Two major shows are finishing up shortly, at their only venues in Australia. William Kentridge, ACMI, Melbourne Why, why did I wait so long to see Kentridge at ACMI? Partly it seemed to be on for ages; partly I wasn’t sure I liked his work, d’oh. The show is gobsmackingly tremendous; K and I spent [...]
Rightho — this is something I should have done a couple of weeks back. It’s a heads up for a (free) talk I’m giving on book cover design, specifically on the Text Classics series, Australian classics, rather than from o/s. You can see the thirty covers here, and hopefully you’ll have seen them (yellow: Aussie [...]
Paul Krugman in the NYT warns us of Eurodämmerung within months, but like the girl in Don’t Dream It’s Over, we turn past to the TV page. To the balm and cocoon of song, of a life’s drama passing by, Live!, in 2.5 minutes of limelight. ‘You owned it! You were hungry! Well done, well [...]
Constant Gardener wasn’t feeling so wonderful from the previous night out — an old-fashioned bring a plate dinner — but was very keen to see the last opening of the season for Open Gardens. (The next one in this fantastic local treasure hunt is in August at Cruden Farm, ie Dame Elisabeth Murdoch’s hangout. She’s [...]
It’s not like someone running into a burning house to save a child — a super hero is relatively invulnerable, so it’s no skin off her nose to do it. And if there is no chancing personal pain, how to be heroic? Wait up! Let’s rewind that. We ignored Luke Buckmaster‘s warning about The Avengers [...]
Don’t know about you, but I find most writing about art not very helpful, sometimes, actively unhelpful. That’s writing like art reviews, rather than a monograph, say. The writers want their reviews to be little bits of polished writing, art in themselves. This is by Dan Rule in the Age, a writer for whose writing [...]
What would the marketing department of the “venerable” auction house, Leonard Joel, est. 1919, say? Own a piece of outlaw history! What they did say was: ‘This sale of street art is the first time such a collection has come to public auction in Australia.’ (On view from today and on the block this Sunday [...]
April 30, 2012 – 11:11 am
You can lose yourself in one of the great, late Rembrandt self-portraits for an hour, and wake as if from a dream. But it is curious, to me, how a voice can feather you with goosebumps or lay you low within a bar or two, bring you to near to, or, to tears. Short arc [...]
‘Robert Dessaix’, the performance The other night at the Wheeler Centre, where I seemed to have camped out lately, we saw the celebrated writer Robert Dessaix take the stage for one of his brilliantly sly and penetrating performances. By penetrating I mean how he seems to cut into the moment — loosing the sap? the [...]
The writer Robert Dessaix (on whom I’ll post tomorrow) says that mindfulness is a kind of attentive tranquillity. Like a dog [has]. (But not a cat.) In that spirit these tiny scraps of driftwood on the shore of dailyness. The phone rings. Hello. Do you sell the calendula? (It’s an old woman. How can I [...]
