two fun-sized poems found in a journal.

1.
young man in a funeral suit
barcode on the bank door
empty tram lacks character of
sweaty school uniform or foreign language practicalities.
instead the peeling paint and beer on the floor asks
if this is the future, now what?

2.
dali's clocks are a picture of a girl
in vaudeville cottons;
escaping the
still heat of hot winds
through cities clean
of interference.

balaclava II

art deco on the roof
whilst wind blows through the beard
of homeless harry.

one german backpacker smokes sloppily
whilst his coffee cools.
i called it Red Terror
(you called it ironic)

the clutched bags and closed minds
eyes darting gossip of
out and insiders
fails to keep us warm at night.

we toss and turn over
3000 years of maltreatment. what Figes
said was right;
we are all, social, historians, now.

regardless, the bolsheviks were unable to
transform themselves from the underground
to the legitimate

so we too hide in doorways and under beds.

the trust that They profess - the unharmed and the young and the outsides looking in - doesn't soothe us.
these habits are hard to give up.

on balaclava

hot espresso dribbles down throats
while old jewish women compare
grandchildren and superstitions.
a remnant from gypsy days
plays his piano accordian too loudly.
kosher meats hang in windows
whilst hairless women in
heavy hung skirts act as pilgrims;
children follow blind
to the next festival,
celebrating the pasts they have not lives
(but have to live with)
our yom kippur is palestine
and our jerusalem
is no longer a safe place.
(but that's not what the bakeries or the zionist camps tell us. that's not what exists in the minds of thick pouches of skin beneath heavy eyes of our grandparents.)

these are the faces i will always carve

lino prints of the
men i grew up with;
pouches of flesh and
wiry wisps of hair you
push under your hat
litter my bedroom floor.

several of my favourite scenes of all time

CAN'T GO PAST VIRGINIA WOOLF.
i love craziness.




also; i love coffee black and egg white and this film in general, but i think renee is my favourite. it's weird simplicity female/male/yes. plus the girl is gorgeous.



i suspect no explanation is necessary:

on the topic of dreams

i went to this play the other night. it was good. surprisingly so.
actually there were two. that's besides the point. but there was this scene in the first one - which was a non-narrative piece about the subconscious and was entirely set inside this girl's dreams - where she dreamt about commercial products solving all her problems.

oily marks on walls

developing a strange teary attachment to this electronic thinkfest.
pretend communication. email intimacy. i love/hate this.

i'm terrified about, i don't know what. on and on and on it goes.
scribblebrain.

i saw a painting the other day that was what steven hawking's dreams would look like. geometry and exactness floating around in cloudy pinks and blues and whites.
my dreams just look like mad girl's love song by sylvia plath.
with more abstract additions of people i don't really know and less blatant romanticism. only a little, though.

so, malcolm turnbull, hey?
seven dissinters.
do-nothings, apparently, have more support than weak support of a shitty bill.
i vote a mass political suicide. the potential member for higgins who stresses the presence of her Husband and Family Values in her pamphlets was at the train station this morning. i'm mostly just excited at the prospect of greens in my electorate.

enough pseudo connected rant for tonight. goodnight.

origin[al]s

there's something inately comforting about the grampians. partially it's the family history - the mother growing up and the little old ladies who invite us inside for champagne for lunch while she tells us about my grandfather. the hundreds and hundreds of pictures people pull out for us to look at and the art on the walls and the hot, hot hot hot weather and the sand in the shoes and the kangaroos and rabbits and one lone emu. olive trees and old couples making us tea and all of it.
partially it's just the town itself. we walk through the main street. buy shoes. find a health food shop. what are the chances? make friends with the owner. she makes me a soy chai and tells me about her little boy. he runs around.
if people are this open, don't they run out of things to say to each other, eventually? does everybody just know everyone else's stories?

goodnight internet. one day we'll all work out our cultural confusions. self realization in literature will die a slow and largely unnoticed death. it's kinda boring, anyway.

i miss this place i've never lived in.

hit me with a flower, andy warhol. adieu friends.

