Moments, Thoughts, Memoirs over time

Poems

2010-10-28T04:21:00.000-07:00

Heterotopia

There are ghosts

Of spaces

Like buildings that

Once were bodies, living, present, but now

Decay in stillness and history

Like flowers dripping, saturated by

violent echoes, screams and discord-se

That phantom death of time

A black cat full of secret that brushes

past your hand, your heart

Darkening re-membrance, the eyes of mind

Blurred as truth – strange as transgressor

Purring, attaching you to experience until it

Disappears.

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Eucalypt

Take up and drink from the

sun of the day, take up and

drink from the welling fount

that flows from

victory peering over our horizon,

over that dankness; what shade of Hades

a scent like the stillness of night

left and yet to be revived.

O, Eucalypt, how our daily deaths are like leaf matter

decaying and yet remade in eternity

by your Internal Root

we are leaves off the trunk that is world

- chlorophyllic, swaying with wind

diseased and yet by a grace

you perfume the air

and I, worshiping your source

take my living breath and die

in the faith of the hand that made you.

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Homo Liturgicus

All incarnations of love are driven,

To signify in a moment the liquid sheen of

A silvery glow that lights lips of fire and hearts ablaze

Like lovers who kiss and know their Oneness,

To speak, and sing, and act, and dance, and worship, and make love

But the city falls, it does,

It makes grand temples, that Delphi of beauté si agrandissante,

That keeps us suspended,

Killing the malakoi, and arsenokoites

– Such disgusting bodies, such horrible souls,

Split them apart they cry, split them

In the numb shadows of death

They speak and curse; condemn, nations of normal over us,

In which you buy your carved god or goddess,

You know them with authorial omniscience,

and exploit them,

You enslave your neighbour and yourself with these gods,

The grand arches of their form cast dark over us,

Until the riots pull them down,

The Mind being suspended away from Body,

In enlightening, fiery desires of a dead and maligned spirit

And in the crucible we forge our own science of perfection

Which is our own vanity, Cartesian dreams, all figures of naturalism.

We cry for the salvation of

Deconstruction (I say with a German accent).

But a voice still remains and battles to this Dei,

Imago,

Homo Liturgicus,

I am what I worship,

I love, and therefore I am,

And it speaks, and promises, and relinquishes its love,

To perform what it speaks, and promises in truth

(Unlike Artemis, or Pan or Dionysius or Mammon)

And then it dances, acts, worships, creates and makes love,

All to say (and never in vain) -

“I have just died for you.”

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Le Bosquet pres de Monastère Cimiez

Silence is cushioned

In this grove of falling leaves

Defined by its brown, leafless interior

Housing owls that hoot

Whisper and pray

To stone nuns,

With the white of doves,

They peer into texture serene

Deep olive, like my lover’s eyes

A dark forest of hair above;

His smell musk like pine

A kiss that makes me a

Body again.

I am broken from Him now

This place of the One

Solitude, cool and soothing like

The rain that falls; heavy drops

Through canopy

I find, at the centre

Nature so unqualified

Peering out

To see the sun; ochre and new,

Lighting the green

Grove of day.

Hades' Mountain

2010-05-16T04:14:00.000-07:00

We climb it seems,
An incline of sloping dreams,
Boding in time with shimmers echoing,
Dogged spirits fuming up fires,
Eucalypt blue from cooling streams,
Licking dank and enclosing desires.
With the moaning scrape of sandstone – itch,
The coalescing circles of skin – slide
We define the vessel with our mouths,
Relishing its scaly surface, kissing it, sucking it dry,

Until Sisyphus seizes our lips, and possesses their work -
Apparitions, ghost-like and wooden holding us back,
Spilling up from a ferned crevice,
Sexed, taken-in, drenched, wrought and done -
Coming, coming at its peak.
The hole, the dirt, the brain-deadening moment,
Finding nothing in the dark,
But white sensed and once delicious nothing.

A Home Away From Home

2009-10-13T21:15:00.000-07:00

Larissa Behrendt – Indigenous Person of the Year

Larissa Behrendt finishes off an email, documents piled up around her, spilling over like the spare contents of her mind. Author of an acclaimed novel, Home and an array of seminal non-fiction works it seems Behrendt has mastered the life of a polymath as both an accomplished writer, and an activist lawyer. Behrendt’s passion for justice first emerged when hearing her grand-mother’s story as a stolen generation child, and the xenophobia and shame her father took on growing up in a country boarding school. As a young lawyer, holding on to the hope of a bright future for indigenous Australians, her views on education and the telling of story as the salve to the problem of indigenous rights were thrown into disarray when the Howard government disregarded the Bringing Them Home Report. From here Behrendt was convicted for a deeper form of change, and went on a search for the root cause.

“Because of my family’s direct personal experience with the removal policy, when Howard’s office said that it is only 1 in 10 that were taken away and that it was for their own good and that it wasn’t genocide it enraged me - I wasn’t going to let the government wipe out the stories of my family,” asserts Behrendt. From the anger experienced in those years, and the struggle of confronting the reality of racism and the indigenous plight in Australia was the important step that led her to diverge from governmental advocacy and her work as a pro bono lawyer to write her first novel, Home. The novel works as a fictional account of Behrendt’s family history, capturing the space between two characters from vastly different eras; Candice, a young rights lawyer, and her grandmother, Garbooli a member of the stolen generation. From this process she has developed an out self-confidence and an inner biography of both the nation she emerged from and the one that exists today.

As part of the process of writing and before studying at Harvard University, Behrendt travelled to her grandmother’s tribal lands around Walgett and Brewarrina in Northern NSW. Her time spent there allowed her to piece together the jigsaw of her father’s past, and in so doing her link to her people. “I think it says a lot about the memories of Aboriginal people that when they look at the landscape it’s like they’re reading a history book… (returning to the community) was a very powerful moment for me because it was a reminder that it didn’t matter how poor policies were that there has been something so resilient about Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal families.” Out of it came a renewed vision for lasting social infrastructure and a community undergirded by the Human Rights required for a substantive form of reconciliation. For Behrendt, there was no longer a past denial of identity, but a newborn strength shaped in the crucible of homesickness for Australia in America.

“I felt as Aboriginal there as anywhere else… I was much less concerned with my choices and I knew that I could be a Prada-loving, very comfortable urban Aboriginal person. I don’t think I would’ve felt as confident with my aboriginality if I haven’t been somewhere where there were no trappings of it,” muses Behrendt. For Behrendt, the place our nation needs to consider is ‘home.’ It is this place where Australia will find the source of the problem of Indigenous disadvantage, and the solution in the guise of reconciliation. It is this inbetween space we must go to when our sense of self is shaken. “Identity is such a complex amalgam. It’s almost as if it were one hundred percent nature and a hundred percent nurture. There’s no dichotomy around you in a sense,” says Behrendt.

As we turn the conversation from her own identity to the deeper questions of indigenous rights and law, Behrendt sports an acute academic dexterity and radiates the sensitivity of a life lived in the tensile gap between worlds. She envisages a fresh future in the auspice of an Australian Republic where the stories of the past become an ossified part of our constitution; where story is weaved into a constitution in touch with the diversity of Indigenous Australia. “People need to see the move to Republic as not just a simple legal change that changes the head of state and a few words in the constitution… but we really need to take it as a national building exercise and as an opportunity to make a more inclusive Australia.” It’s not until the policy-making of Australian governments matures from an impoverished dialogue between white and indigenous Australia, and see indigeneity as an intimate part of our history. The personal substance of Behrendt’s testimony naturally demands the respect that surpasses the clanging cymbals of political correctness and rhetoric.

In light of the rigorous political and community-based career she has pursued, it is easy to see why Behrendt was donned the National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee Indigenous Person of The Year for 2009. It seems that her views have touched a deeper place in the indigenous community, which stands as a testament to her natural strength as both an indigenous women and, social justice lawyer. She maintains hope, and the tenacity to strive for a form of justice rare in our society’s constant pursuit of the quick-fix pragmatism which has failed its indigenous people and redressing the injustices of the Stolen Generations. “It has been incredibly disheartening to see that now, despite the apology and despite the endorsement of the declaration on the rights of indigenous people, policies haven’t changed at all and that this government has been as tenacious about hanging onto the policies of the last government,” asserts Behrendt.

Behrendt’s next novel Legacy is coming out this October, and takes a sympathetic view of the rights movement in Australia as our next step in developing a system that has caught up with other developed nations with inbuilt Human Rights and moved beyond the horrors of the past and the current atrocities of the Northern Territory Intervention.

“Legacy’s a very different book, it really focuses on a relationship between a father and daughter - one in the rights movement and middle class educated daughter. It tries to look at the legacy of the civil rights movement and to counter those statements that people make so flippantly that rights movements haven’t worked… I think there will be a time when Australians will be comfortable with a leader who has a fairly strong social justice stance,” says Behrendt.

Legacy is released on the 26th of October.

Crying Havoc for New Theatre

2009-10-13T21:04:00.000-07:00

“Cry Havoc sums up an attack on bad art: Cry havoc! – shake it up a bit! Try something new! Be risky, be brave! No more safe theatre. No more museum pieces. No more two people on a couch. No more TV in the theatre. No more static space, domestic theatre. We want the big stories, the big experiences and the big visceral time in the dark,” declares the fresh-faced and audacious Kate Revz.

As a former alumnus of UTS in Media and Arts Production, Kate has gone on to a directing degree at NIDA under the tutelage of Egile Kipste. From this expert training, she has gained the skills to hatch her childhood dream of her own theatre company. Having completed her Assistant Directorship with the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of God of Carnage, Revz is in a prime position to achieve her dream. Her upbeat approach and enterprising attitude have garnered the vital support of family and the big wigs in the industry such as Cry Havoc’s patron Marcus Graham, and the sponsorship of Sydney Theatre Company.

Cry Havoc is no longer the naïve high school whim that she shared with her now creative accomplice and co-founder, Gemma Pranita but is now an ever-surprising reality replete with hard work. However, Revz is adamant that the pros far outweigh the cons. She sports the confidence to authenticate her optimism. “We learnt very quickly at drama school that it’s not just going to happen… I really believe in big vision and big concept but you can’t have that without strong performances that are informed by truth and the intricacy of the text,” muses Revz.

As she recounts the story of school-day infatuations with musical directors, and the intensity of her often premature infatuation with the works of William Shakespeare as a teenager, it is quickly evident that Revz’s relationship to theatre has grown into a fully-fledged love affair with the practical traction to awaken and rebuild a thriving theatre scene.

