We haven’t seen much of the Sydney Festival this year, but last Friday we managed to go to see Mirazozo at the Opera House forecourt. It’s an inflated structure, a luminarium, which you can wander about inside for 20 minutes. It only costs $10, or less if you’re in a group of four or more.
As we move closer to taking possession of our new house – filling the attic and the kitchen cupboards, we come across little treasures that have been left for us by the lovely people known as The Vendors. There are some small black hexagonal tiles which will come in handy if the bathroom floor suffers serious trauma, several cans of paint clearly marked with the room they belong to, a roll of toilet paper (an act of superb thoughtfulness). And then there are the grace notes: a plastic soldier missing one leg; a dog-suitable tennis ball; and this little putti lyrist on the paling fence:
One house gets itself into boxes. The other lies in wait.
Here’s a dog treat idea that deserves wide currency.
You do need a little equipment: a balloon (one balloon for each dog); some scraps of meat or peanut butter or other substance attractive to dog(s); water.
Chop the meat up fine and force it into the balloon. I used a kitchen funnel. I pushed the meat into the narrow part of the funnel using the handle of a bowl scraper, then kneaded it down the neck of the balloon. It wasn’t too hard.
Fill the balloon with water. It doesn’t need to be very full – I was happy with a diameter of about seven centimetres.
Tie the balloon off, and put it into the freezer for 24 hours or more.
Give to dog(s) when they are in need of entertainment, or just when the weather is unpleasantly hot.
Our dog Nessie has many virtues and at least as many vices. Here’s a seasonal story in which the consequences of her vices, though vile enough by any reasonable measure, are less vile than those of her virtues.
You could argue that the whole thing was the humans’ fault. On Christmas evening, the Art Student and I packed a basket of leftovers from lunch, including most of a roast chicken, and set off for dinner with my sister and her family who are in town for the holiday break and living just down the street. After a pleasant evening, in which the Art Student displayed her Auntie qualities to striking effect, and my sister’s leftovers, including spectacular poached salmon, won the day, we brought most of the chicken home with us. We went straight to bed, absentmindedly leaving the bag of chicken in the basket on the stairs.
Enter evil Nessie.
The next morning, Boxing Day, the chicken bag was on the kitchen floor, completely empty: no bones, no crumbs of stuffing, not even a smear of grease on the lino. We didn’t know which of the dogs was the culprit – Oscar, the Honeymooners’ foxy Jack Russell, is staying with us while they’re in Thailand – but our dog-walks during the day made the criminal’s identity clear, as Oscar was his usual energetic and regular self Nessie was uninterested in chasing balls and failed to produce anything for our doggy-do bags.
That night when we humans went to bed, we shut doors as usual: the back door so the dogs couldn’t get out to bark at the possum, the front door in case of an unlikely intruder, our bedroom door, and the door that separates the front of the house, where we sleep, from the kitchen area, where the dogs sleep, because Oscar hasn’t quite accepted the principle of Separate Sleeping Quarters. The Art Student, usually a very light sleeper, took some anti-inflammatories for pain she’s been having in her hip. So there’s the setup: many closed doors, two deep sleepers (I don’t need drugs to make me stone deaf when asleep), and a dog with a dangerously overloaded digestive system.
I’ll spare you a description of the state of the kitchen floor the next morning. It was at least as retch-makingly noxious as you can imagine. That was the result of her vice – and though the ghost of a smell still lingers, there was nothing that carpet foam, scrubbing brushes, newspaper, disinfectant, deodorant and the passage of time couldn’t fix. It was her virtue that caused the serious damage. Unlike A Small Dog That Shall Not Be Named, she recoils from the very idea of crapping or piddling indoors, and had tried desperately to make the back door open: from the evidence she knocked, scratched and bit, presumably in the hope that one of us would appear, godlike, as we normally do to the faintest of her knocks because the door is new and beautifully stained – at least it was. We didn’t hear. And the door is a mess. We didn’t have the heart to beat her severely or even yell at her, but our hearts bleed for the door. Behold just some of the damage:
Whew! Getting married is a big deal. I know that now because my younger son did it yesterday.
