Sea Green

Ephemera etc.

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Make mine a double

So, stars are sending body doubles to events now. I'm not sure what I find strangest about this article. Is it that:
a) A certain star (allegedly) actually used a body double - the sheer chutzpah, the cheekiness, the 'how on earth did they think up the idea in the first place'-ness of it all.
b) That she sent the double to do the bit I would have actually wanted to do, ie go to the museum, while sending herself off to do shopping, which I would gladly have sent a body double for. Imagine that - someone your height, weight and general shape, with same colourings and taste, who could go do jeans shopping for you for an entire gruelling Saturday! How exciting!
c) If it's not true, and she was just a bit off-colour and 'not her usual self' then who the heck made up such a loopy story to explain it?
d) How do you even go about hiring a body double?
And finally,
e) If you do have one, aren't you obliged, at least by the laws of fiction, to date the same guy in an amusing comedy of errors, or at least try to get your parents back together through a series of hilarious girlish high jinx adventures involving climbing up trees and spying through windows?

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Permeating culture with... permaculture!

Oh I know my word jokes are terrible, but they make me happy so I can't really give them up.

There are a series of events being held around Sydney this weekend for May Day - with a "MAY DAY, MAY DAY THE PLANET IS IN PERIL. DO SOMETHING TO HELP" theme.

The events look lovely, and they are spread out around the city.

See here for more info.

I know, there is a definite sustainability events theme to recent posts. Stay tuned for more, I've hardly got started!

Noyoik

Have I mentioned that I'm going away? To Canada and New York? Ever so exciting. If I didn't have a head cold right now (it's not pig flu, I swear), and wasn't sloughing around on the couch cleaning out my inbox as suitable brainless busy work, I would probably spend some time waxing lyrical about it. Instead you get an event notification, in case you are lucky enough to live there or in surrounds. I will actually miss this one as arrive afterwards, but looks good.


- - -

An Evening with Ezio Manzini
Where: The Cherry Lane Theater
38 Commerce Street
West Village, NY City
When: Wednesday, May 6, 2009
6:00 - 8:00 PM
Tickets: $20 + $.99 fee.
$9 + $.99 fee for students
Register Here

Ezio Manzini, author of Sustainable Everyday, Professor in Industrial
Design at the Politecnico di Milano, and founder of o2 Italy, will
join us for an evening conversation. Ezio has been on the journey towards sustainable design for over 20 years, and has noticed a growing
trend to move beyond first measures of eco-efficiency, to seek larger vision of sustainability.

contact j [at] o2nyc [dot] org to volunteer.

Monday, April 27, 2009

You walk into a room...

You try listening to Nick Cave on loop to hum out the background noise and help you concentrate but notice you begin to feel even more tired.

You reach into your bag thinking you've found a snack box of mixed nuts and then realise they're tampons. You don't even have your period, so they're in no way an interesting discovery.

You try to eat fruit, 2 serves a day at least, an in doing so forget to eat vegetables.

You type and your fingers slip changing 'full' committee to 'dull' committee meeting and you wonder how the minutes would have been received by the group if they had gone out with the error undetected.

You write list upon list, a never ending spiralling, Alice in Wonderland like smaller and bigger growing set of lists. To do, to buy, to call. A list of lists to check.

You're wearing 3/4 length woollen sleeves and washing your hands. Water slips down there and your arms are damp. You try taking off the cardigan, but its too cold. You put up with the damp.

You dream about a new lover, serious, dedicated. You dream very specific details of their sexual technique, things you didn't even know you liked.

You henna your hair late at night. It looks like you are attempting to style your hair with melted chocolate. The next day you smell like a warm pot of herbal tea, being served in a stable.