“I believe you’ve got to go for the gut rather than the head. I try and make theatre that I want to see. I do like thinking but I prefer to be provoked to thought… You can think and think and analyse when you go to the theatre but how wonderful is it when you ‘stop thinking,’ and you just feel it and it naturally converts itself to enlightened thought,” Revz muses.

Her vision is larger than solely dramaturgy and directing. Revz is crying out for a new generation of arts activism and a renaissance that echoes the Nimrod Theatre days born of the collaboration of Australia’s theatre legends, John Bell, Richard Wherrett and Ken Horler.

“[It’s] poetic, but we like to think we are starting a new era in theatre and the revolution comes from the idea that Australians are quite comfortable with mediocrity and often there’s a lot of good theatre around but not much great theatre around… Cry Havoc for us is going to be the next premier theatre company in Sydney and we want to do this for forty years, and we want to leave a legacy… and it’s not just so we get picked up by STC,” Revz asserts.

Her fresh tenacity and determination are a product of a particular view of theatrical practice. For Revz, it is the infusion of contemporary concerns with classical theatrical texts that provide the richest crescent for the creation of compelling and bold theatre.

“You can speak about today through the great classic texts because there was a climate in Ancient Greece, and in Renaissance London and in the turn of the century Germany of saying big things through art. I don’t think it’s gone away but there seems to be another renaissance now of us realising that these big texts hold the key to our existence. I do think we are text starved. That’s where the revolutionary idea came from and the central mission of the company,” says Revz.

The company’s first production, Julius Caesar, which debuts on the 27th of October, holds a particular sentimentality as her favourite Shakespearean play, but also as a text that makes manifest the company’s own ethos and vision.

“You’re breaking bread with the dead when you work in a revolutionary way with these kinds of texts… you’re sitting on the shoulder of greats and if you start there then the sky is the limit. I’m an atheist but if I had a religion it would William Shakespeare. I’m fanatical and I defend Shakespeare if anyone threatens his authorship, and I arch up like I’m talking about Jesus. I have this profound respect for him and all his work, and I find it quite a ritualistic and religious kind of experience to work on his plays,” muses Revz.

The production difficulties and obstacles don’t seem to deter her either. The love of resurrecting a play, and getting under the skin of an audience keep her anchored. “I think we’re actually doing Shakespeare justice by taking Julius Caesar and throwing it against the wall and seeing where it breaks and of course always with the deepest respect for the work… but reading it with a contemporary angle and trying to breathe it back to life,” says Revz.

As we turn the conversation to the future, Revz’s outlook is optimistic, as if she is on the tip of a new vanguard of Australian theatre, expecting nothing less than a mutinous effect. “It’s this ephemeral process that I hope keeps working; where it’s a deep respect for the past with a strong vision towards the future, and they collide in the Molotov cocktail that is Cry Havoc,” muses Revz. It seems in these young hands we can rest assured that the future of Australian theatre is looking up.

“Our strength is that we all have the same vision, and it is one really strong factor that none of us are in this as a star vehicle, or as a step on the way to larger things,” says Revz.

Julius Caesar debuts on the 27th of October at the Wharf Theatre. See www.cryhavoc.com.au for more details.

Creation's Sunset

2009-07-17T07:15:00.000-07:00

Civilisation is as wild as the wilderness,
And nature is as ordered; as civil as civilisation.
They are all one and made one,
In sight of the hallowed Word;
that is the creating; the created, creation.

Hush, and listen to the breath of those trees:
One alive in the light of the Sun,
Hidden by the veil of sight,
Alive by the Spirit hovering over the muddy waters;
The other bears the fruit, decaying, open like a wound -
The one, the torn apart by my bloody mouth,
from my ageing hands;
I chose and choose to pick.

The horizon exhales its fumes, coughing and diseased.
I bend myself down, lower my head –
Until I hear His wind brushing over flesh,
His Grace in cruciform branches,
Crunching, howling, cracking as they cry,
Singing and cooing with the magpie’s sigh.

So we share for a moment, reconciled;
Watching the sun’s eternity slowly decay,
As His Sacred is split,
Oil and water,
Building and bush,
Sharing the sorrow,
As I and the city skylight forget.

The Iceberg

2009-06-15T06:38:00.000-07:00

"The only truth I know is logically defined a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor." (Ursula LeGuin)

Stormwater waste drifts out to sea, churning with the waves, pummelling whitewash. The mess is sucked out and pulled, called by the iceberg that groans under the sea. The swell chews, and crunches on the cellulose. The river bank bleeds silt and decays, but as Sidney edges away, far in sight, it appears calm on the surface.

Sidney sipped instant coffee. The brown liquid slid down and broke its surface as he slurped it up over the edge of a paper cup. The bottom was left with a sludge brown residue, still runny. For a moment the liquid was still in motion. It reminded him of an ochre paint he had used the night before. With this likening, it became strangely unpalatable but he gulped the rest down. The hospital walls stretched out in white corridors. He’d been attending this bed for weeks now, his mother’s chest inflating with the soft elevations of a coma. He’d hold her hand, but it was always cold. He wanted to paint her like this, immortalise it as a kind of conscientious objection to existence, but he just held her hand as it would start to warm. He detested the stink of the place; his jacket had started to smell like the cardboard scent of an aeroplane.

The light was always blue at this time in the morning and the residing rains outside made the gloom deeper; the blue greyer. He ran his hand over a vein on her hand; blood trickling slowly down; lights shining from fluorescence above. His gaze was held on her face, following the lines of her wrinkles. He liked how they gathered into the density of a dimple on one cheek. It reminded him of how she’d smile the most she ever did on their trips in her Kombi down to her favourite spot on the South Coast. They both would sit and watch the sun setting over a Western grouping of mountains. The water was always the warmest of spots in summer, shimmering like the smoky-orange of the campfire. They danced around it and he felt his soul leaping in and around the flames.

He couldn’t bring himself to paint her, or anything about her. She was his blind spot. The silence of the room hummed out in its paradox of sounds. He craved to understand her, not so much to know her. He closed his eyes and watched as an invisible progression of souls, hidden and black, held her body up from below, pushing it up towards the light. The darkness swam around her, the voices groaning from the underneath. He felt as if generations should have been sitting there in mourning. No one had been in to see her. His aunt Judie was probably coasting down the highways, phoneless and free. She’d taken a political theory class at university, and joined an anarchist commune. All that was left of his family were libertines of the most clichéd proportions, engendering all the purest of intentions, but suffering all the mistakes of putting freedom above everything else. For this he enjoyed the silence.

He itched, and this made his diaphragm and throat shake a little from under him. “What freedom?” he thought. Most of his childhood was estranged from her, as if he were a barrier to all she thirsted after, the escapism she craved. There would be no testifying to pretence. He was sorry for the first time since his sixteenth birthday; the day he left home and found her passed out and dolled up, hair like a scarecrow. Peaceful. She had that same goddamned twilight of peace across her face. He wanted her eyelids to open, to see blue eyes. He dug his face into the grey-blonde grease of her hair, and inhaled. He choked, and loved choking, needed it, and his muscles relaxed. The nurse came in and regarded his sobbing with indifference, replacing the drip. With the interruption, and the coming dawn he decided to leave for home, weary from a broken night’s sleep.

The sun opened the sky and made the autumn air crisp. As it swept through Sidney’s hair it bobbed sleekly, forming a precarious quiff. A scent of exhaust fumes and the faint line of ocean salt on the air hit his nose. His hands felt heavy, and he wanted to get them dirty with charcoal, get furious on a canvas. The bus pulled up, and his curiosity was spiked as an old lady, a regular on this route, alighted. She was his favourite passenger, always sporting a new broach on her coat each day. She appeared to have a collection, and he marvelled at how the broaches were so uniquely different from each other, so oddly incongruous with her clothing, or the city surrounds. This time it was an iceberg, standing tall, a white cap on it like a mountain, contrast by a dark grey base, floating on the running lines of a pictorial ocean. He didn’t assign any meaning to it this time; instead he stared out over the humming of the day, undone by the sun-yellow warmth contained in his hands.

The bus doors swung open, and he greeted the clean air of the Bondi cliff faces. He caught sight of an ice-cream that had been spilt on the walkway up towards his apartment building. He caught it in passing, oozing over the wooden board; a white mound retaining some of its shape amongst the seagull-white. The sound of wash pummelled the cliffs, gushing up from below. As he walked up the steps toward the apartment block and opened the foyer door, he failed to pull all he’d seen together. He put thoughts aside, and pressed four on the elevator. He loved the mild coconut smell of the place, and the sand embedded in the carpet, and the wooden finish of the corridors. He was excited to see Michael, maybe kiss his neck and taste the salt on it from the early morning surf. A fresh canvas awaited him too, untouched, and bare.

The apartment was empty and the French doors were left slightly ajar, letting the easterly winds breeze in. A guitar was sitting on the couch amongst a pile of sheet music, and a laptop was placed next to a script marked with corrections. The shower clouds on the horizon were strung together, moving in formation closer to the shore. The glass battered lightly as the wind whimpered. Sidney decided to open up the studio room. He’d let it get musty, and it was full of mess, coffee cups and old paint that had dried hard on palettes. On the table were some of his childhood drawings that he’d gotten out the day he received the call from the hospital. They sat like a calendar, chronicles of his past, brown and tea-stained.

One pile contained pictures of his mother that he drew as a child in the sixties dresses she used to wear. In therapy he was told that he was an extreme introvert as a child, and the education system didn’t cater for his learning style. One of the drawings was missing, which he gave as a gift to his mother for her thirty seventh birthday. As a boy he thought it was his best drawing -- smoke enveloping her, cigarette ashtray full of burnt hashish by her side, sprawled out on a bed. Her reaction was engraved in his mind as he gave it to her; her lips tightened and a tear dropped from an eye. This was hidden quickly by a face, sweaty and flushed from the summer heat. She starred at it for a moment, in awe of what he could do, but this was concealed by a blush, an untamed fury rising, a crack, a bloodshot vein. “Are you testing me?” she said. Her face would bend in anger, beautiful and savage like that.

There was a severe drought and bushfires that year, and the city was flurried by a cloud of black ash and dust. Ribbons and strips of ash would fall like a black rain. As the wind carried them, her breath came like eucalypt vapour, dry and wavering in the heat, sucked up by flame. As she slapped him he would just focus on the one tooth, black behind the white, half-dead and hanging from ruddy gums. His nose would dribble, and dry, caked with the ash. He was grounded for three months, and given a severe strapping. Blue bruises stung if he sat, and they stretched over most of his buttocks. She took his drawing outside with her, setting it alight with her cigarette lighter and proceeded to bring in the washing. He saw the flames through his back window; smoke rising from the kindling of a barbeque. From that day the fire stung him, cooked his flesh. He wanted to let it up; extinguish the embers. His hands moved over the canvas, unsure of what he’d draw, with that same image of her in peace on the bed, floating with the smoke.

