T minus 4 hours

missed the plane twice already... 
guess i don't really want to leave you.


jet plane from punk monk propaganda on vimeo.

raen rabbit, raen rabbit

...raen, raen, raen

[the end of the birthday [dinner]]

life is a cabaret

...and then in an apparent overnight coup my baby duckling turned into this, erm, colorful vivacious swan.

it's so surreal that we just did her 21st birthday party. i'm still pinching myself & assume there was an alien abduction involved. there is no other reasonable explanation.

she seems to have inherited a shy retiring manner & love of dress-ups from her mother [but is much more wise/sensible]. she has incredible friends too. aint life grand?

former incarnations

in a former life this was me. my van was called nettle. hippie much? this was the first house/land i ever bought: a half acre with an orchard & loads of native trees where medicine herbs were grown & organic seaweed/comfrey fed plants ran amok in raised biodynamic beds framed with gathered driftwood. i was twenty. my year off from uni.

leaning against the hedge [which i climbed into & hid just prior to my daughter's birth -- i heard pushing hurt] is my old bike i rode 1 km on to call the midwife after being in labour for over ten hours. on the rural outskirts, there was no landline & this was pre-mobile phone popularisation. aaah, the 1980s.

this is the place where my earth faerie sprite, raen miro, was born. she's right there in that pram. born eventually following a storm which broke a several months long hot drought. i named her for the hopi indian tradition of which i was a student at the time under the guidance of wise woman, susan weed. rain is life, "ae" for faerie, miro for the artist/tree.

twenty years later my beautiful friends, marianne & francois today have given birth to a little boy eliah. taking the essence of the universe into oneself & believing it is one of the many secrets to life. the naming tradition is vital as is listening to the signs from within/without inherently key to many aspects of our journey.

eliah is such a great name. powerful yet humble. he will undoubtedly be blessed as will others around him. along with my other pseudo nieces nehlia & bella he has the best parents i know. lucky them.

onto excrement which sort of segues... hanging out with all the feral hippies at peats ridge has made me all kind of nostalgic. yesterday my GF anna who was also there posted on facebook that she'd acquired bacterial pneumonia as an occupational hazard from being at the fest. she's now riddled with antibiotics after kicking off the year in A & E. joy.

the compost toilets did get beyond epic overflowing proportions at one stage. if one chose to sit on the seat after standing through the queues, one's ass grazed previous attendees recycled breakfast [needless to say i did my squat muscles a favour & used them]. i can talk shit for hours & am happy to go into great depths about the inane beauty of a colonic irrigation, perhaps not changing nappies, but there is a line drawn when dealing with others beyond perhaps one's inner nuclear core. i can't even clean a carnivore's oven/cooking implements & that's prior to digestion.

thing is, those dreadlocked hippies in all their technicolor wonder, tree of life garb & underarm crystals are not so many poles apart from me. if i were to be experiencing anyone's shit outside of my own comfort zone i'd have theirs any old day over the general populace. there is something to be said for peace, love and happiness. even when it assaults the nasal senses or even inner polarity.

slushy cocktails for everyone!

raen's 21st. the day after... the clean-up stole my words [but now we have matching pirate tattoos -- arr, arr, arr].

nappies - a retrospective

this is me with my mother a long time ago when instead of bleaching hair, crisp white sanitised nappies were de rigueur. at least in my world.

last night i saw this photo for the first time. it's almost a faded bastion of a lost world. it was given to my daughter as a series of family portraits for her coming of age. it's official yet simultaneously surreal, raen miro is now a woman in the eyes of society & so the commencement of the handing down of family heirlooms/bric a brac begins. the traditions are passed, stories are told & shared.

when she was an infant, we too floated in a framed sea of freshly washed nappies which flapped wildly in the wind permeating their happy apple cider vapours into the breeze on the line at the little house i bought when still wet behind the ears at university with her dad, before we parted ways a year later. that is where i gave birth to her after hiding up a hedge seeking to divert the inevitable after being in labour for the longest time because i didn't want to push. eventually i was coaxed down & the rest is history. twenty one years ago yesterday.

i can still smell the vinegar warmly whitened by the sun's deep caress.

burning bridges

today a small handful of my drinking buddies ran the blackmores running festival's flagship event, the sunday telegraph body + soul bridge run [doesn't sponsorship make for un-succinct copy?]. in what became blistering conditions friends & flesh cats; ky, raen, & andrew with only extensive beer/wine/whisky arm training joined 33, 000 others & um, decided to subject our bodies to an altogether different kind of abuse. 9kms is an excellent cure-all hangover technique. i think it's called pain transference.

with firmly strapped feet, i joined them in the ultimate asthma attack impersonation to survive the completer finisher ranks on the harbour foreshore opposite the opera house after starting on the other side & running over the closed off sydney harbour bridge.

the crown in the jewel of the running races was the sydney marathon [42kms] which appeared to feature peeps of notably higher fitness calibre to ourselves with slightly more rounded training regimes. the marathon was taken out by winning kenyan runner julius seurei in a time of 2 hours, 17 minutes and seven seconds. that's um, 1km in 3.18 minutes... quite a lengthy sprint. as a reality check we ran 9kms in around an hour in a fast fashionably paced "yog", something between an uphill crawl/downhill jog [you saw it here first -- wait for it to go viral].

on completion, after subjecting the god-sent three minute angels to our toxic sweat [lucky them, apologies to your colleagues clare], & following the repeated beration by the woman in the corporate sunday tele tent who put seinfeld's soup nazi to shame taking pride of sausage sizzle catering to new hedonistic over-possesive heights: we did what had to be done when permanently denied the juice we desperately craved... we went & drank more beer. apparently there's a half marathon coming up. we do have our training to consider after all.

pix by punk monk michael prechtl

bleached beach painters

saturday avo. bondi beach. number 12.

three intrepid adventurers raen, claire & myself assailed dear friends; francois & marianne's over the weekend to transform their new 1940s pad from ugly duckling to beautiful swan with paintbrushes & chisels firmly in hand.

with the invaluable aid of julien, the saw wielding wonderboy & under the inimitable direction of the expectant overseer marianne: grill rendering was, um, resculpted, a ladder was beautifully painted rather than walls, a fab new brown paper bag hat trend was set, a bathroom ceiling was miraculously created, orange nectar from the gods/shop down the bottom of the road was quaffed & i somehow ended up looking like i'd been at a face painting carnivale...

time happily sucked us up into a vortex & we also managed to miss the premiere of another friend, ben ferris's feature film penelope at the sydney underground film festival but managed to [just] make it in time to see our own two films [chick addict & salome's picnic] play in the following session... before engaging in that err, stimulating ass-talking scene in pink flamingos.

we missed the midnight session of porn dogs [but love the website] after an epic three session run, but befriended greg blatman, the director & his lovely wife [who was almost a willing victim to an alien pink abduction]. congratulations on winning SUFF's "most taboo" award. greg won't be introduced to my furry felines anytime soon... fluffers they are not.

AR004: ALGAEVERSE 2009

with all these images -- words are almost unnecessary. almost.

the full shake-down will be available on the soon-to-be relaunched punk monk website including the complete rhineflesh-vaghörn test results, ALGAE RHYTHM film series, the stop motion record of the night AND the finished ALGAEVERSE!

the launch of "ginger rhythm" the first in our beverage line with civilised pig AKA dan simmonds, was an unmitigated success & the mulled wine kathleen & i brewed up went down a treat as well.

what busy bees we all were.

[pix shot by punk monk dave cheng]