frisco

going to san fran where the bookshops first published howl. the beat museum beckons.
all these places; the house on the hill where kerouac lived with the cassidy's, big sur where ginsberg ran to get away from the world, harvey milk's hill and the publishers and the gay bars and the vegan coffee shops and the record stores; i'm excited for these most of all.

the clouds float past her face and it's a little like being in love.

blank pages like a couple comfortable in the silence of wind and waves; avoiding the squawking of company that runs shallower.
there is nothing needy about emptiness.
there is nothing ugly about quiet.

byron

the shop on the corner has jewels and silver clinking in the wind until you run your hands through them and the shopkeeper with her one purple dreadlock smiles at you. there is soy and you can make yourself a cup of tea and take off your shoes and watch the seagulls slip over the ridges in the sand; until the sun goes down, and then the tie dye looks as though it's glowing in the twilight, and you can walk home barefoot if you don't mind the rub of sand between your toes.

reading mid life crisis books approximately 15 years too early

"Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But they are both equally true."
- Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

the ending of something which i am yet to write the beginning for.

"... the romanticism had faded: without hot water, the baby cried, without fresh food, he cried, and without sleep, his parents, behind doors or late at night, they cried too.
Shivering on the step with a blanket wrapped around him, Jones told Betty; I'm sick, he said, I'm sick and they say I might die.
She stood up.
I thought I heard the baby cry, she said, but he was asleep, and they both knew it, so she sat back down and took his hand.
I'm only young, Betty, he said, I'm only young and now I'll never be old.
Now that's not, necessarily, entirely true, she said quietly, because, she thought, to look at us, who would have thought we were so young? He started to cry and it embarassed them both. She moved to touch him, but hesitated. There was nothing she could do but live; and nothing he could do but die, and nothing that the baby could do but grow up thinking he was invincible until he didn't, and by that stage, he was as good as dead, anyway. No, she decided, pulling out a cigarette, she would live."

anti-school.

in equal parts the yellowed street lights, like old cotton
fill the holes of winter sun.
midday reeks of no-one
but nighttime solitude is communal:
in the rush
smooth tyres on concrete
patchworked advertising / melange of housing.

this city
can't make up
its fucking mind

"it's an improvement on zero, isn't it?"

coffee leaves a stain
on my stomach;
burnt skin a deep, dark red
shallow breaths and
deep, chesty cars cough.

i thought you would.

japan: travel list #1

"Lovers hang padlocks on this statue at the top of Venus Bridge. They write a message, lock it then throw away the key. Those steel wires are unhooked from time to time to clear out the locks. Some couples don't use the statue though; you can see padlocks hanging here and there all over the bridge and around the park."

found here

amitriptyline

inept.

tomorrow's escape, we fail to understand that
change
between the silence of six and that of eighteen
is a damp web
centred in what cigarettes and cask wine
cannot dry.

the suggestions of
a history dictates
cheek kisses do not give
and hand shakes do not take.

what you need to do is simple;
what you will, and can, is not.

today is taking knowledge
from untrained teachers and the
aspiration of change.
growing older is not the answer.

from the walls of a cubicle

"before i could read, i could pull a book of poetry off the bottom shelf,' she'd told me, and went on to write such awful odes, working in a call centre and paying half the rent. though the other half belonged to me i do not live there.

i watched the goosebumps crawl around me; bare legs in the rain. wind whips a cigarette and next door i hear her cough, heartily, before falling back asleep. the lights are still on.

outside a man asks patrons for spare change. i shout him a beer. the nameless and the incomplete are no more crazy than the average fucker out there on the street, but who's he - and who are we - to know that now? he leaves but the space of conversation remaines, not in free verse but without grammar or metre or ryhme. though she will always carve meaning, sometimes, it must be said, words mean nothing. there is no noise to fill the silence.

last summer on that same veranda she explained to me the visuality of good poetry, and in the dust on the window drew a wonky silhouette.
"this," she said pointing, "is a poem, and it draws the author's face."

