HIGH UP IN THE TREES

Motion pictures.

My annual Festival of Film holiday, of sorts, is galloping along at a suitably furious pace, and I hope only that I have the stamina to keep up with it. As with any good holiday, chores of the daily kind have fallen by wayside. There is much washing to be done but not by me, it seems. I am too busy embracing my celluloid love. Yes, I am enjoying this tail end of July a great deal.

Every couple of days I make a large pot of vegetable soup to be shared and heated upon return to cosy den. I enjoy tasting my soup as it cooks (surely the best part?). A leek, a little sweet potato, perhaps we’ll add some legumes. Not too many. Just enough. Some chilli. Some black pepper for good measure.

Seems I am missing most of the winter sunshine but I know I would have it no other way. Shoes on, let us harvest pine nuts with the good people (The Whispering of the Trees), walk down the aisle a second time in a small chapel in Iceland (White Night Wedding), have our domestic sanctuary intruded upon by the opening of a highway (Home) before heartbreakingly being separated Albanian style (Divorce Albanian Style).

I’ve room for you in my pocket. Come along do. So long as I can sit on or near to the aisle, I am happy, liking little better than sitting in the near dark awaiting a film to commence. I like to listen to fragments of neighbouring conversation. I like to listen to people mutter that the film ought to have already started. They get angrier and angrier with the ushers who get friendlier and friendlier.

{How many pairs of bensimon's constitute too many? No, don't tell me.}

Film stills from...
The Whispering of the Trees
White Night Wedding
Home (a favourite thus far)
Divorce Albanian Style (screened in conjunction with Two Love Stories)

Feet...
My own

Ginger feline...
Monsieur Frank

Come on, dear. Let’s go the cinema.

On Saturday my film festival began (it feels like mine even though it belongs to everyone). It started in Romania with a Silent Wedding. It started in a state of glee.

Two days in and six films seen. Grab your coat and come and join me.

Film stills from...
Silent Wedding (Nunta Munta)
Sweet Rush (Tatarak)
The Milk of Sorrow (La Teta Asustada)
The Beaches of Agnès (Les plages d'Agnès)
North (Nord)
Letters to Anna

Freitag.

{Something mighty peculiar was afoot but I was hard-pressed to say for certain what it was. (II) A new collaborative print is on the way. I do hope you like it.}

I set aside the morning for a slow start. Preferring to let it unravel of own accord, after the usual morning tasks are completed—bed straightened, curtains drawn, pets feed, coffee brewed, birds taken outside into the garden—I relish such opportunities. Not every morning can launch this way. I am making the most of this one.

For a winter’s morning, it is sunny and spring feels close at hand. Yesterday’s sun I saw all too little of, tucked up in the one of the reading rooms of the State Library. Bliss all round, I doubt I could love this time of the year more than I do already.

Happy Friday.

{At home. In the morning. (These Thelma's stuffies can now be found at Counter, Craft Victoria.)}

{I am in Turkey. I am in Russia. I am in Kurdistan. Actually, I am taking notes upstairs in the reading room of the SLV.}

{On Tuesday my Dad turned 66; it appears I live in a cave-like dwelling.}

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'He treated her to one of his smiles.'

In today’s post came for me a treat I had been waiting for. Uppercase magazine (issue 2, summer 09) arrived literally on my front doorstep and made the winter sunshine all the brighter. Featured inside you will find Lisa Congdon, Carolyn Fraser, Heather Smith Jones (you fine three, warm congratulations I send you) and other familiar and friendly faces. You will also find an invitation to participate in Uppercase magazine’s Postcard project. To introduce the project, several of my collages of late feature; I am tickled pink and have few words to describe how exciting this is for me to see. I do hope you’ll play along. Time to celebrate with not ice-cream but a sweet bite at the Gelobar.

The day may be windy but winter sunlight ought never be wasted. Outside we go, people.

Thank you Janine for both the complimentary copy of your beautiful magazine and for featuring my work.

Suit one's book.

{Tumble and fall (XIII).}

Reading Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf I feel as though I could not have picked up a more magical book to read. It feels the perfect fit for my winter days and I love when such things occur, when the book you pick up to read is the book you should have picked up to read. Following on from The Holiday, I have parted company with Celia, and Harry Haller is now my guide, my voice in the ear. How is it that I have not read this before?

What are you reading? Do you have any recommendations to share? Come now, don’t be shy. Any books that have been recommended to you that don’t quite fit… yet?

{Tumble and fall (XIV).}

{Tumble and fall (XV).}

{Tumble and fall (XVI).}

{Tumble and fall (XVII).}

Yes, you've been down this path before…
Out gathering stars as they tumble from night sky.
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.

The business of constructing something.

