Quick! Music!

Kristina Olsen is on The Music Show on Radio National this morning at 10. Try and catch her, she's sooooo good.

Later: She IS so good. Check her out. RLY.


And this tribute to LOLcats, is, as the maker suggests, rather good (snaps to Zoe for the link). I'm rather fond of the Kraftwurst clip as well (we are pork products...)

Lunchtime

VH1 has half an hour of Split Enz vs Crowded House videos.

Split Enz is winning so far IMHO.

I know, it's the perfect Twitter entry, but I just haven't mastered that process yet.

Carry on.


-- Post From My iPhone

Comfort zones

TOO MUCH INFORMATION! was bellowed down the phone.

Heh. I do love those moments. Well, I replied, BB needed a small reward for mowing nearly all of the lawn...





He steeled himself and braved the heat on Monday to mow everything but half of the back yard, only stopping because the lawnmower conked out. Now we are experiencing that exquisite but short-lived time when our lawn has transformed from unruly white trash into something that makes everyone else look unkempt. Bliss!

Please note the abundance of plums on the brink of harvesting. Not long now until BB goes completely nuts with the jam jars and our kitchen turns purple.

Bejeebus, it's hot, isn't it? Padge thinks so, and is cooling his fur coat by living in the bathroom:



He's very happy.

I did a similar thing during the holidays, at a wonderful waterhole near Kyogle:



The water was cool and green, the blue sky had a wonder of cloud shapes, and I lay there for ages watching them, fringed by rainforest. Around me, people splashed and played, but my ears were under water and I just floated and breathed.

After a long while, I looked up to see my son and my brother-in-law watching me from the rocks. FOUND ANY EELS YET? they yelled. Ahem. Time to hop out. Still, it was splendid, and I was reminded of it by Fifi's splendiferous recent post about swimming. I'm NOT a swimmer, never have been, but I enjoy water when I can swim within my comfort zone. I do so envy Fifi's being comfortable in the ocean.

I am drowning in blogposts to catch up with. My feedreader says I have 2786 unread posts. Holy mouseclicks. I'll get there, but don't be surprised if I leave really stupid late comments on posts you've written months ago. I seem to start with the people who only post occasionally, because they only have a couple of things for me to read, which is why I nearly fell off my chair catching up with Bad News Hughes' Visit to an Antique Store this morning (warning: that link is not for anyone culturally sensitive or Nice, but it is definitely for people who think dolls are creepy).

OK, enough computer. Time for a cold shower and a bit of studio time. I love cold concrete flooring (in summer!).

Not much to do with Australia, but it was a good weekend

WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU? My father bellowed down the phone.

Here, talking to you, I answer.

WHY AREN'T YOU BLOGGING? YOU HAVEN'T WRITTEN ANYTHING SINCE TUESDAY. ALL YOU'VE LEFT US WITH IS TWO CATS WEARING HATS! WHAT ABOUT THE RESPONSIBILITY TO YOUR READERS? WE'RE DYING HERE!



Sheesh, talk about parental pressure. You'd think this was my homework or something. I've been busy, ok? Osteopath appointments, voluntary newsletters, paid work, studio setting up, movies to watch, partner to woo, overhaul to attempt. It's been a busy time.

The Studio is as set up as it can be until I have the muscle strength to have the press in the same room as me. I'm not even going to put my letterpress gear in there until I can comfortably lift a half-empty typecase, it's just too tempting. So here's a quick tour of Studio Duck, phase one:


Bottom left corner, the 'reading room'.


Top left corner, the 'clean working room'


Top right corner, the 'print room', yet to be established...


The bottom right corner, the 'homework room', later to be part of the printing area.

If you are studio-buffs and want to know more, click on the images to go back to Flickr and read my notes. Basically, one side will be clean work, the other dirty work, and I hope to have a central bench with drying racks underneath to divide the two spaces.

So I got to the point of getting out some actual pages and folding them on Friday afternoon, and then had to stop and go to meet Best Beloved for a movie. And I haven't been back all weekend! So today will be my first proper working session ever. I've decided that until art school goes back, I will work on the computer in for the first half of the morning (or all morning if I have to) and go to the studio in the afternoon. Hooray!

