death up close

...from my 32nd floor window. roppongi hills. tokyo.

high tea by candlelight

contrary to popular perception high tea does not bear aristocratic roots. the poor working class of yesteryear could only afford one solid meal per day which was lunch. after crawling back home late at night from the coal mines, factories etc they were obviously hungry.

the kettle would go on, tea would be brewed and what scraps could be gathered and assembled into a snack of sorts supplemented by never-ending cups of tea. it would seem that the institution of english drinking copious amounts of tea is a many headed beast. in far flung colonial outposts the aristocracy would be drinking tea under the mobile shade of their coolies as a symbol of class superiority whilst back home the comfort it provided the poor industrialised peasants was arguably equivalent if not greater. emotional, physical and psychological sustenance is hard to beat.

as standards of living gradually increased then so did the quality and quantity of accompanying tea foodstuffs until eventually the now antiquated english expression "tea" was born. and still they incessantly drink the vile stuff in delicately patterned porcelain cups. i mean even lady gaga does it [this makes me think of my south australian friend dave].

cut to every other thursday. in a semblage of eclectic worlde bric a brac & dark sombre tulle walls surrounded by the odd what not, a wonderful underground movement has been born sprung from the humble building which gave us the original [recently relocated] 505. this is high tea.

last visit we [claire & yours truly] were delighted to find ourselves in a small world filled with strangers punctuated by friends. the wonderful kent eastwood [who was my 13th hour live pianist for my "explorations into the sound mind" installation at the successful punk monk collaborative "multiple personalities exhibition"] was a special guest performer. with renny field. a delightful & unexpected treat. fine company indeed.

high tea is a pseudo secret movement for artisans & lovers of intimacy where unplugged sets are experienced up close with a cup of tea in hand or a bottle of bagged wine. i'm not that traditional & nor is claire, so we float on the periphery of the caste system with lips stained red not black or blue. no china required here.

but RSVP quick.

floating flower

spice temple's green tea keeps friday insanity at bay.

the scales do not lie!

so... i got on the scales earlier today after dusting them off from their lost spot under the pink couch at the corner shop. i don't know what exactly the motivation was but i did start training again this week after an enormously long hiatus. it has been hell.

on the first day i threw up two thirds of the way in. and then continued to work out. that is what you do. today was day two: i hallucinated for a chunk of it, lost vision for a time & my legs became oversized rabbit vibrators. learning to swim by being thrown straight into the deep end. from experience the first three weeks is always the worst.

maybe the weigh-in inspiration was "the biggest loser" the runaway US reality TV franchise produced here by channel ten which is now airing for something like it's 5th successive season in australia. a country obsessed by food [master chef et al] and then how to purge it shows. i sneakily watched two episodes earlier instead of preparing for a video interview. which is still have to do today.

people were losing phenomenal & arguably unhealthily large amounts of weight. like 16 kilos in a week etc... and the cool thing was i was fast tracking even more efficiently than television punters by skimming straight to the weigh-ins. have another tim tam. i'm all over this.

that was my mistake. whilst the cheese and tomato toastie was happily making soft crackling noises from the nearby "hello kitty" appliance in the kitchen i located my inner scan body composition monitor ie. scales & faced a reality served up in a digital interface i wasn't prepared for. being overweight is what happens to other people right? disempowered people with no idea. is this middle-aged spread? domestic bliss? suddenly the whole world spirals...

now those pie in the sky figures & back breasts viewed at 1024 x 768 res don't seem so far flung at all. i am by far the heaviest i've ever been in my life. even more than when nine months pregnant. suddenly all those stories these people are saying on TV whilst half a nation jeers at them for cheap entertainment, strikes a resonating cord. empathy.

all efforts must be doubled. but first let me finish this packet of tim tams & feel a little bit sorrier for myself before facing the rest of the day... and then i remember that the camera adds ten pounds. perhaps we can film this segment after dark?

my friar tuck

sometimes the universe just doesn't want me to go back to the city. and that's OK. then someone irrevocably intervenes... um, thanks.

i am the fly

so i got bitten by a spider week before last whilst playing in my garden off the grid... it may have been a funnel web. possibly a fiddleback. we don't really know. whatever it was, it hurt. initially.