He wanted to sleep, to have Michael by his side as the hours passed. His toes dug into the carpet. The charcoal box contained only a few remaining cylinders, his canvas a bending ocean moving yet still with the crushing of waves. From obtuse arches and curves came a shape like an iceberg. It sat amongst the two dimensional mess, sticking up and over, above the chaos; a dark monolith against a grey sky, a black expanse beneath. He’d never charcoaled like this before – it had always been abstracts made with ochres, fluid and languid; surrealist landscapes that made the industrial natural and the natural industrial and merged the bush and the sea with the geometries of city centres, factories, and warehouses. His supervisor at art school always tried to introduce him to oils and paints because he had the nimble fingers, and the eye for visual textures. She said they’d provide him with greater modality, contrast, depth of exposition. A charcoalist had to have large palms, and rough thumbs, always handicapped in the art market by the shortened longevity of their medium.

His buyers loved them, but he wasn’t sure he did. As he continued sketching, he felt the hint of flamboyancy in his hands that he hadn’t for a long time. It was a release of colours – yellows and light blues, and reds. Vibrancy came all in a rush, like a smudged rainbow falling with the rain. The wind swept up, whistling outside with the onset of a shower. He closed a window, sitting and adjusting the drawing. He hadn’t heard the figure creeping behind him with the pummelling of the rain. He flinched slightly as Michael kissed him on the neck, running his hands over his shoulders in a massage. A wave of exhaustion overcame him as Michael plied and caressed his shoulders. Michael’s eyes smiled, speculating the shape in front of him.

The surf was really choppy today, full of twigs and rubbish… unusually cold too – they say there’re icebergs floating up from the arctic.
Sidney rubbed his black hands together.
I had a productive day.
Y’know, this is really different, Sid.
I’m happy with it.
Thought we could go for a walk after the rain stops.
Bit tired. Can we make it an early night? Got to see Mum again early tomorrow.

The sun was revealed by the passing of the shower clouds. It slid under the horizon, a yellow orb encased with orange ochres. Sidney tasted the light and it was dry like the tip of Michael’s lips. He kissed them and ran his hands over his back, smearing Michael’s singlet, dunness like shale, sweaty from a jog. The black of the sea devoured the day, and they swam in its orange sleekness, under the shimmering as the eucalypt smoke burnt off. Heat rose to a sating breath; a gasp up on the surface. The cliff faces called with the final tweets and shrills of birds amongst the green of the bottlebrush. The waves crashed on the iceberg, gurgling with the water retaining itself around the vessel; the moving entity being drawn out into utterance. It sank deeper, thawing out with time.

Sidney woke to the dark, Michael lying sprawled on the bed, mouth hanging open as he twitched in dream. That same blue light confronted him, and filled the whole room; his mother’s chest emptying: the long, slow exhale of the ocean noise outside. He opened the fridge and poured a glass of milk unable to sleep. The digital clock on the microwave flashed 5:13am. He drank the milk up and over the room’s stillness. He put on his jacket and went down in the elevator. He was dazed, staring at his reflection in the silver of its steal plating; a groggy blur. He liked the new flowers in the foyer. They were wax-red lilies, and blooming full, their stamens furry with yellow pollen. His new landlord had a better maintenance keeper than the last. He closed the foyer door. The sky was dark, except for house lights on the head land and street lights in the distance. He noticed the ice-cream from yesterday had run off with the rain and water was still running off under the wooden boards and mossy undergrowth. The sandstone cliffs stood high, reaching over the sea like the heads of ancient creatures and the waves were crashing hard from the swell of the low pressure system funnelling out to sea. His favourite rock pool for swimming was overflowing with the high tide.

He climbed up and over the bush track along the side of the cliffs. He expected to see runners weaving their way along the track, the corporates enjoying the same early morning freedom. Perhaps it was too early. Instead the track was empty, and he walked over the wooden floor boards to look out a little higher up. As he listened to the snores of early morning; a rat scurrying past him, and the occasional rustle in the bushes, he sat on a railing at the southern most point, and stared out over the declension of the cliff faces. He had often gained inspiration from the rock faces; carved out by the rain and salt. He greeted the first of the buttery light of dawn on the horizon and the sand white beach in the curve of the bay. His eye moved curiously to a figure far across from him who stuck out from the landscape. They were lower on one the sandstone ledges to the most seaward extremity across the escarpment, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. He couldn’t make them out exactly but he watched as their hair blew in the wind. It wailed a little in his ears.

The figure stood there motionless, staring out to sea, like a living memorial to the drowning sound − some grand figure from myth, emerging out from the blue of the sky. The figure seemed unfettered by time and consummate to the force pushing them back from the cliff face. Sidney’s heart started to beat faster as he felt the unease of their closeness to the edge, and heard the silence of their fall. The white wash rushed around it as the figure hit the surface, breaking it open; sinking under the sea.

God

2009-04-12T07:54:00.000-07:00

When hills become mountains,

Clouds fall as pellets,

Ice screeches down,

Sheets run,

In cold forms around

Me and the shadow.

Grasses and waters waver,

Yet I'm only sky,

Dotted with sequin light,

Silent explosions,

Glistening off,

So near, so far

Travesties - Sydney Theatre Company

2009-03-26T19:54:00.000-07:00

Photo by Heidrun Löhr (Blazey Best [Gwendolyn], Toby Schmitz [Tristan/Dada]).

“The truth is always a compound of two half-truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.” (Tom Stoppard)

A sand-yellow canvas, vaguely reminiscent of a cubist artwork, veils the stage. Geometric shapes and abstract images are linked together loosely. The warning on this packet signifies that Tom Stoppard’s ‘Travesties’ is not for those who enjoy facile entertainment. It will require you to work the cogs of your mind, connect the dots, decipher wordplay and confront your own way of thinking. If you can jump these hurdles, Stoppard’s outstanding talent infused with Richard Cottrell’s superb directing will give life to an eccentric whirlwind of a play with its haughty political rants, impetuous romances, smooth intertextuality and sharp repartee.

The play begins as an ostensibly fragmented sequence of nonsense that slowly works in the concurrent circles of Henry Carr’s memory (signified by the cuckoo clocks that constantly sound when a motif reoccurs throughout the play). Soon, however, the mess constructs meaning and a plot emerges. ‘Travesties’ is set during the onset of World War I in 1917, and the subsequent migration of some of Europe’s most influential intellectuals to Zurich, Switzerland. The superb timing and malleability of the cast’s acting allows us to travel with ease between The Zurich Library and protagonist Henry Carr’s apartment on Michael Scott-Mitchell’s turning stage.

Each character parades their large egos on stage (unabashedly emphasised by an Armani-cut, but dandyish, costume design). The decoy English Consul, Henry Carr (Jonathan Biggins), is a vain but plush, costume-loving libertarian who is cast to play Algernon in James Joyce’s resident production of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Ernest’. Meanwhile, the brainchild of Dadaism, Tristan Tzara, (Toby Schmitz) who introduces himself in hilarious outbursts as “Dada”, is staging his poetic attack on the bourgeois stagnation of Modernist art by erroneously rearranging words of classic poems.

Dada soon takes a liking to Henry’s sister Gwendolyn (Blazey Best), who is infatuated with James Joyce (Peter Houghton) and his writing, willingly transcribing chapters of his oeuvre ‘Ulysses’ at the library. Cecily (Rebecca Massey), a librarian, is hatching a Soviet dream from her collaboration with Bolshevik Lenin (William Zappa), helping him prepare his thesis on Imperialism at the Zurich Library. In an unlikely turn of events, Cecily develops a soft spot for Henry Carr, who feigns his identity as Dada’s left-leaning brother in order to sniff out information about Lenin’s plan to escape, and lead the revolution rising in Russia.

The fantastic irony of the play’s situation is garnered from the omitted fact that each ideologue’s love-interest possesses, respectively opposite, political and artistic sensibilities. As this becomes apparent in each character’s reality, the social entanglement of the play escalates to humorous highs that will leave your head sore with laughter. Stoppard’s strength as a playwright lies in his ability to balance dramatic conflict and reveal the humanity behind the headstrong pretensions of each character. On another level, the play pays intertextual homage to Wilde, Marxist thought, Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, Libertarianism, and the movements of art that gave birth to Postmodernism, and portrays the effects that each of these has had on Stoppard.

Stoppard and Cottrell’s ability to merge and evenly represent all these paradigms in one play/production, without sacrificing the structure of the script, or the layer of realism that keeps audiences entertained, is evidence that this production deserves the accolade of your spectatorship. As the fresh-faced Toby Schmitz and the other equally brilliant members of the cast came to, and left the stage, I was compelled to give more than just one encore. I thought to myself, ‘this is exactly what I want to experience from the theatre.’

Published in Edition 4 of Vertigo - www.utsvertigo.com.

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth

2009-03-15T18:35:00.000-07:00

“It is only the dead who have seen the end of war.” (Plato)

“I’ve seen people being shot; I’ve had guns put to my head, I’ve seen people burnt alive, stabbed, decapitated . . . because Mexico is still a very violent place. So I do think that some of that element in my films comes from a Mexican sensibility,” (Guillermo Del Toro, in Tsuei, 2007, p. 227).

Guillermo Del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth reclaims the fairytale form set during the tumult of the 1940s Spanish Civil war and Franco’s regime. The film is a testament to the power of human imagination, exploring its fantastical ability to both confront and escape the trauma of war, hatred and corrupted power. We peer through the central protagonist, Ofelia’s eyes into a magical underworld kingdom. She confirms her royal link to this world through three tests of fate which are given to her by Pan, the underworld’s messenger and guardian of the portals between worlds. Similar to the nature Goddess Persephone she is given a double-vision of reality (that of death (the underworld) and life (human existence)). Her world is engendered by a merging of the threatening reality of Franco’s Regime as represented by the psychopathic Capitain Vidal, the efforts of its leftist resistance, her mother, Carmen’s birth-complication, and the imaginative reality of her subconscious; the Kingdom under the ground. It is her task as protagonist to be tested in this reality, to see beyond the blinding light of the sun; the horror of the real by overcoming her own human foibles with her imagination.

