our sunshine

Mullet Dress

2012-01-25T17:33:00.003+08:00

I really don't get this style of clothing - short in the front and long at the back. I spent hours shopping for clothes today and not buying anything because so many of them have this half-arsed propensity. I'm not going to cut my hair like a bogan and I certainly don't want to wear a dress that looks like it's designed by a biker's sister.

Yes I know its shallow to discuss fashion, but I like the way talking about such things reveals my hidden prejudices.

The home office.

2012-01-02T21:47:00.004+08:00

posted on this isn't happiness

more woolstores

2011-12-26T23:59:00.006+08:00

view from the woolstore

2011-12-26T22:44:00.001+08:00

i took this one a couple weeks ago...just to distinguish it from all the photos that i download!

Skipinder the Punjabi Kangaroo

2011-12-07T21:23:00.001+08:00

Watch it!

Shizers!!

2011-11-20T20:05:00.006+08:00

Cooking accident:

Esperance

2011-11-19T21:53:00.002+08:00

Vital Foods movie of slime

2011-11-19T19:05:00.004+08:00

Toasted Cheese

2011-11-16T21:52:00.004+08:00

Have you seen this? Hillarious I say.

http://www.foundshit.com/

On the track to Quagi Beach.

2011-11-13T14:23:00.001+08:00

Vital Foods

2011-10-31T19:11:00.001+08:00

Junior Police Friend

2011-10-18T20:14:00.001+08:00

having an australian music festival in my living room. i am just amazed at the number of powerful beautiful voices singing out really interesting songs from this era.

The Wool Stores

2011-09-05T15:23:00.002+08:00

breath

2011-07-19T20:28:00.005+08:00

The Bird People In China

2011-07-02T15:35:00.004+08:00

You are invited!

2011-05-11T20:33:00.003+08:00

Saturday 14th May from 10am

Fair Trade morning tea, home made cakes and savouries (donations welcome.)

Live Music!

146 Aberdeen St - the Old Convent/Greenskills/Elders (was ITC)

New animation

2011-04-20T10:50:00.006+08:00

A couple weekends ago I went to a great animation workshop with Nic, hosted by GSFI/SCOPE. It got me very excited - I do love a bit of animation anyhow, but using this new software (iStop) makes things so much easier. Yayness!

Here is my first attempt, at the workshop. Now I'm lookin for a cheap webcam to have a go at home. EEeeek!!

Junk

2011-04-10T21:09:00.001+08:00

sitting in a dark bedroom with 3 junkies,

female.
brown paper bags filled with trash are
everywhere.
it is one-thirty in the afternoon.
they talk about madhouses,
hospitals.
they are waiting for a fix.
none of them work.
its relief and food stamps and
Medi-Cal.

men are usable objects
toward the fix.

it is one-thirty in the afternoon
and outside small plants grow.
their children are still in school.
the females smoke cigarettes
and suck listlessly on beer and
tequila
which I have purchased.

I sit with them
I wait on my fix
I am a poetry junkie.

they pulled Ezra through the streets
in a wooden cage
Blake was sure of God.
Villon was a mugger.
Lorca sucked cock.
T.S. Eliot worked a teller’s cage.

most poets are swans,
egrets.

I sit with 3 junkies
at one-thirty in the afternoon.

the smoke pisses upward.

I wait.

death is a nothing jumbo.

one of the females says that she likes
my yellow shirt.

I believe in a simple violence.

this is
some of it.

- Charles Bukowski

fremsley

2011-03-29T13:50:00.001+08:00

fremsley helping with my work. (2007)

Likes lettuce...

2011-02-16T22:01:00.004+08:00

I'd like to get it together to write somethingto post here, but in the absence of ideas or effort, can't resist posting this!

more info: http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/bunny-boiler-kim-jongil-ate-my-giant-rabbits/2007/04/05/1175366413169.html

and: http://www.hoax-slayer.com/giant-rabbit.shtml

2011-02-09T18:01:00.000+08:00

http://www.themonthly.com.au/anthropology-and-passion-political-ghassan-hage-2230

I love suburbia and suburbia loves me...

2011-02-03T22:01:00.014+08:00

Nomadic or territorial? The millenium-old debate between these two ways of inhabiting the world happens internally also. The debate in my life seems to've been settled on the sedentary, at least for now.

And here's a phew photos of my new house to prove it!

Nice original wall paper:

Thanks for the Versailles Hall of Mirrors suggestion, Kirsten, it's a winner - just you wait and see!!

The renos are underway:

Nice original lino:

And nice original light fittings! Thanks, Vera, whoever you were, you rocked!

Doo doo doo, looking out my front door:

2010-12-20T20:17:00.002+08:00

The labyrinth is a “place with more dead ends, more flaws and fault-lines than the human heart”.

http://www.musicweb-international.com/sandh/2008/jan-jun08/minotaur1504.htm

2010-12-15T22:58:00.000+08:00

The Poison Tree

2010-11-28T22:54:00.000+08:00

by William Blake

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I water'd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with my smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veil'd the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree

Only one person dies...

2010-11-01T16:10:00.009+08:00

"... the Mishnah declares that, for the Justice of God, he who kills a single man destroys the world; if there is no plurality, he who annihilated all men would be no more guilty than the primitive and solitary Cain, which is orthodox, no more universal in his destruction, which can be magic. The tumultuous general catastrophes – fires, wars, epidemics – are but a single sorrow, illusorily multiplied in many mirrors. That is Bernard Shaw’s judgment when he states (Guide to Socialism, 86) that what one person can suffer is the maximum that can be suffered on earth. If one person dies of inanition, he has suffered all the inanition that has been or will be. If ten thousand persons die with him, he will not be ten thousand times hungrier nor will he suffer ten thousand times longer. There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human suffering; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.”

Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions. 1937-1952. p178, “the Modesty of History.”

the full text

What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men...

Summer Swallows

2010-10-06T20:19:00.006+08:00

It's been a long day, a busy day, moving sheep and checking troughs, inspecting fences. We drenched two mobs of big, headstrong wethers. Hard work on a hot day. At the end the dusk comes very slowly, the heat sitting in the hollow, the sky turning orange like the underbelly of the swallows.
Swallows nest on the metal girders of the machinery shed. Swarms of them swoop in and out through the open front side of the shed catching insects abundent in the gloaming; their darts are a pure, sharply precise cutting of the air. My brother winds down after the long day shooting them with the air rifle. He is quite an accurate shot. The roof and tops of the walls of the shed are speckled with dozens of feathery, bloody slpodges. He knocks down their nests, too, until dad gets annoyed with the mess of the nests falling on the vehicles parked underneath.

2010-09-10T18:41:00.002+08:00

2010-09-06T20:51:00.003+08:00

http://www.ekosystem.org/

I want you - live

2010-08-29T15:20:00.006+08:00

Oh no, my darling, not with that clown!

I'm gonna say it one more time, til I instill it...

I know I'm going to feel this way, until you kill it.

Fuck, ey?

My dog doesn't work.

2010-08-04T10:37:00.006+08:00

I leave the mobile phone charging on a shelf in the kitchen where I keep pills and salt and stuff, and eggs which I like at room temperature, because its a convenient powerpoint and doesn't get in the way of much. Normally when it rings I think to disconnect it first, but I was in a rush just now when it rang, and forgot to unplug it so of course pulled everything down, including the box of eggs. The eggs hit the corner of the antique dresser - I'm house-sitting - but only one broke, so not too much damage; I'll get the dog to lick that up.
"Yoshi, come here! Come on little dog, another breakfast for you! " Yummy egg, what dog could resist?

This dog! she cautiously approach, had a sniff, looked at me slightly offended, and went back into the kitchen to sit on her haunches, saying "I thought there was some food for me."
The egg dropped and broken into the wheel-foot coaster started to soak into the carpet, the deep-pile cream-coloured carpet.

"Come on! It's egg. Yum. Here, I'll show you..." Nope, not interested.

In lots of ways having a nervous minature is slightly annoying but quirky, like when she needs to climb on my shoulder to escape bigger dogs that scare her at the dog beach - like miniature foxies and those savage silky terriers. It's kinda cute. She has such delicate little feet and is so pretty. And most people aren't too scared when she comes racing out onto the street to bark like crazy with her hackles up.

But not eating eggs is really just taking the whole delicate thing a bit far.
This dog just doesn't work properly, and I'm wondering if she's still under warranty.

before dinner

2010-07-07T00:05:00.008+08:00

and here they are, just sitting around waiting to be eaten.
they look kinda suprised...i guess if i woke up and found that i looked like that, i'd be surprised too.
i wonder if they were about to play a game of....
ha ha
ha
ha ha

ha ha ha!!!
(leap frog)

Prudence

2010-07-01T17:56:00.003+08:00

John Ralston Saul:

"Beyond politics, many would assume that prudent behaviour meant in a sense conservative behaviour. But that would be to misunderstand the meaning of common sense. The very essence of good military strategy - which often means radical behaviour - has always been built around prudence. Two and a half millennia ago Sun Tzu set out the basic rules. His incisive summary was further summarized by Mao Tse-tung into a sixteen character jingle which provided the general instructions for defeating Chiang Kai-shek:

1. When the enemy advances, we retreat!
2. When the enemy halts, we harass!
3. When the enemy seeks to avoid battle, we attack!
4. When the enemy retreats, we pursue!