whilst trying to positively ID the spider after an instantaneous short scream of "motherfucker" complete with dance & a nano visual flash of multiple legs & eyes wedged between my finger and the brick i'd moved [just after removing my garden gloves. doh!] in the waning light my arm started to go numb so after applying a pressure bandage, it was decided to face the hour or so drive to the nearest rural hospital. goulburn is lovely at this time of year.

a funnel web spider bite can kill a child in only a few minutes. adult response is a lot more variable & it can take hours if it happens at all. whilst experiencing the hypnotic pleasantness of the half loss of the use of my arms & a soft humming pins & needle sensation through my legs, i have to report after the initial wave of nausea as my body did battle with the toxin it was very very relaxing.

it really seems now that the whole dangerous spider thing is a bit of a misnomer. spiders are being terribly maligned in this country. three days later when i got bitten by another spider, i barely budged & continued to throw rocks into my shiny red wheelbarrow unphased whilst enjoying the slow tingling sensation. my feral bush woman initiation complete.

in fact i'm thinking about patenting spider venom as some new street drug. deliciously creamy. after first bite i was all ready to bequeath with love my juices to the nearest over-sized spider. now i kind of know what it feels like to be a paralysed fly. that movie was all wrong. don't help me, help yourself.

arachnophobes have got it all wrong. love thy spider.

september 11 generation...

matthieu rossat AKA matto is a member of the september 11 generation. his definitive breakfast television was the collapse of the twin towers. hence the expletive.. "FUCK"

like many of us he's concerned about art being blindsided & no longer pushing barriers due to lack of broad commerical appeal/profile.

last week i went to his exhibition opening at a little gallery i occasionally frequent quayside. gallery eight is an intimate but politically aware environment which often houses art with significant social commentary whilst delivering an aesthetic edge.

as usual neither the gallery or matthieu [who has played an active role in previous punk monk propaganda art events] disappointed. in fact i rather liked what i recognised/saw conveniently packaged for my viewing pleasure in a politicised nouveaux tribute to the pop characterisation popularised by banksy meets warhol. no standardised beauty facism here.

tristran mendès france had this to say as a preface to the exhibition. let his words mirror mine.

you can feel ill at ease, have an unpleasant feeling, even feel sick, that’s the objective.

the mechanism rests on some unlikely analogies, you may vaguely feel they are not politically correct, though you can’t actually grasp this.

the familiar pictures deal with our time.

you can recognize its tones, its aesthetics at once. the motives one claims are about our nowadays. they reveal something about the revolution of the media-related order that is taking place. the icons, the screens, which have always had a set place, their own logic, their social or political status can be found here, bare and without a hierarchy. the tsunami of post-modernity has just flown away.

the analogies you are confronted with have lost their structure, they are hybrid, regurgitated, and they question you like an insult.
you would like to know who it is aiming at and what it conveys.
you would like to be offended, to refuse. but it would only mean that you are staring at the finger pointing out to the moon. because these figures, however disturbing they are, convey nothing but vertigo, really. exactly the one you feel when the structure of history collapses.

the vivid picture is facing you. you answer it, but you are stunned. it swallows you up along with your own indignations.

the serigraphy posters can now be purchased online. AND there are these awesome pics which complete the series on matthieu's blog. if you're afraid of naked women you might not want to venture down the rabbit hole... red pill or blue pill? as matthieu says "everything's political."

as tears go by

fresh or perhaps more appropriately somewhat jaded from her rogue escapades for sydney festival after more than a few publicized hitches, marianne faithfull can be found tonight back behind the great curtain of oz up the opera house stairs. i'm so there.

hopefully it won't be the anticlimax i experienced when seeing a very smacced-up washed-out nico back in 1987. it remains to be seen whether or not marianne has already exited stage left with lucy jordan.

under blue moon i saw you

technically it's not the start of the year, but for all intensive purposes according to certain AWOL monks & blog party time it is. anyway i'm BACK! happy new year one and all. january was a false start punctuated by bush & bollywood. february is much more focussed. more internet time. so soon you'll take me up in your arms.

what better way to commence 2010 than a piece of tortured nostalgia whilst tenderly nursing a morning after KINO hangover? unwillingly mine.

