Atomous kai kenon

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Standing on the corner a-ringing a bell. And up stepped the sheriff...

How's it going he asked.

Just standing here, you know holding up the wall. Really there taint not much to report really. You?

The shoppers and the workers in town swirled and rambled all around and about us.

Got time?

For you? Of course.

Let's duck in this here joint get us some coffee. It has been a while we can catch up. And besides I am freezing.

Well, I said, as there is not much happening from my end I'm happy to join you in a coffee.

It was more than true that there was not much to say about my life, the last few months have been little more than the daily grind of family and work and all the forms of mental illness that come free with the working class loss of free will life style.

So we sat and we ordered a coffee each. I like to order latte because of the idea -- I think it was Simon Crean who put it out there -- that one can not be a good union member and drink latte. I wanted to prove him wrong. And a long black.

I saw Ian the other day.

Really and how is he?

Good, he was all excited, he had been to the poetry slam heats and later on he read something in the open mic section later. So he was -- yeah all excited. You know Ian.

Indeed he's a pistol. I thanked the waiter for the latte and played with the sandy coloured froth, distorting the intricately poured design. What did he think? I am sure he would have gone all ultra on their arse.

No he was cool. He was surprised -- pleasingly surprised - cause he reckons that the slam format is all male oriented. So he was sort of impressed about the fact that there was about half and half girl boy performers and two of the three finalists were women.

Yeah, well no, that is good. Ian is good like that. He has a, you know, open mind. Having played rugby in college, it has always struck me passing strange how something like poetry can become so macho. Some people just gotta get all competitive. Like those aggro cooking shows. But I think it must be the shirtless, arm waving, shouty-man performance aspect. You know the winning and the losing.

Sure - that is exactly what Ian was saying too. And he thought it cool the way the slam brings out all sorts of poets from out of the woodwork. You know there are heats all across the country?

Yep, and did you know that we were lovers for a while?

Truly? I did not know that. Makes you more attractive to me.

That lemming has dived off the cliff. I have lost all interest. I am pretty much asexual these days. Does not even enter my pretty little head. We all wear a variety of, various masques, do we not? LOL. et tu? And besides after 911 there ain't no need for performance poetry anymore.

I guess.

Yeah but you know I gotta force myself to jerk off at least once a week, you know just to maintain good prostate health.

So okay, whatever. Ian thought it was a good night. He is very political. Right? So he was, he said, he had been to a few slams over the years around and on the mainland and they never really caught his interest. At the heat last week he thought maybe it was you know maybe he dug it cause of the small town vibe of Hobart. People having to make their own fun and whatever.

At this point an earnest young woman, Iona, wearing a fourth doctor sort of scarf -- she told me later her thirteen year old niece had knitted a bunch of these scarfs for various family members -- ripped jeans and a leather jacket, and her equally, if more traditionally garbed beard and glasses sloppy jumper earnest brother Bloom interrupted.

Slam is the democratisation of poetry, of verse. It allows more voices. It may be macho at times and places, but at the same time slams allow different voices to be heard. The voices of women in particular. They may or may not win, that is not really the point. Poets get to perform, mind if I sit, and so by performing they get to build up confidence. What they do from then is up to the person. But lots of voices, of the marginalised and the ones who have not had the opportunity get to be heard. Did you ever read The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry? You should read it, by Somers-Willett - it is interesting. She is in US so she does not talk about the Australian scene. But she does talk about the divide. Poetry in the academy versus in the bars and in the alleyways. I will send you a link of a review.

Like Bukowski.

Or Ginsberg before. Whitman when he said something like, Great Poetry needs a Great Audience.

It is that DIY punk sort of a feel innit. The sum is worth more than the parts. The audience is central to the performance. Slam is the all night acid house dance rave party, the stage dive, slam is Shane MacGowan getting his ear bit off while Joe Stummer caterwaul strums what the hell is wrong with me? The Bomber boys who stole kit during the great blackout and went out to the street corners and clubs and puked forth grinding poverty hip-hop.

I lived for a while in Canberra, the poets there seem to do a good job of it.

Last century there used to be a cool scene in bris vegas based at the Storey Bridge Hotel.

Still your boy Ian reckons that slam is an inherently broken form, due to the idea of competition. The very nature of the slamming scene is broken.

By now we had repaired to a little downstairs hole in the wall jazz wine bar. Trading latte for beer and cider and cheap industrial port, not being able, no matter how ironically I tried, to abide Chardonnay. And conversions swirled and jostled for attention like bored children bickering in the supermarket trolley. Beer flowed like wine. This way and that way words flowed and swirled around all opposition and solid forms finding new paths and forging new channels. Ideas and flirtations. We all overlapped and argued for time and space around an unoriginal table stained years of excited bullshitting and alcohol. A small gang melded the group pushing the tables together, painters, dealers and stoned rappers. Ply upon sandy ply.

No! Slams are good they give people immediate feedback and if the poets or whatever listen and learn they come back and think about things and they can stumble about improve. Even if only in the sense of winning the twenty dollars at the end of the night. But it is all supportive. The old way of getting poems out there -- from entering the contest to getting final finished published book containing heartfelt poems -- could take you know quite a long time. Getting hooked into the slam scene one has a focus. Keep writing monthly new stuff. A monthly deadline. Asses must be driven, as the saying goes, to hay with blows. Or polishing up some piece they are particularly fond of.

It is the constant changing of styles and forms. And a bringing together of voices from all around the country, bush & city. Big places and small. The old and the young. The old hand and the tyro. Coming into being and passing away. The way certain groups, particular groups coalesce around their daily lives and so form particular styles. Meeting in cafes or pubs, sober or not or high as kites and sounds and voices bubble up and styles come and go. Some move on, most are like writers or visual artists just experimenting about or musicians trying out song ideas, or just drunken layabout no names ecstasy poets seeking to get some kicks and maybe laid. All sorts. Resorting to nutmeg. Which as it was the sailors high seems appropriate for Hobart. Eh?