I knew I had a lot of computer work to do over the weekend, so Best Beloved and I made a commitment to go to a number of movies over the long weekend. We decided to go to the first session of the day, since these seem to be the least crowded, and then you come out of the cinema with the rest of the day ahead of you, which we love.

Friday was the exception, we went in the afternoon to see Frost and Nixon. Loved it.

Saturday we didn't see a movie, but I managed to get BB to drive over to Gunghalin with me and look at a Display Home Village. Miracle! BB is very cautious about debt, but now that I have a 6-year tenancy for a studio, we're starting to think about what to do at the end of it: move house to something with a studio? Extend? knock down and build again? We haven't got the finances yet, but if we start planning and budgeting, we may well have in the next few years.

Well. What a load of crap is out there. Project homes range from scummy badly-designed tiny boxes on tiny blocks up to enormous bloated badly-designed McMansions on tiny blocks. We found one we liked, and that is because it actually had some wall space for bookshelves and pictures. Obviously no-one likes books or gardening anymore. We are hoping that Penny and Kevin can push a few more mandatory green features onto these designs over the next few years. And we've been pointed in the direction (by friends) of some affordable eco-designers who may be able to help when we're ready.

Sigh. Anyway, it was a first step. And they're important.

Saturday night I went to a Girl's Night with some art school mates. Traditionally these consist of nice food, a bottle of champagne each (bare minimum) and some home hairdressing and beauty treatments, accompanied by lashings of gossip. This one wasn't much different, except that usually I'm the odd one out, not liking nail polish or hairdye. I usually sit and watch them play with each other. This time one of them had hit upon a less permanent plaything and brought along her curling tongs. I got thoroughly tonged and sprayed, and ended up looking like an aging 1920s flapper...





Which is all good and well (besides bringing back memories of years of bad perms in my yoof), but then I drunkenly rode home on my bike sometime after midnight, flopped into bed, and woke the next morning with a crazy halo of tortured hair that made Best Beloved (who had been asleep when I got back) do a double take when he opened his eyes. Thank Ceiling Cat it washed out, which is something that never happens when you do drunken girlie perm nights.

Sunday morning we saw Seven Pounds. I hadn't heard much about this, apart from friendly mentions about letterpress scenes. The first half of the movie was extremely frustrating; I knew they were teasing out strands that would be pulled together by whatever fantastic climax we were heading for, but it just felt TOO bitsy. Then the letterpress scenes started, and I stopped thinking about anything but what I was seeing right then and there. By the end I was very impressed by whomever thought about using letterpress technology as a perfect way of showing how that character's working life could be disrupted by a heart problem (not a spoiler!). It just wouldn't have worked if she'd been a computer designer, and it tapped into the recent explosion of letterpress stationery designers, so it wasn't way out in left field for an American film (since that is where the explosion is mostly happening). I loved that line about impression (or embossing) being the only way to prove something isn't digitally printed. Although the idea of her press sitting there ready-inked waiting for her to trot out and demonstrate the process is ludicrous, isn't it, Printing Grrrls?

And Monday morning we saw Slumdog Millionaire, which I think is one of the best movies I've ever seen. I loved everything about it, and spent the rest of the day listening to Indian music on my computer just to keep myself in the mood it had left me with.

And the rest of the time I've been working on the computer, finishing paid jobs, working on voluntary jobs, and eating BB's excellent cooking, including a dinner of goat vindaloo and a lunch of poached eggs Florentine, my favorite.

So there you go, Colonel Duck, that's what I've been up to. And sex. Lots of sex. (well, not lots, but enough to get back in the saddle.) Blushing? Heh.

Kitten Wars: Cat in the Hat

Pooter and Padge decided to try on Aretha's hat: who do you think suits it more?


Mr Padge doesn't seem to like the hat, but he loves the new president.


Mr Pooter just wants that person over there to SHUT. UP. He's loving the Brave New World vibes.





(Snaps to Ann oDyne, who added to the joy at Sorrow at Sills Bend)

Dawn, new era

Mr Pooter, as a cat of colour, has been glued to the radio since the wee hours and can't wait to see what the DVD captured. He thinks that the Americans got everything right except the President's species, but also knows that is just a matter of time...


