Jen Berean's, the one against the back wall which looked like a double-panel photo of galaxies from a great distance and then as you approached it went snap and turned into a hammered surface of broken glass over black lacquer.
Now it is thundering, the sky is fat and turning in on itself, ah...

Scientists suggest new geological epoch: ours: It would be called the Anthropocene. The word was coined by chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen at a conference in 2000. It denotes a new geological epoch, beginning about 200 years ago at the time of the Industrial Revolution, when our planet's systems were increasingly affected by our species. While the term Anthropocene has been used informally for years, a recent peer-reviewed British paper argues that it is now time to officially accept Anthropocene as a distinct era and to leave the Holocene to the pre-Industrial past.
(Monga Bay)

Been very busy. Lots of planning and thinking to do this week, and a million stitches in time besides. Getting used to living alone. It's funny how breakfast alone at home is an eternally wonderful thing, luring yourself out of your own dream-mind with caffeine and vittles. But eating dinner at home alone becomes curiously depressing after a while. I have not eaten any meat at my new place. I theorise this is maybe because it is counter-instinctive to consume meat without sharing it.
Went to see No country for old men last night, new Coen Bros. film. I thought it was a pretty good film. I don't generally expect realism in film and this didn't give it, garlanded as it was with typical Coen Bros. thukting, chuttering gore and the contrasts of hollow shell where human compassion ought to be, all mixed in with bread-and-butter nice guys and honeyish, David Lynchian women. It was partly this film's idea of what people think they are in the world for these days which I found interesting, though of course Cormack McCarthy is accreditable for part of this, being the author on whose book it was based. It was also very, very well acted, and completed by carefully chosen instances of ambiguity and rather impressive makeup, especially the shotgun wound in the guy's leg. When I got home I more than half expected to be shot through the forehead from behind the shower curtain with a silenced shotgun, but didn't particularly mind the fancy...



Exhibition opening drought is breaking this week, lots to see, hurrah - group show at Murray White, Elvis at Utopian Slumps, Kath Huang soon at Neon Parc... will try to cobble together some reviews eventually...

Holy stock-market-crash-amoly

'The US Government owes $US5 trillion and no-one seems to care despite what is supposedly a global credit crisis.'
(Crikey)

Mmmm, brownsocks food...

I realised last night that since the new year began I have been detoxing without even realising it - which can't really be a bad thing, can it? So life is all brownsocks vegetarian organic food and dandelion tea and no cigarettes and fair to moderate alcohol consumption...

Been a long time, yes, but not forgotten, just busily amassing grains of sand and shuffling them around until I have fashioned a suitable little mound for myself and steeled mind and body for the return to school - ah, but how exciting to be a student again!
For now, holing up until tomorrow is over, I can feel my British genes shuddering and panting and groaning under this 41 degree heat, we were not meant for this, where's the fogou, etc.
Bis bald...

I was impressed by the quintessentially English songs my randomly filled ipod shuffle coughed up upon my arrival in London yesterday:
The Art of Driving - Black Box Recorder
Frankly Mr Shankly - The Smiths
Bizarre Love Triangle - New Order

London, ho...

That's mandacious!

Oh dear, if poor old Brendan Nelson keeps providing the level of jeer-worthy material that he has put out there in the past week, it could become a blog unto itself. But perhaps it's time to cut him a bit of slack, so flagrantly obvious as it is that he is merely a neocon sacrifice to the gods of Interim and Precedent.

What is interesting to me at the moment is this attempted denial of Rudd's mandate to abolish Work Choices. I would conjecture that many Australians still wincingly recall the mandates which Howard claimed as victor in past elections:

'Prime Minister John Howard's conservative Government won re-election today in Australia, claiming a mandate to reform the nation's tax system despite a diminished majority in Parliament, national news media said.

Mr. Howard can take only limited comfort from the victory, as voters deserted his governing coalition in droves to vote for opposition parties that may be able to alter his tax plan.'
(From The New York Times).

'Mr. Howard, you couldn't even get 49% of the vote. How is that a mandate?'
-Kerry O'Brien

And so came the GST to complicate all our lives and diddle the poor somewhat more than the rich.

And onward:
'If it is, in fact, true that unions have been forced, by the introduction of "Work Choices" legislation for which this government had no mandate and the subsequent lavish spending of taxpayers' funds on blatantly misleading partisan political advertising, to sell of [sic] their own assets in order to be able to counter the government misinformation, then a massive injustice has been perpetrated against many unions and their memberships, and they should be entitled to seek reparations from the Liberal Party.'
(From [We] can do better).

And let's not forget Howard's role in the 'Coalition of the Willing', in which it is worth remembering Bush had assurances of Australia's participation before the UN had issued a mandate on intervention in Iraq, upon which mandate Australia's involvement was supposed to be predicated:
'Having earlier indicated it would support the U.S. in any military action against Iraq in its war against terrorism, the Australian government now "has been given a psychological mandate," McKinley said.

He said the death of numerous Australians in Bali will likely sway the minds of Australians unconvinced their government has been following the right policy.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard has called Saturday night's bomb explosion outside a Bali nightclub, which was packed with Australians at the time, an act of terrorism.'
(From Asian Political News).

Eye's 'Mandate', with guest vocals by John Howard and Kerry O'Brien:


A bit rich then, isn't it, to deny the Labor government what seems to me a clear mandate on Work Choices - the Jackie Kelly disgrace may have made a dent in the polls, but it's not as though the Liberals under Howard had up to that point administered a squeaky clean government and campaigned without recourse to dirty tricks, I mean really... that's not what lost them the election.