But this very diversity is as much about fragmentation and loss of community as it is about anything. It is one group seedling in and carving out and a liquidness that disbars other groups. I am not making myself clear. Like the way yon internet has a chat group a forum a scene for each and everyone for every sort of idea or kink you can think of and so people become more close, closer in fact, to some random cat two thirds of a wide and wicked world away -- round the world -- or even more better unknown just down the road. And so what ever you want to call it, skate punk XY youth label culture, or some sort of arty boho scene, or some inarticulate anarcho-dread progressive culture all movement it all gets sort of rutted on the ancient wallaby track and people get isolated and so isolate themselves fragmenting into every sort of fraction or clique or ratio group or faction that you could ever think of -- so by this fragmenting we argue and miss the boat the moment and while trying to become the perfecting ourselves change we want the world to be the bosses laugh all the way to bank. Their wealth is my death my life is being broke. Whoa!

Personally, to me it is the death of art, well maybe not THE death of art. This bunch of unemployed or under-employed or unemployable can never destroy art, not even poetry. But this entire American Idol, clap-o-meter idea. When the hurlyburly's done it comes down to me hating this pub scene poet scene the drinking the braking of glass and the nauseating sound of the cash register. Ugh - sends shivers down me spine. Like that inane Nokia ring tone. Makes me physically wanna be ill just thinking about it. But this venereal measuring clap-o-meter could never tear down art by itself. But it is the fragmenting the murdering of art with one thousand cuts. Bleeding it out. No not cuts -- how quaintly cliché of moi. Rather it is like the Cyberian reindeer in the thawing spring time tundra. So many mosquitoes. Fantastic clouds in number and in formation of the blood suckers like dentist drills rise up from countless small puddles and pools of melt water. So much so that some beasts perish with anemia. From so many tiny little bites from so much drop by life creating drop blood being drained. While others in the vast herds are driven insane and panicked fleeing and flailing about the reindeer exhaust themselves running this way and yon - not never being able to find relief.

No it is the democratic dubstep hodge podge of voices and opinions, a honing of ideas in a furnace of art and competition and sampling commerce. The free interchange market of twenty four hour party signs and signifiers of many voices striving for the one voice the way to describe what it is we have been thrown into. For if we be equal in one way, then we must be equal in all ways. Each of us should be expected to have something to say, and we should be allowed to say it. It is even our duty as citizens, whatever the hell that may mean, to speak our mind. Two thirds Rosa Luxemburg, one part Dr Suess. And the slam movement has wrested and extorted poetry from the Academy. Too too much poetry is controlled by the guild of English professors and those who having access and resources speak of the primacy of the written word over the spoken word. It is a silly argument to have as they are both of value. The best writing is best if it is closest to conversation. Even the old fashioned five paragraph essay form should be read aloud, if only as part of the editing precess. Slam poets are like the old beardy bards, like the rhapsodes of Homer's time.

No, not like rhapsodes at all. The name shows the difference. Rhapsode mean to stitch together a song or even better a stitching together of lies. Those poets would have to commit to memory scenes and phrases and what not so then can then, on the spot stitch together a song a lay. They were able to put theses formulas of meter and narrative together. Maybe in new and varied ways. But one big thing that these archaic poets would not have liked would have been innovation. They were very concerned with keeping intact the ideas of the cycle. And it was all you know religious and traditional and you know religion and tradition hate change. The word that Homer used was singer. And here you are right, cause the first duty of the singer is to sing, and the slam venue is just the place to do that. Again we have the idea of immediacy, of meeting face to face like minded people in your community. This is the power of the medium.

Immediate and democratic, and even if I do not agree with what you say, I have to go along with what Sylvia Beach said about Joyce -- he treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses, or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him; he told me that he had never met a bore.

The babbling pumpt of platinism

Yes well LOL sometimes it takes a bit of digging to find out the kernel of the poem or the poet that is any good, worth remembering.

I like the idea of the anti-slam, everyone gets how ever much time and everyone is given as a score a perfect 10. Performing is the victory. Like the Seinfeld joke, people would rather be in the coffin than give the eulogy.

But I guess that raises the question as to how to get an audience to attend what is little more than a poetry recital. Anyway it is getting late. I have to dreadful work in the beastly morning. Until next time, I said, putting on my scarf and overcoat, I shall leave y'all with Democritus, “The realm of the universe is atoms and space, the things that are, are custom. These universes are infinite and so they come into being and they perish.”

FILEREMOS

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MONA FOMA 2013 or Why Theroy

Before we start I must say that I am a political person. I have a strong left wing bent to my politics, and this of course colours many of my opinions and much in my daily life. More than that I am of an old school of left wing politics. If someone held a gun to my child's head and I was forced to give myself a label, I guess it would be some sort of anarcho-communist, in that the end goal of all political activity would have to be the classless society. Many people throw up their hands in despair as to what is left and what is right, to me it is fairly simple. Each and every day we reproduce our daily life. This is done in the work place. If you think that the socially produced goods should be appropriated by the few, than you are what I like to call right wing, if on the other hand you think socially produced wealth should be shared socially than you are what we can call left wing. Much flows from where one stands on this issue. Art and culture have a special interest for me, as they are of vital importance in the formation of opinion and of ideology.

So moving along...

Had a busy weekend of art. Starting innocently enough on Saturday morning. The day was like most others. A morning I spent making breakfast and getting the children organised. After lunch I jumped into the car and drove...

Over cast with a whipping mirthless wind over hill and over dale whistling past overrun with wild thistle sheep paddocks faded golden and brown and wild dishevelled competing with mown grown fields of irrigation complex spray wasting water in every direction. A man made rain shower on a field of rising green shootings surrounded on all sides by the dry cracking brown blown on the wind broken grass and dirty dust. Cliche of a sugar loaf shaped mountain of childlike scrawling landscape and weirs roistering in the whippy cautioned wind along the cool coal river vineyard valley.