fangirl

"THE SMELL OF OLD BOOKS, 1970′S LEATHER BOOT HARNESSES, WORN IN JEANS, SAM COOKE, BENAH MINI SATCHEL, RIABOOSH.COM, BIG SUR, TAILORED SHORTS, JUMP ROCKS, TAN MARNI WEDGES, COEN BROTHERS FILMS, PEDRO GARCIA BOOTS, BUNNY LOVE, COLORED SUNGLASSES, MARIA’S ENVELOPES, MY TIBETAN SHERPA RUCKSACK, KARLA SPECTIC SCALLOP DRESS, AIRPORT TERMINALS, MAPS OF CONSCIOUSNESS, BLUE BIRD BY BUKOWSKI, MY BOYFRIEND’S ART, DESOLATE ART GALLERIES, CASHMERE, HUNTER S. THOMPSON, MY FATHER’S RECORD COLLECTION, JÉRÔME DREYFUSS MESSENGER BAG, SUEDE TAN BUCKET HAT, WARM SOCKS, JEFF BUCKLEY, MY CAMEL COAT, FIGS, LAYING ON THE STREETS OF MELBOURNE, THE DREAMERS, THE SWEET SOUND OF FRIENDS PLAYING MUSIC, SNEAKY HYDRANGEA PICKING, MY NUDE LEATHER BACKPACK AND FOREVER BEING YOUNG"


here.

speaking of art and life and things you can wear, i'm going to knit myself a big chunky warm dress. it will not be knitted before next winter at least. but i am quite a bit excited.

canadian poet makes jewish folk music

"...like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it."

sharing cognac with Sharon

liturgy:
"A man's origin is from dust and his destiny is back to dust, at risk of his life he earns his bread; he is likened to a broken shard, withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shade, a dissipating cloud, a blowing wind, flying dust, and a fleeting dream."

starts of middles of short stories.

"In the garage of a student share house she wraps around him, disconnected from the taste, salty, and the sound, desperate, he lets out, by the barrier of bitter drinks and the compartmentalization of time. He pulls on her hair and the changing face of their friendship chokes.
There is not much she can do. "

insomniac

when you don't sleep you instead stay up late reading books about people that do much more interesting things than you like one live in new york two road trip around everywhere three write nice poetry that makes sense four take crazy drugs five have nicknames for the cities you love six smoke a lot because right now whenever i see a smoker i feel a bit disgusted so it's not possible even if i wanted it which i don't seven or is it eight live in the moment be a dropkick be a gypsy be a beatnik and never ever learn to be a real person.

ouais

humanisme.

(i can feel you shiver but there is only so much
that can be said before words are not important
and it's only the cold fingers slipped around a waist
scarf against stinging wind
watered eyes
that makes for
us.)

politik

headspins and heels clack
unhappy girls and their
bare legs goosebumped
highpitched voices;

today there are many people
playing guitars on trains
strings twang
bikes sitting patiently for
their writers. alcoholism wrote
its own fucking book in the
scotch glasses emptied on your
carpet; tables seen to be
the enemy of the worker in a
post-socialist world.

there exists a class of non
awakened proletariat
outside the walls of my private school.

all these and recurring themes
make.

linguistic love times

i am
finding the right preposition, to follow the right verb, to tell you how i feel:
we have become the awful couples
intertwined in a sunshower and
attatched at the
mobile phone.
i'm starting not to care.

circular

never write from the perspective you do not understand but never write an autobiography and call it fiction. rip up what you like and develop yourself, create a style within and without the structures which have come before and sell it to the minds, hearts or souls of the world. never get into advertising. always tell your parents you are making a living. affect a walk, an accent and a story which, like Raymond Queneau, you can use in your excersises du style, but instead of buttons and bus seats create drug-addled mothers and suburban horrors; these are the things which sell books. buy a pair of glasses and call yourself an intellectual. never be tempted to be a socialist. coffee stain your cigarettes then use them to punctuate your spoken word as commas, semi colons and dashes punctuate your writing.

every night you drown and by morning are resurrected

woman in white pulls an eyebrow out of line.

grout between your toes;
we are silent and the
clack of sturdy heels
falls around us as a knell. we are still.

palpitations are the beat of
words yet to be unsaid; orwell and his
'what can be done,
cannot be undone', but it is
only the implications of power
that follow us like
the dream of death. knowledge
is fear.
and the tiles hear us breathing.

writing on writing on writing on writing.

it's the sifting of information;

when exams make you sad..

THINK OF A BOX FULL OF KITTENS! and you will be happy again.

daria approves.