The Viet Minh and Viet Cong in turn took this perfect evocation of common sense as their method for defeating two of the most rationally organised armies in history - firts the French and then the American."

p46 On Equilibrium, 2001.

tigersnake eating a frog

2010-07-01T00:33:00.004+08:00

This is a photo from the early weeks at the new house in Elleker. I nearly stepped on this snake an hour earlier, then when I was inside I heard the last of the frogs in the bathtub squealing...

2010-07-01T00:00:00.006+08:00

Déjeuner du matin

Il a mis le café
Dans la tasse
Il a mis le lait
Dans la tasse de café
Il a mis le sucre
Dans le café au lait
Avec la petite cuiller
Il a tourné
Il a bu le café au lait
Et il a reposé la tasse
Sans me parler

Il a allumé
Une cigarette
Il a fait des ronds
Avec la fumée
Il a mis les cendres
Dans le cendrier
Sans me parler
Sans me regarder

Il s'est levé
Il a mis
Son chapeau sur sa tête
Il a mis
Son manteau de pluie
Parce qu'il pleuvait
Et il est parti
Sous la pluie
Sans une parole
Sans me regarder
Et moi j'ai pris
Ma tête dans ma main
Et j'ai pleuré.

Jacques Prévert

A couple of my favourite poems from high school. The first I love for its simplicity, the second for its sentiment and beautiful sounds. Verlaine, watching his youth drift away as he lies in prison, due to his arrest after a drunken rage at Rimbaud, if I remember right.

Le ciel est par dessus....

Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit,
Si bleu, si calme!
Un arbre, par-dessus le toit,
Berce sa palme.

La cloche, dans le ciel qu'on voit,
Doucement tinte,
Un oiseau sur l'arbre qu'on voit,
Chante sa plainte.

Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est là,
Simple et tranquille.
Cette paisible rumeur-là
Vient de la ville.

-Qu'as-tu fait, ô toi que voilà
Pleurant sans cesse,
Dis, qu'as-tu fait, toi que voilà,
De ta jeunesse?

Paul Verlaine (Sagesse)

2010-06-24T17:35:00.002+08:00

I view myself with detachment? No, I hunt myself out frantically.

But is only through the words of others and their memories of you that you come into being in the world.

Be careful who you choose as your friends.

Back to the Nullabor Crossing

2010-06-15T00:15:00.003+08:00

yeah, so as i was saying, i stopped the night at Tintinara, then drove a bit more, and came to this little town, which is just a railway siding for loading grain.

love these silos!

2010-06-10T12:35:00.008+08:00

134 ZEN VIEW*

…how should one make the most of a view? It turns out that the pattern which answers this question helps to govern not the rooms and windows on a building, but the places of transition. It helps to place and detail ENTRANCE TRANSITION (112), ENTRANCE ROOM (130), SHORT PASSAGES (132), THE STAIRCASE AS STAGE (133) - and outside, PATHS AS GOALS (120).

* * *

The archetypal zen view occurs on a famous Japanese house, which gives this pattern its name.

A Buddhist monk lived high in the mountains in a small stone house. Far, far in the distance was the ocean, visible and beautiful from the mountains. But it was not visible from the monks house itself, nor from the approach road to the house. However, in front of the house there stood a courtyard surrounded by a thick stone wall. As one came to the house, one passed through a gate into this court, then diagonally across the court to the front of the house. On the far side of the courtyard there was a slit in the wall, narrow and diagonal, cut through the thickness of the wall. As a person walked across the court, at one spot, where his position lined up with the slit in the wall, for an instant, he could see the ocean. And then he was past it once again, and went into the house.

What is it happens in that courtyard? The view of the distant sea is so restrained that is stays alive forever. Who, that has ever seen that view, can forget it? Its power will never fade. Even for the man who lives there, coming past that view day after day for fifty years, it will still be alive.

This is the essence of the problem with any view. It is a beautiful thing. One wants to enjoy it and drink it in every day. But the more open it is, the more obvious, the more it shouts, the sooner it will fade. Gradually it will become part of the building, like the wallpaper; and the intensity of its beauty will no longer be accessible to the people that live there.

Therefore:

If there is a beautiful view, don’t spoil it by building huge windows that gape incessantly at it. Instead, put the windows that look onto the view at places of transition – along paths, in hallways, in entry ways, on stairs, between rooms.

If the view window is correctly placed, people will see a glimpse of the distant view as they come up to the window or pass it: but the view is never visible from the places where people stay.

Put in the windows to complete the indirectness of the view – NATURAL DOORS AND WINDOWS (221); place them to help the TAPESTRY OF LIGHT AND DARK (135); and build a set from which a person can enjoy the view – WINDOW PLACE (180). If the view must be visible from inside a room, make a special corner of the room which looks onto the view, so that the enjoyment of the view becomes a definite act in its own right…

Zen View is pattern number 134, pp 641-43, of A Pattern Language – Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel. Center for Environmental Structure, Berkley, California. New York Oxford University Press, 1977.

2010-05-31T16:30:00.001+08:00

Right is that which allows you to breathe, and allows others to breathe.

Meniscus

2010-01-18T15:18:00.008+08:00

- Stop crying.

- I can’t. I’m sorry. Don’t be angry with me.

- Well, go some where else.

- Please talk to me.

- Stop whining.

- Can't you just to talk to me?

- There’s nothing to fuckin talk about.

He leaves the room. She sits on the floor on her haunches making intermittent squeeks through her wide open mouth. Her face is red, like she’s not getting enough oxygen.

He returns. He has a glass and a cardboard cask. He sits in the single arm chair in front of the television and pours himself a wine and lights a cigarette. She crawls over to him and looks up.

- Don’t look at me like a dog.

She wails loudly, snot streaming out of her nose.

- I’m trying to watch the soccer.

She stands up and walks into the corner of the room, pushes herself as far into it as she can, and continues sobbing for some time.

She straightens herself, wipes her face with the bottom of the t-shirt she’s wearing and squeezes her nose into it. She walks behind his chair, takes the tobacco and box of matches outside.

The grass is covered in dew. She walks to the verge and leans against the angophora. She pinches tobacco onto creased paper and with slightly trembling fingers rolls a thin, papery fag. She wets its end and rotates it between her lips before she lights it.

She walks into the empty road, to the end of the street, round past the shopping centre, strips of quiet houses, into the reserve. In the bright moonlight she picks her way along the narrow tracks and across Kangas’ rock. A dog barks in the still distance, part of the perpetual conversation.

She crouches, feet flat on the cold rock, gazing out over the town, for a long time.

Tintinara

2009-11-06T18:33:00.007+08:00

After Castlemaine staying with my sister, my second night on the road I pitched my tent at Tintinara on a couple square metres of grass called the caravan park; reminded me of the project of a Studio8 colleague which was a series of camp grounds scattered around Woomera townsite on vacant lots, each one managed by the house owner next door.

Wandering around town the next morning I came across this very nice piece of drainage infrastructure - a concrete ditch across an asphalt road.

A parking bay next to the shire offices, the footpath is concrete, the parking bay unpaved. If ound this really appealing. Something about a relaxation of priorities, perhaps...

Goodbye!

2009-11-04T22:22:00.006+08:00

A couple images of Melbourne to say goodbye with. Boo hoo.

My local public open space...

and behind Fed Square the night of the fringe Soundwalk; high heels clocking up these stairs was a truly beautiful moment in a city soundscape experience...almost makes me think i might enjoy visiting.

spa-fish feast on your flesh

2009-10-16T10:09:00.002+08:00

http://kcpss-innofishion.blogspot.com/

graduate

2009-10-15T10:56:00.004+08:00

yep, that's what a graduate landscape architect looks like...
bloody hell, i'm a bit bloody proud of myself now!
celebrated my first morning of freedom by reading in bed until noon.

presented "stustainina" to the panel for my portfolio yesterday was my last act as a student at rmit. very looking forward to life outside this particular institution.
and this is a shot of the last presentation for structures and materials, monday night.

2009-10-13T09:29:00.004+08:00

slickest looking broken heart blog yet!
http://ninemilebridge.blogspot.com/

2009-10-13T07:58:00.001+08:00

I consider journalism everything that will interest less tomorrow than it does today...
Andre Gide.