newold books

"bonjour.
parlez-vous franglais?
c'est un doddle.
si vous etes un fluent english-speaker, et si vous avez un VCE francais, fraiglais est un morceau de gateau.
un VCE level de french est normalement inutile. un nothing. un wash-out. les habitants de la france ne parlent pas VCE french. ils ne comprennent pas VCE french.
un cours de VCE francais est un passeport a nowhere.
mais maintenant 'Let's Parler Franglais!' vous offre une occasion d'utiliser votre schoolboy french!
avec ce livre, vous pouvez etre un maitre linguistique, amazer vos amies, sentir une nouvelle confiance, developper vos muscles, perdre le flab et attracter les birds.
pas mal, hein?
le franglais n'est pas un gimmick. il n'est pas un quick-improvement method. il est simplement un wonder-new-product qui remplace tous les autres wonder-new-products sur le market. non, straight up, squire, nou ne le regretterez pas si vous achetez 'Let's Parler Franglais!'. Tell you what, pour vous, pas $6. Pas $5. Pas meme $4.35. Pas $3. Mais $2.99!
je suis crazy. a ce prix, je fais le give-away.
un copy? bon. cash sur le nail. merci, mate.
maintenant je vais me rendre scarce.
voici le fuzz.
toodle-oo."

- Miles Kington

big clean out of the room.

shaking off the dusty cape
because she used to love it.

in preparation for my departure for paris/inspired by the lovely room of pretty things i slept in last night, i decided to come home and clean. my room is messier. but i've thrown out junk magazines and replaced them with my new typewriter. i threw out my trashy books and now there's space on my bookshelf for zines and all the books that have been lying around in piles on my floor and bed.
whilst cleaning i found this: (an unsent letter from me to an old boyfriend. written during an art exam. better than finding money or food, even.)

"Dear Boy,
I do not like contemporary sculpture. I do not like it one bit. It's a pile of wank. Ugly, wank. How unfortunate for the art world, that there are people making godawful trucks in art galleries and pieces of al foil and a fucking chop saw.
Studio Arts exam, what the fuck is that? 15 marks on perspective? Now that's just lazy.

There is a quote, I will find it for you one day, but it makes me happy. It's about fuck, we get it, art is everyday objects, art is ugly, art is difficult and art is everywhere. Don't dwell. As an artist, it's not your job to create something irritating. Something petty. It's no longer revolutionary to take a picture of garbage and be like oh, fuck, consumerist modern society, cry. It's not for the artist to keep trying to prove a point that's been made long enough. Yes, art is anything. Yes, that includes gladwrap. Yes, that includes 1000 hours of video footage of a plain white wall.

The role of art - as I see it - now - it's not to prove what pop art already has. It's to create something real. It's not to dwell. It's forward. It's making something, in a world that feels nothing - be it good or bad - that creates feeling, or meaning, something that doesn't imitate or make fun of life, but embraces it.
I'm so sick of cynicism in art. We're fucking alive.

I hope you agree/disagree. I love you.
Casi"

book-binding-love

feeling like my habit of collecting pretty pieces of paper is now not so odd.

currently in the process of many different projects. i hope that they will all kind of come together on their ownsome. but i will maybe need to do some work and invest in some quality time with needle thread and piles and piles and piles of paper lying around waiting to be turned into books.

there will be scribble.

hit my head

and now i can't find any of the words that i'm looking for. like right now, i want the word that describes when the line of poetry carries over and the punctuation doesn't follow. i was going to write about how much i like it when it's done right but with my mind all fuzzy right now i'm not going to achieve very much at all, i don't think.
i opened google to ask it something but forgot what it was.

they don't love you like i love you.

take a long big sigh of relief.
all your choices are your own. there's enough time to read until your eyes hurt. smoke until your fingers are black. knit a motherfucking scarf and learn to make really good coffee.

all my friends are finishing school and it makes me feel old.

all my friends are getting married and it makes me feel old.

jay says, be a man.
i say, get a typewriter.
you say,


you could never kiss a tory boy without wanting to cut off your tongue again;
(and this sums up the reasons for the failure of our relationship. all the cocktails in the world won't erase how you last voted.)

