HIGH UP IN THE TREES

Of a feather.

{Louise's A beating of wings (i) and (ii) in hand.}

It seems Agatha and Bertie are the best of friends. One green, the other blue, they sit upon the branch, side by side, preening one another. He brings her food; she neatens his crown. They chirrup to each other and seem to my eyes devoted like lovers infatuated. It really is sweet to see these two budgies get along so well. We purchased Bertie a week or so ago now and he is proving Agatha’s perfect companion. Say what you will about pet stores, curtailed liberties, and birds that are kept in cages when it is far nicer to have them soaring in the sky, I am happy to have this outdoor aviary and two feathered charges in my care and in my home.

There are no budgies in either of Louise’s new yellow-papered zines, but there is a Turquoise parrot and a Zebra finch in one, and a Crimson topaz and a Common swift in another.

A beating of wings (i) and A beating of wings (ii) are two new zines we will be bringing to Sunday’s fair. Sometime soon, after we’ve packed up our paper wares, we will be listing them on our online store alongside some Thelma’s stuffies and dancing bear cards. New things are afoot once more and it feels good. After a lull, things are moving. The end of autumn, she is a beauty.






{New Thelma's handmade stuffies are coming, just as soon as they finish their autumn Footscray frolicking.}

Pining for the spontaneity of old times.

{Good company awaits.}

Dear you,
 
The monthly meetings drag on and on and I wonder how ever it is I can reverse the process, wind back to a time before our hook-ups became regimented affairs. Pining for the spontaneity of old times, when we had our afternoons spare. Rostering a good time seems to fly in the face of all I believe I still hold dear.
 
Shaking things up with a spot of what we call Droppings Practice in Sydney this clear day.
 
Look out down below! Got you!
X

+ The beautiful assembly line: Louise and I are busily working on a trio of new zines in readiness for this Sunday's fair (of which the above postcard travel features in Conveyed by the postal system). Come along, gentle readers.

Page Parlour
as part of The Emerging Writers' Festival 2012
at The Atrium, Federation Square, 191 Flinders Street (VIC)

Sunday June 3rd
12 noon – 5 pm

A reduced palette.

{Waiting for you in Spain.}


{If you were here you would hear me crying.}

Emerging some three plus hours into a dark wet night having forgotten myself in the brilliant William Kentridge survey exhibition (direct from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) at ACMI, I feel that fantastical mix of awe, inspiration, amazement, and envy. William Kentridge: Five Themes is one of the best exhibitions I’ve seen in the longest time. From Occasional and Residual Hope: Ubu and the Procession films and drawings and shadow theatre techniques through to the model theatres and black and white chalk drawings projected, birds embraced, and rhinos writhing and contorting in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and the works based on Gogol’s The Nose (for The Metropolitan Opera’s Shostakovich opera premiere of The Nose, 2010), I greedily wish only that I’d gone sooner (today is the last day of the exhibition in current guise at ACMI) so that I might go again and sit in the long dark room watching that suite of seven films about the artist in the studio, to reflect on the “invisible work that must be done” (quote plucked from the ACMI exhibition brochure). It is something magical to partake in, all those exhibition punters quietly watching film after film in the many darkened rooms, negotiating a seat, a wall to lean against, or a floor to sit on as before them plays out scenes that give rise to a knot in the throat. A tingle of the skin, a beating of the heart faster, a lump in the throat, a tightening about the chest, a watering of the eyes; the body tells me what I think.  Handspan, rule of thumb, the body is a great measuring device. I’ve no right words for how magnificent, strong, beautiful, melancholic, dark, and brilliant I found this exhibition, but I wish I could go again and I wish you could come with me. It’s been the shove I needed, and my head feels as though a door was found, opened and a new room beyond sighted. If this exhibition didn’t prompt you to pick up charcoal stick or paper play, I’m sure nothing could.
 
+ Temporarily shunning all media shortly so that I can watch a different kind of brilliance tonight on the telly. I’ll bid you adieu, and leave you in the hands of a plucky sparrow.

Half-time jellied oranges.