It was a wonderful event. The ceremony was in the relatively new Ballast Point Park, formerly – as the name suggests – a source of stone for use as ballast, and until recently a site dominated by oil storage tanks. Now parts of the largest tank have been used as a sculpture, an iron crown floating over the park, with a line of Les Murray’s poetry punched into the rusting iron. The park itself is pretty stark so far, dominated by a bare sandstone cliff, but indigenous plants have been planted there and promise that in time it will be a softer, kinder place. It provided us with a fabulous site for a wedding: a grassy lawn enclosed by rock, hacked into circular shape, presumably to accommodate an oil tank. (The only photo at this link shows the exact spot, though you’ll have to imagine the flowered arch and hundred people.)
The reception, at the bride’s parent’s home five minutes down the street, was just as fabulous. It was on a sloping lawn in front of a block of townhouses, right on the edge of the Harbour. We built a symbolic fence of bamboo flares to warn little children (of whom there were four) and people whose judgement might be impaired by alcohol (of whom there were potentially many) of the danger of falling over the edge.
I’m not going to attempt a full report. There were vows, beautifully pragmatic as well as romantic. There were poems, Pound, Shakespeare, Philip Larkin (‘This Be the Verse’!), and some written for the occasion. There were speeches. One running theme was that my son was taking a different path from his parents, who have never married. This theme peaked in the opening line from the Best Man, brother of the groom: ‘Liam and I are bastards.’ If only my mother had lived to hear the accepting laughter that rolled like thunder at that line! The competitor for best line of the day came from the Best Woman, sister of the bride: ‘I pre-emptively love your children.’
There was loud music but no dancing, except for my little nieces and, according to the photographer, me. There was enough excellent non-alcoholic drink among the beer and wine to save non-drinkers such as me from dehydration.
Today the Art Student and I spent most of the day helping with the clean-up, post-mortemising, attending on the Opening of the Presents. We had tickets for Geoffrey Rush in Diary of a Madman at 5 o’clock at the Belvoir, but we were so done in by our weekend excitement that we gave them away, with hardly a qualm.
Posted in Diary
I started this month of sonnets with the announcement that we’d sold our house. Read on.
Sonnet 12: Announcement
We’ve bought a house, we sign today,
pay ten percent of far too much
(but we’re in love, so that’s OK).
It’s done up with a loving touch,
it’s near a park and faces north,
near shops, trains, buses and so forth.
We’re downing size, yes, less is more,
from Three One Seven to Thirty-Four.
Bring us garlands, bring us flowers.
Blow the whistle: end of innings.
Sing a song of new beginnings.
Four signatures, the house is ours.
Soon we fly the empty nest.
We’ve found our home for all the rest.
Jacaranda’s green
Five bright flowers on the ground
Ten live in the leaves
Posted in Around Annandale, Books, Diary
Wednesday night, Yuendemu at Gleebooks. Last night Java on George Street. Or close enough to justify the alliteration.
It’s Art and About time in Sydney, and among other things our civic sculptures are dressed for the occasion. Here’s Queen Victoria near the QVB, taken on my iPhone and then manipulated out of almost total blackness on iPhoto. She’s wearing a bright red quilted skirt, a white fuzzy bonnet, and, among other things, a huge cameo brooch with a dog on it slung round her neck.
Around the corner from the Queen, a number of exhibitions opened in the artist-run Gaffa Gallery last night. The one that had drawn us, and turned out to be the most interesting, was a solo exhibition by our young friend and neighbour Jesse Cox. (All but one of the others were photographic shows, with a lot of photoshopping, and about equal amounts of restrained elegance and garishly exuberant montage.)
