dumb but lucky

I had what you might call an oblivious brush with death today… toast well and truly stuck, so I yanked out the plug – dying with your knife in the toaster is so dumb you won’t even make the darwin awards – and had a good fearless dig around getting it out. No worries.

Five hours later, clearing the bench, I noticed I hadn’t replaced the plug. So I picked it up and pushed it back in, realising as I did so that it was the plug of the coffee-maker. Thrill for the day.

the goddess project

the goddess project #1

Originally uploaded by Illuminata.

yes, it’s time i told you about my next show…

Alina, Liss and I (in the guise of ZenSiren) will be performing sets of our own songs – interspersed with dance, ritual, spoken word and a certain amount of divine mayhem – at Bar Me, in Kings Cross, on the last two Wednesdays in November.

Expect some surprises and tell your friends; this ain’t your ordinary pub gig…

To see more photos, click on this one and search my flickr site with the tag ‘goddess project’. To see more of the work of our wonderful photographer, Lisa Hogben, follow the link from goddess project #2. To view the press release, read on…

MEDIA RELEASE UPDATED 15/11/05

glory to there is no god

glory to there is no god

Originally uploaded by Illuminata.

October 20 to 31 at the michael commerford gallery exhibition of spiritual truths…

“As a devoutly atheist mystic I wanted my work to illuminate a pure yet polemical truth while intimating something of the divine as I understand and experience it.

Thus although the primary effect is of lyric splendour, on examination the medium of broken glass evokes the idea of shattered past constructs and a present reality somewhat hard to handle…

Working on this project put me in mind of other devotional acts – medieval monks illuminating vellum, Victorian virgins embroidering wall samplers, and the masochistic ritual reiterations of believers throughout history.”

this is yu-hsin

‘It hurts… it hurts to have only one penis.’ …Eugene, love junkie.

real dance

I dropped in to the Performance Space today to see the current crop of ReelDance film installation works. Now generally speaking, I’m sorry to say, and notwithstanding the fact that I’m currently negotiating to make one (which will naturally avoid the conditions of unwatchability I’m about to describe) – generally speaking I find dance film a thankless experience – self-indulgent, turgid, half-developed ideas too often poorly filmed and abominably presented, justified with a lot of self-important academy-speak about ‘questioning notions of time-based dimensionality’ and ‘interrogating the body in space’, etc, etc. Now, I don’t think I’m reactionary about this: problematic is okay – art doesn’t have to entertain – but it does have to engage the viewer or it surely fails in its fundamental intent. So forgive me if I sound old-fashioned, but it still seems to me that even in the most postmodern context the primary condition of good film is watchability. If you want to challenge that condition, well, fine: make it hard to watch and tell me in your portentous program notes that that’s what you’re intending, and I’ll do my best to rise to the challenge of understanding. But most dance film looks like the creators had fun making it and therefore assume we’ll all have fun watching it, despite its apparent lack of coherence, character, propulsion, passion or purpose.

That said, the current Pspace show isn’t too bad. Not wonderful; not terrible. Four films, each on a loop in their own space, and at least the worst was the shortest. I was there on a weekday early afternoon so very few people came in during the half-hour or so I spent in the building. Just as well, perhaps, because one room actually got me going – that is, engaged me and made me move with it. Here’s the description from the program:

today in the sydney papers

The Telegraph says NSW’s poor puppet premier and his transport minister are failing the taxpayers so badly over the new Cross City Tunnel that they’re clearly ‘out of their depth’. The tunnel has been plagued with complaints over cost, construction delays, exorbitant tolls, traffic congestion around the entrances and claims of traffic being illegitimately directed into it. The Herald, meanwhile, says ‘Sydney motorists are about to get a toll road that makes the Cross City Tunnel look like a bargain.’

Tolls, taxes, traffic jams, and a train service recently reduced to a near-skeleton timetable to make it ‘more reliable’… we pay and we pay and we pay, but we still don’t get the service.

city of trees

they call it the living fossil

Originally uploaded by Illuminata.

I spent the October long weekend and the next three days with my family in a caravan park in Adelaide, city of churches, as it’s called. We were in Brown Hill Creek Caravan Park, a lovely place… balmy enough to ease the usual familial tensions.

Drew and I did some sightseeing-type things while there, including a tour of the wine country in the hinterlands and a wander round the CBD. In the Botanical Gardens we came across this tree, one of only two of its kind in public view after the discovery of a copse of them deep in a national park a couple of years ago. For the full story click on the photo and follow the link to the Botanical Gardens website.

In the middle of the caravan park was another tree in an enclosure, though the dimensions were somewhat different. The Monarch of the Glen is a great hollow gum, over 400 years old, former shelter to generations of black and white travellers, burnt and scarred and supporting an ecosystem of its own, lichens, grasses and ferns growing in the creases of its huge conical trunk. A plaque beside it outlined its known history, and the area was fenced to prevent careless damage.

In another tall gum, directly over our campsite, a bull koala grunted like a feral pig… we slung the hammock and rested by the babbling of the creek.