Cottages and old timey signs over butcher and baker and video and petrol shops.

Cold blow rode.

Everybody's talking about bagism.
Traffic jams.
Tennis games.

And fundraising Dunnalley skool lemon aid. Stately fowl march rowed tortured vines swelling bunches green and hard.

Headed up to the Museum of Old and New Art Saturday afternoon markets. In many ways the drive up to the MONA is a thrilling as the museum itself. As much as I love the artificial, even so do I love the natural. I effortlessly killed an hour or two as I strolled the grounds and stalls and spoke to some locals about this and that and a bit of the other thing. And the goal of standing on ones head. Far off, on the wind, I could hear the finger style playing of Richard Gillewitz. A guitarist from Florida. Sadly due to time constraining realities and the social blather I was not able to pay as close attention as I would have liked. Which is a shame as it is always pleasant to listen to someone who is able to skilfully finger play the guitar. This style seems to my untrained ear to bring out sounds and rhythms that are often overlooked in much guitar work, or used only sparingly. What I could hear blowing across the cloud chasing lawn wind was delicate and made me want to hear more. Which is the result that any artist wants, to leave the audience wanting more. And a man in a tent painted green and lounging and posing as a half man half amphibian beast. Between two worlds. Artifice and nature. Town and city. Male and Female.

So after whiling away some time at the markets I drove down to the Hobart waterfront. The clouds of the beach and the morning had been chased away, as if thousands of children sang sunny day rhymes all at the same time. And the warming sun was balanced by the cool damp wind off the river.  

I don't like driving at the best of times, it strikes me as terribly unnatural, and so with police cars about and roads changed and rerouted I took the cowards way out and rather than hunt for the perfect spot I retreated to where I knew there were ample car parks and waked the five minutes or so to Princes Wharf Plaza.

An apocalypse, an uncovering. Slogans on the pavement and on walls. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Forgetting the parallel and equal Nothing is permitted, everything is true. Natural disaster settings and seats made of sand bags and old tractor tyres. A giant theremin made by Melbourne artist Robin Fox. And children ran about and up to and behind and giggled and ran some more as the pyramid installation made it's many strange noises. This amusing piece which allowed, even forced, the audience to participate was a big hit with this reviewer as well as many members of the general public. A piece originally commissioned by City of Melbourne. Later in the evening as the drink and drugs took their grip it was amusing to watch the midnight creepers and staggerers wander past the theremin and be surprised by the songs created. And once they understood what the happening the drunks and druggies (or as I like to call them my people) took to flying airplanes around, onto, and into the machine.

So I took my place in the long conga entry line of music hungry punters hipsters and groovers. Sucking a vanilla thick shake through a straw I waited my turn to enter into the Princes Wharf. I was ushered into this empty vast temple to a distant industrial past, into this modern temple to a technological future still be created. Banks of computer screens controlled lights, sound, images and more. Wires and lights and speakers and all array of electronic gadgets and toys hung over exposed girders and crawled along the roof.

In the first instance I was there to see Ben Walsh's Orkestra of the Underground Scores Shaun Tan's The Arrival.

Shaun Tan is an Australian artist, from Perth originally. In 2006 he made an illustrated book titled The Arrival. This wordless story won the 2007 "Book of the Year" prize as part of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.

It was by happy accident that Ben Walsh came across this evocative book. Urged on by the evocative images Ben Walsh created a score for The Arrival. The performance was a well produced production with all the various elements of sound, rhythm, image, light and motion working seamlessly. To the outsider who is not privy to the minor errors introduced in any live performance, the production seem to flow flawlessly.

One of the key aspects of this performance was the inclusion of a series of illustrations from the book projected onto screens behind the Orkestra. These dreamy, lovely drawings of half forgotten times was filled with strange amphibian like creatures and indecipherable swiggles and markings meant to be the foreign language refugees must learn. Amphi being a Greek word, and having at the root of the word the idea of 'on both sides.' (According to my (online) Liddell & Scott Greek–English Lexicon.) Whether by another happy accident or prior planning these strange creatures in a single simple image encapsulated the real life of the immigrant. That is the fact of being caught between two worlds, being on both sides of a cultural divide. Even the venue had echoes of this idea of being between two worlds. The old passing into nothingness Hobart and the new Hobart coming into being.

The crowd gathered and chatted and doodled with mobile phones and took photos and texted envious friends some sitting on recently installed bleacher seats some on giant hot pink bean bags some stood in the centre of the hall surrounded on both sides. The rising din echoed off the hard walls and was at the same time muffled by the soft humid crowd. Phones flashing children laughing. Out the open door the blue blue of the river. Warehouses along the waterfront and the low foothills retreating to infinity. And then the hushing anticipation as the musician took the stage and noddled here and there with their instruments warming up and calming nerves.

The lights fall and rise, eyes appear and fade away, rapid changes and snatches of folk music and others snippets of sound and sense swirl and build to a frenzy of faces and drums and horns and a take your breath away galloping flow. The music flows images fade and now we see fearful children under covers. A clatter of drums, wail of horns. Mystery and Threat. After the rapids a slow cool eddy.  It is easy enough to make a hash of electronic or found sounds into a piece such as this, but here I am happy to say that the various sounds added fit together fluidly. The gulls overhead and the waves splashing the immigrant ship only added to the soundscape, slowly fading away and I looked away to see the heaving river and could almost smell the salt air. Further into the maelstrom of emotions the hero of the book came into the city with a discordant resonating click clack series of sounds. And looking out the window of his railroad flat window, a fractal wall looking the same from any dimension, one could sense his isolation. A feeling of alienation and vulnerability. A longing for return and reuniting.

