{In my ear and most unwelcome.}
Today as I walked home something small and winged flew right inside my ear. Giving me a hell of a fright, it made a terrible frantic buzzing noise as it thrashed and flapped. It may have only been a tiny thrip or something insecty-similar but how awful it felt as I ambled down the street. Whatever was it thinking darting in there!
{At rest.}
Today I am thinking of making an outdoor aviary for my birds. Using an old wardrobe (I have yet to find) as a foundation, knocking out the wooden sides and replacing them with wire, slapping on a tin roof and positioning it so as to get a little warmth, but not too much sun. A protected from predators spot right by the back door seems the place.
I am thinking of gardening and fixing the fence palings between our house and our neighbour's. I am thinking of painting the ceiling above me white. I am thinking of reading, fooling around doing little, napping (early starts are not my preferred) and a host of other things because I am procrastinating. This is also why I am logged into typepad. I am procrastinating. I am the full embodiment of a procrastinator. I have something that needs doing before I next lay my head on my pillow and I’ve made little to no headway on it.
Instead of working, I am dreaming of a new aviary for Claude and Agatha (and all the new feathered friends that I will source for them). I am stalling for time.
Be well, friends, and happy weekend.
{In the library for the blind, the hare went about her business unbothered. (more)}
Views from a Saturday and Sunday spent largely indoors working on a new project. Sourcing, scanning, placing, repositioning, cutting out and tweaking images until my eyes went fuzzy at the edges and sleep beckoned. I love weekends like this. That this weekend was chilly only made it more heavenly.
Here is all that surrounded me as I worked. Not pictured, the homemade Anzacs greatly enjoyed, heavy and syrupy and almost all gone.
+++ A husk of hares - a bright new post can be found here. Expect to find hares drawn, painted and collaged. Expect to find them on their lonesome or fooling about en masse. +++
{Talking to me in a long forgotten tongue.}
Filling my eyes and ears with beautiful haunting visuals and song, plenty of song. I have been to acmi cinema to catch, as part of their recent focus on a century of Russian cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), a philosophical fable about a mysterious Zone that is believed to contain a room which can grant your innermost desires. I have also been to see Transylvania (Tony Gatlif, 2006), and in my ears at the moment Yo La Tengo, Blues singer Bessie Smith, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Calexico, Dolly Rathebe and her dangerous good African Inkspots and more. Visuals and sounds these past few days set out to win my affections, and easily succeeded in doing so. It was not tricky for I bent easily to their will, such good things to tumble headfirst into whilst working on a series of new collages and a forthcoming collaborative artists’ book with Louise. There’s inspiration and stimulation to be found everywhere; I only hope I can capture a thin slither of what I can see and hear in my mind on the page and screen before me.
Enjoy your Monday; mine has almost gone.
Scenes from my Wednesday, on foot. Come along...
{Casting shadows longer than the trees could ever hope to.}
I buy books sometimes based on cover alone. Otto de Kat’s The Figure in the Distance however, I bought for both its black and white photographic cover and its first paragraph.
The Algonquin lay in New York like a small island. “The names of towns and small islands are feminine,” sprang into his mind as he drew the comparison, a rule from the book of Latin grammar resurfacing after many years. Over and over again his father had gone through the book with him. Hours spent face to face, weeks of testing, and all that had stayed with him was a couple of exceptions.
Translated from Dutch (by husband and wife, Arnold and Erica Pomerans), it would be a tremendous understatement to say that I am enjoying this book. The world he describes, past and present, I want to walk in it. In the constant and relatively quiet company of my cat companions, I hope to return to it to read a few more pages. Unlike most, this Monday morning I am keeping deliberately quiet and slow; last night I cut out collage pieces until it was almost 2am. The red indentations on my fingers tell me I have cut more than enough.
Today the room smells of mock orange blossom. One small branch of flowers snapped from the tree in the front garden, it doesn’t last long in a vase indoors and its petals drop almost immediately, but it smells of sweet citrus. It smells of idyll Sundays spent reading and tinkering and drawing and nattering, and that is just the effect I long to recreate today.
Thursday proved stressful, Friday productive, and the weekend sped by. Today is full of promise.