Del Toro’s cinematic expertise is horror, and in Pan’s Labyrinth, he inverts horror to represent real life, and inextricably links it to its usual repository, the fantastic realm of the imagination. Through animatronics, special effects and filmic breaks in verisimilitude Del Toro takes us into the metaphysical and oneiric space of Ofelia’s experiences in another world. Early in the film, the camera works in deep focus, and extended shots to highlight the gap between Captain Vidal’s stronghold where Ofelia sleeps and the verdant forest where Pan’s Labyrinth lies. However, this gap soon dissipates in the film as the setting is structured by the narrative thrust of Ofelia’s imagination, and the battle scenes between Vidal and the resistance are depicted in the forest. She is given the ability to make passage ways with a magical piece of chalk given to her by Pan advising her to “make her own way.” Using the interiority of camera angles, masked cuts, a contrast of blue and red-yellow filter lighting del Toro coalesces the two realities, and the extrication between Ofelia’s imagination and reality is broken. He creates an enchanting neo-gothic aesthetic. These give the narrative a highly portentous symbolism, casting a platonic shadow across the audience. Del Toro merges two worlds in one diegesis, emphasising and celebrating the importance of the imagination in our materialist realities, and highlighting his prominence and ingenuity as a filmmaker.

An increase in the use of animatronics and special effects to depict the various mythical creatures in the film such as the stick-insect-come-fairy, Pan, the pale-man monster, the Mandrake that safe-guards her mother and the toad under the tree constantly subverts the naturalism of the film fusing the imagination and the horror of the real. It also increases the vividness of the “child-witness/protagonist point of view” (Smith, 2007, p.6) juxtaposing it against the horror of war allowing the audience to historically re-remember the socio-political situation but also access the vivid symbolism and harrowing innocence of Ofelia and her experiences. The continuity of narrative between these worlds is evidence of del Toro’s expert plot-setting and the mastery of his story-telling technique. Del Toro portrays the way in which the power of the imagination can reorder and confront the horror of the real just as film can re-represent the real, and remember the historical: “Fantasy is made proportionate or compensatory to the real,” (Smith, 2007, p.8). Evidently, the success of Pan’s Labyrinth lies in del Toro’s ability to cinematically capture the human capability to dream beyond and in confrontation of the horror of the real.

Del Toro mixes mythological allusions and intertextual references to other films such as Snow White, the Wizard of Oz, and Alice in Wonderland to reinvent the Hollywood Disney spectacle exporting us away from the conventions of the clichéd fairy-tale. His film takes a leaf out of Guy Debord’s philosophies, whereby the contrast of the horror of the real and the imagination align with the assertion that the fairy tale should not simply provide a spectacle; “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images… the self-portrait of power in the age of totalitarian rule over conditions of existence,” (Debord, in Zipes, 2008, p.240). Del Toro is purporting that fairy tales should challenge the spectacle’s structure and pierce its escapist and societially-esconced nature. In this way, the very politics of his cinematography critique the socio-political nature of mainstream filmic fairytales.

Del Toro does not shy away from showing children the realities of the world they must confront and the hope that all humanity possesses – “I know for a fact that imagination and hope have kept me alive through the roughest times in my life,” (del Toro in Zipes, 2008, p.239). His film does not simply follow the suit of the escapist forms of spectacle that support a certain ideology or utopian ideal. In this way, Pan’s Labyrinth is a film that transcends the conventions of mainstream cinema, and provides an audience of all ages with a stimulating and deeply moving fairytale; a testament to hope and the power of the human imagination and the salvation of sacrificial love.

References

Zipes, J. 2008, ‘Video Review – Pan’s Labyrinth’, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 121, no. 408, pp. 236-240.

Smith, J. P. 2007, Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno), Film Quarterly, Vol.60, No.4. pp. 4-9.

Tsuei, H. K. 2007, The Antifascist Aesthetics of Pan’s Labyrinth, Socialism and Democracy, Vol.22, No. 2, pp.225 -244.

Interview with Tropfest Winner, Genevieve Clay

2009-03-09T02:32:00.001-07:00

The Indie film fest atmosphere was in full swing. As dusk fell the sky glowed orange, and the Botanic Gardens bats were swirling above. There was a sense of prescience in the air as David Wenham came to the stage. A random on something from Happy High Herbs broke the suspense shouting, “Will you buy my bus ticket home?” David Wenham was quick to give the hint, “No, I won’t buy your bus ticket for you.” In a Surry Hills cafe, Genevieve recalls the moment: “There was an eternity between when he (David Wenham) was saying that and when I realised that it was a line from my film… all I did was scream. It was a real relief.” The surprise was filled with UTS pride as our very own MAP student took the pineapple, and $100,000 dollars worth of prizes, smiling radiantly in an eye-catching red dress.

Meeting on a sunny Sunday, Genevieve hadn’t forgotten her university, leaving a gap in her Tropfest-winning schedule to talk with Vertigo. She arrived clad in a ‘50s-style dress patterned with popcorn kernels, hinting at her betrothal to cinema: “At seven I was determined to be an Oscar award-winning actress,” she reveals. Her modest Parisian elegance gives this impression. “Soon I learnt that I was better at making stories than being in them,” she muses as she briefly touches her coiffeur, short and reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn.

Raised by her grandmother and mother in South Cardiff, a small town near Newcastle, she was brought up with the altruistic values that inspire her filmmaking and her vision for how she wants to affect the industry. “It can be such a self-driven, self-motivated industry. People write stories for themselves. I wrote my ‘Be My Brother’ script for someone. I’m writing my next script for someone,” she reflects. “I think it’s definitely important to have a sense of servitude in your career; helping others who’ve helped you or helping others just because.”

Her approach to film is far more centred on the thrust of story telling and pursues a social justice mission. She wants to see a greater focus on writing in film; “a good script, no matter what you shoot it on, no matter what technical faults, will shine through… I think that it is vitally important for the Australian industry to focus on script development and finding, supporting and celebrating good writers,” she says, sipping a latte.

Some have criticised her film for not being as stylistic as the others, yet Genevieve sees film as much more than a cinematographic ego-stroke. “I was thinking if we just get best actor for Gerard then that’s my job done... That’s something that Gerard has been dreaming of for a long time, and it’s really great that it came to pass,” she says.

Gerard O’Dwyer, the down-syndrome thespian that touched the audience showcases his bard-like flare in the film. His character quotes lines from Shakespeare, The Lion King and a Frank Spencer comedy, and breaks down the prejudices of an estranged brother by charming a girl at a bus stop. Genevieve’s ability to see this spark of humanity in Gerard is evidence of her skill to write cinematic realities that hold true human value.

Her decision to explore the universal themes of rejection, prejudice and the healing power of love and her ability to construct a slice of life that warms hearts impressed judges. It doesn’t seem to be a show of philanthropy for Genevieve; it’s an important part of sharing her experience and without undue cliché, being true to herself: “… In high school, I was rejected a lot. I think you reject yourself internally a lot of the time too. I got to points where I thought ‘I’m no good,’ and you have to make the choice to overcome it,” she reflects.

It is this inner integrity that propels her, and her education at UTS helped to develop a voice and fostered her passion for film. “UTS definitely laid down the foundations and gave me a lot of support,” she says.

She provides this piece of advice for uni filmmakers who want to make it in the film industry: “The thing about studying film is that you’ve got to do it yourself, you’ve get outside the boundaries of your uni and find your own work experience; that is how you should use the course to your best advantage,” she muses. It wasn’t all self-driven. She lists Michel Gondry and Steve McQueen as auterist idols. When she first moved to Sydney she worked in a bar, which Baz Luhrmann often frequented. “I used to sit down with him and have a glass of champagne... He was really kind and very encouraging. He said that if you want to do this (be a professional filmmaker), all you’ve got to do is make as many films as you can. It was great having him there and having him to look up to,” she reflects.

Her vision for the future remains ambitious. She says she already has four projects on the backburner including a documentary series, a comedy, an Australian miniseries and a feature film in the works. When describing the underlying aspect that draws all her work together she muses: “No matter what you’ve done, what you go through, who you are… you can still achieve your dreams and have the life that you hope for… it [the message of my work] is all about hope.” Her other more audacious goal is to establish a production company with this message in mind.

She smiles at me with her pert affect. It seems in this grim global climate, Genevieve hasn’t lost any of her mettle: “I want to challenge and inspire people and uplift them with my stories.

Again

2009-02-14T19:53:00.000-08:00

The ocean is big,
Pulls me where I want to go
And back away, flailing antagonism,
Like jelly-fish spawn.
The ocean is deep,
Octopi firing black smoke
Around my memory, my impetus,
To the formless winds of a cool day
The soothing currents of water
The lassitude of after art, after love
Body in a moment, empty
Rocking forward and back
Silent in lullaby
Like all those beaches as they pull me back
Where the ocean is big, and deep, and never-ending.

The Night City

2008-10-22T18:49:00.000-07:00

“They move out of the house… so they can look back and see what’s true there” (Russel Banks)

I started dreaming about other places, whether it was on the internet with Sam, chatting to the occasional avid traveller, or experiencing my life through the frames of various writers and their voyaging narratives. I itched to outgrow my bookshelf. The 31st of October was Liz’s birthday, signalled her offer to stay in Cannes as her inexperienced translator.

My bags were packed, and the cab driver was waiting. Just outside the ferry boats pushed majestically on; the yachts were chiming in the sun, the children’s shrills floated intermittent on the wind. As the cab continued down narrow streets, my home enclosed itself, content with families, almost motionless to the bleeping world in front of me. I passed the mansions competing for harbour views, and the crude-oil silos, heaped on one side of the peninsula, leaking fumes into the air. I could see speed boats breaking waves over the oyster-caped rocks. I peered into leafier parts, scraggly, full of intruding weeds and eucalypts that held perilously onto the slope, some having collapsed into the green murky water. Planes left cirrus clouds scattered across the sky.

I had postcards stashed away in my diary from Sam for those vacuous hours between Sydney and Europe. His post-cards contained descriptions of the cicada singing landscapes of Spain, and the frustrations of his clumsy Spanish tongue. The last post-card he had sent was my favourite. Its cover featured a marine fort, looking over the port of Lisboa. Many an explorer must have stared over the same horizon, watching the sea breathe in the haze of a setting sun. I thought of his movements over this landscape. Was he amusing himself amongst the colour of the Spanish party scene? Was he still frustrated with the language and with the brats he had to teach in Badajoz? He couldn’t come and visit me because he was too poor, too disorganised, or, so I imagined, too much of an epic adventurer. I closed my diary, re-arranging its contents and drifted back to sleep.

