It’s almost a year since I saw any of Marrickville Mattress Poet C.L’s work (last sighting here), but she’s still going, and I saw this this morning. It looks as if she’s feeling the strain of living with a climate-action-delaying bloviator as Prime Minister.
I’m not the only one who keeps a weather eye out for new works by ‘C.L’, who turns discarded mattresses around Marrickville into ephemeral works of literary art. Here’s my latest sighting. After a brief foray into politics, she (I think the poet is a woman) is back to more existential subject matter. The calligraphy is less precise than usual – perhaps 2020 has taken its toll.
[Added a bit later: I keep thinking I can’t be the only one uploading images of C.L’s work. A moment with DuckDuckGo led me to the Nothing Really Mattress site, which showcases street mattress art from around the world. One of C.L’s distinctive works, perhaps from a happier time – ‘People fell in love on me’ – appears at this link.]
Neil Patrick Harris holds this together as a gay man who is dumped without warning by his partner of 17 years. It has been described as Sex and the City only with actual gay men. well, I never took to S&tS, but this stays charming. I especially like the inscrutable affability of Colin the dumper.
We went to this with high hopes, but although most of the audience seemed to love it, laughing heartily at things invisible to me, I thought it was abysmal: badly paced, grimaced and shouted rather than acted, cynical about politics with a reactionary and misogynistic undercurrent. Poor Oscar. That is my impression of the first half. The second half may hav […]
A line lit on at random – 'I call it mediocrity whose name is australian poetry' – reminds me why I approach Ouyang Yu's work with caution. Either he is describing himself as mediocre or he is worryingly exceptionalist. But worrying isn't the worst thing poetry can be, so here goes.