-- Post From My iPhone

Orange from Greens

My studio is cool. Not in the 'oh wow, amazing' sense (I'm working on that), but in
the ten-degrees-cooler-than-outside sense.

It has a tin roof. Right now it is raining, hard, and I am transported back to... Just back, somewhere where there are tin roofs. The sound is fantastic.

I am playing Machine Translations, which is my rainy-day studio music, always has been. They've got the right sense of atmosphere.



I hope that photo turns out. It shows the only nice corner set up with all the things that will allow me to work until I get more shelving and move in the press paraphanalia.

Today I went looking for bookcases and shelving. I went up to my local Salvos on the way to Aussie Junk (looking for a teapot, but there's a DEARTH of them in Canberra op shops. I may -- gasp -- have to buy a new one) and intercepted two people with a trailer full of stuff trying to offload it to the reluctant shop assistants. They had a couple of bookshelves, and I asked if I could buy them directly from them -- or should I wait & see if the shop would take them? Turns out that they were jolly people from the Greens doing an office clean-out, and since the Salvos were looking harried, why not?

We ended up with them following me back to the studio and they helped me move the bookcases into the space, plus they threw in a couple of whiteboards. I gave them a donation to the Party in return, and I think we were all pretty happy. I heart The Greens.

One of the bookcases is wildly eccentric: hot orange, a bookcase on one side and a display case on the other! I think I'll slap a rough coat of lighter paint on it to knock it back a bit, then use it as a divider to hold all my poetry on one side and show off a bit of making on the other for anyone that peeps in the window at gallery openings.









Ooh, thunder! What a great day. Not for poor BB, though, who is home feeling miserabubble from a spider bite incurred whilst helping me move shite from the garage. Poor bugger. Still, the beauty of this studio is that it's less than one pop song's ride from the house. And with Bumblebee away, I can play for hours. And I will!

-- Post From My iPhone

Not dead (yet)

Sorry, didn't mean to leave you all stranded by my sickbed! I got home and hit the ground jogging (can't run quite yet) and have only been at my computer for brief perfunctory email sessions since. I am a lot better, apart from a hacking cough.

We had a grand plan for the weekend: After we'd unpacked and caught up with the neighbours, we were going to slowly sort out the house and move things to my studio while Bumblebee used the majority of the studio floor to put out his Warhammer things and play with them with some friends.

Of course, when my plans are grand, they invariably bugger up, which is why I tend to make lists of small plans instead. For a start, B's dad asked if he could pick him up a day early, on Saturday rather than Sunday (he has him for the rest of the holidays). No worries, but it meant that he would only have one day in the studio, so we shifted the plan slightly so that we would pack him a fresh bag on Friday night and he could have a good full play day. Then he couldn't rouse any of his friends who all seemed to have disappeared down the coast like every other Canberran. Oh well, solo play day.

Friday night turned out to be awash with bubbles as Zoe and I drank our way through a number of bottles of champagne and by the time we got home, all we could do was fall into bed groaning. So no packing.

Saturday, Bumblebee awoke sick as a puppy, and could not bring himself to move further than the couch. No Warhammer. He was very sad, but slightly cheered by the fact that I won't be moving my press & type into the studio for a month or so, so he can use that side of the studio for small bouts of after-school gaming. But nothing on the scale that he would have had if the plan had worked.



The upside is that I spent the whole weekend moving things out of the house and into the studio. Saturday, while Best Beloved and B flopped wanly in front of the tv, I put small things into green bags and moved them slowly and steadily from one venue to the other, stopping to have cups of tea with nice people through the day.

Sunday, I borrowed the Zowen (collective word for Zoe & Owen) trailer and the muscles of BB and Byrd, and we moved the bigger bookbinding stuff, including two work tables donated to me by a friend and some comfy chairs. So now the space is usable, if not organised in any way. There are boxes everywhere, and will be until I can organise some shelving, but I have chairs and tables and guillotines and nipping presses, so when I can find a minute, I can start working! Hooray! I'm going to try and get in there a few hours every day until uni semester starts.

And the loungeroom is amazing. Most of the stuff that we moved was jammed into half of our loungeroom, and now we have the whole space again, albeit strewn with half-empty boxes and bits of bubblewrap. Best Beloved has gone back to work, so I can't do any major shifting of furniture and things until the evenings, but with Bumblebee away we should get a lot done in the next two weeks. I love being able to rearrange my living space, it's almost as good as moving house (but not quite).