My flight set down in London. I inhaled the old, musty air of the Heathrow terminal and the sound of Leonard Cohen. There were large Romanian men bickering over their passports who were held back at one of the security points. The labyrinth of escalators and tightly controlled security checks took me to a bus stop that would take me to the departure terminal for Cannes. A black woman, who’d been working for the United Nations on the Iraq war, and security investigations, sat next to me sharing interesting facts about the last American election. We were thrown around on the bus, looking out at the gloomy fog above. I was only barely listening, imagining a vivacious Cannes situated amongst the blue of the Mediterranean Sea.

I was meant to meet Liz at the terminal, but her plane left early. The epic journey now totalled twenty hours, and I wearily boarded the last plane. There was a girl who sat next to me who reminded me of Liz. She casually inquired to the Italo Calvino novel I was reading. She smiled at me meekly. His writing style amazed me, his narrative entanglements challenged my readership, but his mess frustrated me. It contained the clashing narratives of what Liz described as “the first postmodern novel”, which in its euphemistic irony enchanted me. She was my best friend, the feminist, the artist and the actor. She helped me to dream. I finished a chapter as the pilot announced our set down on Cannes:

“You certainly do not exist except in relation to each other, but, to make those situations possible, your respective egos have not so much to erase themselves as to occupy, without reserve, all the void of the mental space, invest in itself at the maximum interest or spend itself to the last penny. In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn't change a thing. At the moment when you most appear to be a united voice, a second person plural, you are two tu-s, more separate and circumscribed than before.”

Italo was whispering in my ear as I looked outside my plane window, my vision blocked by the plane furrowing through clouds. The ships and yachts came into view soon to dock down on Cannes.

We lived a pretty stale life in Cannes, enjoying all the hospitality of restaurants, and stuffy English tourists, some of whom we later found out were con artists, trying to manipulate her family into a bogus business deal. Other than aesthetically, the centre of Cannes was a pretty horrible place, stuffed with money and overpriced boutiques. It was a hallowed-out cliché, with pictures of film celebrities lining the streets, a spectacle de la promenade. This attracted vulture-like upper class tourists and the rich French that clung to some 1920s version of the place. Either way, we both got plump on the dirt cheap rosé and the pasta dishes that remained from previous Italian occupancy. There was a charm hidden beneath Cannes, but it was winter. It soon got to a point where our beau couple status dulled the whole point of being on the other side of the world, our eyes tinged by the pink hue of the wine on our lips as we discussed our travel destinations.

We’d come back from a day just past the border of France, in a small village that boasted the greatest market in Northern Italy. It turned out to be full of imported goods, and clothes made of cheap synthetic materials. I didn’t mind. I was enjoying the local French company. Liz had been silent most of the day.
“I can’t act here. I can’t speak the language.” She’d locked herself in her room opposite, having one of her thespian tantrums.
“We’re on the other side of the world. It’s fucking brilliant!”
There was no answer. I slammed my door in frustration.

I left our apartment and figured it was time for some space. The light was fading prematurely, shadows being drawn by dusk. A little brown dog led me on my way through the complex of cobblestone streets, littered with the occasional video store, butcher, kebab shop or bakery until I came to the old part of Cannes. I climbed up and up, every building slowly gaining hundreds of years of age, until I reached the town church. There was an ancient oak grove here, where owls slept and made the occasional hooting noise and a huge statue of Mary with Jesus suckling on her breast surveyed the city below. There were a few benches that had young French people on them, drunk, kissing and tangled around each other. I looked over the whole place, which shone with its azure gleam. Large carnivorous gulls squawked with razor teeth on their beaks, picking at a dead pigeon on the road below. Craggy mountains bordered each side of the city and the brine-heavy air blocked the horizon, pushing the Mediterranean blue into focus. It all reduced out into stillness. My stomach churned with a strange sort of desire.

I woke the next morning with a broken message on my phone from Sam. “Something fell through in Madrid and I’m on my way to Barcelona. Meet me there on the 10th of January.” Liz was still locked away in her room, having slept close to a day. I was jumping around with excitement, relishing in the irony that he was from Adelaide and I, Sydney yet we were meeting in Spain after having shared a year of flirtations and correspondence on the internet. Liz packed her bags reticently. I wanted her to come, perhaps unfairly, as my shield against disaster. I was sure she’d come around. The seats were booked on the next train.

The train pulled into the long platforms of the Estación de Trenes Barcelona-Sants. Liz was asleep on a copy of Judi Dench’s biography until one last jolt of our cruddy seat woke her. There was a little excitement in her eyes as we alighted from the train. Above us sat a huge hull-like ceiling. Signs in Catalan directed us into tunnels leading up to Espana Square. There was a figure peering in the opposite direction dressed in a blue flannel shirt and tight black slacks looking around the square. He responded to my beckoning. He was what I’d imagined from online. Tall, blue eyes, with a well-defined face, rough with stubble. We hugged and exchanged stories on the way back to our youth hostel, hidden a few blocks away.

The night markets were in full swing. Sam and a few people from the hostel took us on our way down the stone black promenades of central Barcelona. It was lit with large shop-front displays that ran down little laneways, alive in a post new-year atmosphere. I watched the tall Catalan men with their blue-green eyes and darker hair, and the waiters from restaurants offering their saffron yellow bounty, paella. There were darker back streets that ran off these squares, empty, and funnelling a chilled breeze. I was ecstatic, a veritable tourist, occasionally brushing hands with Sam.

We were all soon drunk on sangria and cheap pizzas from a plaza that was, unawares to us, a price-trap for tourists. I felt Sam’s feet under the table playing with mine. I was a little heady, Liz getting up to go for a walk; to enjoy the “sights not the people”, putting it with an affectionate tone of sarcasm and jealousy. Sam and I wandered aimlessly, without a map into the periphery of the burgeoning night city.

A week passed and Liz slowly came to, making friends with the travellers in our youth hostel, telling me about the art galleries, and museums and the thriving club life that Barcelona offered. Yet I had become increasingly infatuated, and agitated, my blood thick. It contained no distraction for me. Sam had met other friends, but I’d convinced him to spend our last day together on our own amongst the works of the city’s most prominent architect, Antoni Gaudi.

Parque güell was sitting above Barcelona’s centre built into the foothills as a marker of Gaudi’s influence on the city, a relic from the early 1900s. Its large majestic towers curved, and bent in mosaic-tiled facades. Its quasi-extraterrestrial buildings seemed to fascinate me melding with my hankering mood - futuristic forms that were organic and bodily, ripe with ingenuity and design. The sun was soft on my skin, and Sam, off exploring the cavernous hulls that bulged out of the bedrock was noticeably distant. People were crowded on steps and rocky balconies enjoying the fine weather. The place seemed to glisten, whilst inside, my heart was thumping with the sensation of life, with a sort of alien pain. I found Sam, who was photographing a couple kissing behind a statue. A hand came to embrace me and lips to kiss me, but they didn’t settle. His presence continued on, distant and meandering down the other paths of the park. He was fascinated by the city, a traveller enthused.

Barcelona was quiet on this Tuesday night before our departure. People were emerging from their fiestas only for food to take home and cook. The streets were almost empty, except for the occasional group of sweepers. I was crying on Sam’s shoulder, drunk on cheap red wine. Passers-by stared at me with animosity as if they’d never seen a man cry, as if I were an unwanted guest. Sam just sat silently. He took me by the hand, back through the streets, wet with drizzle.

The next morning the city was bare, council workers pulling down the last lights of the new years celebrations. Liz and I were trundling our gear to the station ready for departure. My eyes were red with dark rings around them.

Liz looked at me with a knowing look, “You didn’t really live with the place”

Amanda Stewart – Poet Vulcana

2008-10-13T18:01:00.000-07:00

A slim, athletic woman gets up out of the audience. The black curtained room insulates her against sound. She mutters a few pleasantries to the audience. There is laughter and then a moment of silence. Her voice suddenly sounds in a droning tone:

‘The first sounds filling the mouth with self
My death on your lips
My birth on your sigh.’

Her vocal dynamics come to articulate a sort of poem, laced with surges of extended polysyllables, breaths, chant-like whirs, interweaving registers, accents and idiom.
These phrasal fragments and words arrange themselves in the thick timbre of her voice:

‘and the word is space
and its obliteration
the tongue of sacrifice
at the edge of the other words
Interdetermined absence’

The audience is silent, somewhere between the text, our consciousness, a sort of musicality, and absence. The codes within everyday language lay exposed only to be pieced back together. I’m left quietly contemplating, and a little in awe. I’ve never heard this kind of song.

What is most striking about Amanda Stewart is her poetic style. Her poetry comes alive in performance. She achieves a multiplied voice in all edges, plosives, throat pulses and psssts. When she reads it is a little like listening to a mishmash of the news, radio, people’s voices, and the sounds on the street. You are thrown into an awareness of the intricacy of their music. This is where you realise her ability to both decipher snippets of theory and allusions to Australian identity and politics and to merge many persons in one, many points of view in one. She is a master of “those moments when things become incredibly ambiguous so the mind is in flux trying to classify sound into meaning.” This edgy ingenuity is a large part of the reason that she has gained the reputation as Australia’s Poet Vulcana.

Her life has not been without polemic having expressed opinions on a vast array of issues in contemporary Australian society. Born in 1959, to a world in the shadow of great upheaval and political change, she encountered certain ethical issues stretching from the politics of nuclear weapons, power plants and waves of feminism. It wasn’t until the formation of one of Australia’s most prominent experimental and interdisciplinary sound groups in 1989, The Machine for Making Sense, that Amanda’s interest in sound and poetry came to fruition. She made her film debut, acting as the narrative poet in the Eclipse of the Man Made Sun in 1991 and co-wrote an opera The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior which was first performed in 1997.

From 1991 onwards she travelled to Germany, France, the UK, USA and Japan. In Germany, she was given a reception that made it her second home and a place to consolidate her poetry. This led to the release of I/T Selected Poems 1980-1996, containing a CD that acts as the notation of her unorthodox form.

Globetrotting days now behind her, Stewart is back where she began, living in a homely terrace in Sydney’s Surry Hills. I arrive at the terrace on a sunny Tuesday afternoon and knock on the door. No answer. I’m five minutes early. I’m looking up at the blue sky. Minutes tick on until I see her walking down the side walk, flustered but smiling warmly at me with grey green-eyes and tresses of unkempt hair. As I enter the smell of dust, old books and cigarette smoke settles. She offers me a couch in her living room. I’m left alone for a moment intrigued by two book cases, records from the 1970s and onwards form a trajectory from the Monkees to Nick Cave. Philosophical oeuvres sit scattered throughout in some erroneous order. Australian literary journals poke their spines out from darker parts of the shelves. Obscure sound CDs are piled in a stack to the side. It’s comfy, shabby and the furthest from derelict. She returns with a huge mug of earl grey.