As well as the images projected on screen the lighting and effects for this piece were all very supportive and added to, rather than subtracted from or overwhelmed, the primacy. Which in this case was the music. Flashing red as things fell apart to wide spans of thin smoke glowing purple in the light, and the menace of blue as runaway children held hands amid the clatter of drums, the popping of hand slapping skins and wailing and crying of horns. All moved together as one relentless flow of music and art and technology and space and coincidence to tell a sparse tale which forced the individual observer to fill in gaps with their own life experience.

Any criticisms I could make would be only the quibbles of one with neither the talent nor the drive to make such an event happen. A few minutes knocked off here and there to make the piece shorter. A wider range of instruments could have allowed more texture and nuance of emotion to come through. As the number of makers in the Orkestra was only a cricket team the emotional range was limited by the tonal range of the instruments. I admit to feeling a bit churlish even typing these words as the piece worked so effectively, and opened another door of discussion in the topic of how we treat newcomers to our sun burnt land. So I will say that it is a shame that this piece is not performed more often. It would be a useful activity to film the concert for viewing on one of the sensible stations, either ABC or SBS, followed by discussion with various people involved in the immigration debate. For all the joyful, liberating power of music, speech is often required to fine tune the discussion. But again this is just my opinion, and opinions as well all know are like assholes, in that everyone has one.


If I had the power of Orpheus, O Father, to bewitch the rocks to dance with me by my song...
Iphigenia in Aulis 1212 - Euripides

After this show ended I waddled my self over to the Peacock theatre to see a chamber opera starchild by Tasmanian composer Dylan Sheridan. Knowing nothing of the composer, or of the piece, I had high hopes. In many ways it is best to know very little about the artist. Like the rest of us, artists are often selfish little jerks, and too know too much about them only opens a series of doors into rooms of doubt, fear and envy.

The Peacock Theatre was a very different venue from the Princes Wharf. The Peacock Theatre was small, Princes Wharf was huge. The Peacock is intimate, the Wharf is one of those spaces that makes one think of old 1950's tropes of the post Atomic Age, the lonely battlefield and the individual lost in the crowd. Coming into the cosy space from the late afternoon angle of natural street sunlight, it took a few moments for my vision to settle into the gloom of the theatre. As I adjusted to the light the stage and the many details came into view. This was a small simple piece, with only four musicians plus some electronics controlled by the composer. One singer and a child who sings a song at the end of the opera.

It was of interest to see how this could be done. The conceptual idea of the opera is in the idea of the 'far-off song' carried on the wind. The endless song of crying far off, unable to be touched or to even heard properly. Is this a better way to think about this thought, is there a better way to discuss the ephemeral and the ineffable, than by using the structure of the dream?

Three loud claps a drum beat, a woman's scream. And here recalling Finnegans Wake we fall; not however into shame and disgrace, but into a dream.

Like some dreams the scene was sparse, alien, with few objects and interactions. The small space of the theatre was used to maximum effect. The musicians were a part of the stage set. Obvious when one looked, but with a turned head the musicians seemed to fade away to became Satie's famous furniture, or like the Silence in recent episodes of Doctor Who.

Opera is in many ways the greatest of all art forms, in that it using all other art forms. Music, dance, gesture, speech, painting and more. This is not to rank types of art, but merely to point out the unifying aspect of opera.  In this production the scenery was sparse, but effective in all ways. A small table, a floor of artificial grass, the netted and muted coverts for the musicians to play. But all of this fitted into the dream state of the work. With a small, empty arena for performing the action it is important for the lighting to 'do more work.' In this case the lighting was able to texture the simplicity of the set design, revealing and concealing in turn, imparting a dream quality to the commonplace  A thin aerosol filled the stage so the lights could fell like solid cubist rays of pure fiery light onto the dancing place. This misty, obscuring light did much to reveal the mental state of the singer and to add a solidity to the nebulous world of the dream.

Like a dream the opera moved from a lighthearted confusion to moments of terror and panic. Internal questions unknowable seeped into the dream story. External stimuli imposed themselves on and were incorporated into the dream nature, be it the whistling wind in the background, the abrupt alarm clock, a far off laughing transforming into crying and back again into laughter, the branches tap tap tapping on the window.

And the 'heroine' sang of her and our confusion, like Gaugain, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?  Soprano Allison Farrow used her voice to tell the story to move along from one scene to the next. Her voice became another instrument, an extra layering onto the simple yet complex music created.

After a day of listening to male bands and male artists it was more than nice to hear a woman's voice being brought to the fore.

This was a lovely little piece and one I would happily recommend. I can understand some not enjoying the work, but to my mind it was a success. This simple short chamber opera was enjoyed so much that the audience seemed surprised and a little disappointed when it somewhat abruptly, ended. But this seems a good thing, surely it is much better to leave the audience wanting more rather than saying you have gone on too long.

Don't know if I should feel vindicated in my view of this opera, or should I think I am completely wrong. Seems the Mercury and I are on the same page, as it were.


Back to the Princes Wharf dark Satanic mill. A piece entitled No input by Scot Cotterell. This was pretty much what the title promised. The artist engineer created a no-input system. Or to quote the artist 'Outputs taken from an audio mixer are fed back into the inputs of the same mixer, creating a contained, semi-controllable feedback system,' he says. Like a snake eating its own tail. Sort of.

A flat out experiment in questioning music, an attempt to find new ways to make music. With the smallest amount of input Scott was able to create beats and sounds which filled the Princes Wharf and vibrated into the space between the diaphragm and lungs. With the limitations of the task Scot set himself it was difficult to create more in depth fields of emotion or discussion. What was apparent was the deep evocation of the memory of the industrial proletariat. The deep rumble and machine like rhythm brought me back into the many production line jobs were I spent many mind numbing, soul destroying days of my youth. Speaking to a random concert goer the image that she had was of being within the bowels of a great ocean going ship with the massive engine burning and churning through the water.