Mothering the human ape baby

2009-10-03T11:29:00.012+08:00

...there's been some fabulous hormonal studies, that map the hormonal response of men, which actually parallels the hormonal response of women, and you get those sort of love hormones of oxytosin and prolactin and testosterone supressed when a father is involved in parenting closely or even surrounded by the parenting process, so there is that chemical heritage...his prolactin levels go up, his testosterone levels go down...it's a remarkable potential, and it depends on the structuring of society...if you look cross-culturally, the societies that are the most war-like, that have the most fighting, are uniformly - anthropologists have known this for a long time - are the ones where you have extreme sex-segregation.

promiscuous: has sex with more partners than someone else thinks she should...assiduously maternal...it just wouldn't be prudent to rely on only one male...
babies as sensory traps...
the presence of a maternal grandmother can halve childhood mortality...
these are quotes from a conversationon between Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Natasha Mitchell today on "All In The Mind"

It takes a village to raise a child we knew, but why? Sarah B Hardy has some amazingly insightful answers.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2009/2699425.htm

And the consequences to really engaging with this at a policy level is so exciting.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Professor Emerita
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Davis
http://www.citrona.com/hrdy/index.html

Doust quote.

2009-09-27T09:24:00.008+08:00

I like this, it gives me hope!

"You know, they say that every writer, almost every writer, that he or she has a book that they have to write before they can write a book. It's a book that is lying within them that they must get out of their system before they can settle down and ... this is a book I had to write. [Boy On A Wire.]"
Jon Doust

buckets of moonbeams...

2009-09-25T18:10:00.012+08:00

For about 2 weeks now things have been good, really quite good, continuously quite good. After an outburst about two weeks ago I got some important messages of support, and since then something in me seems to have clicked. Admittedly I've had a few moments, but they've had traceable causes.

The biggest difference is being off the drugs. I realise now that they were keeping me stuck in a false sense that everything was ok, when it most definitely was not. I have just had to go through the shit, just like everyone else, to get out the other side.

Partly, improvement in my state is due to a renewed sense of hope now I have a sense of home to come back to. And with home a coherent narrative of self. It has been a concern at times that that is an unreasonable expectation, but it's important to me, and that's what is at stake here: a sense of self. So much of my time in the past seems to have been spent flitting from one partially-real self to another, where I have inhabited a part of my personality distinct from the other parts and sometimes the different bits just don't add up together: no core, no contiguous self.

And with home, community, and a place within community. A purpose. I clearly remember the devastation at Carlisle street focused around hopelessness without purpose, and that was at least 10 years ago.

Very early on in therapy a main preoccupation had been drawing a coherent map of my life. I'd construct minutely detailed time-lines, showing months spent in this place or that, who with, how I left, what car I had, how much money, what length my hair was...sometimes trying to construct new countries that might explain absences and actions when there were bits missing, or they were there but the whole just didn't make sense. It was a puzzle to fit all the pieces together and make sense of all these gaps I felt in me. Every time I poked my finger under my ribs or into my thigh I’d touch the edge of a hole; it was disconcerting.

But I just couldn't map the territory, I came away dissatisfied that it was still a piece of two dimensional paper with a couple of lines drawn on it. I don't remember when I gave up trying to map my self.

When I stop whining about rmit I have to admit that one of the greatest liberations I have gained from my studies of landscape architecture has been a sense of the immensity. And with that a realisation that no one person can fix it.

con·tig·u·ous (kn-tgy-s)

adj.

1. Sharing an edge or boundary; touching.

2. Neighboring; adjacent.

3. a. Connecting without a break: the 48 contiguous states.

b. Connected in time; uninterrupted: served two contiguous terms in office.

Always, for as long as I can remember at least, there have been bits of me that fear the actions and words of other bits, worrying they’d say and do things that I'd be completely embarrassed by later, when I returned to 'sanity.' So I screwed the lid down tighter and tighter - which of course meant that there'd be a blowout somewhere else and the most feared things would manifest.

But lately I'm tracking it all, being kinder to the bits, and feeling, for I don't know how long, a sense of wholeness. Iguess in simple terms, it's making friends with the darkness instead of wall-papering over it.

2009-09-25T17:03:00.004+08:00

i suppose, growing up surrounded by sheep is not necessarily good practice
for living in a city...

A good education is a marvellous thing.

2009-09-23T16:07:00.009+08:00

An good education is a marvelous thing. And I will be eternally grateful to all those who have given and supported my efforts in taking the opportunity to partake of two exemplary and radical degrees. I am extremely lucky and white, middle class Australian and the rest of it. I shouldn't complain, only 3 weeks left to go. However, about 5 hours ago I was reminded of just how fucking annoying stupid people with too much education can be. Why 'academics' in this course (and i use inverted commas advisedly) can annoy me so fucking much is the undying dedication to obfuscation that I have had the abject stupidity to subject myself to for four cunt years.
'What do you mean by "expanded field"?'
'If you read the course guide which is a document developed by the department outlining the tripolar model against which we must align our practice [your what, you academic?!] and which all we lecturers have had to position ourselves against, within this tripolarity, and boy does that make staff meetings exciting blah blah blah and use it to position your own projects.'
'I've read the course guide twice and I still don't understand what you mean by "expanded field"? I know what expanded might mean, but field has so many possibilities...do you mean a paddock that's getting bigger?'
'Well there no right or wrong answer, it's a useful way of positioning yourself and helping you to examine where you sit.'
'In a big fucking paddock.'
other student: 'I think if it resonates with you, then it is useful, and it might help you to think about your work and to position yourself.'
'So, if it doesn't resonate with me i should just ignore it. It's not going to resonate because I've got no fucking idea what it is that you're talking about.'
'You could try Googling it, Christine.'
Yes. Right.
Only sixty one thousand hits. Right.
Now fuck off.

Dorianthus excelsa

2009-09-20T13:13:00.007+08:00

Transition towns

2009-09-10T11:30:00.003+08:00

Caught this guy, Andrew Lucas, talking on Bush telegraph this morning, about changing suburbs away from fossil fuel dependency, growing food locally, etc.

If you go to the end of the article and click on the listen to this link, you'll hear some really inspiring ideas.

http://www.foe.org.au/resources/audio-centre/2009-sustainability-convergence/m_Andrew_Lucas_Transition_Town.mp3/view

"Panorama" panorama.

2009-09-07T10:24:00.006+08:00

A view from a morning of my stay in the caravan at Panorama. Forgive my melodrama, six weeks is no time at all; but this morning I just can't shake the feeling that the prison I am in is closing too tight. I stictched this together because I needed to feel that what I long for is really real.
If only I was clever enough to live in this walnut and count myself a king of infinite space...then I suppose I wouldn't be longing, I wouldn't be living for a future elsewhere, I wouldn't be dreaming of projects that imagine a new world of possibilities, using trees and moss and communal spaces terraced roof gardens, retaining walls as houses, places where one might have an opportunity to live with your neighbors, in a street that is the extension of the house...it is a horror to wander in an empty city, morning after morning, evening after evening, street after street after suburb after highway after everyone has disappeared.
Highlight of my ramblings was a Sunday afternoon soccer in the local park. A beautiful game, simple, elegant. Hume in the white, all-Iraqi boys. Played Preston (Darebin) in orange. 3-1 Hume, those boys were fast and pre-cise!
Each verbal encounter is a shining light in my pedestrian world.
I don't want to live in this box anymore!

2009-09-06T20:09:00.005+08:00

- and check this out for weird:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvBkbPEoeAI

Bobby is a Cassandra...

Edge of Sand

2009-09-04T19:57:00.014+08:00

Things got a little bit furry this morning, I believe, so she headed out to the edge of the sea. It was a beautiful day, the rain sharp and cold, the wind whipping in blue. It was a return to where it all began - journey back to heartland. So much has happened for her, so many changes, new words, a new interior construction and sense of wholeness.
When she came back to the city a few weeks ago she talked suspiciously of a re-dis-intergration, and I know at time there have been moments when it feels like the centre will not hold and she will return to psychic anarchy. But through practice she's remained thus far, intact. At times I've watched her marching to a mantra that must be at each moment repeated, holding to the edge, her knuckles white, lips white.
She walks a line sharp and fragile, triangular weathered sandstone, balancing one foot in front of the other, bare foot to grip, repeating at each step the mantra, perhaps not tomorrow, but nevertheless in this moment free, and free now and free now and now and now and now. Arms wide.
The rain is cold, it is fine to feel on skin.
If I see her again I'll say hello.

William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939). This written 1919.

The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?	5 10 15 20

Printings: The Dial (Chicago), November 1920; The Nation (London), 6 November 1920; Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Dundrum: Cuala, 1921); Later Poems (London: Macmillan, 1922; 1924; 1926; 1931).

2009-09-03T16:46:00.004+08:00

you are my sunshine

(This is the best I seem to be able to do.)

You are my Sunshine

2009-09-02T17:13:00.011+08:00

Press play and check this out, folks, if you haven't already. I so want to post this video here, but i just can't work out how. So frustrating!

http://hellejorgensen.typepad.com/gooseflesh/2009/08/ha.html

Thanks for this great link, Kate.