You sit next to someone who is checking their messages on a laptop and laughing, a kind of huffing through the nose, as they hold an unlit cigarette in their mouth.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Eyefuls of city

A shortish walk from where I was this morning to the centre of the centre gave me so much to think about. It's such a cacophony, don't you think? My walk went something like

Eyes: box squashed, nice shadows, look at lumpy walls with fern growing, people, people, funny teeth, busy at bustop, round man, lit up security guards in blue, picturesque, skinny tourist, shiny sunglasses, oooh rollerblades, old cafe - kitsch? empty? white paint,nice backdrop for ironic photoshoot, my own reflection - argh hair frizzy, and stand up tall girl, round building, love those round builings, T-shirt shop, peer in, can I see, what are those pictures, reflections on glass, peer some more, where is the decimal point in that price tag, I like those frames, look back aruond, argh, two men there smoking, I am being observed, face blunt and tired, lady dozing - the nod I guess from her skin - into an open book, now there is a lady with very purple tights, click clack shoes, short girl funny lips, tall girl, pale downy face and knowing smile, boy with great jeans, bus stop crowded, old lady like a turtle, her neck is shiny and lined eyes peering from hoods, she gives me a shrewd look, slow walking, short dress too close to underpants, cellulite, smallish tattoo, pouchy faced dough nosed man, straight from hotel looking people, matching couple, lumpy fountain, buses dozing, I thought this building was red? Oh no, red is on the inside, blank faced stone out here, argh greasy hair and trolley weilding man, tiny, but his hair is side parted and he brushes it down with deliberate open palm, foyer, hey snazzy, picture, I'd like a wig like that, low couches, quiet in here, peaceful, open, there's the door.

This commentary is entirely usual. As is seeing things and thinking 'aah good photo'. What's new in how I've been seeing things lately is thinking 'how would I do this in black and white?' Thanks to drawing class, in the city at night, I now wonder about rendering shadows, about refelections, about things that are dark in colour but in the light, as opposed to lighter things in shadow, in the same field of view.

Last week I did my first streetscape. Possibly my first ever - which kind of surprises me because I think of myself as someone who draws, but really, my drawing experience is quite limited, and light-on. Post school my drawing has been mostly life drawing (an enthusiastic but short lived bout when I lived in the blue mountains), which doesn't really require a whole landscape, you can kinda just place figure on chair/mat/draped cloth hanging in space, drawing from the imagination (course at NAS a coulpe of years back), which was great fun, and involved drawing actual objects, just kind of stylised, from memory and without actually having anything in front of you, and my own drawing for fun, which is mostly designy/illustratey and lately has involved a lot of monsters rendered in oil pastels and scratchy pencil.

None of which really prepares you for 'how the f**k do I make that dark shadowy patch of the world exist on my page? Where does that end and this begin? Am I really drawing what I see or what my brain is telling me I should be seeing?' etc. Great fun though, if somewhat demoralising at times, when you find yourself shortcutting to that awkward panic that renders (excuse the pun) any drawing flat and painful. There is soemthing magical in the way that images made by hand channel not just your knowledge of the medium but the feeling you have about being there doing the image making. As our lovely tutors point out, it's all about the care given. To be able to look and transcribe and stay with the looking and transcribing without judging the marks you make - and worse judging and getting angry or despondent and trying to change them. To bring an open heart, like a child, and be ok with making changes or learning or even discarding what you made. To focus on the looking rather than the recording, which in tangible terms means actually spending more time looking at the object than looking at the page. It requires a lot of trust, drawing, trust that the looking and the feeling with translate into an image that looks 'good', rather than trying to make marks one by one that look good. If that makes any sense at all...?

So yes, did my first shadowy night time streetscape last week, and enjoyed it immensely, somehow managed to stay with it for the hour and stayed enthusiastic and not judgemental for the entire time. Used charcoal, which is perfect for filling up the page with light and shade. Drew cars, which I don't even drive let alone look at normally, and they came out swell - little round nosed hunkering beasts. Had a tree and signs and a gutter and leaf shadows on a wall, and I loved drawing it all. Funny how some nights it just clicks*.

[*I think it helped that after having felt a bit despondent about my earlier efforts in the class, and kind of having skipped a few weeks ('busy dahling, work you know'), I had a dream the night before last weeks class, in which the softly spoken English tutor told me 'it's ok to not be good at it - that's why you go to a class' and I had a strong feeling that the going and trying was the important bit, that there was soemthing important, and good, in the being there and trying.]

Monday, April 13, 2009

wanting or not wanting to be zine?

In answer to your question Georgie, no, I haven't been working on any zines of late. I have two new editions of 'Week in Review' that are drawn and written (as of the end of last year) just not copied, bound and distributed yet. I'd really like to finish these as I dreamt up 'a Week in Review' as a four part seasonal tale (erm, not imagining it would span a couple of years!), and have only done two so far.