So here it all goes again, balancing work and work and work and play. Already the year seems so short!

Sick

In Dubbo it was hot, and we stayed in a motel with air conditioning positioned straight over my side of the bed. Best Beloved gets very cranky if he gets hot when sleeping (he emits so much heat naturally) so we left the aircon on all night and in the morning I awoke SICK. Dry, sore throat, glandy, headachy, grumpy.

Three days later, I'm still sick & grumpy. I get this way towards the end of a holiday/break anyway. I ache to be back with my bone folder or my keyboard. I get sick of moving, sick of being reliant upon others. I get to be one antsy Ducky. It doesn't help to be physically sick as well!

Sorry, I don't mean to be churlish. Today I stayed in bed, sleeping and sucking lozenges. I feel better, but not well yet. I've been reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins, a book I've been thinking about reading for years, and am happy that I've only started now, because I seem to be the right age for it. It's funny how procrastinated reading works like that. I think if I'd read this when I was 21 I wouldn't have enjoyed it.

I'm in the Blue Mountains at the moment, staying with my parents-in-law. Usually I'd be spending some time with Dr Sista Outlaw, but she's choofed off to Vietnam with her sprog. So I might as well be sick & wurty. Tomorrow I'll get up and do some vintage book and clothes trawling, which is something I love about the mountains. I don't know why I'm complaining, I could be stuck in a factory, chicken-sexing or something.

I really enjoyed Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo. All day there was a dark purple thunderstorm off to one side of the sky, threatening to engulf us, booming and sparking. It made us appreciate every moment in case we were rained out, but in the end it passed us by as slowly as the Galapagos Turtle heaved itself reluctantly out of its mud puddle to get a mouthful of leafy greens.

I was completely taken by the giraffes, such elegantly alien beings, eating carrot sticks from children with long ultraviolet tongues. They walk like supermodels but are far more attractive than any human bearing that tag. I hadn't noticed before that they have three horns, not two. The third is on that ridge of forehead leading down to the nose.

And the siamang apes were hilarious, putting on a show worthy of an experimental dance troup capering to jazz, providing both the deep booms and the trumpet top notes from the incredible black balloons on their throats, swinging and chasing and suddenly halting as if playing statues, arms up in a Vogue pose. The crowd roared, delighted. They lapped it up and continued until they were bored, at which point they all sat down, backs to the humans, ignoring us utterly.

Meerkats, otters, baby cheetahs, elephants, tapirs, hippos: all delightful. We picnicked beside the zebras, but with our backs to them, more interested in watching the other people around us.

While I'm sick and grumpy, I'm going to take the opportunity to say that lately I've developed into a staunch hater of smoking in crowds. I have no problem with people choosing to smoke (apart from the fact that they're killing themselves), but how anybody can think that smoking next to or inside of a group/crowd of other, non-choosing-to-smoke people is acceptable is beyond me. The smoke may go inside the lungs, but when it comes out, it is in the shared air. It doesn't just magically get wafted straight up and out of everyone's way!

I had problems with this at Woodford, sitting amongst thousands of people watching music (one young woman in front of me just held her lit cigarette beside her and let it burn, only taking about three puffs, leaving all the smoke to me), and I had BIG problems with this at the zoo, like when we were watching the otters being fed. A large group of people, mostly kids, and some bastard lit a cigarette without bothering to move away from the group. I have absolutely no problem with asking such a person to put their cigarette out. The thing that bothers me is the way they then look at me as if I'm being unreasonable and prudish. GAH.

It's my resolution to be more unreasonable about this. I'm sorry if this means I'm a wowser in your eyes.

Sigh. Sick. Grumpy. I'll be better next time, trooly.

On the road again

I'm sitting in the passenger seat of our 'long drawn-out sigh' of a car, as the Aged Poet calls it, trying to type accurately as it bumps along the Newell Highway between Gilgandra and Dubbo.