hold your breath.

scrabble club

for luna sauce

"the artist is the creator of beautiful things.
to reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
the critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
the highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of auto-biography.
those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. this is a fault.
those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. for these there is hope.
they are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. books are well written, or badly written. that is all.
the nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
the nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
the moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
no artist desires to prove anything. even things that are true can be proved.
no artsit has ethical sympathies. an ethnical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
no artist is ever morbid. the artist can express everything.
thought and language are to the artist intruments of an art.
vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. from the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.
all art is at once surface and symbol.
those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
when critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
we can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. the only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
all art is quite useless. "

- oscar wilde

thousand pound day out

on toulouse lautrec

you were right,

there is nothing to cover up, let the brush strokes

bruise the canvas, let the nouns and drunken adjectives

fall out like broken teeth from an old woman.

a brief tribute to anti-folk, summer nights, and soviet russia.

my procrastination brings me once again to the land of the pretendingtostudy, filled with jeffrey lewis singing about his pretty drawings of the russian revolution. he should make illustrative books for all of my exams. i don't care if they're blatantly leftist.
i will possibly fail this subject purely for my inability to condemn communism.
i like lenin despite his political cunning, disdain for the peasantry, what is to be done, forced dissolution of the constituent assembly AND hanging of kulaks. fuck you richard pipes. no need for black and white-isms.

also; i like trotsky's glasses. like, i REALLY like trotsky's glasses. i paint pictures of him and my art teacher is a little bit sceptical.

"Trotsky was a son-of-a-bitch dude, but the greatest jew since Jesus." - Orlando Figes

disagree. woody allen wins.

"it's a film about a weedy jewish guy searching for love in manhattan, who eventually realizes he hates everything."


overquotedunderstood.

vonnegut meets malouf

me oh my i like this.

Patrick Pittman from Patrick Pittman on Vimeo.

reflection

nowhere man

burning all my essays. not even mother-fucking-ironically. just burning them.
i've killed several forests with the amount of trees immma be pulling down with my revision. dear jesus. i'm over it.

essays fail. charcoal, born ruffians and v.woolfe win.

also; watching the time flip past until the excuses get tired and so do i, so i go to sleep and wake up somewhere, sometime else.
everything is still there.
i'm not quite.

at home it's sunny and at school there are people. inside there's food and tv and books and movies and outside there's cigarettes and cats and bicycles and coffee to buy and people to see. even in the study room, though there are books and pencils and computer and charger and practice exams and highlighters, there is also a space on the floor where one could lie in the foetal position and psychoanalyze one's dreams or hypothesize about the meaning of the universe or think about what to eat for lunch.

if one was so inclined.

lets leave here. drop everything and just leave. i don't even like suitcases. or clothes on backs. just, nothing. there's so much to say and so little time. oh my.

late night poetry

Your single bed can’t hold us both
So I sit cross-legged on the floor
With nothing to be said but
Comments on our matching sets of
Hair in a pile and motionless heat of two long days and nights reading
Nothing but Virginia Woolf and eating nothing but ice blocks
(They froze small holes in our exterior)

We fiddle with smalltalk
Respectively, one and two
Fall between us we ignore what has only been said in dull-humming light
What have three, four, five ever done for us we ask in earnest not knowing that
Within the tangled fingers shiver cold and touch palms
There is a wolf
And hungry silence chewing us to pieces
Whilst her stillness nestles.

So this is it, I say and stand, but do not leave.
Yes.
This is it.
(Six, seven, eight, nine)

time to run away and join the circus

also, get a job in a bookstore drinking wine and reading dusty books all day.

i have gotten into the habit of

writing abstractionist poetry late at night at other peoples' houses for them to discover in the morning. or sometimes, for ME to discover in the morning.
gardo calls them raps. but i am no rapper. nonono.

good luck to you if i have, at some point, hijacked your notebook/computer/walls to write on. heh.

other habits which warrant mention:
- watching other people rap about the french revolution to pretend i'm doing homework when really, i'm just on youtube
- lurking facebook to avoid work
- planning festival-love
- changing in and out of too many clothes. ridiculous amounts of Being A Giant Girl.
- downloading too much new music. all in the name of procrastination. yes.
- photohoarding

things that are a little bit bullshit.

