Monday, November 30

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.

Friday, November 27

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.

Thursday, November 26

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.

Monday, November 23

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.

Sunday, November 22

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

Friday, November 20

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"

Thursday, November 19

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.

Tuesday, November 17

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.

Thursday, November 12

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

Monday, November 9

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.

Saturday, November 7

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.

Thursday, November 5

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.

Tuesday, November 3

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)

Monday, November 2

time to run away and join the circus





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

Sunday, November 1

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