Unfortunately for me, hunger over came me and I had to sneak away to find myself some food and a cooling soda water.

Graveyard Train are self described as six men playing men's instruments just as men were born to do. They played a frantic, powerful sort of foot stomping, hand clapping, sing along music. Which the crowd enjoyed immensely. The use of the screen to project film of the band playing was a nice touch, but it made me think of Dylan's comment about how he should not be on MTV, because people make horrible faces when they sing. Passion and the power, as it were.

The projecting onto the screen allowed the audience to get close and to see how the band played and smashed the nine pound hammer all night long. In an age of mounting catastrophe, of ever rising tensions and threats, it does seem to me that Graveyard Train would be the perfect band to make a new protest music. With their relentless driving rhythm and ability to involve the crowd with their singable lyrics they have the perfect engine to play as men were born to do, that is to break the chains. Rather than singing of werewolves and ghosts why not change a bit and sing about hunting down the bosses and the landlords and bankers who work to keep us down. With the poor boy look and sound rather than whistling past the graveyard, why not attempt to storm the gates of heaven?

This type of music would fit nicely into a more political stance. Why sing about fanciful zombie apocalypse, when we have one facing us in the prospect of the Tony Abbott led LNP government?


And so being one of the ones who the state government likes to call the toxic dump opposing uneducated hillbilly mobs I wandered my way back to my home in the bush fire ravaged Southern Beaches district. High beamed driving tailgaters followed me from the airport roundabout to the roundabout at Midway Point, where I was able to make a discrete turn to free myself from the great white 4WD that turned the cabin of my car into a scene from Close Encounters. Dark roads and a half moon, car headlights flashing the shiny gold green eyes of feral and native animals. Possums and pademelons (Thylogale billardierii: the smallest of the macropods), feral or domestic cats attempting to cross the road, or attempting apparent suicide. Slaughtered animals on the verge.

After a fitful sleep I was able to spend a good part of the day at the local beach playing in the relentless, powerful mosh pit of the cranky waves of Frederick Henry Bay. This, while leaving me battered and bruised put me in good stead for the David Byrne & St Vincent mosh pit. Which was more a happy go lucky ball of humid bodies eager to dance and catch a glimpse of their heroes than the life threatening mosh pits of the mainland festival circuit.

The band made less use of the feast of visual tools and toys at their disposal. Rather than projecting onto the screen behind the band, they seemed more interested in using their bodies for visual excitement of the audience. After each song the lights would fade and the band would rearrange themselves and change instruments. The lights would come up and the band would waltz or square dance or quadrille themselves around the stage. This gave an odd feeling to the show and turned the band into a mixture of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, an old timey revival meeting all overlain with hyper-American marching band styles. The various influences and styles were all tied together in the slightly stand offish manner of the artistic professional observer.

With a very horn heavy sound the band played something that was not rock and roll and not quite jazz or funk either. Something old, something borrowed, something as usual in the career of David Byrne unique.

I do not have the album Love This Giant, but have heard several tracks on Radio National, so I was anticipating a good show, and I was not in the least disappointed. I greatly enjoyed the way that the band worked and moved on stage. I have always liked my art to be ritualised and this show fit into my conceptions of what art could be very nicely. David Byrne had always been an artist who relies on gesture and movement to both conceal and reveal what he is saying. This was true when I saw him way back in the late 70's with the Talking Heads, all the way to this most recent work. The band also seemed to bring to life the idea of Andre Breton that if you are going to do some strange things, it is best to wear a suit and tie. I assume on the theory that it would make it seem stranger.

So happily and with wort cunning I was lightly tripping, wrapped up in my own cocoon while the speakers pounded and every stomp on the bass drum threatened to lift me off the ground, while the each breath into the trumpet was amplified by electronics until it blew across the sweaty heaving mass like a crossfire hurricane. Shadows jumped and jived as the lights pulsed and the shadow of the trumpet player glowed golden yellow like the apparition of an angel on the wide white wall.

And then in this ever rising tide of bliss Annie Clark introduced the band members, 12 or so talented musicians. One of the horn players was a young woman. And as she was introduced some lads felt the need to wolf whistle.

And like the poet who notices a mote in his eye, notices the minor inconvenience which changes and deflates their mood; in a flash the two days of music and art crystallised in my mind. It was a big old sausage festival. Of the dozens or scores of artists I saw and heard in the two days only a handful were women. This may or may not be the fault of the festival organisers. To my mind it goes deeper than the tastes and desires of the organisers, it seems to be a deep seated problem across all the various forms of art these days. 

This is why Guerrilla Girls ran a bus advertisement noting that only 3% of the artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC were women while some 83% of the nudes were of women.

This is why in England there was the need to set up the Orange Prize and here in Australia, after the 2011 Miles Franklin Award had no women short listed there was a need to set up the Stella Prize.

To my old fashioned mind this directly comes from the fact that the people who run the large museums, that run the publishing houses and recording studios are in the main men. Sexist or not I will leave it to you to judge, but we can at least say that like goes with like, and if men run things they will obviously see things from a male point of view and will agree with what their other male friends think.

Some may say that for music and art it does not matter, what matters is the art produced. But of course in this situation we are not only not getting women artists and musicians in the fore front, but we are not even able to understand what we are missing with so few women. For like all things art is political, as we must agree with the old feminist slogan that the personal is political, here we must agree that art while maybe not political on it's own, and much of what is art deals with issues not often found in the mainstream of political debate, we also have to see the importance of art in the creation of opinion and taste and the way that we look at and interact with the world.

While on the one hand we have to congratulate the organisers and staff and al involved in creating a rich and full program that ran over several days with few hiccups to upset the punter, we can on the other hand ask them to look a bit deeper and maybe even think about having another festival, maybe a MONA FEMA (Female Extravaganza of Music and Art) festival, or setting one day aside for only women musicians. For I am not one of those who think that a special festival for women artists would be a bad thing. While we live in an era of gender separation we must do all we can to overcome this divide.