"dad, stop oppressing me with your totally mainstream totalitarianism" - one half of haitlin on Orwell being a modern-day-flinders-st-emo.

can't deal with Winston's dark hole of the future. nor Orwell's intense amounts of repetition in his writing. nor poor construction nor thinly veiled self-promotion attempts nor political writers trying to be literary writers nor english teachers that can't write, read or speak.

i do, however, appreciate the fuck out of this.

nerd win.

maybe to be spoken

metal against metal sparks
the voice of contracted language
drawing patters with the soles of
grubby feet we are
-what?
we are
-what?
...always, the red shirts banging doors
and we are eerie
phone ringing on the intercom
coughing through wires
announcements for no-one.

unfinished and not to be spoken

sordid drizzle of smoke
as the
lights flash, gears pulling us
to grey alignment, the traffic
lights buzz
like sirens.

clank of trams rev electric
in the gravel wind, catching
rats - our urban deerlings - in their dark.

lithuanian poetry

soviets prove the implicit in a town
where rows of shells cut
crust-blood at the corners of your nose
and a language without syntax
spells
expedients
and
God.

"over the skeleton of thought
mind builds a skin of human texture"
- Gwen Harwood

+ roadtrip hometimes.

too tired to write, however:

testament to the amount that young people can do has never been so strong.

later i will post on the speakers i heard, the people i met or the things we did; the enthusiasm and unenthusiasm, the yelling and screaming or the not sleeping or eating or organizing.

for now, suffice to say that even cynic mc angst face is inspired.

a bit pretty

i have an ongoing conversation with one of my friends who tells me that he needs a muse to write well.
i disagree. nonononono.
i create all of my bestest art when i'm heartbroken and sleepless.
that being said, i wouldn't trade today for the world.

"line breaks don't make you a poet; canvas does not make you an artist; and a debit card, school uniform and camera phone decidedly fail to make you a real person."

dislike the sound of my written voice and
enjoy the tap-tap-tap of procrastination.

"careers are a 21st century invention, and i don't want one"

nonfic writing + being stuck in a university. i am a big fan of the purely theoretical. pragmatism and politics mix but pragmatism and casi do not. hence; therefore and moreover, we know nothing.

squeeze my hand.

shakespeare and co.

silly red wine lips eating japanese food in the sun.

exerpts from an interview with louise swinn

i'm very sickly and yet so many nice things for the mind have been happening today. this was one of them:

"Your short fiction has cropped up in top-notch publications like Meanjin, Best Australian Stories, Overland, New Australian Stories and Cutwater. What's next for Lou Swinn, fiction writer?

I'm not happy with my writing. I'm not very good at nailing the words the way I want them to be. But I think I am gradually getting better at that, letting fewer soft sentences creep in. I think that today; perhaps tomorrow I'll think differently... If I can write another couple of short stories that are really good, then if I could write a really knock-out one, that would be good. I used to want to write lots of books - now that I read lots of books I guess I just want to produce a decent sentence or story or one really good book. Sometimes, on the darker days, I think there are too many average books - I don't want to contribute. I think perhaps all my stories are just one story and I need to find the best way of saying that. Just to write one knock-out story that I am really proud of. Ask me tomorrow and my answer could be quite different.

How goes it down there at Sleepers Publishing? Can you offer us a glimpse inside the sleek machine headed by you and Zoe Dattner?

Oh, Sam - sleek machine?! Haha. A glimpse inside Sleepers? Um, okay - we're just two hokey girls trying our best to make a godfearin' livin' from some publishin' of the literary variety... We drink lots of tea. We talk about writers and books and words we don't like (panties) and how annoying the mean people are and how amazing the great people are. We drink more tea and we read and read and read and read and hope for the next great novel. We write grant applications and send out lots of mail. We giggle a lot at silly jokes - that's kind of important to our business plan. Really, if we weren't doing Sleepers, we'd be doing comedy or some kind of live entertainment act with snakes and Zoe on banjo.

If you could read anyone's journal or raid anyone's hard drive, through whose would you rifle?

Can I do the opposite -- can I know less of that kind of stuff about people? I feel as though I'm reading everyone's diaries all the time already. Don't you? I sort of feel icky about that kind of thing. I wouldn't go to a party I wasn't invited to either - I don't know why exactly, but it's just not something I feel comfortable with. All the magic in the universe is contained in the knowing that there are things I can only guess - if I learn them, they lose their power."



loveeeely.
another nice thing was a lecture i was privvy to by philosopher/patriot/writer/historian : Tim Soutphommasane :
who talks about the necessity of liberal patriotism for a working democracy; a set of shared values in public culture which allow us to respect the rule of law and parliamentary democracy, a patriotism which doesn't entail violence or southern cross tattoos, which isn't militaristic or blind; but is about love of country which allows for criticisms, adaptations, and pluralisms.
i'm surprised at how much australian history has interested me.

academia creates nice things.

multiple exposures i did not take

the luckiest.