My local copy shop up and left - which was very sad as I'd just started to feel comfortable in there overdosing on copy fumes and enjoying the peculiar mix of the worst service in the world with the worst fluorescent humming lighting in the world. Now my closest one is further into the heart (huh, assuming it has one) of the big bad emerald city. I think I've been too lazy to go and or, if I'm honest, a bit too self conscious to be busted by suity business district types as I lay my bits and pieces over the copy table. Hey, baby steps. When you're not 23 and no longer wearing plaid skirts with cute long socks and Hello Kitty bobby pins (well not very often), and you're sneaking out of your sensible office job early to go print your xeroxed wonkily drawn manifesto of slacker chic, before heading home to cook a sensible dinner, it can feel kind of naughty. And private. You know, like making zines is kind of like having sex. Like something you're glad you do, that you like doing, and you know lots of other people like doing too, and it's fine to do at any age, but it's just not something you want strangers who aren't doing it watching as you do it awkwardly, in your work clothes, under fluoro lights. Or if that metaphor isn't working, it's something vaguely like that!

I did join an online zine forum - and have now added a button/link in the sidebar below. I haven't quite got around to populating it with much more than a picture, but I did think it would be a good place to put images that didn't make it into the zines, or ideas for future zines, etc.

I'm also on the Sticky shop mailing list, and speaking of which, here are some events they mentioned recently, for anyone who's interested:

MAY: MELBOURNE

Sticky founder, manager and all time legend Luke Sinclair is holding a
zine workshop at Box Hill Community Arts Centre on Saturday May 30th,
1pm to 4pm. The workshop is aimed at teenagers and will take the form
of a discussion around current zine making practises leading to a zine
making project. To enrol in the course contact Box Hill Community
Arts Centre, 470 station Street, Box Hill, Vic 3128, 98968888,
www.bhcac.com.au

MAY: SYDNEY
MCA and Sydney Writer’s Festival Zine Fair
Sunday 24 May 11am-5pm
Museum of Contemporary Art, 140 George St The Rocks
Stall cost $15, bookings 02 92452484

(Sadly I'll most likely miss this one as it's the day I get back from OS)

JULY: MELBOURNE
9 July 6.30-7.30pm
Zine Collection Reflection
State Library of Victoria
Bookings only
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/282493947
or 03 8664 7099

And yes thanks for the distro info, I had come by this site, but not sent any material there. I think for the next two I will. Cheers.

Bloggedy blog

Oh. And a new blog, the Fergus report, created by a friend. He has a wry sense of humour, and this blog sees him setting it loose on the world of politics. Queensland politics. And yes, this does count to the final exam.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

oh oh where does the time go

Or more to the point - what have I been busy doing that I haven't been here musing on the world and its workings?

Not sure really.

Have been working. Office stuff. Everything on a fast spin wheel at the moment - mini deadlines that each seem laughable in their absurd details and teensy turnaround times, but joined up make big projects work or not work.

Have been drawing. (A bit, mind you I missed the last couple of weeks classes so that can't be it)

Have been having Easter weekend minibreak on the Central Coast with requisite coffee drinking and pottering. Went to a very sweet community hall style book sale yesterday to raise money for a rock pool with 'concrete cancer'. Makes me think we should be taking it a fruit basket and visiting it in hospital... but anyway.

Have been reading trashy mystery novels.

Have been writing lists for myself - suitably Autumnal curled and torn pieces of paper that have blown into gentle piles on my desk. A range of lists. Themed lists usually, that together make quite the Beat poetry. In concert, to the wandering eye, they read like this:
"Charcoal grey or two tone mary janes
Appreciate people
Banannas
Card, present
Tofu hard
Guidebook
Red cabbage
Necklace? make wed pm?
Olive green
Buy henna
Button sewing
Book trip"

I have also been planing a trip to Canada and North America. Spurred by a work trip, and now extended for a bit of a holiday too. Very exciting. Very soon. Slightly nerve wracking. (Delicate nerves, wracked easily??)

Have been wardrobe renovating (see non-vegetable items on list above). More on that later.