We've just had salad sandwiches in Gilgandra after visiting the Siding Springs observatory in the Warrunbungles, and we're heading for a day at the Western Plains Zoo tomorrow.
Thanks to my country boarding school days, this landscape is threaded with memories of teenage bushwalks, visits to family farms, and Bachelor & Spinster dances. As we enter a town, names I haven't remembered for years leap unbidden into my brain, surprising me, as I have an extremely bad memory for names. BB has stopped asking 'what?' every time I gasp. I've stopped trying to verbalize the mixed emotions I'm feeling.

Two days ago we went up into the Border Ranges and stood at a few vantage points like The Pinnacle to see the remnants of volcanic activity around Mt Warning. Bumblebee was very impressed, especially as we followed through with lunch at the Sphinx Rock Cafe, close to the volcanic centre, and then a swim at a waterhole so deep that local legend tells of a tractor lying unfound at its bottom.

Today we saw better volcanic remnants in the 'Bungles. I love the view from Sidings Spring, over the marvellous rocky outcrops to a landscape that is absolutely flat right out to the horizon. On the way out of the National Park, I pulled my hair out of my face with a scarf, rolled the windows down, put 'Meet Glen Campbell' on the stereo, and enjoyed the flat hot fields and straight roads with top-of-my-lungs gusto.

We take turns driving, and our styles are very different. My turn is full of noisy music I can sing along with; when BB takes the wheel the music comes off and either Radio National or an audiobook goes on. This tends to make me sleepy, and I'm a bad passenger, so I'll nap or play gameboy.

Bumblebee keeps himself amused, playing Gameboy, reading comics or making his Bionicle do spectacular things. Every now and again we'll make him down tools and engage with the landscape so that he actually sees the journey, so to speak.

Wow, here is Dubbo. TTFN.




-- Post From My iPhone

So green!

Close your eyes.

Imagine a two-storey mudbrick-style house sitting on the edge of a verdant rainforest. There is no television (there is a projection system), and the cicadas and frogs are loud and persistent. The power is completely solar, so the lights are dim and warm, and the toilet is a comfortable compost construction complete with friendly spiders to eat the mosquitoes.

Got it? You can open your eyes now. It's lovely.

Thanks to the wonders of satellite broadband, here I sit, listening to the frogs, typing to you on a laptop. I love modern life! I am typing while the others make curry and play carrom. We are visiting BB's brother and his wife, S&E, in their home turf, Kyogle, NSW. They have gone from the stall at Woodford to a stall at the Byron Bay markets, and now they are officially buggered. They have done well, and deserve a good break.

Yesterday we went into the city to the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) and saw a marvellous show called Optimism, full of contemporary works that spoke of hope, wonder and joyousness. IMHO, all they needed was a Charlie Sofo piece to make it perfect. [update: my favorite piece was the house floor, featured here.] We also checked out the State Library and a bit of the Museum.

Today, before leaving for Kyogle, we dropped in on the Studio West End, the artistic home of book and print artists Adele Outteridge and Wim de Vos. What an amazing space! Upstairs in a heritage industrial complex, full of light and air and amazing collections of interesting stuff mixed up with lots of handmade books and maquettes. I came away completely inspired about my upcoming studio set-up, although I'm pretty incapable of keeping spaces clean and uncluttered.

This afternoon we had a lovely lazy afternoon with our nephew while we waited for S&E to return from the markets. The boys and BB practiced their circus skills and watched some weird Youtube clips that BB has been dying to show them, and I cruised the bookshelves and plucked out Alex Miller's Landscape of Farewell. And lost the next three hours, completely absorbed from the first to the last page. Such a wonderful read, and leaves you with many things to think about.

I was taken by this, which is about the process of writing, but can apply equally well to reading:

The story was finished. The bird had flown. My little journey into fiction was over. The surprise, more impressive in its way than my disappointment, was that what I had done was no longer mine. By finishing I had not gained something but had lost something, and I did not know how I might remedy the loss, or fill the gap it left in me, unless I were to write another story and to make my escape again by this means. But what story?

What story indeed?

Vale Woodford

Ahh, a large friendly keybort and some gentle airconditioning. I'm back at Redcliffe, sitting down quietly after a shower and a nice cuppa. The folk festival is over, done and dusted. Or rather, done and dusty, and all my dust is down the drain right now.