We start chatting on the obvious subject, writing. “I was either going to be a writer, jockey, or a vet… but I truly came to writing when I had some loss in my life when I was around 10. It was with someone very close to me.” She breaks eye contact for a second. I want to pry further, but she steers the conversation onwards. “I started to write a lot more about the world, death and ageing… poetry became a good friend in hard times.”

“At the first poetry reading I went to I was really quite scared… I was fifteen and I went to the café d’absurde in Balmain… I thought it was going to be an intimidating intellectual environment, but as the poetry reading started someone yelled ‘load of bloody bullshit!’ A brawl ensued. I had to leave the café. It wasn’t exactly the reception I’d expected.” There’s certainly another side to Amanda that her work doesn’t show. A sort of comedian lies hidden beneath. You’re always left endeared by her stories. She’s got that Australian sense of humour, casual and gritty. She gets up and flicks on the heater.

Her laugh is full of open enthusiasm. She’s pretty composed. I wonder if there were any difficulties for her in the pursuit of a largely neglected art in Australia. The public seems to close its ears when it hears the word poetry. “There is a pressure to be prolific and be obvious but bugger it. You have to go at your own pace. When I was young, I sent my poems off to six publications and five of them rejected my work. However, one accepted it and sent back some curt notes. They were gold back then. It didn’t stop me doing it. You have to have a strong interior and internal resilience.” Poets aren’t alchemists. In Australia, they’re expected to be able to wield a spinning wheel of gold, or a day job and support themselves unscathed. “There’s more money in Europe. I don’t believe that Australians don’t have an interest. It’s just that there’s a greater infrastructure there, financial viability, a bigger population and a ‘sing for your supper’ tradition in Germany, and Scandinavia.”

There is a certain marginalisation in Australia for poets, especially of the experimental kind. “In some ways I feel a bit marginalised in the poetry scene in Australia; being labelled as a ‘sound poet’… Sometimes I get irritated because people pigeon hole me in a little experimental sac hanging off the mainstream…” She looks at me with a more furrowed brow. Her poetry doesn’t fit neatly into the lines of any genre just as her personality is free of a lot of the pretentious dogmas that can hang around poetics scenes. “It freed me up from theoretical debates… you can get very wound up in those debates… music gave me the freedom to create outside of that world… My poetry became more oral. A friend of mine, Richard Veller who was publishing the journal New Music Articles recommended that I try and notate my poetry at the Conservatorium of Music in Sydney to a computer. It vomited out a rather complex score.” I’m imagining a sheet full of disjoined and scrawled notation, a sheath that doesn’t do her skill of performance justice.

She’s dynamic. A natural performer. Her poetry never seems to dip too deeply into theory, just as when she speaks she never excludes you from her experiences. A large part of her struggle must’ve been centred on contemporary poetic debate and the institutions that propelled them back in the eighties. “Back in those days, there was a big split between historical literary critics and the, what were considered, ‘philistine’ post-structuralists and postmodernists… I don’t feel like there’s any basis for that old antagonism anymore. It was a big deal back then. It’s such a relief that there are people coming onto the scene now who’ve absorbed all those histories and don’t feel a need to wage that old war.” We’re now left with a small underground poetry movement in Australia that is conjured back into the public’s eye with the occasional poetry prize.

This poet Vulcana of the 1980s, however, didn’t give in. She wouldn’t pass on from her reflections on life and their expression for commercial ends. “It is precisely because they do not make easy sense that they (poems) have been excluded from currency except as high art or advertising.” We both have a grin on our faces from the quixotic tone of her old-hat self. We cast the reel back.

“That was back in 1982. Oh dear, what an idealist I was… To some extent it is really difficult. I’ve become more cynical. When I was in my twenties I was having a freak out because I couldn’t get a job. I had some very bad administrative jobs. However, I got a production job… I got a grant for a project. When you go into full time work you have very little time to spend on the side. But in my thirties I fell for Germany and Europe. I knew you could work professionally there, so when I was in my early 30s I wanted to focus on Europe.” I’d felt similar things in Australia, often having reveries about France and Europe. Yet it’s a funny place to be, in between the two places, one so young, and full of creative possibilities, different things to express and the other, post-industrial, full of culture-rich illusions, a playground for the mind. It all seems to play into Australia’s ears. I’m sure it would be a deafening sound for someone like Amanda.

“After five years of working in Europe, I felt really cut off from Australia. I thought f***, I’m getting cut off from my own context. I tried to reconnect here, putting my eggs in all sorts of basket… I’ve now become a Jill of all trades… I’m planning to take a few years off to get back to non-performance based poetry. It’s where I feel most at home. ”

I find this intriguing as she’s naturally entertaining me. Her ring tone bleeps. We’re suddenly in a rainforest with cicadas and bird calls. The travelling bus stops. She speaks to what sounds like her PA who she calls ‘honey.’ We pause the conversation. She pulls out a cigarette. Smoke lifts above the books. I tell her about a certain block I’d been feeling writing wise since I hit university. People rarely talk about their artistic blocks, but they reveal a lot about someone. There must’ve been some necessary obstacles, or hurdles to jump over for this aspiring jockey come competitive athlete.

“When I was studying I was in a block. I worried, but without it I would not be where I am now. I had to change my substructure. You have to let it all sink in…. I was reading Joyce, Burroughs, Lacan, Derrida et cetera... I was completely overwhelmed. I had a sort of confidence in my poetry yet I became blocked. I was writing shit... It was as if I was travelling to new countries and worlds but I didn’t have control over their languages so I couldn’t express myself. I thought I might have to give up writing. Everything I wrote was dreadful and I knew it was dreadful.” Despair is a common artistic vice, especially with the seismic changes that come with growing up next to such huge bodies of theory, such a burgeoning world. It is difficult being inchoate in our society, yet this was the time when Stewart was opening to the world and a represented identity in it. It wasn’t a light-hearted affair. It’s something which is pretty direct for writers.

“I was confronted with my self… I questioned whether poetry was just a crutch for my ego… I hoped that it would lift. I couldn’t stop writing, although I considered it. It’s what I do, who I am. I’m just glad I didn’t release what I wrote publicly. There’s a pack of piranhas out there, and perhaps there should be. You have to wait for when the block breaks.” She looks over at me reassuringly, reclining in her chair, looking out of the window. There’s an understated wisdom in a person like Amanda yet there’s no fuss in her depth of explanation, or if there is fuss, she’s aware of it and openly calls it, in an ironic tone, ‘wank.’ She lends more to me. “I was blocked. My mind was so full. I kept feeling that I’d found something, yet nothing would come. I’d always written from experience, but I decided I wasn’t going to write from my own experience; that it was a way to radicalize form. It really mucked me up. Ironically, it was a terribly important thing to do. It completely changed my substructure. It was like an athlete using a new technique. I’d been exposed to writers that were much more self-reflexive and I was compelled to get rid of the old substructure and when I did there was nothing there. Then something came, and took that space, and my block broke.”

You can see why our poets are so vital when you have conversations like these. In the realm of pop culture it seems that people don’t like this sort of sensitivity. They do in a sense, but they find the intimacy of poetry hard to gulp down and digest because it takes a little more work, especially in our speed and money driven world. Stewart stated in 1982 that “one must control sense to make money.” Those words certainly hold a more urgent meaning now more than ever, with the rise of advertising, and the slow decline of poetry and an independent publishing industry.

“I have a real beef about how badly funded the Arts are in Australia. We have so many great artists here that get treated terribly… There is a propensity for the mediocre and the safe… It makes people feel comfortable, makes them feel understood… Yet poetry is a very empowering thing… Poetry’s a play between form and matter… understanding and the unknown… it is pithy and self aware… a poet is always approaching the text in a very specific and powerful way. They have the chance to look at the complexity of meaning and to test it… Poetry is a key to freedom of thought. It can be a friend in boredom; it can be a friend in hard times. It’s all fine and well having freedom of speech, but unless you have freedom of thought who really cares about what you say.”

As I leave the house I feel as if I've lifted the cover off her work. I got to know that non-author identity that was no longer textual or contained in dusty bookshelves. We shared instead what came from a voice, two mouths and four ears:

‘The first sounds filling
The mouth with self
My death on your lips
My birth on your sigh.’

Research and References
Websites and Online Resources:
Keefe, E. 2008, ‘those strange movements of the mouth and throat: Merging fields of inscription in the work of Amanda Stewart’ accessed on the 6/10/08, URL: http://whenpressed.net/work/ellaokeefe/those-strange-movements.
Stewart, A. 2005, ‘Postiche’ accessed on the 6/10/08, URL: http://www.abc.net.au/arts/adlib/stories/s862622.htm.
Stewart, A. 1995, ‘Absence’, accessed on the 6/10/08, URL: http://whenpressed.net/work/amanda-stewart/absence/

Books
Stewart, A. 1999, I/T selected poems, Split Records, Sydney.
Stewart, A. ‘Statements’ in eds. Brooks, D. & Brenda, W. 1989, Poetry and Gender: Statements and essays in Australian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, University of Queensland Press, Queensland, p. 63.
Smith, H. ‘The transformation of the word: text and performance in the work of Ania Walwicz and Amanda Stewart’ in ed. Fuerry, P. 1994, Representation, Discourse and Desire, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, pp.221-239.
Journal Articles
Manning, J. 2000 ‘Amanda Stewart, I/T: Selected Poems’ in Heat, vol.1, no.15, Giramondo Publishing, Melbourne, pp.301-306.
Stewart, A. 2000, ‘A Comment on “absence” (1995)’, in Heat, vol. 1, no. 15, Giramondo Publishing, Melbourne, p.306.
Newspaper Articles
Clarke, M. 2007, “The road less travelled – THE CRITICAL GUIDE – CULTURE CULUTRE’, The Age, 24 November.
Jenkins, J. 2007, ‘Excerpt from: From page to stage’, The Australian, October 16.
Ferguson, S. 2006, ‘Constantly evolving’, Daily Telegraph (Sydney) November 23.
Eastman, W. 2005, ‘A bold test of artistic nerve’, Hobart Mercury, October 13.
Creagh, S. 2005, ‘So different this time, even though it’s all the same’, The Sydney Morning Herald, October 19.
Everton, D. 2000, ‘Four in the mix Machine for Making Sense – Spotlight on:’, Illawara Mercury, May 12.