last night was KINO #33 [with an appearance by my pseudo 24 hour flick "not beautiful enough" now sublimely edited/sound designed by the wonderful star germans, felix and michael & starring the ever lovely muse catherine davies]. the fat32 myth finally debunked... fate up against your will.

heads up to oliver dickens, dan rossi & dave cheng for shooting, sound recording & capturing awesome stills whilst we illegally ran amok amongst the loading containers adjacent to sydney airport before security threw us out as the sun rose and heralded in the day. we were in and out almost within the hour. except we had to break back in in the dead of night to look for missing make-up & head torches. under blue moon i saw you.

anyway that was yesterday. today is echo and the bunnymen. in sydney. if this is what george orwell's 1984 looked like i could easily move in. and stay. forever. your lips a magic world...

message in a bottle

regardless of the unlikelihood of a user specific message carefully placed in this bottle [i lost count of how many i sent off as a kid but never received], there is some kind of inherent communication with this bottle anyway.

pondering on a bevvy of related tangential manifestations on this bright gleaming day where the sun kisses the ocean makes me partially happy & sad.

one day we may not be able to see/touch the ocean for the toxic waste but for now i cling onto the nostalgic fantasy which accompanies one solitary bottle bobbing on the harbour waves...

and then place a freshly scribed piece of reflected light back into the floating vessel liberating it back into the emerald blue yonder.

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.

no dig, ya dig?

one of the appeals of heading up to peats ridge fest under the guise of work mode was to 1. break my 21st century eco fest virgin bubble and 2. pick up a couple of refreshers in the multi-disciplinary field of permaculture. the good times/peeps which surrounded were a most convenient side-effect. reconnection with the earth & life force around are vital for any sustainable community.

i've been certified as a permaculture designer since 1988 when people outside of the biodynamic community didn't know bill mollison & david holgrem's names [modern day founders of the movement], but i haven't been actively practising throughout. this all changed in the last few years where outside of a limited city practise i now have the opportunity to pursue one of many dreams under challenging conditions: developing an eco community & sustainable lifestyle on a drought stricken temperate forest block just shy of the blue mountains national park. time to infuse new sensory experiences to jump-start old filed knowledge & brush away a few of the more obscuring cobwebs.

i'm currently in the process of building a long planned no dig multiple mandala garden complete with straw bale wintering chook shed after being partially influenced by the writing of australian, linda woodrow who over the last couple of decades has popularised the science/art of chook tractors in a rotational multi-cropping scenario for domestic/commerical application.

the heritage chicken source has been researched [probably going with australorps], the worms are breeding away happily munching down on organic leftovers both within the city borders and without. now all that needs to be done is to gather/harvest raw materials to build an oasis on what is essentially a concrete carpark. an impervious bedrock of hard claypan with no top soil in sight. enter no dig garden. if you want to know more check out esther deans who is one of the modern day matriarchs of the movement. i still have an adorable much thumbed version of her book from yesteryear.

utilising the super powers of chooks & worms there is about to be launched an incredible before and after scenario in the makeover journey of the decade. it doesn't actually take quite that long but there is a lot to do. in fact the cool thing about no dig is essentially after building a bed without technically breaking one's back is that it's almost immediately ready to go in terms of planting. generally it's good to wait a couple of weeks however to allow the microbes to kick in and stuff to break down. just a little.

not unlike a day of compost building no dig gardens are like the opposite of peeled onions -- you just keep piling on the layers laden with moisture between each one. a little newspaper, cow manure, compost, lucerne, seaweed, chook manure, pea straw, lawn clippings etc goes a long way... a delicious lasagna for the outdoor senses. just add water & sit back and watch...

another day, another decade, another song

with the beginning of one year lies the shadow of the last. mine was cast in glorious tribal technicolor beats & imagery surrounded en masse by beautiful people, vibe and scenery. peats ridge festival 2009.

best of all at my side was this similarly solar powered faerie lit chick who i even have a theme song with & a bunch of long distance calls with the man who brings the music. i am fortunate that there is a whole symphony worth of incredible people in my life [hello raen, punk monks & friends] & nothing shows that more than a few trashy self-depreciating new year's eve photos. aaah, out with the old and in with the new.