Others may this is not needed, we have a female PM these issues are in the past. Other may say that a day set aside for women artists would be no more than a token effort. Some might even say that it goes against ideas of equality. I would say that we are already in a situation of inequality. This was highlighted by the annual Australian of the Year awards. The award has been awarded every year since 1960, meaning there have been 53 recipients, 11 of which have been women or some 20%. Including joint winners and the Seekers (who won in 1967) it is more like 60 winners of which 12 were women, or 48 have been men.

As women hold up half the sky it is rather glaring that only twenty percent have been so awarded.

To me this shows that gender issues are still important, and then the problems are systemic. This is not to specifically criticise the organisers of MONA FOMA, as they did a great job with the logistics and organising the event. There is much that happens away from the public eye, and the most important limiting factor would have to be availability of artists. But on the other hand it seemed to me a topic that had to be raised.

An Imaginary Review

Artist have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is
to change it.

I am not an artist, at least not a visual artist, so of course my
views do not count much more than a hill of beans, a bucket of warm
spit. Well maybe they count a little, as anyone can study - perhaps in
spare time between working and children and the invariable quest for
transcendence, and through patient study understand several of the
received wisdoms about art. One may understand and still be unable to
create art themselves. My concern is to review with having any actual
art works involved. I am not so much interested in 'attacking' an
artist or a single work, or group of works. My wish is to use this
essay as a skeleton. A skeleton that I can flesh out with my obscure,
unloved words. A skeleton I can use to conceptualise a review.

Driving in the car, damp, overcast, drizzle. I heard part of a static
interrupted interview on RN the other day. An artist, a photographer,
had created a series of black and white photos. The works were tidied
up with care, framed and put on the walls of the gallery with price
tags and a catalogue. The smoothness of modernity. The exhibit, as
they were by all accounts accomplished and beautiful works of art, was
a success.

I parked the car in front of the independent bookshop where I work,
and having moved from family car (a penis shrinking Tarago) to shop, I
switched on the radio to catch the end of the interview. I thought
about what I had heard long into the afternoon, as the blue skies of
spring wrestled with the early rising clouds of slow to leave winter.

More than any actual art works, which I had not seen, and most likely
will never see, it was his interview that I was interested in. Here I
am on sturdier ground in my ability to add anything to the
discussion. Specifically I was moved by one small sliver of the
interview. When the artist described her work as probing the
boundaries of art & photography.

The word probe was what caught my interest and prompted this
confessional. Our verb probe comes from the Latin probare, which has
several meanings. Which is understandable seeing how Latin was spoken
for many hundreds of years over the, at that time, largest empire in
the western world. These meanings can in the present context mean To try,
test, examine, inspect, judge of any thing in respect of its goodness,
fitness, etc.

I started to write this is the darkness of night, when windy sleet and
rain pelted down on the roof and windows of the wood fire heated
house. I can also see the word probe having a weaker connotation, in
the sense of an army probing the defences of the enemy. A section of
the army will move forward and test the enemy and gather
information. Usually they are ordered not to launch a full scale
attack. They just move into contact, find information out, and then
pull back into the relative comfort of their trench line.

Others will of course disagree with me, and that is to be expected. I
have a particular point of view, and a particular ideology and way of
seeing the world and our interactions with the world. Many will say
that probing and trying to describe and understand the world is
enough, some will go further and say that is all art can do. In this
they will argue against the idea of didactic art. That art should seek
what it wants and that it has no need to go further.

Again let me reiterate that I do not wish to be seen as attacking any
art works or any artist with this article. What I am saying, and am
happy to say, is that art needs to go past the probing of the
world. As the world moves into a dangerous new era. To paraphrase from
The Will to Power 'For some time now, our whole Western culture has
been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is
growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a
river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is
afraid to reflect.'

In short, in prosaic words, we are going to hell in a hand
basket. Never before have we had to ability to wreak global damage on
the planet. We have been able to destroy little bits here and there,
the over farming of Libya during the time of the Roman Empire, the
cataclysm that was Easter Island. Now we are able to create universal
catholic destruction. Gaia is seeking to shake off the poisonous
bacillus that is humanity.

Now is not the time for art to describe the world, not the time to
engage in art works. Now is time for art to stake a claim, to chose
sides and not look back. The goal is no longer to probe
boundaries. Art must become part of the dream factory, the imagining
of a new and better world. The borders are well understood, as are the
false dichotomies of male/female, black/white, right/wrong all of this
is understood. The boundaries are meant to be overstepped, erased. As
the chalk lines after a shouty and hard fought sweaty football match
fade and dissolve into the ground with the rain and dewy mornings, so
should the boundaries of art erode and wear away into the meaningless
dust from which they arose. 

Now the time has come for artists to gather their courage and storm
the gates of heaven.

My Years of Freedom

Some I entered a short story contest for Adult Literacy - using the usual arts bureaucracy sort of language the contest was '...for the creation of exciting, inspiring and challenging stories to support and encourage adult learning, and to highlight the fact that "It's never too late ... to learn to read".' I did not expect, but would have welcomed the cash, to win. And here you can find out just why my story lost.

---

By all accounts Charlie had led a hard life. He was born in 1965 in a
small nothing of a rust coloured falling down town in outback
Queensland. His Father worked as a truck driver at the local coal
mine. He worked long shifts doing dangerous work. Over the years the
stress and the drink took hold of him. One day the thunderbolt
struck. He was promptly fired after causing an accident on the work
site. Having made a bit of cash, betting on a horse race, he was well
and truly drunk at the time of the accident.