Tiny gardens

2009-08-29T18:50:00.002+08:00

Some gardens are so small you don't see them. For three weeks I've been walking over the top of these beauties . . . in my own backyard.

Not a lot

2009-08-27T20:46:00.005+08:00

Not a lot has been happening, mainly study, a little bit of walking, and a fair bit of that other stuff that I tend to do quite a lot of.
Most of my blogging has been on Sustainina, I am intent on engaging with this history course, and getting as much out of it as I can. That means a full and positive presence. I do tend, however, to get sucked into computer [no] land. I forget to read and analyze but prefer to synthesize and create, so I might give it a bit of break for a while. Something about blogging makes me want to post pretty pictures. It's going well, I'm feeling really good about it. The closeness of the finishing line is making me just a touch excited. Only 7 weeks to go!

What's been happening today:

Yep, that's razor wire on top of the wall.

A New Blog

2009-08-18T19:09:00.005+08:00

As part of my landscape studies I am starting a new blog called SUSTAININA. It is partly to meet the portfolio requirements of the History unit, and partly to question what it means to be a Landscape Architect.
Please come and look
http://history03portfolio-c-king.blogspot.com/
and contribute inflammatory comments!
I'll eventually submit it for marking, so the more controversial the better!

Mids

2009-08-18T15:39:00.007+08:00

Some photos from April.

Palimpest in the city

2009-08-14T19:43:00.003+08:00

677877 Subtle Penetration/Spreading The Fates

2009-08-13T19:01:00.004+08:00

Above: The penetrating/Wind
Below: The penetrating/Wind

Turn conflict into creative tension. The situation is already changing.

If you are traveling and don't have a place of your own, this means subtly penetrating from outside. It means being humble and hiding your virtues. Subtle Penetration pares away in order to realize the Way.

Yarra Valley

2009-08-13T18:53:00.004+08:00

Small Gardens.

2009-08-12T18:31:00.005+08:00

At the abandoned brickworks, Brunswick.

Next to park in Brunswick.

A moment on Mt Melville.

Very small gardens.

2009-08-12T17:38:00.006+08:00

Lined up in a schoolyard just like children. Another one from the Yarra Valley.

The view out the roof of my tutorial room on level 12 in building 8, last Wednesday morning.

Yarra Valley

2009-08-10T19:04:00.005+08:00

Gentle

2009-08-10T17:51:00.004+08:00

The rain is gentle
even in the city you can find the sky.
Smile when it helps, cry when it hurts.

Broken hearted again, loving you still.
A past shadowlike underfoot.

I wish you were here,
I'd tell you all about it.

Even in the city the sky can find your face.

2009-08-10T17:42:00.005+08:00

The rain is gentle, even in the city you can find the sky.
Smile when it helps, cry when it hurts.
Broken hearted again, loving you still.
Reminded of the past and how it is better left shadowlike underfoot.

I wish you were here,
I want to tell you all about it,
want to ask why you're sorry,
when it's me that did wrong.
why am i so sad,
when were you born?
Because I don't know anything.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
It really doesn't matter.

I want to walk out of here, I want to be free.
I have to give up to learn this lesson.
Lessons one two and three.
Am I only a student - nothing else defining me?
It's all down to me, they say. Choose, they say.
Just leave it all behind.
Set yourself free.

Lesson one two and three.

2009-08-02T11:57:00.000+08:00

"Adversity is like a strong wind.
It tears away from us all but the
things that cannot be torn,
so that we see ourselves
as we really are."
Arthur Golden

2009-08-02T10:48:00.004+08:00

Don't let what you are being get in the way of what you might become.
Harry Palmer

We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.
Sam Keen

Love grows by giving.
The love we give away is the only love we keep.
The only way to retain love is to give it away."
Elbert Hubbard

The way is not in the sky, the way is in the heart.

For the traveler who knows his direction, there is always a favorable wind.
Stuart Avery Gold, ping

"When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow
that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight."
Kahlil Gibran

"Adversity is like a strong wind.
It tears away from us all but the
things that cannot be torn,
so that we see ourselves
as we really are."
Arthur Golden

1989

2009-07-27T17:16:00.009+08:00

It was murder and negation. I was refusing to dive into the ocean of my life, to really feel it. And Why did I not see that at the time? Because I already had but a tenuous connection to my emotions. I was absent. So it was easy to make the choice not to live, not to feel life. So easy to refuse to be woken up and become present.
One thinks one has no choice, but everything is a choice: every movement, every moment of inactivity, every thought. Every No, every Yes. Every pawn has a place in the battle, it's not just the queen that matters.

So I made the choice not to live, I chose to avoid life, to avoid emotion, to avoid reproduction and everything that goes with being a parent and a co-parent. I chose the selfishness of avoidance. As if it was my decision to make! I thought an abortion was an experience. It was not. It was a denial of experience. It was in both ways, for the child and for me, a negation of life.

And where did it get me? Absolutely no where except further inside the hole inside my own mind. Negation of life, negation of experience, avoidance of pain, when so much learning comes through pain. Avoidance of love and joy and trust and growth, of a shared life.

And do I regret it? No. It is impossible to regret. One is what one is through the habit of living. I can only apologize...

Melbourne Monday

2009-07-20T21:04:00.004+08:00

One thing about cities is the flooding multitude of stories being written and rewritten one over the top of another. Some stories get completely obliterated, some remain despite their irrelevance. Despite being totally ridiculous some remain because of how they appear. The mosaic of time and culture is what makes cities (potentially) so exciting.

Carlton Cemetry, Lygon St.

Craigieburn Grasslands

(I'm searching for a way to make life in this chaos bearable!)

2009-07-16T19:35:00.004+08:00

The Melbourne sunset is that interesting orange colour because the air is so thick with smog, I think, sitting in my car in peak hour traffic.
I've been here nearly 24 hours. Gosh I miss Albany!

This Remarkable New World is Good

2009-07-08T23:55:00.010+08:00

It tears at me each time I go

forced to leave pieces of this new place behind. But each time I leave it’s bigger in me, surer,

the World shown me, in me. I'm surprised

I didn't notice it before, it's so good. I suppose because it fits so neatly into this one, underneath

shells and tied to lamp-posts

And each well-scripted line

surprised I did not find it,

When these tunes make its transluscent space.

You can tell the world I was good; second, that I left a small place open for you.

Before I sleep show me. Farewell.

Show me the World is really good.

I leave something of this newly created thing on your window ledge. The smell of honey.

I long for you until the sun goes down or until I find something to occupy myself, and then I am no longer inside you. Free of you like fish are free of the shore.

Today the season’s first finally ripe Ballardia, pink taste in my mouth.

Some time later the astringency.

He rises fresh and dripping, magically opposed to death.

He sinks and I am left alone on the surface, looking all around me in confusion.

Christ smells miraculously fresh.

This is where you do not notice decayed flesh. I have ridden high on open time

Plateau after overwhelming crisis

Where it was impossible to go forward into the maw of defeat

And retreat was certain failure.

The general gathered strength by turning inward and finding hope, repose.

I look forward to you and then I do not mind.

Now I have turned around and I am not so covered up,

not so earthed.

Something blooms. I'll only do this one last time. And once again perhaps. I lived

so deep I almost don’t feel this pain of forgetting.

This is my tears without leaving anything out.

(I forget I'll feel the pain.)

I lived so deeply inside your tunnels. The bright night swims down to me bursts like fish upon the net.

Ah! Bright night swim to me!

I leave you my tears.

A perfect shape.

It fits me so much cleaner this time.
And then more mature, and then fruitful.
I ripen alone, forced to leave, forced to fruit

As if the only strength I have is to oblige.
Can continue to do so but this would be the last time I stop. I am healed.

...leave something.
I lean towards you until sunset.

2009-07-08T18:30:00.002+08:00

It rips me each time I tear away from you, I leave something of this newly created world behind again. I don't want to feel this pain, I'll do it only this one last time. Then again, and just one more time. And maybe once more. My skin is raw.

Today the very first ripened Ballardia of the season, a pink taste in my mouth. Some time later astringency at the back.

...I leave something of this newly created thing on your shirt. I long for you until the sun goes down or until I find something to preoccupy me, and I am no longer inside you. Free of you like fish are free of the shore.

I forget that I am going to feel this pain because I lived so deeply inside your tunnels. The bright night swims down to me, I burst like a fish into the rocks beachside.

I burst like a fish into the rocky shore, tearing across a plateau, on my way back to the ocean. Forget I ever said this? It is there, it is here, it is in a bowl at the back of the fridge.

Jesus rises fresh and dripping still magically opposed to death, as if it makes things any easier.

Jesus sinks and I am left alone on the surface, looking all around me in confusion.

I'm ripped open each time I leave you.

The stiches rip the skin around the wound.