As counterbalance to a week spent indoors, it is now time to head outside, to walk home, rugged up, to marvel at grey sky and feel the cold bite through the thin rubber sole of summertime sandshoe. It is the ideal time to sit with pencil and coloured highlighter in hand nutting out the Melbourne International Film Festival guide; to sample chocolates shaped like jewels and ruby-red love hearts; to catch exhibitions before they draw to close; to walk home, carefree and sated.

Come with me…

(I recommend heartily you go and see both Tacita Dean and Shared Sky before they close on the 2nd of August.)

There we will sit upon the rocks.

{All mended. Collage on Camera Studies small photograph.}

{Watched over. Collage on Camera Studies small photograph.}

{Safe passage. Collage on Camera Studies small photograph.}

From my Mum I recently borrowed her Parker fountain pen and now I am enjoying how it feels in hand. It is the perfect fit for today. It is made for swift movements and also for steady hand. It is a sword to cut through tangled vines and clouded thought. It writes well. It makes me miss pen and paper days of my youth and I am reluctant to hand it back. I am writing titles for new collages and I am writing a list of things I wish not to forget. I am writing facts as Sir David Frederick Attenborough narrates them to me. I am writing a list of all I want to do this week. It is proving a long list; I’ll need to change the ink.

Today as I work, I have in my head the sounds of the Penguin Orchestra Café (the films Malcolm and Napoleon Dynamite may be called to mind, yes?) thanks to Joanne (it played on her blog last week). Whenever I am cutting collage pieces I listen to music. I try to keep up and I often don’t succeed. Whenever I am working on a collage and near to gluing the pieces in place I listen only to the thoughts in my head. These thoughts are sometimes in relation to what lies directly before me, but more often than not, they are incongruous and pedestrian. Sometimes though the wings of such pedestrian thoughts come laced with a little whimsy, for want of better word. Armchair philosophy also plays part as well but never the lion’s share.

In pyjamas usually, I work. Hair tied back and lost to thoughts in my head. It is a heady and intoxicating feeling and one that makes me think to myself that I ought partake in this drug more often.

When not hand-to-paper working, I am reading Stevie Smith’s The Holiday. Here's to beautiful melancholy suspended.

('There we will sit upon the rocks' is a line I have borrowed from Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.)

+ Thank you for the sweet mention, Heather.

Grow dark.

The soft glow of twilight giving way to dusk, surely this is my favourite time of any day. As sun sinks below horizon I wake up. The rooms of the house grow dark and slowly, one by one, lamps are turned on or candles lit. A little artificial illumination so as to make things cosy but not too much so as to interfere with that soft and longed for glow of evening approaching. The corners of the room no longer distinguishable, sharp forms rendered fuzzy, I doubt there could be a more romantic time of day.

It is said that one operates and likes best the time that they were born. For me, at least, this is true. I was born in the early evening, at thirteen minutes past six some three and thirty years ago in the month of September.

{From light to dark, small scenes from my home.}

Read this morning,

It was quiet and dark — only high up in the tree tops a vivid golden light quivered here and there and transformed spiders' webs into shimmering rainbows.
(A Russian Affair, Anton Chekhov)

Yes, I’ve said it before…
Of luminous intensity.
The onset of night.

+ Thank you for your comments on the previous post. It meant a tremendous deal to me. Really it did.

Nest.

{Where I spend a great deal of time.}

Some days are golden only I do not seem to realise this until they draw to a close. Afterwards, standing back, I can see that they were dripping in honey and bathed in light, but always, always it comes ‘after’. A realisation after event, yes, seems a constant thread.

The first half of this week has been like this, nothing especially spectacular but wonderful all the same. That it found me once more at the ballet helped shape my feelings so. That it found me in the company of good friends added to its magical allure. That I have spent time hanging out with the little ones of friends. That it is winter.

The lure of a cheap ticket found me seated at the ballet on my own, and, to my shame, I cannot recall the last time I went to something in the same vein on my own. I have made vow to do similar again. Perhaps the international film festival soon upon Melbourne’s doorstep will give me chance to make good my promise.  Perhaps it will not.

All things in proportion, with work counterbalanced by play, such a string of satisfaction to tie about the neck. If it were always like this, would I grow tired of it? Probably, I would. I like my choppy seas on rotation with smooth. My soaring highs followed by inevitable lower periods.

{Where Olive spends a great deal of time, too.}

+ Uppercase magazine comes out on the 2nd of July. Fantastic! I am particularly excited. Watch this and you might see why. Keep an eye out for ‘postcards’.

UPPERCASE magazine: Issue 2 preview from UPPERCASE gallery on Vimeo.

Thanks to Bob Dylan for the inspiration.