Charlie's family was forced onto relief, onto the dole. The family's
average everyday rural poverty was transformed into a desperate
struggle for survival. As the amount of money coming into the house
lessened so the threats and the bullying and the violence
increased. Charlie hated living in his own home, he hated living in
fear, but mostly he hated the fact that he was too young and little
and so could not protect his mother.

One small mercy was that Charlie's father would spend as much time
away from the family home as possible. He would try to scrounge up a
demoralising days work here and there, often getting paid in rum or
beer. Maybe helping a local cocky shore up a lazily leaning
fence. Sometimes going off to help muster cattle, or digging a trench
for an irrigation scheme. To make ends meet his mother grew
vegetables, and looked after some of the local kids. His father would
shoot feral animals, cashing the pelts in for the bounty the state
government offered. The children gorged themselves with thin rabbit
stew on such days.

There was never enough money. There was never enough food to feed the
growing children. There was never enough of anything. Whenever
Charlie's dad had more than a couple of bob he would shoot off down
the pub to drown his sorrows; in the selfish manner of the weak men
with families who drunkenly wallow in self-pity and self loathing. One
long humid steaming summer days eight hour long drinking session ended
with a fist fight. Inflated, ranting male drunken froth pride wounded
over some trivial slight. Charlie's father was arrested for the king
hit. A punch caused by nothing which in turn caused the victim to fall
with a sickening thud. The back of his skull shattering when landing
on the stone guttering of the footpath in front of the local hotel.

Before the sun set on that day two more isolated rural families were
plunged deeper into merciless poverty due to that one single,
mindless, drunken punch.

Before the father left the family home, before he started his stretch
in a cold hard cell, he had got Charlie's mother pregnant. The
pregnancy went well in the first trimester, nothing beyond the normal
nausea and aches and pains and cravings. With the terror of the house
being locked away, it was like a dark storm cloud had dissipated. For
Charlie it felt like the first rains that break a desiccating
drought. The heart lifting sensation of the cooling wind carrying the
smell of the coming rain. The far off rumble and flashes of
lighting. Charlie's mother seemed as happy as he ever remembered her
being. She had more time, now that the demands of her husband had
disappeared, to spend on her children. She would often be found
working in the small vegetable garden round the back. She could be
found feeding and fussing about the dozen or so chooks that a
neighbour kindly donated to the family. The kindness extended to the
effort of building a chook yard from old bits and bobs found around
the property to protect the precious birds from the senseless blood
lust of the dingoes and foxes and wild dogs.

And then one day, a month or so before the due date of her child
everything went wrong. The drought breaking rain become a raging
tempest. Charlie, being the eldest of the three children in that small
rusty dusty house, tried his childish best to save her life. With no
telephone, he yelled at his younger brother to run the mile and a half
to the nearest property to get help. By the time assistance came
Charlie was already hugging his dead mother, soundlessly sobbing
without end, unable to even articulate his grief. His little boy tears
mixing with the dark deoxygenated blood that poured without stopping
from out of his mother. His little boy innocence poured out of him,
tears and snot and sweat mixed with the blood that searched out and
found the many tiny cracks and joins in the hand made floor and
dripped onto and mixed with the rusty dry dirt so full of the
heartache and betrayal of the history of this land. His breathless
brother sweaty and covered with dust, his infant sister sitting in the
blood, slapping her hand and crying for reasons she was too young to
understand.

It would be decades before he saw his sister again. He never spoke
with his brother again after that day, the younger brother had been
killed in a car accident.

Needless to say that with such a shocking start to life Charlie had
very few chances as he grew into adulthood. He was separated from his
brother and sister. They were all sent to different foster
families. Not knowing where his siblings were, Charlie was shuttled
from agency to agency, sent to a series of unsatisfactory foster homes
and brutal or indifferent schools. He spent most of his time angry,
fighting with teachers, fighting with the other students, fighting the
bullies, preying on the weak. He banged his head against the brick
wall education system. So the young Charlie, alone in the world, was
overlooked and misplaced and eventually given up on by the
system. Soon he was not bothering to show up for school. He had
dropped out of school more or less completely by the time he was
fourteen. He could read a bit, but only with difficulty and he was not
able to write more than his name.

At a young age he, like his father before him, found himself locked
away in the a cold in the winter and stinking hot in the summer
Victorian era prison. He had tried to rob a bottle shop. He was
arrested when an off duty police officer unluckily entered the bottle
shop at the time Charlie was demanding of the publican's nephew all
the money in the till. Charlie was twenty five years old, and he was
stuck away in prison. He had lost all contact with his sister and
brother. He had refused to even speak to his father when he was
paroled, and Charlie's father was only too happy to ignore and reject
his troubled son. Charlie no longer even knew how to get in contact
with any uncles or aunts. By any sort of reckoning, unless something
was to seriously change in his life and quickly, he was destined to
a life of poverty, drug abuse and petty crime, and most likely an
early death.

His luck, however, was about to change. Who could imagine that a stint
in prison could be a life changing and life affirming event? As luck
would have it he was housed in the same block with a tall, strong,
handsome and charismatic aboriginal elder. Not many of the prisoners
knew his real name they all called him 'Goanna'. He laughed his rusty
rough as the outback eroding dust laugh when questioned about his
name. 'Everyone calls me Goanna, cause I used to like to fuck every
woman I met. See the goanna has two dicks, and all the ones in my mob
they would say I fuck like a goanna. Name sorta stuck. One day I met
up with this nice white girl, she was sweet, and we had a good time
together. Until her racist dad found out about us. The bastard was a
local cop. I was eighteen, and she was only seventeen, so the bastard
did me on statutory rape charge. That was years ago, but if you are a
black man and you catch the eye of the police, well let's just say I
have been in and out of gaol ever since.' He slapped the green
custodial painted walls and laughed. 'This place is my country now,
and this mob is my mob. Eh?'

