gothic:blue

The Scots Church, corner of Russell & Collins, Melbourne CBD.

heartfelt

Baptist Place, Melbourne CBD.

on listening to sufjan...

heartsore and heavy, but this too will pass

as i listen, i imagine us on the beach, only it's pristine and clean, no pollution, and we're watching the sun rise as night bleeds into day, and we're sitting at the edge of the water with our jeans rolled up so the little waves only just wash over our feet, and the water is as warm as blood, and it smells of sun-on-metal, and of absolute calm

To Be Alone With You - Sufjan Stevens

winter:afternoon:melancholy

Victoria Parade & Carlton Gardens, walking home, a passing mood.

Now The Spring Has Come Again. Almost...

Carlton St, Carlton, Melbourne.

The first-sighted jonquil, on Solstice-Day. Narcissus jonquilla, surrounded by Camellia joponica, Galium aparine, and what i suspect may turn out to be Hyacinthus orientalis.

Federation Square, Melbourne CBD, night-time, crappy Picasa collage.

winter:noon

Canning Street, view from Carlton Gardens, Sunday afternoon.

sun:shower

View from office window, friday afternoon, sun through rain, a moment.

Market Lane, Melbourne CBD.

but on a more positive note:

another delayed post . this deliciously kitsch mandala created out of dried foods and odd bits of plastic crap was sitting outside the melbourne town hall a few days ago, as a protest against china's occupation of tibet.

aside from my multi-perspective admiration [including the time involved, the effort, and the political motivation backed up by political will - as insignificant as a dried-food mandala in an inner-city-shopping precinct may seem], the expressions on the faces of passers-by were absolutely priceless.

I passed this pub in Fitzroy on the way to Kimya Dawson's gig last night. My very first job in Melbourne, almost ten years ago, was pulling beers and pouring bogan&cokes here, and many, many happy memories are married to this pub in my colander-like mind [i.e. i live in hope that the important things get captured and the dross filters through to the drain]. It appears to be sadly untenanted at the moment, and its past is as chequered as an MRI of my brain would be, but the building alone bulges with history - therefore i expect it to be turned into yuppie dogboxes at any moment...

Don't Stand So Close To Me: and speaking of neologisms.

this is my opportunity to try and start a, um, [clears throat] "thread", or even perhaps generate a "meme":

Two English Words That Should Never Have Been Put In Such Close Proximity.

Exempli gratia:

Liquid Lobster.
Funky Curry.
Thai Tanic [not two english words, strictly-speaking, but i kid you not, and therefore worthy of inclusion].

i have a few more up my sleeve but i'm hoping [hoping] that some other kids are willing to join the oh-so-wrong-two-word-phrase party...

p.s. "All Rights Reserved" my arse. [although i'll be laughing out of the other side of my, um, arse, when i get sued, won't i?]

[wig] argh! [/wig]

when i realise i've started making lame, archaic jokes in bbc or html, i KNOW i'm in trouble.

nevertheless, my iTunes wigged out tonight for no apparent reason, and the wig was apparently iTunes-generated because i don't have the latest up-to-the-nanosecond version. so when i followed the iTunes-synthesized "HELP" link and was asked for feedback [now THERE's a neologism that should never have been coined: feed. back. feed + back. feed-back. feedback. think about it.]


but [and colour me narcissistic] here was my box-filling reply to the question "What were you trying to do?":

work out why iTunes wigged out on my crappy computer for no apparent reason. i never usually make the effort to fill in these kinds of boxes, but i thought "hey, here's my opportunity to maybe remind some poor wage-slave stuck in a sweatbox figuring out tech-y things for a multimegarichmultinational company {in order to make the people sitting at the top of the pile megamultimegarich} that there are real people at the other end of the box. and more importantly, to maybe raise a smile, or even a laugh, because hey, we're all human. uh, more-or-less."

Draw your own conclusions.

This is a coin-operated vending machine. Inside a tobacconist's. On Russell Street.

Regression Therapy.

Anonymous Installation, Forgotten Laneway, Melbourne CBD.



Oops. This one was from Wednesday. Hence the 'forgotten' [although I do remember that it ran off Franklin Street, down near the Victoria Markets, where we'd been sent on a work mission to look for drug-related paraphernalia. The irony being that the street-based drug scene in Melbourne's CBD seems to have based itself somewhere other than the CBD streets. Hence me having plenty of time to photograph other things during our ever-expanding peregrinations].

Working backwards yet again.

Tram Stop No.?, Corner of Dandenong & Chapel, East St Kilda.

A delayed post from Friday. I forgot I that I had deliberately photographed this image to blog it [the word blog still sounds faintly lewd to me even after all this time] until I was uploading crap to Picasa. Or Picasa2 or whatever the hell it calls itself these days.

The unreadable sticker says:

"Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtains"

I was cold and I was wet, and I'd had a really long day, but for for some reason this made me laugh, a lot.

jemoeba!

me catching a tram from brunswick to carlton, in my beautiful new, original, hand-printed hoodie & scarf, made by my beautiful friend jemima. who is also designing a tattoo for me, in a similar style [mmMMmmm, tattoos...]

i'm not a fucking advertising machine, i only put up stuff i love, and admire, and believe in. and i'm a die-hard advocate for all of my talented friends. credit where credit is due, i say.

check out her other work, or contact her and tell her how amazingly rock she is, here:

www.jemoeba.com.au

~ for 'mima, ♥ ~

oh my f*cking god.

i'm managing to post an entry almost every day!

what a wonderful tool for procrastination blogging really is! and all this time i've been looking for blank walls or lightbulbs to stare at, when i could have been typing meaningless crap to nobody about nothing!

fool, me!