Stitches rip out of the skin of my wound each time I leave you. I cannot keep doing this, this is the final time I'm going. Then once more, then once more and then one last time. By then I'll be healed.

the world you showed me is really perfectly a reflection. I'm suprised that I didn't notice it earlier, I think becauseit fits so neatly into this one, just there between the cracks and under the line

Becalmed

2009-07-08T09:20:00.006+08:00

Paintings circa 1995.

2009-07-01T17:14:00.005+08:00

Ravensthorpe

2009-06-24T11:44:00.010+08:00

Ravensthorpe road

A paddock of rape stems.

A not-so-beautiful replanting in ravensthorpe.

Mt Barren Ranges from the highway.

Palimpsest

2009-06-16T15:32:00.015+08:00

I
Driving back from Denmark on Wednesday morning I recognised for the first time the relevence of the word "palimpsest" in the landscape architecture discourse: along the road corridors, suddenly in the middle of a mound of rocks in a paddock, in the riparian zone suviving under bridges are thin, very thin strips of native vegetation. Perhaps a single line of marri trees, an occassional stand of coastal jarra, a patch of complex riparian community surviving at a river mouth...These are the tiny lines remaining when you rub out a page of writing. Carelessly you've failed to remove a whole line of letters at the side of the page or a few strokes stay where you pressed harder to make a point and the pencil cut a little deeper into the paper; maybe the indentation of the marks remains without the lead.
So it is that a little bit of bush remains in the landscape rewritten as agriculture. Tiny remnants of Australian vegetation - or should it be pre-Australian vegetation? - these thin marks allow you to imagine a forest, a complex of interactions and timeframes and you could dream the dots and lines reconnected as a whole system. Each fragile moment hints at a vast swamp of time that it might be possible to recreate. But the new story written on the palimsest is fences, sheep and tail-docked dairy cows, an old man tinkering under a Fordson tractor, a patch of bright green sub-clover in kikuyu grass, thin and brown come summer. Try rubbing that out with jarrah and marri and Acacia accuminata.

II

...Anyhow, I was talking about writing to create the new story of talking to someone about something, making a story of a happening or an event then constructing a theory of the event, constructing a palisade on a palimpsest. Re-writing a notional contrivance to dredge up a forum of time that could conclude the swampish indulgence of and fulgence in the swamp of morass of tears. Does it come from having nothing to do; or does it come from not having anything to do?

"He told me, I must sit here and do nothing. That is what I am doing."

"I ask you again, have you nothing to say of any use?"

"Nothing doing!"

"There is nothing here."

"I don't think it'll be able to support anything now."

"I sat all day, in the sun, by a window, warm, because I did not have a thing to do."

"I did not have anything better to do."

"I have nowhere I would rather be."

"I am here because I don't have anywhere I would rather be."

"I am sorry for you."

"I wish you weren't."

[But I didn't say "I have nowhere to go," I said I have nowhere better to go.]

Buckets of Rain, Buckets of Tears

2009-06-05T19:35:00.004+08:00

I know it's depressing and unproductive to talk about it, but i just need to say how depressed I am and how completely sick of it I am. I thought I could manage it, find a way through it without anti depressants and for about 6 weeks I did feel heaps better, but now I just seem to be back to the old pitch, crying all the time, not able to find a programme to occupy myself with during the day. Etc etc etc. it's so very boring.
Maybe there is a solution. Maybe I just need to wade through the floods of tears and eventually I'll come out the other side. But right about I am just nearly prepared to give up and get back on the drugs.
Hope everyone else is having a better day than me!

Eucalyptus platypus platypus

2009-05-29T11:05:00.006+08:00

Have been measuring trees for 4 weeks, and just got back from Ravensthorpe. One of the favourite sites we measured was a large stand of mort, on a farm just below the Lake Magenta Mallee Fowl Reserve.

2009-05-17T18:06:00.003+08:00

Last night lasted an hundred years

emptiness found a thread of hopeless desire pull me
from one room to another
following human sounds
while I was not.

But only a hopeless knot of self pity.

Enough! I
will not go down that too-well
trodden path again,
because of my laziness
and self hunger.

I will not tell you how I feel
nor feel like this.
nor return,
trying to drag you along in my wake of tears.

I do not even ask that you forgive me,
I ask that none forgive me.
I practice this act of newness to forget,
and to be new.
This guilt shame is wearing a shirt too thin,
I will simply to be anew
and so the practice of this I will
is to use to simply be

another

self-death for the death of self pity,
this hopeless one whom i disown,
disavow,
and what is it? Excommunicate.

For a church of the new world
I will build from canvas on the shifting sands
that it be strong,
knowledge-renewable
infinitely flexible
and allow the passage of the winds of change
eternal
happy
joyous.

Do not forgive.

I will it.
then I am so
other.

If I could tell you...

2009-05-01T09:45:00.003+08:00

If I could tell you
the laws of my longing
you would be here
on behalf of your greed
the witness of a hungry man
who does not care
if you are naked or shy

Because now that I
can't use it or feel it
I know for a fact
that I am beautiful
and more than anything
you want a beautiful slave
to make you cry

And long after that
whenever I touched you
whenever you undressed
you would need to know
what I was thinking
and you could be as treacherous
and you know you are
you would be a spy

And then something would happen
that would crush us
and free us
and destroy completely
whatever had been
and we would have begun
to signal one another
each time before we lie

p46 Leonard Cohen, 1972, The Energy of Slaves. Jonathon Cape Ltd. London.

Disintegration to find it, I.

2009-04-30T18:20:00.024+08:00

An inability to write is an inability to write is not having anything to say no not having nothing to say but without the words to write down what is on my mind, to hear what is on my mind, to see it and translate it into words not having the language that can make it sound like it sounds in the sounding shell of my mind. My cunt is on my mind.

But without words to write what I think it is to hear what is on my mind, to see and translate the words which have no language which can make it sound like it sounds in the shell of my skull. My vagina is on my mind but did not write it down, what is it seems to me that what is heard as I can remember,

to see it and load it is not a language

can here but be achieved
but did not write it down, then what is my impression that what is heard as I can remember,
Can not write can not write, is not no no no no say, my vagina is my thoughts.
Inability to write is not able to write is nothing
to say anything, nothing
to say but no
words to write

what I think is what is heard on my mind, to see and those without language, which can make it speak but did not write it down, it seems what is for me that which is heard as I can remember, to see it, tell someone what to say, but not the words to write what I think is what you hear of my mind, see, and without the language, which can be done. Cunt

mind.

(I went to the vivid desert for a drive and came out dry, too dry,
I've been too dry too long, far too
long. I'm going back to the coast to get rained on.

Tall trees.

I want to get wet.

I want the sting of cold rain on my face and in my heart, grey clouds and soft light breaking through all over me. I want to stand on my skin and wash the dust out of my veins, stand on the streaming streets water courses drains rivulets running through the lines in my face, my hair, swim down the street, flow down the drains into the glassy harbour.)

I would like to be a thorn coast, was Rain. My face and in my heart, grey clouds and soft light to break the All I.

flow in the street
river runs through the line rains, my face, my Hair, swimming, in the street drains flow down to the glassy harbour
grey clouds and soft light breaking through all over me
I want to position your skin, wash the dust off my veins and streaming on the street run through the lines of your face, my Human hair, bathe the street, the flow down the drains into the harbour. and the light on all questions. I want your skin, wash the dust off my veins and on the city roads I

Human hair, bathe in the street, the flow down drains into wine.

(I have vivid desert, drive, and left the dry, very dry. I was too too long, too long. I will return to vein and urban roads sewage water rivulets running through the lines of my face, I Human, swimming in the street, drainage flows into the vitreous port.)

Long tree. I want to get a drink. I want a cold rain and a bitter
all questions. I'm your skin to place.

There's only enough room for one in here, you and me. Back here, again, drinking flowers,

but better listening, listening this time to the soft music, gentle chords lightly on the tendons in my neck, my throat, the breathe in my throat, soft pause. Each string buzz is a caress on the nerve centre spinal messenger of flesh, warm blood flow, flow, buzz, shiver and shift in my seat. Neither of us knows what the sound of your fingers sliding down the strings is called.
Only enough space here, you and me. water flowers, only better
Listen, listen to the music this time, gentle chords of the tendon gently on my neck, my throat, breathing in my throat soft suspended. Each string expression is a messenger caressing the flesh nerve spine, the warm blood flow, flow, word of mouth, trembling and change behind. Neither of us unknows
theunvoice of your finger
s down the string.
How it feels! under particular my epidermis, I know the coordinates. It is nerve stroking, running fingers under my string, lips, your teeth? How did the teeth of Jimmy Hendrix call it?
Back here again, water flowers Listen, listen to the music this time
Back here again, but better
listening, hearing this time, soft music, gently chords lightly on the tendons in my neck, my throat, and breath in my throat, the soft break. Each string buzz is petting us, central, nervous, spinal messenger flesh, warm blood flow, flow, buzz, shiver and shift in my place. Neither of us knows.
Not only enough for a room here. listen, listen
time,
skinware, music, chords gentle light
on the tendons in the neck, infringe each line is bothering happy,
scarred Not all of us knows
what is the sound scald
I only enough for me here.
How to feel! I know the coordinates. This is a touch nervous, run the string in my fingers, lips and teeth?
feel
He is stroking my cheek, running his fingers in my string, lips, play it
It feels like! It is stroking the cheek, running his fingers in the string, each, that?