++ An afternoon edit, A skulk of foxes have arrived. ++
{A new friend for Agatha Cyanide. She and Claude Blue-belly prattle and preen.}
{A bag purchased from Paula. It will come as no surprise to you to know that I use it often. (otchipotchi)}
{Misha-non-penguin lands in Hawaii.}
This weekend through Cédric Klapisch’s film, Romain Duris and Juliette Binoche took me to Paris with them. “Two tickets to Paris for $28,” joked the guy at the box office to every second patron, "they’re the cheapest tickets to Paris this weekend”.
This weekend I ate chocolate crackles and toasted a friend’s birthday with a mug of hot tea (Happy Birthday, CS). I watched footage of Margot Fonteyn in both The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker and I thought how beautiful it was and it almost made me cry. I repaired, with Louise, a broken window pane, and replaced it with a piece of ruby-red glass.
This weekend proved the perfect time to wear a paper Contour Line brooch (thank you, Brydie), and to marvel at the ingenuity and brilliance of some everyday implements fashioned from forks, tape, wire and rubber bands (Vladimir Arkhipov’s Home-Made Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts). A boot hanger can be made from copper wire and aluminium wire, a winter fish feeder (that goes through a hole carved in the ice) can be achieved with a little brass, lead and a spring at your finding. In this collection, a lamp can and is assembled from aeroplane parts and a lamp socket, all you need supply is the light bulb. Such functional objects they look beautiful to me.
This weekend I drew up plans for an additional blog to run alongside this one, and later this week, I hope to share it with you. I may even be calling upon you to participate, if you like.
Happy Monday, you.
Sometime ago I was tagged by both Fliss (udder) and Frances (wishthimble) to show my workspace and reveal six things of a random nature about myself.
Here at last, for you and everyone else who reads this, are both.
My workspace – ready to begin.
Here is where I often sit to work. I also work a great deal on the floor and in my lounge room whilst a dvd or cd quietly plays. Mostly I work here, especially when gluing pieces. This is what it looks like before I begin. It does not look anything like this at the end of the night.
I have yet to put on my glasses and touch my coffee, and you can see various artworks from friends. I will be sitting here just as soon as I post this.
Six pretty random things.
1. One of the first things I see upon waking is a handsome polar bear with a bouquet of green-blue blooms in hand.
2. I dream in colour… full, saturated technicolour. And sometimes my dreams feature credits like those you catch at the end of a film. I can’t make out the text, but I know that is what it is meant to be.
3. I have amassed a collection of birds that will not fly away, though they may break. I am still looking to add to my collection.
4. I enjoy forming small, silly, secret and fun crushes on people I don’t know.
5. This is what I looked like in 1996. I am with Nutters, my big red tom, and I have cut my hair from long to short.
6. There aren’t too many people I have actually met who read my blog (so far as I know).
Many of you have already participated in these two tags, for those who have not and would like to play along, please do. I’d love to see your workspace or to read six random titbits. I am ever curious and I hope you'll play along. Let me know if you do.
Here’s to a sparkling and brilliant week, one and all.
{Scenes from yesterday.}
This weekend I attended a one-year-olds birthday party (Happy Birthday, Mathieson), and, seated outdoors, ate cake and gobbled sweets with the best of them. I watched inebriated bees land on the white tablecloth before me, so drunk they could not stand.
This weekend Louise’s parents returned home from China and we each now have wrists encased in colourful and beaded bracelets. This weekend I reacquainted myself with Fred and Ginger when I ought to have been asleep. This weekend was a good one.
How was yours?
++ A Tuesday morning edit that has nothing to do with it being April Fools' Day... a Hans Fischerkoesen animation starring a bee (thanks, Alyssa).
{Agatha in her home yet to be furnished with leaves, twigs and seeds.}
One hot afternoon, in a pet shop near to the South Melbourne Market, I met, and, so it followed, fell for (Sparkling) Agatha Cyanide.
Agatha is a classic budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus, a parrot to you) with green and yellow plumage and two beautiful splodges on her feathered cheeks. Older than the juveniles in the cage, she scuttled left and right on the main perch, shielding the others from view. As the younger, leaner budgies, some green, some white and blue, busied themselves with climbing the aviary walls, using their beaks to grip hold of the wire, Agatha, as she would come to be named by us, raised her bird shoulders and aired her armpits. She tilted her head left to right and was the most personable, intelligent bird I’ve ever met. We picked her, or rather, she, as all animal lovers will attest, picked us.