{Nothing changed since last I was here.}

Dear you,
 
After much searching, I’ve found the perfect after-hours roller-skating rink for our tournaments in Sweden. The third door by the back stairs of the town hall has a broken lock that to all appearances looks locked but in fact is not. As with many things, appearance of the thing deemed everything. I’m relying on you to spread the word to our racing comrades, but perhaps tell Ernesto last; he’s no good at secret keeping.
 
Need now only to find a means of providing the half-time jellied oranges and to purchase a pair of speed skates.
 
Until the first Wednesday of the month,
X


{I enjoy your company, They had constructed their own grden from what they had, Testing the laws of hazard (ii), The Retreat. Four of sixteen iPhone skins currently in our store.}

+ Our Society6 store has FREE SHIPPING THROUGH TO SUNDAY ON ALL ORDERS WORLDWIDE. Cause for celebration!

+ Checking Dancing Bear proofs in the bright sunlight. New things are afoot and soon will be revealed.

Intended for writing and mailing without an envelope.

{From Fanja. Thank-you. Your Lewis slides down the bannister and into a new land.}

One of the things I love about blogging today is one of the things I loved about blogging when I began in January 2006: the conversation with friendly faces the other side of the screen and the camaraderie. Arriving by post from Fanja, a selection of handsome postcards that you will soon see sporting new collaged addition and perhaps a narrative too. Thank-you, Fanja, for posting such loveliness, reminding me that of all the things I love about blogging, the friendships formed is what I value most. As so often happens, this parcel arrived when needed, a friendly little pick-me-up from across the way.

From recent arrivals to departures, thank-you, friends, for your recent card orders that have Louise and me heading to the post office. (A handsome batch of cards will soon be delivered by hand to MIlly Sleeping (157 Elgin Street, Carlton) too.)

+ Snail mail revisited 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 times.
+ Head to Fanja's beautiful le train fantôme shop.
+ The work you can see in the Chapter House Lane window is that of Pia Murphy. (Discover more.) The café with the mint green legged tables and chairs is Little King.

Foursome Friday.

{Four new cards. With rainfall and thunder close behind, Guiding me home, I enjoy your company, and You're in my sights.}

At last, she cried. New cards, four of them, are available through our online store. Those of you savvy, of which I’d say a great many of you are if not all, will recognise this early morning autumn scene in Melbourne. On my way to RMIT, to sit in a tiny room and assess artistic outpourings of those studying the art of oils and collage, I pass this alumni courtyard flanked by the Old Melbourne Gaol. Louise and I took the opportunity to make the most of the beautiful clear morning and from thus set to photographing our brand new cards. To our left, someone else was making use of the Gaol’s wall, and was photographing a series of masks in the old barred windows.
 
Thank-you. We greatly hope you will enjoy these liberated animal cards, and offer new homes to convict zebra (Equus Burchelli), goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis), lion (Panthera leo), and Emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri).

The new quartet of cards are now available through our online store
SINGLE GREETING CARDS
A SET OF 4 CARDS (one of each kind)
A SET OF 5 CARDS (five of the one kind)

Thank-you, too, instagram love, and for your iPhone case and iPhone and iPod skin enthusiasm. It is exciting for the two of us to think of our animals scampering the globe.

+ Newsletter 34

A different pattern.

{Gioachino Rossini}

In conscious shake-up of pattern, last night I went to the opera, to see Elijah Moshinsky’s production of The Barber of Seville (opera in two acts by Gioachino Rossini). With a little cajoling, I dispensed with the evening’s planned framework and instead of by computer tweaking files on a new puppet style zine, I found myself at the State Theatre watching the grand parade in all its powdered, theatrical, bright costumed glory. Sometimes it is good to mix things up, and this, with push, it must be said, is what I did. This vegetarian teetotaller partook in a pre-show serve of beer-battered fish and chips and glass of chardonnay at the Café Vic in large Tuesday shake-up, and with full belly and rosy cheeks thought how good it is to sometimes do what you might otherwise not have done. Familiar patterns can easily become ruts and thus sometimes need a little picking up by the neck scruff shaking about. With lucky gifted ticket in hand, this, friends, is how I found myself in the very front row of the theatre, in the very middle of the row, watching the bright spectacle of it all. The conductor pulls himself up on the railing before me. Two hands appearing first, and then a head, like a swimmer emerging from a pool, and such close proximity is both fascinating and amusing even if forewarned. From such a seat, I can watch both the conductor dance, most of the orchestra play in the pit, and the performers on the stage. It feels deliciously almost as though they are performing just for me. I can see every rise and fall of José Carbó’s elegant rhythmical moustache and I can hear the conductor Andrea Licata’s humming and trumm-paaarum-pummm soundings as he bobs and bounces and sways. I can see the stage set in detail, and those bold wallpaper patterns from the red and white diagonal bands of the barber’s trade to forward floral prints anchored by black, with their large flower faces a lolly gum-pink and sun-yellow. But best of all, the sound of all this, of all these elements, of the unexpected experience and famed thrill of live performance, all this coming together so terrifically loudly. The hush after the performance, after the applause, after the orchestra have packed up their instruments, the hush is amazing. Out into the quiet night we go.