One day Goanna, who was also a member of the Communist Party took
Charlie aside. Standing over the younger man, he said, "Mate. Blokes
like us, we're shit, our lives are shit. We're shit. We got nothing,
we got nothing in our past, and our future is more of the same,
eh. Past, future, present it is all fucked. We just got shit, eh? Our
life is a constant struggle everyday. You just wanna drink and drug it
all away eh? You only get one chance. How do you think you can make a
better life for yourself, eh?'

Charlie thought, and after a little while he replied, 'We gotta get
ourselves a whole heap of money, I reckon.'

'How you going to do that boy? Eh, how you gonna do that?' Charlie
mouthed words, but no sound came out. 'You gonna rob a bottle shop, or
a bank? That will just bring you back here.' The silence of Charlie
was answer enough for Goanna. 'Books eh. Books are the weapons you
need boy, books are the tools which will allow you to build a better
life. You want me to teach you to read?"

Charlie thought for a moment, He remembered how mother would sometimes
read from an old tattered fairy book to him at bedtime. She had wanted
him to go to school, to stay in school. Who knows how things would
have been for me if she had lived. I owe it her, to her memory. 'What
the fuck have I got to lose, I've got five years in this shit mound,
what else am I to do with my time? What the fuck else...'

With Goanna working with him and urging him on, and picking him up
when he fell Charlie quickly built up his confidence and
abilities. And soon he made his teacher smile. When the screws found
out what was happening they saw to it that Goanna was moved to a
different wing of the prison. Charlie tried to write him letters, but
his spelling and his handwriting was atrocious, and his grasp of
grammar was not much better. So he redoubled his efforts, it was not
enough to be able to hunt and peck at the words and struggle to make
sense of sentences, he had to gain fluency. He had to work
harder. After a few months Charlie was able, with pride, to send and
receive letters to his friend and mentor, Goanna.

I first heard this amazing, inspiring story in an interview with the
local ABC radio station on the National Day of Literacy. Charlie spoke
with passion about the story of his life. I felt the need to track him
down and hear his story and to write it down. He was joy to be
with. We had many long conversations. Charlie, not his real name,
would not let me use a tape recorder, or even to take shorthand
notes. I would franticly scribble in my notebook after our
meetings. So there may be mistakes, and misquotes in the story, but
even it is not exactly the story of Charlie, there are plenty of
stories of men and women who have overcome the odds and turned their
lives around. Almost all of these positive results were the result of
education. Charlie is but one of many. Granted more people fall by the
wayside, but we can feel a certain reverse schadenfreude when we are
able to hear about the victory of the true battler.

I will leave the final summing up to Charlie. I have done my best to
accurately capture his words.

It seems absurd to say, but those years in prison were my years of
freedom, the time when I was most free. I devoured everything I got my
hands on. I attacked learning with all the hunger of a sailor in a
knock shop after a long stint at sea. I read the Bible, a book which
was easy to get in prison. I read tattered, battered dog eared and
smudged old westerns, I read the letters to Penthouse which circulated
around the prison uni like currency. The Salvation Army officer who
came to visit us got me copies of classics like Plato and
Shakespeare. I stayed off the drugs and the harsh gaol house grog. I
got my hands on a dictionary, and using Malcolm X as my guide I copied
out every damn word of that book. How much I learned from that effort,
I can never say, but it was my infinite university in a small
room. All the knowledge of the world can be found in a good
dictionary.

With my new found skills I became a hero among the prisoners. I was
able to make a few dollars and pouches of tobacco, to earn some prison
respect by writing out letters for criminals to their family. I wrote
heart felt love letters to wives, girlfriends or boyfriends. I
modified angry replies for Dear John letters. I also wrote letters to
lawyers and social workers. Too many times I found that the prisoners
often drew the short straw, as they were not able to read, and so were
not able to fully understand the intricacies of the cases against
them. I am proud to say that I was able to help quite a few of these
sad broken men, many of whom were suffering from mental illness and
should not have been in prison. This lasted until the authorities
understood what I was doing and how I was helping the inmates. For
many of the cases against them were weak, and being ignorant the
accused ones were able to be intimidated into accepting gaol terms
that they did not deserve. The prison staff used the fact that I was
able to get my year twelve diploma as a weapon against me and my
fellow inmates. The governor organised for me to be paroled early. It
seems funny now, but I was sad to leave the prison, I felt I was doing
good work, that I had found my calling.

I was thrown back into the world, with a new set of clothes, and
$75.40 in an account that my 'wages' for prison work had been
deposited. After a few months of confusion and despair, caused by
adjusting to being free and at not seeing my prison friends, I roused
myself. My life of freedom began by my going to the local library and
pouring over records. Soon I was able to happily track down my sister,
and sadly I learned about the death of my brother.

I enrolled in and graduated from the local university. Now I fly
around the world and I work talking about the problems caused by
illiteracy, and advocating for prisoners rights. I have a family and a
future. I will try to instil a love of books in my children. Goanna
was right, books are the tools we need, the tools that can allow us to
lead the life we want to lead. Books are weapons that allow working
people to fight back, not just for ourselves, not just for our
immediate families, but rather for all of the poor and vulnerable and
oppressed the world over.

---

I am in the fortunate group of people who are able to read and write. I learned to read in school, as a child, so I have no real understanding of the depth of problems for those who are not as lucky as I have been .

I do know that for years adult literacy was a very important goal and organising tool for a revolutionary proletariat. Too important, I think, to leave to the arts administrators and the beauacrats and time wasters at DEEWR, but that is apparently our fate in the current age.

Not, as I said, being unable to read, on hearing of this contest my mind at once jumped back to the half remebered fragment of a reading of the biography of Malcolm X. He spoke of reading the dictionary in his time in jail, and transcribing all the entries. This was the revolutionary edge of adult literacy I had in my mind when writing this piece.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader as to how well, or how poorly I hit my target. The winners can all be seen here.