"it will be okay and you secretly know this"

her whole being was waiting

prominence of passivity
is foreign to
the englishman whose
thin gun is shot on the basis of
linguistic nuance; whose
legality rests in the place of a comma.

l'homme a ete tue
mais moi, je le tue.

minimalism is the edit of our cluttered words.

writing should be taking out all the key words and leaving in the key points and making space in the reader's mind in which they can pour everything freud said was a lie. characters are blank spaces in between a wall, a chair, a door, and like fitzgerald a whole lot of people should take out a whole lot of words and just leave the skeleton of the story you meant to write. the scariest realest parts are the worldess. god damn writers' paradoxes.

run, jesus, run.

http://www.molleindustria.org/runjesusrun/run_jesus_run.html

recap:

writing lots that will never be shared : sop and loveliness.

saving late night messages. love letters/good decisions. soft hands and pretty
eyes and all kinds of fitting nicely together.

although all my writing is awkwardly self-indulgent, autobiographical and
styleless;
there is comfort in the reading back of structured diaries
and warmth in remembering

today says:
happy.
and that's all.

pomplamoosemusic

i love a good cover and these guys are all kinds of pretty harmonied love.





i miss france. but australia and its wide open spaces are sometimes filled with rather lovely people. all the world is growing up and working out nicely; fitting with other people, smiling far too much.
we're good. we're happy. we're good.

paris me manque

these are not my photos.

i remember sitting in a cafe overlooking the notre dame, next to shakespeare and co, and we said that we should run away and get a job here instead of going back home and working and studying and growing old. paris is like neverland that way.

tattoo

i've wanted this tattoo since i was 14 and i am gradually heading towards designing it.
i'll maybe do a lino print of it first.
see how i like it
make myself look at it every day for a year
(i'm wary of comittment)

maybe i'll go to israel first.
but it'll be symbolism; chai or shalom, trees, eyes, hamsa, culture.

my old age moderation says that this will be a well thought out decision. i think.

people should yell less.

it's funny; we're all arguing the same point.

in israel, i'll float and be alive and the
anger of this class, these people, will be shadowed by this larger thing;
the north will be alive. we don't stay long.


i miss what may happen.
there's someone and they're rather nice.
i'm not sure where we're going
but i like it.

achievement

spending too much time in libraries. appreciating the crap out of a good resource.

god damn arts student.

and waiting; lots of waiting.

everything takes too long or not long enough and coffee or coffee-less, i'm impatient.

and i found a love letter someone wrote me not that long ago.

it's not funny or moving or even very real. it's not even really about me; i'm just the figurehead of imagination.

i kept it comme même.

identity centers around our achievements. i try not to think about it.

i've started sleeping again.

there are lovely people; sometimes.

when we find out what our real nationalism is, we'll let you know.

"i'll stop talking about dissasociation if you don't eat that dirt"

i spent today hungover in the garden with a writer and her baby. she said, four generations of organic gardening, in my family, and her little boy ran around getting dirt under his toenails digging up tiny pieces of earth. she asked me what i was reading and through the haze of last night i told her about distance between readers and characters, and writers and characters, and how no-one really knows what they've created and how frankenstein warns us of tired misogyny but we didn't really listen. she brought me second hand books and the card of a second hand book store. they got back all their cats and now the house is no longer empty and silent at night. owen calls me anna, after anna karenina, and this should offend me, but i love him in all his little literary goodness.

the things that i bought you

In the morning, through the window shade
When the light pressed up against your shoulderblade
I could see what you were reading



All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications you could do without
When I kissed you on the mouth







In the morning at the top of the stairs
When your father found out what we did that night
And you told me you were scared



All the glory when you ran outside
With your shirt tucked in and your shoes untied
And you told me not to follow you



Sunday night when I cleaned the house
I found the card where you wrote it out
With the pictures of you mother



On the floor at the great divide
With my shirt tucked in and my shoes untied
I am crying in the bathroom



In the morning when you finally go
And the nurse runs in with her head hung low
And the cardinal hits the window



In the morning in the winter shade
On the first of March, on the holiday
I thought I saw you breathing



All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications when I see His face
In the morning in the window



All the glory when
He took our place
But He took my shoulders and He shook my face

And He takes and He takes and He takes





Sufjan Stevens. Brilliant in its sad loveliness. Golly.

vive l'apocalypse

surreal afternoon walking on leaf-carpet through streets with no people. grey at four in the afternoon and drops on my cigarette. shiver a hug. throw some hail.
there are alarms going off at the city prison so we walk a very long way to find that in our absence, the city has closed down, and with no coffee we are confused.
shut down surrealism.

visual listmaking.

nice things.

add to this list;

apple season

pink cigarettes

the french language

and

dylan thomas.

you can make the pictures in your head.

reblog. it was too beautiful.