Your voice on the back of my neck I'd call pulling each tendon string and playing chords that tingle a vibration that loosens the sense from my brain cells. I don't know. But in some language I'm sure they do.
Your voice in the back each string playing chor'ds that tingle a vibration that loosens mind my brain
I do not know. But in some language I’m sure.
In a language where the sun turns skin to silk, silk to honey and you lick down to raw blood cells in a landscape of hot moist deep green big leaved ancient trees, where you could open my chest and place the light of the moon inside there, to tide cast my moods in a flood of pleasure tears, wet and sticky, creamy and hot.
An old wet hot tide, merging in my blood. Rising up in that language where they bring you pleasure on a platter and smear it all over your face, one day I'll find the century of that language.
A language of the sun to the skin of silk, silk, with honey and you to primitive blood cells in the hot and humid landscape of dark green leaves of the big old trees become, where you open my chest and place it in view of the moon, through the I feeling happy to cast a flood of tears. Heat the old trend, the integration in my blood. The rise of the language, they bring you pleasure and smear it
one day I will find the language of the Century
A language of the sun to the skin of silk, silk, with honey and lick you to primitive blood cells pleasure all the disc and smear your face, one day
The purpose of a language, where you suck down the raw blood cells
you can open and place the light inside the moon, the tides cast my feelings in the pleasure of the flow of tears, wet and gooey, creamy and hot.
Old wet hot tides, the merging in my blood.
pleasure to have and smear the whole of your heart
honey raw blood cells hot wet deep
inside the moon the tides cast emotions of joy flows tears

Old hot wet flood, a combination of the blood. The mass obtained by the language, if it will be fun bowls and smear the whole of your face, one day, I see the age of this language. Arse.
( expulsion vivid desert-dry, too dry, been too dry too long, too long. go back to the coast of Rain. Tall trees. be wet. be a thorn in my face and in my heart grey clouds and soft light to break the dust from a vein, the flow from the street, swimming. Just enough space here, you and me. Neither Your voice, my neck nor I. Climb the language. )
older, where you can open
and set it
in view of the moon
through feeling like
my tears flood,
wet
sticky
hot
hair,
to music from the vertebral line, the hot blood flow, the flow of breath, chills, and change.
is called the line. How do I know! I know. Worried?
the chain of my fingers, and it?
when can you
in the light of the moon through a sense of how to cast my flood (I intended to send vivid dry desert, very dry, I too long, too long was established. I went to go coastal rain. Uzun trees. Went to be wet. (To face my heart, grey clouds and soft light are all violations. To me your skin from the dust takes. Wash the vessels, the river goes to the streets over the street rivulets, wire, face, hair, baths, glass, drain all time into the curve of the flow.) enough! There’s space for me here. Here again, sandalwood, patchouli just the music now, flesh tones, and light tones, in my throat, to listen to listen to my soft suspension. If a string expression is a message from the vertebral line to tender cheek, warm blood flow, breathing, chills, and site of the flow it is not. We all have these fingers. How do I know! the brain cells are shaking. I do not know. Language Sunday silk, leather, silk, honey and hot and humid, dark green, open when you smydalthen this month how to light in a sense through the old blood cells to colours’ tears, wetness, stickiness and my master’s songs. Heat former tendency, blood integrity. Language is climbing, you scratch your face to bring joy and one day you can find the art of English.)

What do you think of me, however, to want
not to write something for someone
my mind to hear you to impotence, a look and language
which can be done without. I explained my idea of the vagina.
Can not write, as I remember Can not write a no no no no, not to speak, write, not what it is for me to hear what he, like seeing
is accessible. I think my vagina is.
Rain in months.
Long tree.
I want to get a drink. I want a cold rain and a bitter
On my face and heart, grey clouds and light
all questions. I'm your skin to place, I want to wash the dust
and urban roads and
sewage water running I
flow into the drain.)
flowers
,
He is coming! Under the skin, I know the coordinates. This is runningfingers his fingers Stroking the cheek
raw honey skin and blood cells you and the moon light sea joy to open the dumb feelings, my tears flow, PG, creamy wet and hot. The old hot wet flood, a combining of blood. Achieved with a collective language, it will be fun and a bowl scratch parchment, one day, this.
I call back in a voice, tone and each line and the game pulled tender vibration to lose my brain's memory cells tingling. I do not know. However, some languages, we believe that for this.

I and I

2009-04-30T16:45:00.013+08:00

I'm reading back over stories from the last decade or so, flicking through the pages of my memory, sleeping in late and dreaming in empty rooms. I've spent too many weeks alone. I've
got packets strewn all around me, going through so much, back in Albany now after an absence of five long, dark Melbourne winters; Melbourne a black and grey landscape in the near distance, a new marker on my highway. My time there a sad pain, not quite over. Sad, but necessary and in some way an absolutely perfect pain. The pain of a splinter being removed. The pain of pulling a nappy-pin out of the heel of your left foot,
(what is the word for that sound?) scrape of metal through flesh as you step into the long grass.

The twins,(1) lying side by side on the big double bed with the feather pillows indented and grey greased from years of hair pressed there, come back to me now as I listen to the echo down the years of my various voices, some screaming softly in the night, some rational and accoustically unimpressive, and I wish that I had two bodies to go with my two minds. Then we could come to some agreement about whose fault last night was. One of us could leave the room and not come back til I'm over it.
I don't know that it's fair on us that we have to do the learning for two souls in one lifetime. And sometimes such
slow learning, double thickness.

(1) Bruce Chatwin, On Black Hill.
Photo: http://www.pbase.com/image/274414

2009-04-29T10:11:00.003+08:00

"There's only so much prose sense you can make of poetry, otherwise it wouldn't be poetry."
-Steven Carroll

Loop

2009-04-28T22:38:00.007+08:00

i've been a bit slack posting travel news, so i'm going to remedy it all at once!

Trip to Shelley's Beach

2009-04-28T20:07:00.013+08:00

2009-04-28T19:32:00.002+08:00

the mighty boosh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OSQOz3W0u4

hope it works for you, as well as it does for me...!

I Stayed in Mississippi a Day Too Long

2009-04-23T07:45:00.016+08:00

There's only one thing that I did wrong, I stayed in Mississippi a day too long.

I'm lying on the floor all evening drinking roses off the ceiling, organ grinder's in the kitchen. And the flowers on the window ledge withered.
My heart is like the ocean, a cloud passes and I'm turned deep blue.
This passion, this fire my desire I'm sure it's all burned out.

Get up off the floor. Go outside.
Listening to your hymnals makes my mouth
still
I cannot become your hand, your skin, your love. I can't hold you open; trumpet to my lips all night I linger on the verandah, translucent.
My sister talked sense to me and now I'm not longing for you, just longing to long. Just waiting on the verandah, my lips,
my legs open, waiting for the blood to flow.
The tide is going out on my love, I can't
stop it.
My heart is not so warm, my mouth is covered over by this right hand too white and dusty for night.
Oh boy, give me back
dusty tires from too many places I've left behind,
the dirt roads of my country ramblings.
I can't give you anymore, even when you call my name. Did I offer too much, much more than I could take? Was I supposed to wait?
I gave you my black velvet jacket, zipped you up and now I'm cold.

Give me back my black velvet jacket and the 30 bucks I lent you for gas, I need to get the hell out of here.

I turn my face away from the early morning,
call me mist. Headlights reflected as you leave me. I could be driving, so tight are my lips against the red rim of your glass. But I'm not even wet in bed under your covers.
Anyway I always planned to leave tomorrow,
I'm going fishing, see if i can catch more than a rock-cod of passion.