What do we want? BRAINS! When do we want it? BRAINS!

luckily enough i happened to be working in the city again when the annual melbourne zombie shuffle occurred - an amazing agenda-free event [despite the deliberate and unfortunate reference to a particular style of dance for which melbourne has apparently become known internationally], this year attended by about 10 times as many people as last year, who had clearly gone to at least 10 times as much effort.

off the top of my head i saw zombie chefs, zombies in wheelchairs, zombie kids and pregnant zombies [hopefully nobody reported them to DHS], a zombie librarian, zombie goths [get your head around that one], and even, for god's sake if nobody else's, a zombie lesbian construction worker.

it was glorious, and so fucking funny that the tears almost ran down my trouserlegs. serious "kudos" to everyone involved, and especially to these three zombie nuns who agreed to let me photograph them on the way into The Lounge for a well-deserved post-shuffle drink. and some brains. hope you girls got some *wink*

i fucking hates commercial channels, but this is the earliest-posted link i could find... it's not hyperlinked because (a) i wanted people to know that it was a link to ninemsn before they followed it, and (b) i couldn't be arsed with the html.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=580154&rss=yes

You KNOW what I mean.

Stevenson Lane, Melbourne CBD, artist unknown.

even though i meant for this blog to be a little outlet for my currently-frustrated creativity, be it through crappy phone-cam photo's, random writings, dodgy-dot drawings, et cetera, and i meant for there to be a fresh and unique entry every day, i must admit that today was both long and un/productive [meaning some lovely things were achieved, and others that needed achieving, well, weren't].

but hey, there's some axiom about losing something on the roundabout and picking it up somewhere else [and it didn't involve lunches, wallets, or venereal disease, from what i can remember.]

so this is a cute sticker i found a few days ago, the same day as i was working with jules as a matter of fact, the day we created our little floral installation in arcade alley.

divertimento I

B1 says (12:23 AM):
hey, would you mind waking up in a hot tub in helsinki beside me and an empty bottle of vodka, with a wedding ring on your finger and no memory of how you got there?

B2 says (12:24 AM):
nope...
im being serious too
lol
i wouldn't mind that. would you?

B1 says (12:25 AM):
dude, i'm already programming my subconscious to play it out in intimate detail as soon as i go to sleep. and i'm booking david lynch to start filming as soon as we can get our schedules to match.

in the rain...

Corner of Faraday and Rathdowne, Carlton, walking home in the rain, listening to Tar Heart by Zeigeist, and thinking of those whose hearts remain untarred ~

It'll get better.

Arcade Alley, Melbourne CBD.

~ for Jules ♥ ~

loveletter, motherfist.

Heffernan Lane, Melbourne CBD.

Stevenson Lane, Melbourne CBD.

But I concur, my life's a blur...

Tuesday evening, cnr Faraday & Drummond, Carlton.

This post has little to do with originality. But it does have to with learning that someone with whom i share certain walls, both of our making and unmaking, loves Robert Frost, and it is to this person I offer this measly reproduction. Measly, but invested with the weight of feeling that blogging generally makes a mockery of. Ignore the mockery, embrace the feeling, and the fences will just be fences.

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Robert Frost

Naturopathy for Beginners

One of my darling internet friends made the mistake of asking me what it is that naturopaths actually do. This is what I told her [every word true].

"I would dissect your life in intimate detail [biopsychosocial, the works] and wring every millilitre of honesty out of you about where you are and how you got there.

Then I would fuck with your diet and your lifestyle and subject you to often foul-tasting medications to try and get you and your body to be doing the things you know you and your body want to do but aren't currently, for whatever reason/s.

Now this process can be easy or, um, not easy, depending upon where you're at and how much you want to be in the better place."

I suspect this is why my melbourne friend Fornika Fornika [yes that's her real name] refers to me as her Witch Doctor.

If You Didn't See It, It Never Happened.

i want bitty...

hey kids.

being the techtard i am, i only learn things when i have a particular end in mind [no i'm not talking about that kind of end] i mean, for exmple, learning html [how fucking annoying is that shit?!]

so my new trick is learning how to 'borrow' files off the internet, and convert them, without actually having to pay for any new software along the way. ignoble i know, but i'm not a fucking software developer or a web-designer, i don't get paid for entertaining any of you with other people's cool stuff.

so here's me demonstrating that i was able to nick and convert and insert [and a hundred other aggravating tech terms i can't be bothered learning]

an oldie but a goodie: david firth is a f*cking genius in all the wrong ways. we love fat-pie.

WARNING: this is not for the faint-hearted.

Precious & rare...

An image sent to me by my lovely friend Mark [funnily enough he's the one on the left] who's studying dance in Miami.
This man will go far, as he deserves to.

winter sky

Moving Galleries Autumn 2008 Launch

My lovely friend and colleague, who is a mother, a poet, lecturer, and an acupuncturist at the community centre clinic where I also work, generously invited me to join her in attending the Moving Galleries autumn launch a couple of weeks ago.

Moving Galleries is a project centred on putting both visual and literary works of art on public transport [the more cynical amongst suggesting that it's merely an expensive attempt to distract us from the fact that we're paying exorbitant amounts of money for extremely crappy service].

However, my friend, M, had one of her gorgeous pieces accepted for the autumn exhitbition, and was asked to read at the launch, where she did a spectacular job, and we had a lovely evening [assissted naturally by the provision of fine quality liquor and horse's doovers].

Congratulations, M! you ROCK!

www.movinggalleries.org