{Without being out of tune, Testing the laws of hazard (i), And with that, she sets off on the journey home, and All that's bewitching by the water. Four of sixteen new iPhone cases featuring some very familiar faces.}

In further break from routine, Louise and I have created several iPhone cases and iPhone and iPod skins through Society6. Explore the full lineup at your leisure, and thanks for your enthusiasm thus far.

+ The Barber of Seville was first performed at the Teatro Argentina, Rome, on the 20th of February 1816. "In the finale a cat wandered onto the stage, prompting the audience to break out into loud miaows" (Judith Armstrong, 2012, from Opera Australia's The Barber of Seville programme).

Manufacturing a rough sea.

{Manufacturing a rough sea.}

Dear you,

If I were to knock upon my neighbours’ door I should not be surprised if it were answered by an elephant upon an earth compactor. I would not an eyelid bat at what to you may sound ridiculous spectacle. For you see that is the noise they make as they clomp, clomp, clomp about their house. They step heavy as an elephant in a tiny urban space. Not that elephants are loud by definition. Nor are elephants not full of grace in my books, with their graceful swing, swing, swing. But perhaps an elephant in a place not quite to their natural fit, perhaps they would sound like this heavy tread I am by day and night subjected to. Now that I ponder my subject further and with big stick prod at it to see what lurks, perhaps these ‘imagined’ elephants are on stilts. Not being the most gymnastic of old birds, an elephant on tall stilts walking about the house, now this, this would be noisy. This is what I shall picture. Either that or a whale crashing and thrashing about. What say you?

Yours with cotton wool in the ear and a frown creasing the brow,
X

+ The whale above is a Sei whale (Balaenoptera borealis) who is known for being a fast swimmer, achieving speeds of up to 50km/h. Almost any kind of plankton, fish and squid will it eat. Range: all oceans (not polar regions)

+ They say that some owners look like their owners. They say that dogs notice people their owners’ dislike. This is embarrassingly true. Percy has taken a severe disliking to our next-door neighbours. They converse, he woofs. They slam a door, he barks. They throw a ball at our fence and Percy prepares counter retaliation. He has become the neighbourhood noise police. He has detected the anxiety and I cannot do anything to change it, it seems. I try to bluff, to act nonchalant, but Percy is not buying. It is somewhat embarrassing to see my own anxieties in physical form there on the couch. My happy canine hound has become the embodiment of neighbourhood displeasure. Canine doctor, please advise!

Delight.

{Two dancers on rollerskates at New York World's Fair (1939-1940). Image credit: The New York Public Library}

The State Library of New South Wales has just purchased several of our artists’ books recently exhibited in By This Unwinking Night. I mention this piece of good news because it is exciting (very! The stuff of squeals! The stuff of would-cartwheel-indoors were space accommodating) and timely. I seem to operate on a roughly one in ten system. You probably do too. One piece of brilliant sparkling news to nine rejections, unanswered emails, dead ends, almosts and otherwise. I suspect most of us operate this way, one in ten, though it is not something we always hear. We don’t often hear about all the proposals that failed for one reason or another, no, those we keep for dwelling on and mulling over in silence with the odd grumble release.

So, celebrating the one fabulous piece of news today with a Haigh’s peppermint chocolate frog, and leaving the nine little shadowy misses in the corner. Yippee!