So Agatha Cyanide it is, a new addition to the house.
Agatha is an early Easter present from my parents. Not a foil-wrapped chocolate bunny, but an ever so handsome, puff-chested, real live budgie. She reminds me of Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Agatha Gregson (“Would you kindly stop parroting my every word, Bertie?”… I’ll have her saying this in no time).
The budgerigar is, thanks to its ancestry, obsessed with the eucalypt. I plan to find her some tomorrow, on Good Friday. I plan to wet them and place them in her green cage.
{1, 2, 3... Omar is about to transform into a rabbit.}
To those of you celebrating Easter be it religiously or with a chocolate bilby in hand, and to those who don’t, I wish you well. I’ll be back in this space sometime next week.
++ The photography of Joakim Eskildsen... Nordic Signs and The Roma Journeys - Hungary, India, Greece, Romania, France, Russia, Finland. Link found via the ever-inspiring Anne (Strandgut)... thank you.
{All I needed.}
From Sunday...
A new washing machine and a string of hot days perfect for the drying of recently washed garments, has made the heat bearable. Temperatures near to nudging 40°C (104°F) make ideal days to wash, wash, wash (they also make ideal days to collapse and do little save for grumble about the weather).
I have washed sheets and bedspreads and hung them out to bleach in the sun, large, white squares, glowing brilliantly. I have dried jeans and yoga pants on the clothesline overnight and found them stiff as cardboard the next. Curtains next, and rugs, too, I think. Good drying weather that I must make the most of. And, like all new things, I am keen, for a fortnight or so, to make it my latest obsession.
With a 10 metre long grey water diverter hose running from the washing machine, out the back door and directly onto the garden, I am able to give the struggling trees a drink at the same time. Like a giant, grey, plastic snake it stretches across the bricked courtyard, spurting out water from its mouth and mystifying the cats. At present it is watering the hibiscus as the machine spins and beats the pillows and pyjamas into clean shape.
(This weekend, when not knee-deep in wet and dry linens, was the weekend when Louise and I popped up in two-dimensional form in the A2 of The Age newspaper. Our collaborative piece You know this isn't the way home, don't you? also featured. One rosy-chested fisherman and us, so amusing to see en route to a yoga class. See and read.)
{One too many.}
Omar likes to follow me around the house. From lounge room to bedroom to bathroom to kitchen, he follows me. Often a few paces behind, near to my side as if glued there, a very vocal companion is my Siamese cat.
Post trip to the dentist, to have plaque scraped from the teeth (my teeth, not my cat's), he desires me to make myself comfortable not by the computer but in the warmer room where the washing hangs by the bar heater. Autumn is nearing and we are making cosy nooks in every room of the house. Blankets have come out of cupboards and herbal teas are prepared and enjoyed in the evening where once we feasted upon pineapple pieces. Farewell summer, here comes autumn.
And so I must obey, for he protests loudly, and arrange my limbs in a cross-legged position on the couch with springs that lie on the floor. There I can cut out future collage pieces as he sits in a tight ball formation on my lap.
Tomorrow those wooden animals with an appetite for zines are to be removed from the cabinet they have called home for the month of February. We’ll unpin the two large drawings and box up our animals for the journey home. It is always best to have something new simmering quietly on the stove when an exhibition draws to a close. A night spent cutting out tricky paper forms is just what I need. My Omar, he is wise.
{It really was true, you could, for a time, count upon the kindness of strangers.}
(Today's collaged photochrome lands show you Niagara Falls, as seen from the Canadian side, and Sinaia, Romania. The tree house was the Crown Prince Charles of Hohenzollern's hideaway near to the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains... as that was some time ago, new inhabitants have since moved in.)
(To all those seeking to continue your journey from the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, how does the Arctic region sound to you? Louise has a new zine out, Before it's too late, and it features seals in repose. What sight could possibly be better? You'll find it available both here and here. Those first in my find themselves rewarded with a little something extra.)
(To all those dear souls who shared their neighbourly woes and grumbles, thank you. To Brydie especially, the news of a possible six month lease is sweet music to the ears.)