- hungry beast

talking to

a boy who's sharing a joint with rob schnieder.
this is my first time playing in australia, he says.
he's all scratchy-voiced nice-venue good-beer and
solo on the gee-tar.

please and thankyou.

il semble que

i have planned my life up until i leave with no room for alterations. it's ultimate procrastination. months and months of it. i'm putting off getting into anything serious, putting off getting a real job, putting off reading my ever-growing list of books, putting off writing my zine or editing my short story or making confrontations or fixing things with people or breaking things to fix them later. because it's exams then france then Serious Year of Study then sitmyexams decidemyfuture and from there, i don't know. but i'm putting off committing to anything and everything until that point.

playlistfun

stephanie says - the velvet underground
judy is a punk - the ramones
spanish bombs - the clash
god save the queen - sex pistols
where did you sleep last night? - nirvana
TKO - le tigre
rock'n'roll high school - the ramones
bob - nofx
lisa says - the velvet underground
main offender - the hives
los angeles is burning - bad religion

dalilove

halloween

contemplating costumes.

list so far looks comme ca:

alice in wonderland

little red riding hood

karen o

jane from daria

alex delarge

playing dressups is lovely. i think it should be done more often.

the cutups

sideways poor photography. but still. you get the idea.

good morning.

two.

that's all for today, mr antichrist

"None of this fits together? How very true! A woman you leave behind to go to the movies, an old man to whom you have stopped listening, a death that redeems nothing, and then, on the other hand, the whole radiance of the world. What difference does it make if you accept everything? Here are three destinies, different and yet alike. Death for us all, but his own death to each. After all, the sun still warms our bones for us."

fluxus

sufjan stevens in a literature class

kurtz, there is no line.

‘I think [the wilderness] has whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude – and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core...’

‘There was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there. They only showed that Mr Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him – some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, would not be found under his magnificent eloquence’

there is a conflict in the human heart between rational and irrational, between good and evil, and good does not always triumph.

photo

very nicely

drunk.
the recorder lady and her boyfriend with the 1990 computer are asleep legs splayed mouths open.

"heels?" he asks, "you're making an effort"
i tell him i'm not.
blisters rub at my heels. we both know i'm lying.
it's ok. it's the game we play.
we'll never/always be mediocre.

write life only slightly out of proportion.
no need to distinguish between
sky and sea. horizon? no.

___

I missed three trams to finish my last, cheap, cigarette. He holds onto my hands and says, they're cold, you're cold. You know that, I tell him, and he nods.
That's life.
I avoid eye contact.
There's something on your mind, he says.
No.
You're cold. Really, cold.

yoko

misplaced apostrophies are much worse than none at all.

free tom waits download has made my morning.
also literature teacher: 'please. apostrophies. they're easy. just get them right. please.'

bad grammar, dislike. bad grammar in english teachers, dislike.
english teachers who correct people with bad grammar.
love.

\the horror

protest movement pictures. yesplease.

bad posture.

let's be beatniks.

when you wear sunglasses, people look you in the eye.

sometimes kissing people you shouldn't kiss is a very good idea.

stacy says, fuck it '09, and i say, i don't know.

being young. yes.

responsibiliototototototo. no.

paint

something a little more pretty, please.

texttypelove. yes yes yes yes yes.

story of my life.

always with the procrastination.
i could write a novel in the time i spend avoiding it.
bake cakes
clean the house
watch a movie
paint ink all over your hands and feet
annotate your folio
read several non compulsory books
write a blog
send text messages implying you are so, so free to do anything, that does not involve study
have another cigarette
buy some orange juice
friendly facebook stalk

lazy. i think that's the word i'm looking for.

everything's a negative of everything else. these days i look at the world like a great big set of undeveloped pictures, and all the people are unduly black and their hair is white and the negative of me is, i don't know.

we tried to work it out.
we think it's a really hardcore basketball jock. someone who understands sport-talk and wakes up early For The Team and really enjoys motivational running around.
or a Bush loving redneck
i wouldn't count on it.

the negative of lydia is awkward clunky person, and the negative of brendon is shy boy that doesn't know what to say. the negative of lee is ultra macho.
it's easier to define what you DON'T want in a partner, than what you do want.

my phone refuses to ring when i want it to.
i should work. probably. or go procrastinate elsewhere.

robespierre, what a crazy motherfucker.