sadly all my footage is in mobile film this year as we played wannabe rolling stone journos so i rely on the cooperation, read vetting, from my fellow conspirators to provide more of these humiliating time-capsule gems. you know who you are.

apparently there are a lot more where these came from...

charity case

...and then i was rescued from my deliberate hermit-like isolation by these beautiful people who are the poster kids for buddhism & friendship. they even have a benetton baby for christ's sake. eat your heart out angelina, no international adoption papers necessary.

so in the evening i followed up my tinny lunch with something a little more holistic and delicious. although i would like to say my creamed corn was organic.

i am the christmas charity case & thankful for the philanthropists who emerged from blurred shadows [daniel, andrew, claire, marianne, davey] who all tried to rescue me from myself over xmas. the best families are created.

sadly the pool party in the pelting rain was detoured as i passed out on the couch whilst serena and eugene showed me their stunning holiday photos... no, really they were wonderful. life is just so... tiring.

thanks guys, all of you. you are the spirit, the son/daughter and the holy ghost. suddenly i feel quite religious. perhaps that's just the wine/blood i'm drinking.

the grinch stole christmas

behind the smoke & mirrors of lazy summer days & barbecues on the "slip, slop, slap" beach at sydney & fab pool parties with meandering yachts cresting the harbour, this was the reality of my christmas this year.

still that cold can of creamed corn in front of my solo video gaming station for xmas lunch was delicious. all that was missing was a glass of fresh goon to wash it down.

run a mile

this is my mum. like me she likes to run.

except she looks a lot better in short shorts than i do.

bollywood! bollywood!

bollywood! bollywood!

what other genre or mechanism is there where we are afforded full unambiguous shameless colour, song & dance in modern day cinema? the guilty pleasure of a massive population stemming from mumbai india and then spreading around the world gives us what are essentially post modern elvis & timeless sirens in full technicolor productions with probably even more hip swaggering cheese, drama & fun.

the massive hindi cultural vehicle which has essentially become a cinema style has been entertaining millions around the world since its inception in the 70s as an infusion between bombay & hollywood although the bengalese film tradition started way back in tollygunge which was in the early 1900s the hub of the evolving indian industry.

tollywood became bollywood with the geographical shift as india took over america's role as the largest film producer in the world & moved to bombay. i guess technically it should be called mollywood these days...

in 2010 i will be producing a low budget bollywood feature film to be shot in sydney which is an australian/indian production. it's an excuse to embrace fantasy, fun and hard work in an intense environment perhaps even more unreal than usual. i mean even kylie's doing it...

it's come on the back of some hard work with my tribe punk monk propaganda & a bunch of us will be heavily involved in this feature which is incredibly exciting follow through for all our humble but big vision short film & event installation work. some of this can be found on punk monk propaganda's facebook, vimeo or youtube pages. most months we can be spotted at sydney's KINO, showcasing intermittent experimental projects.

something on a much larger scale has just happened for another unknown director in uruguay. comparing our work is like dwarf apples and um, precious persimmons, but check out this vid which was uploaded on youtube last month [nov 2009]. so far it's received over 1.5 million views. he's just been sponsored by sam raimi to produce a 30 million dollar feature... the story isn't particularly original but the execution is breathless. all for less than your weekly rent...

i did that once too for a script to screen five day challenge for KINO [KABARET] after coming out of a year long deep dark depression which is how i met a couple of punk monks. the landlord suffered and this is the film we made. poles apart from fede alvarez's masterpiece but nonetheless we're very proud:

throw some passion in and maybe dreams can really come true.

that's bolly/hollywood!

[and now for fun a really cool little film a friend of mine made, which i saw yesterday for the very first time]

bananas in pyjamas

...are coming down the stairs. studio bound for sleep.

the other arrived at 3am & and explained his "trivial" drunken behavior, barely coherent, still wet.

one [wo]man's trash is another's treasure it would seem. or the converse.

merry christmas.

X marks the spot

now all we need is a pirate treasure map.

looks like punk monk digital will be delivering one of those in the new year...

with copyright laws running amok and proposed changes including total ISP privacy rape in australia this sounds like something a few renegade pirates might want to be a part of.

the iinet debacle was just the beginning.

watch this space, err, spot.