Alan Ball's Americana

2008-09-21T18:59:00.000-07:00

‘Towelhead’ is perhaps a bit of a misconceiving title for the film. It not only explores the racial tensions in America in the wake of the Iraq war but also goes to the centre of what it is to be displaced. The protagonist, Jasira, is in an almost constant state of dispossession in a country which claims its kitsch values of individual rights and loving your neighbour as yourself. This seems to be an underlying theme in Alan Ball’s work. The film is an expression of political frustration with an intense focus on a 13 year old’s sexual awakening. This culminates with the influences of the fantasy space of her neighbour’s closet full of Playboy magazines.

Jasira Bishil first experiences rejection from her faux-feminist and puerile mother. She is exiled to live with her Lebanese father in a cardboard box suburban house. It is here that Jasira has to confront her father’s warped form of nationalism and his phobia for her own abject fluids. Her racial difference is eroticized by her dysfunctional and predatory neighbour who uses sex as a catharsis from his depressive world. Ball doesn’t hesitate to take a lens to the inhumane eroticization of Jasira’s body. It is portrayed directly in episodes of insidious abuse. Jasira does find a boyfriend at school who shares another side of her sexuality. Here the commodification of her body and her abuse is symbolically broken. She meets another set of liberal neighbours who come to give her the space to regain her identity.

Alan Ball does not hold back with this film’s intensity. This is its strength regardless of the fact that it may be its downfall in a wider audience’s eye.

Persepolis

2008-09-04T23:48:00.000-07:00

A graphic film is not something you’d consider to surpass the boundaries of its own artistic or underground scene into the gimmicky market of globalised taste. Graphics of quality and depth now hold a certain nostalgia, however in France, are now a medium that is being rebuffed. “Persepolis”, directed by Vincent Paurronaud and written by its protagonist, Marjane Satrapi, illustrates, in an almost film noir contrast, the rapacious effects of the tumult of Iranian rule. Marjane, a young girl comporting the tactless sensitivity of youth attempts to find an identity in a country deplete of its culture and the liberal freedom of political autonomy. She plays the submissive game of the totalitarian state, casting a veil over her views and the members of her family who come to personify some paradigmatic segment of western thought. She is soon uncovered. In an act of protection, she is sent to Europe, a world that is equally as vacuous in its treatment of difference. It is in this austere intersection of two worlds that Marjane both suffers and finds a sort of resolve from the grey ambiguities of her identity and experience. The ornate simplicity, layered textures and inflexions of her graphic narrating capture a collision of continents, and politics that is all too pertinent and refreshing in light of the worn separations between ‘this’ world and ‘theirs’.

Sense

2008-08-31T00:22:00.000-07:00

3.
Body cracks harking back, forth
Scent somber mouillé and wet
dwelling to morph
Gravel crumbled sea won’t set

2.
Mind thrusts thunder echo
Bubbled white fountain falls
Sails, soars, rotund oars, low
Rolling under breathed wind, grey crawls

1.
Heart crust feathered in dust
Egg nest in twain
Tussled, twining
Ruffled fur furls warm

Photograph

2008-08-25T06:03:00.000-07:00

Grinding flesh twig break metallic

Music. Sound. Steel wool grated shade-shadow.

SNAP

The trees blur. The globe explodes.

FLASH. FLASH.

The boy's face disjoins.

His eyes slip along a grainy red horizon.

Filling the darkness and rising back

Skin is . stretched there, between (eye) ----- (the lens)

As the camera pricks the pixels

My eyes smooth their rough edges

Some faint heaviness settles

Teeth aching, tasting object

Abject

DRrrrrr eam

OPppp eration

The image

Is re-membering me.

Every grain-saturated -punch

forcing my eyes into their opaque

so-

ck-

et-

p a c e.

Hibernation end

2008-08-01T17:49:00.000-07:00

Flies littered over the roof

Waking from winter

Across the new light

Covering over the cold

Speckled stones from

Catacomb sleep

Deep in dusk and dawn

The sun splinters black

Green springing

To the subtle touch

Of warmed dry

Air passing up

Flies in a whirl-wind

Unstuck

Weightless disaster

Only to fall again

Up and around as fleck-ed

Flesh

That glows red

In lumen

Hidden to the dark

Concrete Junk Jungle

2008-07-19T19:39:00.001-07:00

Tortishell cat is the pelt of a city

Twirling to Jazz chords

Strumming off dissonance

To the string of an electric guitar

Breaking buildings open

Architecture as the moving spectacle

Into concrete bloc-ed

Melodies, Motorways, bridges, houses

The citizen is percussion bound

Step, step, break by another

Till thrown forward in syncopation

Electric speed of car lighten progression

Climactic mid-day of peak hours humming down

Stopping and starting in a frozen back motion

Retrograding heliographs of sound bouncing

Moment of concrete dwelling

Out of the wild palm leaf,

Ibis droppings crawls

The Jaguar hidden roaring

Hunting the subject to find something

Around the next bend

-ing

The world around itself to meet back at

The night-ridden dusk of an orange sun

That blooms again cat pelts

Slowing speed to cricket calls

To the spore light and mellow tune

Of a heart-strung moon

The Romantic pauses to take a drink

From the black river that consumes

All colour-crazed mayhem

And finds no home here in contradiction

Dying away as he searches for new, orient-al

Sound wave, guitar rift of originality

And for nature to reign over the concrete

Bring back the harmonic music

Of a strut down the decay of laneways

Here he flashes a-new after love forlorn

Closing over as a night walker double-edged

Using his sound to make sonic sarcasms

Pushing us forward to come to a point

New light gained, genius in ostensible ideal

Of individual ___ love

That may stay slow as cooled self-obsession

Wielding his yielding guitar of reason

Ego, ergo sum

Dead songs sung

Here I sit waiting for

The new junk jungle

Flower to bloom

Language langage

2008-07-06T17:35:00.001-07:00

Language langage

Un mot de francais…

This tool bends itself

As hot iron forged

In unmalleable forms

Of two points

Out there in the dark

That omit to me

Out of brained matter

From a world of infinity

Different for a moment solid entities

Until the clock clangs

All back to liquid form

Cooled down to

Some mercurial curse

Some forged reductive

Here speaking as

‘a word of french’

It is of this heavy penned s-word

That something else

Tells you this whisper between two worlds

Is not every word, sentence phrase a scream and then a whisper?

Some closed over concrete block

slipping?

Know. know, know,

Still.

No.

Speak, speak, speak

Move.

Yes.

Art-iculate.

Be.

Stay in Brisbane

2008-07-01T20:21:00.000-07:00

Summer

Slim bridges skim across mud

Meandering across satellite shimmers

Tall hopes

Sky up to blue

Voice scream and conflict cage

‘til I come back

See myself lost

Where sun shines

Enlightening

Summer in the heart

Picasso Faces

Sense crashes image around body

Mmm… taste

The white walls make a fruity Matisse

Buzz numb in brain - paint falls away

To this soft tongue day

The open organs of Degas’ whores

Bleed out over skin

Mixing some tension in cores

Of Contrast

Molding Picasso’s

Ever-twisting face

Chandelier in hotel window

Cased light in the dream

Suspended in glittered static

There surrounds a darkness invisible refracted to gleam

Hope of moths collecting around

Weighty opulence ripe to fall

Below sits some neon

Of ideals hologrammed out

To flowing diversity of ants

That grow beyond

To some individual flash

Back to promises more

What are we society?

Collective individuals

Drowning over this utopia

Lens of eyes around the dazzle

Beyond the chandelier

Be-dazzle by beguilement

A merlin wand of security bound money

Icon Icon Icon of belonging

To those grand keep-safes that circle

Above my head and steal a beauty

Where are you?

Beyond between below the flowing

Movement of skies and the hidden dark of muddy

Voices lost under in the starry dungeon of dispossession

Come back, go away, return, flee

Until stars fade and the mud sits dark and alone

Pressing under weight

Becoming Stone

Miss Julie

2008-06-18T01:17:00.000-07:00

Happiness consumes itself like a flame. It cannot burn forever, it must go out, and the presentiment of its end destroys it at its very peak.
AUGUST STRINDBERG

I was sitting at the Belvoir Theatre on tuesday night to see Miss Julie by August Strindberg. My divinaton was that it was a depressing but profound psychosexual drama, or so I'd been told. I found it to be more, and strangely pressing for those who search for love.. Miss Julie, the trapped aristocrat and her servant, Jean, who represented the seed of the nouveau riche are unbridled by dreams, that turn in their way into an inner crisis of truth. Their relationship in its class tension and emotive exasperation existed as a grand metaphor for the narratives of modern escapism. In their dialogue it called itself love, however, it was more a way to cope, to shake the boundaries, to tear up the footlay that was so dauntingly repressive. For that the pain of the character's situation, their delusions found a justification. Did they need it? I had to ask myself "had anything really changed? Was love of that kind an ideology of abandon, of escape from self?"

The stage was constructed of a simple plank of timber that stretched out as a kitchen shelf, suspended two metres or so above and out to the ends of the stage. Upon it objects were placed, and the plank was used as a sort of balancing scale. Every object; every person's perspective never allowed you to hold that objective sympathy with a defined protagonist; a quantative judgement. This was the success of the play for me. Strindberg asked questions I simply couldn't answer everytime the plank-scale swung like a seesaw. All the protagonists' situational dilemmas were never denied their pertinence.

Their situation displayed something, in a hyperbolic fashion that i can't seem to shake off with relationships, or their form in any current version. It's as if feeling in such speed, in such a desperate attempt to escape self is a deep contract we make with pleasure, with sex, with the ecstacy of abandon. Affairs and desires are more than simply an interplay of mind and sexual relations. We sell out for that vivacious sense of abandon and dreams and forget friendship, love. The themes were so heavy on the nostalgia of the life i'd experienced in that strangely austere and vacuous place we call society... that amalgamation of clubs, bars, glam, drunk modernity. The place where postmodern identity politics replace the humble family. I thought we drink, we make a contract to abandon, we make eyes at that dark figure whose face won't show itself in the light, and find ourselves in the dark of a bed, fumbling, hands across each others bodies. Or we deny it and we find platonic contracts, friendships of a greater scope, that let idealism breathe out of that overly reduced obsession with the perfect aesthetic - bleep, bleep, bleep, boom boom, boom.