Jesse’s exhibition, A Puppet Show for George Street, is two rooms full of shadow puppets made from used oil drums scavenged from nearby restaurants. There are bicyclists, figures carrying briefcases, umbrellas, mobile phones, walking dogs, riding skateboards, wheeling shopping trolleys – two-dimensional figures cut from old tin with rivets at the joints. There’s some appealing verbal wit – the fat man walking a dog has ‘Cholesterol” printed all over him; one of the kissing lovers has a Heart Foundation tick on his chest. But the main charm is the way it refers to Javan Wayang Kulit.
As someone said, as we watched the video loop of the puppets in action, we half expected that at any moment a dragon would appear.
The other non-photographic exhibition is ‘PARK/PARK‘, a record of an event on Park(ing) Day earlier this year. According to the Park(ing) Day web site, it is ‘an annual, worldwide event that inspires city dwellers everywhere to transform metered parking spots into temporary parks for the public good’. This particular transformation involved a cardboard cut-out car and similar tree – the artists sat in the car until the meter expired, sipping tea.
All four exhibitions are open until 5 October. Art and About is all over town until 24 October.
Because we had predicted it would be unbearable to be near a TV on this election night, we chose to join the art aficionados at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the first night of Ken Unsworth’s ‘popera’, The House of Blue Leaves.
If this happened in the show it was after we left and would have required a transformation of the black decor.
As a distraction it was a major failure. I can’t give you a review because we left after a bit less than an hour. The image above makes it look like fun, and maybe the fun started after we left. The show involved music, dance, sculptural creations, appalling sight lines (exacerbated by sections of audience that radiated entitlement), terrible timing (long waits while clanking and scurrying behind a closed curtain weren’t quite masked by dreary chords from the piano). Much of the action happened close to the floor, and so was easily visible only to the front row of the audience. We were in the fifth row, so relied on guesswork for quite a bit of it.
Given all that, the show started promisingly. After a reverberant male voice proclaimed ‘In the beginning’ and variations, the curtain opened to the sound of heavy breathing on a more or less blank stage (there was a doll of some sort lying up the back left, but it was hard to tell if it was meant to be there), and then a further curtain opened at the back right to reveal the source of the heavy breathing, a woman in a nightie and body stocking lying on her back with her legs spread, crotch towards us. After a little while a small grotesque winged figure descended from the ceiling and rested for a moment between her legs (I think – the woman had moved around and so had people’s heads, so I could no longer see her at all). Then it rose again, and when halfway to the roof emitted a shower of fairy dust, or succubus sperm. A ripple of laughter. The only one of teh evening. The curtains closed.
There followed a song, beautifully performed by Natalie Gamsu in a shiny black frock, in German, something to do with morgen.
A man in black carried a helicopter onstage and popped three balloons by pointing it at them. There were boy sopranos, just their heads in urinal like stainless steel bowls, singing ‘See that ye love one another’. Natalie Gamsu made another appearance, her head poking out of a hole in a tall white boxy structure on wheels, this time singing in Spanish (‘Contorna‘) to a group of masked dancers. Slender wooden poles descended from the ceiling and made occasional clacking sounds that startled the dancers; after a while hands emerged from the ceiling and detached the poles, so that they fell onto the stage. Occasionally, as when a woman in a white dress floated up to land on the table holding the urinal-bowl-boys’-heads, there was a moment that seemed to promise something. But she just floated down to the floor again, helped by a man in black.
To my untutored eye, the choreography would not have disgraced a very good high school performance. The dancers were fine. Everything was done with great solemnity. There was nothing even faintly pop about the music or the decor. It was po-faced rather than pop, and not at all operatic. It was theatre without theatricality, entertainment without amusement, earnestness without seriousness.
One of the young men who made their escape at the same time as us said it was probably going to be brilliant from then on, and we’d kick ourselves when we read the reviews. He was joking.
We got home in time to see 20-year-old Wyatt Roy tell the cameras, ‘I want to be potentially the politician that is available and that gets back to people, that is connected to the community and has their pulse on the issues.’
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