When I started this post I was sitting in the front of S&E's stall, selling dusty stock to the remnants of festival goers as they hunted for last minute bargains while BB and B helped pack up the stall behind me. This is what I wrote:

Our tent is down and packed in the car, we've refilled our water bottles with cool clear Mt Beerwah spring water, one of the best festival features IMHO, and we're ready to go once we feel we've helped a bit with the stall.

Just had a guy stop and look at himself in our hat mirror and exclaim "DUDE! Why did nobody tell me I had a green spider on my face??!!!1!?" All his friends looked hung over and just as startled. Sure enough, there was a lovely largish thin lime-green chappie, perched charmingly on his sideburn. Classic. We sold him a hat, but I told him the spider had looked better.

Last night we watched the Fire Ceremony to the accompaniment of the most dramatic lightning storm I've ever seen. Imagine a large cleared valley full of people, ringed by trees, with lightning flashing around the rim but not overhead, whilst at one side of the valley is a stage containing musicians and an enormous choir, a huge river of candles, fire-twirling morris dancers, a burning European-style windmill and screaming fireworks. The lightning varied between huge sheets running vertically, and long horizontal stripes that would suddenly fork and shoot out flashing balls. And there we all were, en mass, holding umbrellas in the open! Dear Ceiling Cat, thank you for keeping us all safe -- and entertained.

I have to say, as much as I loved BEING at Woodford, and there were many, many brilliant acts, there was nothing that sparkled about the festival this year, nothing that blew me away. The crowd has homogenised; there are very few eccentricities. I miss the ferals, I miss Rumple, the oddest clown of them all, who has been snaffled up by Cirque du Soleil (although how the hell they wrangle him, I have NO idea), I miss the 'freaks' and the people who used to walk nude around the Chai tent. Sigh. I guess they're finding their own groove somewhere else, somewhere that doesn't have online bookings and where people don't tell the Festival Director that they are annoyed by the number of people dancing in venues and spoiling the view for those who like to sit at concerts (true!).

Anyhoo, now we're back in the 'real' world. We've still got 2 weeks of holiday, and plan to wander down to Kyogle to stay with S&E, mosey over to the Dubbo Zoo, and then hunker down in the Blue Mountains for a while, and this time I have an ironclad excuse NOT to go bushwalking. Unfortunately we won't be catching up with Dr Sista Outlaw, because she has escaped to Vietnam, but when she returns we will be able to tell her just how well her pudding recipe worked served in the heat of a Brisbane Christmas.

So blogging will get sporadic again from here on in; I'm going to lose myself in some good books and a few movies. Thank you to those lovelies who showed and bought me a copy of the Ampersand magazine! It *is* magnificent, isn't it? Such a lovely Penguin flavour (carrying on that penguin daydream theme!). I will be keeping my eye on that one.

The Woodford Files 6

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Today is so hot that they cancelled most of the outdoor performers until the afternoon shade kicked in, which is about now.

I managed to make our habitual morning Martin Pearson fix, but since then have been languishing behind the stall, reading papers, fanning myself and sucking ice bits from the esky. If you're in a cool climate or have aircon, send a cool thought my way please.

One of the benefits of being associated with stallholders is access to a hot shower. I usually take full advantage of this, but the cold showers provided for the punters are so damn good in the heat that I've been using them, even though they're communal. It's turned out to be lovely to stand in an open room lined with showers alongside many female body types. I'm no stranger to being nude in public; it's a fantastic leveller. Many of the shower blocks are not communal, or sometimes a combination of communal and stalls, but the lines for a shower are MUCH longer in these.

Wow, wish I could be in a cold shower right now, but I couldn't be arsed getting up and walking to one. The sun is temporarily behind a cloud, suggesting the relief we'll get later when it goes down... Last night of the festival tonight, time to party hard. Ooh, I just heard thunder! I think. Could be anything - I can also hear about five bands from where I'm sitting.

The fire ceremony is tonight, the traditional closing ceremony. I can't think of anything worse than the heat of the ritual burning of a large structure in a field that is the climax, but I guess it won't be so bad without the sun. There will be anything up to 30,000 people in the great grassy amphitheatre, including a huge choir and a selection of performers from the week.

Oh, can't type any more, my hands are too sweaty, and I'm about to drip sweat all over the screen. Penguins. Think like a penguin, in the middle of the ice. Ice, mmmmmm...

-- Post From My iPhone