Strindberg definitely made the suggestion that happiness was a flame for the desireful, and most people i know have had a difficult time lighting it. The play presents this dilemma in that place of modernity, some furious and frustrated abyss, that we've come back out of but can't help but look back at and wonder, and i'm not ashamed...

"What is happiness?"

A list of heavy and grand words, that cast their shadows and their light... states that are always with the "presentiment of their end, causing the suffering, resolve of (de-con)struction at their very peak"

Perhaps.

Nomad

2008-06-18T00:41:00.000-07:00

A curious character was sought out by the civilized as a primitive.
They disliked him - he was clothed in secrets and mysteries.

His identity was found
between swaying motions of seas - the slow movement of terrain
between eyes and feet
desire of a home is cradled in hands and heart where shapes move,
fumbling back, cutting around in a slippery surrealism;
dark broken by the sun
morning.

Nomad
was woken abruptly by city
traveled down new streets built in seconds
cultures were singing songs cut-up into transient echo
mouths tasted insatiable fats
bodies loved, and minds were dulled into muddier pathways
all traded in a magnificent aroma that wafted further
to nether -
ether in home.

Reflections on Phantasm, the enactment of my own piece of writing.

2008-06-09T04:06:00.001-07:00

Rose Purse (O n&On) and Danielle Maas (Simulacrum)

Theatre is the last beacon of knowledge, stir, critique and substantially the last resort of thought, in our march in this veiled life upon obscure ages.

-- Tandasi Susuki

The theatrical plane stretched out into a concentration, a stage. The excitement of theatre beset me. I sat behind, thudding heart, intimate with exposition and watching my work move in and over heads, missing ears, making some receive, confusing others, angering some, boring the non-believers. It, out there, was no longer me and I was humbled, satisfied. I could have critiqued the awful setting, the dissonant sound of the bar behind us, see the heaviness of my words, or the lightness of enlightenment they might bring in someone. I could critique the actors’ performance, see where they could have reached a greater implication or more of a tension, subtlety or reaction, or been more physical. Yet it was that silence of wonder, of moving within understanding, the presence of moment-um, of a delicious spectacle, a ritual of meaning, life of death and death of life; to know that we’d communed. Could i ask for any better parliament of humanity?
I think not.

Something like desire, something like life

2008-06-02T06:35:00.000-07:00

This is all messy prose. Desire is all just some big, wet morass, tangling and tangling around itself knots and moments of hatred and thick blood, moments of greatness... but only delicate moments, volatile moments, that come crashing down to just the bareness of your body-mind alone, bleeping out to nothingness. Find me a reprieve from it, some part of me heavy to the stomach calls. Yet pleasure is coming, oh pleasure, up and up through my throat, till I come to the slight strangling sensation and feel I’ve arrived somewhere. I look into Siddhartha’s light, into Art’s humble- cushy touch, to God’s paternal arm, to friendship, the most altruistic thing I know, embracing me as my self, resolved. This happens to me every day, until it cracks and the cycle starts again, and night falls and the sun breaks the world above, and it sends me hurtling back to a half déjà vu where I gleam again new light and swim in the somber beauty of the dark.

Being past

2008-06-01T22:30:00.000-07:00

The grandfather clock,

Humming --- tock

Over sleeves of wet flesh,

Spilling tea over

Dusty sheets --- tick

Moment of there and now,

Tocking ---

tick ‘til it filled,

This word housed room

with the old oak smell of curving strokes

on paper

somewhere other than

ancient men --- tocking

primordial prose --- ticking

the present of dust

the passed from now

to the place of the ticking tock;

--- the tocking tick

PJ Harvey's Music - The Soundscape of a New Flânerie.

2008-05-31T03:48:00.000-07:00

“Flânerie is a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness even though it is actually a final resignation to it…” (Keither Tester)

PJ Harvey's Sound posits an insatiable tension somewhere between musical flânerie and dialectical playfulness; a sound that is addictive to my generation’s ear. She pulls me from the infinite, finite, organic, city-bound, the body, mind, distilling them all. She ruptures the eternal from the transitory reaching up to those independent, intense and impartial spirits, conjuring that psycho-semantic world that runs down into my bones. Perhaps a bit much? Let me explain with a few fragmented lyrics.

Is This Desire?

“Catherine liked high places,

The hills

Chapel

Washing herself

Wind

Listen

Children’s voices

Women of the hills

A view of the city,

Now she sits and moans” (The Wind)

“Beauty of her

Under electric light

Tears my heart out

Every time…

waiting” (Electric Light)

Stories from the city, Stories from the sea

“Teach me mummy,

How to catch someone’s fancy

Under the twisted oak grove” (Grow Grow)

“The ceiling is moving…

Like a conveyor belt above my eyes

When under ether,

The mind comes alive…

Something’s inside me

Unborn and unblessed

Into this world and to the next” (When Under Ether)

Lyrically, the idea of the city seems to represent heartache, chaos, and the uncontrollable. Nature some place of refuge, where we only gain moments of culminate feeling when her odes to love climax, always being taken forward by her melodic narratives. The city is present more as a motif than a subject in the background, foregrounding all her undulating sound-concepts and nature-based imagery. This is one of the places where her music gains its dynamism and power from a movement and interaction of extremes, between desirous chaos, and romantic reprieve; city and nature; authenticity and deception; a sort of musical Flânerie, always imagistically tied to, yet anterior to the city. Her music is always bound by some sense of modern idealism and the abyss, yet some paradigmatic opposite is constantly bubbling up from an expression of her subjectivity.

Her music is in a perpetual state of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and affairs, and fathomless points of silence crossing path ways and the nostalgic wilderness of feeling, from one great rhythmic throb to the perpetual discord and dislocation of all opposing rhythms. Overall, I feel like her music's taken me on “a turn from the seething bubbling fluid in a vessel consisting of solid materials of buildings, laws regulations and historical traditions,” (Robert Musil, 1954), and out into some ethereal other and for this I can't but feel that she has some quality as a quasi-heroic, journeying flâneuse, placing herself always in a liminality of being.

The Politic of Conversation

2008-05-31T01:18:00.000-07:00

Bombs set off out of my open eyes,

Shapes revolving in a vein structure;

This ethereal rhizome romping,

Tied to beings of ground,

Lost out in air.

Dipolar voices

Make each divide,

Branch after branch,

Ruddy liquid truth never still, astride

Until it spreads and crosses

Blocking beneath,

Another vein shooting beyond

the now and the then explosion of eyes.

Speck

2008-05-30T21:13:00.000-07:00

I’m a speck,

on humble knees bare,

bleeding out away under

the house,

tears escape. smashed picket fence,

words precipitate

crowds stare perfections

Minute revolutions

enlightening,

framing image

away from sense

into specks

On crumpled papers

Circling in heads

My translation of Rimbaud's newly discovered poem

2008-05-27T19:24:00.000-07:00

Bismarck’s Dream
(Fantasy)

It’s night time. Under his tent, full of silence and dream, Bismarck, a finger on the future of France reflected on his pipe emitting a blue thread… he meditates, his little bent index finger advanced from Rhin to Moselle, to the paper, Moselle to The Seine; from his finger nail, he scratched the paper imperceptibly around Strasbourg; he goes beyond. At Sarrebruke, in Wissem Bourge, in Woerth, in Sedan, it flinched away his little bent finger; he caresses Nancy, scratching Bitche and Phalsbourg, Metz line, tracing on the border of little broken lines– and he stops himself…

Triumphant, Bismarck covered from his index finger Alsace and Lorraine! Oh, under his yellow skull, such a delirium of misery! What delicious waves of smoke come from his pipe, blessed and happy!

Bismarck reflects, wait! A large black dot seems to stop his index finger, wriggling. Paris. So, his bad finger nail, scuffing, scuffing the paper, here there, with rage, finally stopping himself… his finger resting, half bent, still..
Paris! Paris! Then, the chap dreamed much, then opening, slowly drowsiness impairs him.. his forehead inclines itself towards the paper; mechanically, the embers of his pipe, escape from his lips, removing the ugly black dot…
Hi! Povero! By abandoning his poor head, his nose, Mr. Otto de Bismarck’s nose, plunged itself into the ardent embers Hi! Povero! Go povero! In the incandescent embers of his pipe, Hi! Povero! His index finger was on Paris! Finished, the glorious dream…

It was so kind, so spiritual, so happy, this nose of the first old diplomat. Hide, hide this nose! And so! My dear, when sharing the royal sauerkraut, you will enter the palace… with crimes of… the lady… in history; you will eternally bring your burnt, sooty nose between your senseless eyes.
Look here… don’t daydream away…

Away from the pages

2008-05-27T04:57:00.000-07:00

“Fluid minds carve their own path in humble, crafted words”

Tonight on the ferry, after looking up over the blurred characters of my philosophy reader I felt this strange merging with the blackness of the water, wanting to get away into some murky depth; liquid slickness that sheaths itself over light, some organic, primordial notion of the world.

‘Authenticity’ I remarked, until it had to recontain itself in some black medium, some opaque limit. Here my body spread outside the corporeal outlines of warmth and out into the cold light where my hands ached, my mind excited itself and landed me here, to spill out, gurgling like the water retaining itself around the vessel; the moving entity, out into utterance. I came to juggle these words, like a joker, who cuts up his mind into moments with their simple truth… until the sensual authentique kissed the lips of perception and reminded me again that I’m moving. Up-ho-ho…skidding, sliding with the water.

Response to Galway Kinnels Poem "The Middle of the Way"

2008-05-04T15:37:00.000-07:00

The sonic universe is moving but the heart doesn’t beat. It is atemporal, corporeal, a pump of presence that captures poetry in its stillness. It is the between of the intertwined and the chiasm. It is the ontogenesis; the opening and closing of the flesh that never reaches space, but comes as a flow of silence in which vein like fingers touch at meaning. It is empty and full in an eternal paradox of extremes but its blood-effect will forever spread, in this subtle interconnectedness of our senses and our sense of the world. It is the moment where space envelopes and time is broken open. It is where the wild dark of sense and the heliotrope of language hesitate to touch.

Signs are subjectification and objectification. They come as heavy sound, the drawing back of arteries, ricocheting off the heart’s still beat, pulling it from metaphor to sign and back into the temporal, the epistemological dimension. Words control the beatlessness of the heart – to make it jump away over some invisibility of the mind-body system, to try to abandon the heart’s stillness, to make it move outside its paradoxical and concrete inertia. Words saturate into the flesh of the heart its ontological signification; the self. It is here where metaphor drops out of the storm and ceases to be rain becoming a droplet that forms a puddle that finds its way into a larger body of water or evaporates back into the clouds up and away from perception.