{Page details from A headdress to show you how much I care, one of seven artists' books recently purchased by the State Library of New South Wales.}

+ An earlier look at A headdress to show you how much I care.

I plant a wet kiss upon your cheek.

{And the bellowing echoed so that I thought my head would split open wide.}

Dear you,

I am pretty certain that when Gene Kelly sang about those raindrops that kept falling on his head in some sort of "is not this enchanting?" way that he did not mean the sort of drops that run down the back of one's neck and all the way down the spine. Raindrops sound more romantic than the reality, or at least that is what I think as several drops catch me in that moment when one must close the umbrella and step indoors. That is when those raindrops as large as can be aim for your dry exterior. With engineered precision, they hit. Drip! Drip! Got you!

I don't begrudge the down pour, I just prefer it when experienced from the snugness of indoors, and if that indoors is to be shared with a thousand fold sea lions then so be it, say I, so be it.

With hair that curls in the rain and a less than sunny disposition, I plant a wet kiss upon your cheek,
X

+ I have, at long last, joined the Instagram ranks. I am posting photos of those creatures I encounter on footpath or under the water. And tiny men too.

"Umwelt"

{Miss Minnie's in pursuit.}


{Enjoying the crunch underfoot.}


{Innocent wintertime pursuits.}


{This could well be it.}


{In the distance and the glare, I'd mistaken you for family.}

Before the neighbour pushes open his backdoor to step outside for a smoke and to let his dog out, my cat Olive has upped and left. She has heard them before me. She has heard them before Percy who is asleep on the couch beneath a smelly rug. She knows what will follow and so she ups and leaves to the hallway until the moment passes. She knows that the neighbour's dog wears a bell that tinkles and jingles as it runs about their backgarden, and she knows that Percy loathes the sound of this bell. Olive knows that upon hearing the bell, the blanket heap that contains Percy warm and sweaty will erupt like a volcano. A switch is flicked in Percy's wiring and he is no longer a sleeping dog but a guard dog defending his fort. He begins to growl and woof at the tinkling bell that irks him. Olive knows the pattern well and, being a quiet thing, she does not care for the disturbance. She takes it as her cue to leave the lounge room and head to the front where soon the autumn sun will be.

A creature of habit, Olive is in touch with her “umwelt”. She is, for me, my own little slice of Gabriel Oak’s sheep that in Far from the Madding Crowd tell him that a thunderstorm will soon approach. I love the description of the sheep clustered at the far end of the paddock in a radiating fleecy fan, their bottoms facing outward to the direction of the thunder soon to strike. It is so easy to see and reminds me of a fantastical necklace. I like the large toad that crosses his path and the garden-slug that draws a “serpentine sheen” on the windowpane, too, that tell him “cold and continuous rain” is coming. “It is Nature’s second way of hinting to him that he was to prepare for foul weather.” (And it is how Hardy describes nature throughout the novel that I think I like best of all.)

They were crowded close together on the other side around some furze bushes, and the first peculiarity observable was that, on the sudden appearance of Oak’s head over the fence, they did not stir or run away. They had now a terror of something greater than their terror of man. But this was not the most noteworthy feature: they were all grouped in such a way that their tails, without a single exception, were towards that half of the horizon from which the storm threatened. There was an inner circle closely huddled, and outside these they radiated wider apart, the pattern formed by the flock as a whole not being unlike a Vandyked lace collar, to which the clump of furze bushes stood in position of the wearer’s neck.
(Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy)

“Umwelt” is a German word whose meaning Louise was only recently telling me about, owing to a recent read of hers being about the scientific classification of animals and the perceived world of animals. (Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science by Carol Kaesuk Yoon.) It means “the environment” or “the world around”. “The “perceived world”, the world sensed by an animal, a view idiosyncratic to each species, fuelled by its particular sensory and cognitive powers and limited by its deficits.” I like this idea of a distinct sensory picture of the world we find ourselves in, telling us what is and what is not.
 
Today’s postcard collages feature animals in their element, in touch with their “umwelt”. Upon second thought, perhaps that mistaken California Sea Lion in the last one is out of kilter in regards to their senses. Perhaps their "umwelt" has gone awry.