"...Illness had kept Robespierre away from the Convention since his appearance at the Festival of the Supreme Being. His reappearance in the National Convention on 26 July and his speech which, included threates to unnamed deputies, rallied his opponents. Robespierre claimed:

Every scoundrel insults me. Let them prepare hemlock for me. I will wait on these sacred seats. I have promised to leave a formidable testament to the oppressors of the people. I bequeath them the truth...and death.

The next day, as he attempted to speak, the deputies broke into cries of 'Down with the Tyrant! To the Guillotine!'. The deputy Vadier rose and listed accusations against him, at which stage, Robespierre lost his composure.


Rushing up and down the steps of the rostrum, he shouted 'Death! Death!' at each deputy he pointed to.
Thuriot was chairman of the Convention, Robespierre turned to him and shouted 'For the last time, will you give me time to speak, President of murderers?' His voice then broke and into the silence someone called out 'Ah! Danton's blood chokes you.' When he collapsed on a seat, he was violently shoved: 'Monster! How dare you? That was Vergniaud's seat!'"


To follow:
1 jaw shooting suicide attempt
101 executions
5 factions in the convention
2 cheeky muscadins
3 major schools of historiography
of which i may or may not have made up quotes for. good one.

spiegeltent withdrawal symptoms.

probably the most beautiful fun-tent to never come to melbourne this season.

following on from the introduction of amazing cabaret loveliness that is the butterfly club; i miss spiegeltent. not that i'll be in melbourne during spiegel season. but still. come back please. we can play dress-ups and talk to the boy in the top hat and have nice cocktails and watch your brilliant gypsy music and jazz music and interpretive fucking dance. croque monsieur and amanda palmer will come back. there will be tim minchin-ing and ali macgregor-ing and people watching while waiting in lines and overpriced coffee and sleeping in the grass. we good?

"A European Mirror Tent - the ultimate cabaret and music salon.

Spiegeltents are hand-hewn pavilions used as traveling dance halls, bars and entertainment salons since they were created in the early 20th century. There are only a hand-full of these unique and legendary ‘tents of mirrors’ left in the world today. Built of wood, mirrors, canvas, leaded glass and detailed in velvet and brocade, each has its own personality and style.
The most beautiful of the last remaining Belgian Spiegeltents, The Famous Spiegeltent, was built in 1920 by master craftsmen Oscar Mols Dom and Loius Goor. This Grande Dame has spent her lifetime at the bequest of festivals and fairgrounds throughout Europe and beyond, playing host to the world’s greatest cabaret artists, musicians and circus burlesque performers.

Since Marlene Dietrich sang ‘Falling In love Again’ on The Famous Spiegeltent stage in the 1930’s, its magic mirrors have reflected thousands of images of artists, audiences and exotic gatherings.

The Famous Spiegeltent is the very essence of a festival club, ‘kabaret salon’ and intimate concert hall. Like every old theatre, her ghosts travel with her, woven into ballooning velvet canopies, circular teak dance floor and stained, cut-glass windows. Her intimate booths, ornate bar and beveled mirror columns hold a million secrets while her glorious Art Nouveau chandelier, or trapeze rig, swings overhead.

The Famous Spiegeltent is a mainstay of the Edinburgh Festivals season and is a star in her own right, hosting parties, concerts, clubs and a myriad stunning performances. She has launched the careers of countless artists and travels to the four corners of the world from Edinburgh to Melbourne, Brighton to Montreal.

The Famous Spiegeltent embodies the living spirit of her operational team of the cheekiest hat checkers in the business. She is a living legend and will forever remain the stuff of dreams!
Welcome to the unique world within a world of The Famous Spiegeltent!

The Spiegelmaestro "