Claire Gardened

2009-04-18T20:26:00.004+08:00

The worst thing that ever happened to Claire, as far as she told me, happened when she left that place where she should have stayed. I think it’s good for her to talk about it all. Sometimes I approach her from around the side of the kitchen, walking to her across the lawn. It’s a while since I visited her, I should go see how she is. Usually she’s standing still, not quite on the ground, as if your approach from the wrong angle, with the light falling in the wrong way, would render her invisible. But mostly I come to her from another direction, through the gate at the back and walk alongside her little grey shed and round the corner, and mostly when I see her she’s just staring. . .
She’s staring over the corrugated asbestos fence, over the neighbour’s tiled roof, over Station Street, Fairfield and Melbourne CBD, over Footscray and the western suburbs, the rest of Victoria, the Nullarbor, The Eastern Goldfields, The Wheat Belt, the Swan Valley, staring across the wide streets and sprawling Perth suburbs and jacarandas, to the western edge, Wembley Downs for Goff’s sake, along Something Street to 156, to the first floor of a two level block of about sixteen units, and into a two-bedroom flat. And she’s staring at one thing in that flat: a three-cup stainless steel espresso coffee maker, with a gold lid!
I don’t understand why she’s so stuck on that place and that coffee pot. Why doesn’t she just buy another one?
– It cost seventy dollars, she says, and it took weeks to choose. And it’s not just that…
What she longs for is to sit in one of the white-painted wooden armchairs with the floral cushions that she’d loved and treasured despite ripping off both her brother and Neddy’s mother to buy - or because, I’m not so sure. There was this big picture window where you saw into the thick mixture of dirty Cyprus pines, mixed natives and weedy things. Once a Butcher Bird brought a mouse, scared to death, and wedged its head into a V of two branches, then split it open from chin to arse and ate its guts. She wants to see that again and she wants to be drinking hot fragrant coffee when she does.
She longs to sit in that shady living room, watching and waiting or to go into the cool, dark bedroom.
The year that she longs to live in again is 1996 I think, she isn’t very clear, when it seems that she finally realized that she’d never be able to leave him, that this was it until the end of time. La-dah-dah, and she’d never ride through Paris with the warm wind in her hair, or fuck a guy who knew how to hold her when she came, never fuck a guy that knew what foreplay was or who liked her. Never fuck a guy who wasn’t pissed. So she was resigned to staying with Neddy and the thing that she decided she had no choice but to do was to Be Happy.
In February she had said to herself, If I can’t leave him I will make myself be happy.
So she did. It was part of her day, then, to walk him happily to the bus stop in the morning, and to welcome him home warmly in the evening. She happily cooked, gardened and painted: beautiful pictures in black ink with a long calligraphy brush like a Zen master. She said nice things to her useless lover, and tried in every way to be good and calm and nice. It is possible, from what I gather, to infer that he was nicer too. He shopped with her, they played games and they giggled a lot.
. . . . .
Before she moved into the flat, she’d burdened her brother with her unhappiness when she came back from Tasmania where she’d fled to get away from Neddy early in ’95. A beautiful girl with big hands and a floppy-eared goat had offered Claire a place to build her own house, but like a hard plastic toy on an elastic cord, she’d flung back to Neddy. He’d had a car accident, and she thought he couldn’t live without her. It was only a small crash. The police found him driving from the passenger seat. He blew an impressive .27, but was easily bested three days later by a guy who was only pulled over for a faulty light, but registered an impossible .35 blood/alcohol level.
– He needs me! and she went bolting home like a rabbit to its hole at the heavy noise of collision: one and a half days in a B-double from Port Augusta by thumb.
But that flying return strained and twisted her spine. She got to Perth, to her brother’s house and realised that she didn’t want to be with Neddy. So she stayed with her brother and her back dislocated. She got up one morning and couldn’t piss because of the spasms of pain. She could hardly stand. The pain came in ripples and waves. She was terrified to move and she couldn’t stand still.
Her brother drove her to the chiropractor three times a week for the next six months, until she could walk properly and was confident on public transport.
Then she thought, Well it’s time to do something, so she took the last unit left of her degree. That was a very odd experience and it’s when, she tells me, she really starts to sees evidence of the extent of her emotional disintegration. And that’s a good word because nothing fitted together any more, all her parts were falling away from the centre, ceasing to be integrated. Everything was operating separately within her, each part of her self with its own agenda. Sure she’d been depressed before, but now her disquiet began to manifest itself in frightening ways. She thought that everything in the environment including what was read and listened to and spoken all entered into her, all movement, sound and space. It became impossible to define her Self, because she was not only changing constantly, but was unbounded. The act of description and analysis itself seemed to be another form of destruction.
Images welled up inside her, sounds created huge endless plains of knowing outside and beyond. She became lost in these unfamiliar territories sometimes for days. Then she became really frightened. She reached a wall. Slowly and carefully she touched it and felt her way along it but she couldn’t find a way around it. Small pieces of her personality wanted to leave, yet other small bits were capable of actively absorbing the wall and passing through, shifting and relocating some of her and some of the particles of the wall. For a short time she had to become the wall to be replaced, reborn: from the youth would be born the mutant adult. As a mother eats food to nourish the physical birth and the infant abandons the placenta, her youth consumed ideas to nourish her spiritual adult which tore away from the flesh of the youth and gobbled it up. This birth would be the idea made flesh.
She would flare up into rages at the slightest provocation or perceived slight, and people attacked her everywhere. Her paranoia grew large and volatile. She would heat up, flame bright, and implode in rage and desperation. This conflagration was soon followed by embarrassed remorse, tears, and further isolation. Her disease was becoming obvious.
She must have thought she was going crazy. She wanted to crawl into a hole of silence and escape the crowd. Thoughts of suicide were a relief from this anxiety. She used death as a kind of trick: imagined piercing her throat with a thin sharp knife, the point pressing right into her neck makes me shiver to imagine. But her mind was somehow able to insert a question at that point: Why die when there is so much life I haven’t experienced? She imagined things could be better. And then somehow for a brief moment, in a quick bright high like a finger of sunlight breaking through on a rainy day, she’d become excited about some little thing she had witnessed or a texture under her finger tips. There enveloped her then a kind of luminosity. I still catch glimpses of bright filament floating at her edges when she speaks of those moments of bright simplicity.
And then it would all pass and she’d be alone again, like the time when Jesus sank beneath the water, his wavy hair all wet and floating and she was left bobbing in the bottomless black ocean, surprised. The edginess lasted hours, immobilizing her, shutting down her senses. She couldn’t think, hear, listen, or comprehend. She shut people out as if they weren’t happening to her. It sounds pretty bad. She wonders that she could stand it then.
As the months passed her anxiety got more intense and persistent, and even though it can’t render her so debilitated, she still feels it now. I thought she’d always been like that, but now I don’t think she was. She does. Once she told me, it was around that time she was raped.
She became obsessed with trying to understand the notion of unconditional faith in God. She was overwhelmed by the paradox of love through fear. When I press her for details she’s reluctant to recall how the argument was constructed, and how it came to pass that she observed the Hand of the Creator in the geometry of a flower. But I think it happened that walking home one day she had bent down to find solace for her pounding thoughts in the beauty of a tiny flower but was instead blinded by the complexity of its geometric progressions, which ate into her eyes and seared into her soul. She suffered the coldest, most fearful and distressing moment of her life. Sometimes she describes it as a triumph of Reason over Reality. That fear she discovered was the offspring of obsessive reason, of analysis beyond the Self, separating her from the soil she trod. There was no comfort in it. There was no love. I am most glad that it did not happen to me. It was a moment of ultimate madness – to feel that one can never again be alone. When she recognised the geometry that daisy possessed she knew that all flowers accord to a plan and extrapolated that everything in the entire universe acquiesced to ultimate reason, and therefore not only could she never be happily alone again, but chaos did not exist. For some of us it is the ultimate hell to live in a world without chaos.
Not long after that she moved into Neddy’s flat. She tried to avoid it but he was in Perth, she visited him, she needed company and sex no matter how bad, and she was afraid of being by herself, not surprisingly. Hadn’t she been alone when she was raped? But let’s not dwell on that. It happens to everyone. The time lines are confusing. Suffice it to say that she was falling apart. Her moods were erratic and volatile, extreme and unpredictable. She was frightened and paranoid, angry, sarcastic, and demented. She was either moody silence or volatile rage. She drew squares over and over and over. She had notebooks full of squares that she drew, on the bus, on the train, in cafes, travelling all over the city, trying to escape the heat in her head. It was a relief to her brother when she left. So she spun back to her twin. How often had she tried to leave Neddy, tried to escape – almost achieved it only to snap back? And yet, wasn’t it just three months earlier that he’d said he didn’t think he loved her any more? Didn’t he write a letter that said he no longer loved her, which she’d eaten? She needed him.
And as she couldn’t leave him, would never leave him, she learned to be happy with him. She learned to be happy and have no money when the dole cut her off after she’d done her back in again working at a nursery lifting trays of soil. She learned to be the house wife she’d always despised her mother for becoming. She’d hated the deal her mother had made. And yet her mother seems to have been in a much better position – she had her children, friends, and a house of her own…
Claire gardened. She dug out the compost pit at the back of the flats, she planted tomatoes and beans and lots of bitter leafy green things that came in shiny beautiful packets with all the instructions in Italian. She taught the kid in the other flats with the baby girl, the beautiful sister and brothers, and the mum who showed her toothless gums and laughed like the belly of the world, and played poker too well for Claire, to grow spinach. And her friend with the baby that never slept made the lightest, crispest damper she’d tasted, with wet fingers and plain flour.
I tell her that there were lots of good times then, that she’d managed to be happy and she’d even had fun. She answers that she knows, she knows, she knows, but more to herself than to me. Then she tells me that she used to wake up in the middle of the night in a blackness of despair. It was opaque, tasteless hopelessness. Once she dreamed a wedge-tailed eagle into the flat, so huge, it tore the place apart.
Neddy started drinking again like he used to. Poker games became more frequent with the neighbours, more chaotic, increasingly more frequently chaotic. Beer and red wine, curried sausages, meat, pasta and the stink of day after day of empties full of butts. . . He smoked more pot and their hatred swelled up like a, I don’t know, like hatred. They hated their lives, hated the city, started destroying the relationships they’d made, started destroying the people around them and their place, their study, their tenuous togetherness. Any freshness that remained was only in their youth. So they decided to leave the city, to live off the land, to become adherents of a small Australian myth. They decided to leave the bad place that was doing this to them. She wishes that she’d been strong enough to stay on alone. She should have let him go.
She took all her paintings to the skip bin. She threw her twenty seven journals into the skip bin. She tells me she stood on a crate fanning photos up into the air and watching them fall like dead leaves into the rubbish. She threw in the negatives. She felt the coldness in the centre of her heart spreading. She sold all her art books and poetry books. He took his favourites to his uncle’s house. She sold her dad’s 65mm bellows camera still in its leather case that he’d had at school which still took beautiful photos, which he’d used to take the first photos of the farm in 1957, to a camera shop for $25. She and Neddy had a garage sale,and a man at 7am, two hours before the advertised starting time, packed her grandmother’s hand painted bone china tea set and silver cutlery and lots of other things she’d loved that she can’t even remember now into a cardboard box, and, and her coffee pot. She watched him, impotent. He offered her fifteen bucks. She couldn’t believe it.
– You’re joking, she said. That’s worth at least twenty!
One man climbed into her garden as he was leaving and pulled out all her spinach plants for himself.
– If you’re leaving you won’t need these.
She stood and watched and could do nothing. Everything was pulled out of her.
She lost control of the essence of herself. She has nothing left with which to navigate. Her record collection, the soundtrack to her life, gone for thirty dollars, all one hundred and forty seven vinyl LPs, stuff she loved or was indifferent too but that reminded her of other times and greater happiness.
And now she stares and longs for her ex-coffee pot, with the cold still in her, packed around a hole of regret. In wishing she had not given it away so cheaply she wishes she hadn’t stuffed her life in it and given that away as well. So many of her creations she threw away and with them her self-possession. Maybe it’s good for her to talk about it all, remember and try to find a way out of it now that she’s here and so very far away. Mostly when I see her she’s just staring. . .
. . . . .
I stopped by briefly yesterday. I approached her from around the side of the kitchen, walking to her across the lawn. She was standing in the sunlight, sipping coffee. She was barefoot on the ground, quite solid. She saw me straight away and smiled. She told me that she’d bought a little coffee pot from the op shop for two-fifty, and it makes just one cup, for her. She infuses it with cardamom and cinnamon and she told me things aren’t so bad now.
I hope it’s a beautiful hot Melbourne summer this year.

Christine King
2nd August 2007

(This the story that won the Brimbank Short Story Competition, 2007.)

green dress with yellow rubber gloves

2009-04-16T23:40:00.001+08:00

Life is a road and Love is a Panel-van

2009-04-16T23:17:00.002+08:00

The Parable of the Rock

2009-04-16T21:45:00.015+08:00

When we travel, it is lightly, seeking to see newly and at sunset everything that lies hidden at home behind bookshelves and between the pages of.

We are a dark people, we awake at the sunset and begin our stories and collectively our everyday business in the evening. Crepuscular. The grey dawn is a going down for us. We live in tents. We travel with the winds and pitch our tents on the shifting sand, Our Prayers are not written on leaves of paper but on grains of sand flowing.

Last year we traveled beyond our normal lands of (nomad) our god whistles around our ears, something like this sometimes like a djinn, sometimes a snake's shadow sometimes the stars, always changing.

We travelled last year beyond the seasonal edge that spread fattly outside its normal limits. And so it was that from under a sand dune that had no doublt moved at least two and probably three kilometers from where it had risen on our last pass, we found the foundations of what must have once been a huge solid building.

We camped around the buckled floors, cracks trickling sand. Scattered for hundreds of miles around were diamonds, balls, bricks and squares of coloured glass that might be part of a huge jigsaw or mosaic of a building. A silence of prayer surrounded the scattered stone.

And where is their god now, the god of the rock? Shattered and scattered for miles in the desert.

Resilience is the god of wind and shifting tides that the survivor knows. Rock eventually shatters. Rock eventually becomes sand, sand always flows and shifts. Like clouds. Our gods are of rain, wind and flapping canvas. Our god is the movement of the lines, resting, moving, light or dark. You cannot remember his name. Her children get fat, then thin. Sometimes we starve on the sands. We are one and we are all dispersed.

Our god is the shape of the water container, the container is the shape of the air between the paper and the nib.

Out the Back

2009-04-03T19:05:00.006+08:00

Went out to the farm today to give Dad and Bruce a bit of a hand to put up a fence and drench some ewes, and to pull up some fences off the sold land. Most of it has been sold, bar 400 acres, to Integrated Tree Cropping company who will Blue Gum it. Accomplished the first task, not that I did much, and they managed to get highly annoyed with each other. The ewes have freshly born lambs, so we left them alone.
I got time for a quick drive out the back to see "my plot" which is 44 acres we fenced off a few years ago to try and revegetate a swamp there. They always thought it was a stupid idea, and when I left for Melbourne in '03 it wasn't long before they were so low on feed Bruce had to run some cattle through...despite having another 2300 acres of farm.
Now I think that's a seriously flawed management system which can't organize itself to do without a one 60th fraction of the total - they must've been running pretty close to the wire. Either that or that just couldn't stand the sight of all that "unused" land, and that beautiful clover just sitting there. And my brother is a selfish cunt.

So anyway, it means not much reveg was allowed to occur naturally. But I have yet to have a thorough investigation, because when the old man drove me out there, he wouldn't stop to have a close look. Don't ask me why. I don't know.

It's funny how I've manged to put off being pissed about this for so long. Now I'm writing it down, I can feel my blood starting to boil. Like, Fuck! Seriously I mean for Fuck!

It was a really beautiful paperbark swamp. I counted 30 types of birds there one day, including black swans, a breeding pair of Cape Barren Geese, a wedgetail eagle and a few other raptors, heaps of other things I don't know the names of, plus lots of frogs, tiger snakes by the hundreds (potentially!) and a wierd blue snake that frightend the bejesus out of me one day by following up the hill. Who knows what else. The wetland systems in Esperance have such extremes of fluctuations it's amazing to consider what is possible.

One year, we had a huge flood and the seasonally dry, sandy drain that runs diagonally through the farm filled up with so much water the boys lay on a surfboard and floated the whole way down: previously unheardof depths. In the stream that year appeared swarms of small fish, that none of us had ever seen before. They were substantial too: about 6 inches long.

But where did they come from? Had their eggs had been lying dormant in the sand for decades? Who knows?

Ah well, I guess I'm not the one who's ever going to find out. I find Esperance a difficult place to be. And now the farm's been sold anyway.

2009-03-10T12:15:00.002+08:00

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/theo_jansen_creates_new_creatures.html

I hope you can access this link: it is about amazing mechanical creatures. really beautiful.

Landscape Architecture #PP01-design.

2009-03-10T11:00:00.010+08:00

Hmmm. So I need to do the philosophical work: where do I stand, what's my position and where am I going?

My first thought on this is that you develop a philosophical position through experience of the world and your practice in it. But then, in response to that, I say it is useful to formulate a philosophical position and to allow it to be refined by experience and practice. This, then, indicates an ongoing process of readjustment and refinement of the positon, kind of like the way that beetles fly in constantly recalculated right angles to reach their destination: always being a little bit out in their flightpath calculations so constantly readjusting their flight pattern at 90 degrees, therefore travelling ever smaller error tradjectories. Implicit in this is the very important notion that one is never starting from zero. Always you are coming from an already developed position, no matter how unaware of it you are.

So then my first position is this:
It is useful to have a position and therefor a primary destination. Allow your position to be refined through the external forces of the world and your own actions and practice.

This might then be applied to design practice thus:
Develop an initial design.
This will be based on what is known, previous design and first creative hunches. Once you have made a move, look at other work and look at Nature's solutions; seek opinions. All this will give information on how the form could be developed and/or reiterated.
To state a negetive of this: don't waste time being uncertain and experimenting for it's own sake just because someone else finds that a good way to design. (Only play games that you know the rules to.)
Allow new data to influence the form. Search for new information that will refine and change how design strategies might be applied in the future.

This brings me to the next point...

inside places

2009-03-09T00:17:00.004+08:00