"Miss Peacock: “Love. This is another lie. I’m still waiting for the truth, so tell me another lie.”
Paul: Fuckin sport, sport fucking. The stoic Ukulhelen sings: Boyfriend in a coma. Isabel and Janet Winterspoon: I love you is always a quotation. Eric reading McGuckin’s poems, Megan reading Pessoa’s diaries, Bruce reading “When I was a boy in Kentucky” and Alberto The Poem of the Drunken Bride part II. The stranger stages an improvisational play featuring Miss Peacock with balls, aka John, Rudolph dedicated to Gabriel, Christopher wears a bag on his head and neologizes with Sarah. Jason goes bilingual and it’s fucking cool. So I take away a copy of his stuff ‘cause I want to put it in the report, and now I’ve lost it. Anna: “I like to to dream alone”, Marty introduces us to the whole work of P.K.R. Mieklejohn in Amour-Propre, Sarah writes poems on the metro, Rita is trapped in Budapest, Jessica: “Do you think I like you as a friend?” First kiss, followed by first sex, followed by first argue. We are aging. Let’s write about that. Alberto "

http://spokenwordparis.blogspot.com/

i wish that i had written this.
consider it a kind of late valentine.

grand plans

He paints in oils when he should be studying. Paint drips onto his shoes and through his worn-down carpet and he doesn’t really care.

He will not sit his exam tomorrow. He thinks it doesn’t matter, really. He’s considering someone he could call instead. They’ll smoke another cigarette on the balcony, drinking coffee saying nothing. Later, they’ll pretend that wasn’t all. Company is fickle. He knows this.

He writes in blue biro on public transport. He doesn’t care much for probationary licenses or rust-ridden cars. He likes delays and babbling strangers. There is no-one at his destination. He thinks he doesn’t mind.

He wonders about plurality and grammar in the collected works of William Shakespeare. Anything much beyond that is just a walking shadow, to him. Anything much behind is just a clutter of 26.

He’ll drop out and make coffee until his eyes burn with sting of caffeine and his clothes smell of sweat and espresso. His hands will fidget with the labels on takeaway cups, and his hair will be tied back, like it used to be. He’ll talk to the girl in the fruit shop next door and later they’ll pretend not to see one-another.

He misses kissing, sometimes. He says, just you and me, please, can we?

He paints in oils when he should be studying.

(He thinks it’s all a bit pathetic)

He will not sit his exam tomorrow.

even if i quit, there's not a chance in hell i'd stop

in a heavy front room we compare insomnias
breaking each others' fingers with each turn of
conversation; bigger than this night, or the next, or the next, or those that stretch
in front. like bottomlessness
there stops being a glamour to the light-headedness, hallucinations, falsely constructed words and grammatically awkward shake hands
and truly, you'd just like to finally hit the bottom where
at last the frustrations
we cynicize
become the ripped red insides of womanhood which
can curl around your cloudy mind.
go to sleep.

traumatism

these projections are the gaps between old train carriages where we shot up:
you, eyes gleaming with
metallic thrill, smiling crooked moving with the
tracks
while she
pulls her posture to forget.

'i don't want a career'

hopelessness becoming
units of our mapped out futures
placements in the twitching eyes

chasing another cigarette the way we used to chase
the things
to know, collector cards and grainy tv
worn scratchy blanket in shades of brown and
backs burning in the afternoon sun. my eyes water

at how young i am around you.

because people say clever things at various points of this technology-fest we call life

"all the little letters on the page represent pictures in your head, but you only paint pictures they want to read"

exit

- cornelia hediger
http://www.corneliahediger.com

biggest army the world has ever seen.

today a woman on the train was crying. sobbing into the phone that she'd just got a train ticket that she couldn't afford, couldn't pay her bills, hadn't eaten in days and was running out of phone credit and never knew things could get this bad. her phone cut out and she looked out the window and just kept crying onto the dirty plastic windows. i wrote her a letter i didn't give. the woman across from me gave her a fifty dollar note and a ham sandwich. a businessman looked embarassed as he passed her a tenner on his way off the train. an old guy gave her directions. there is no, international, co-operation without grassroots things like this. we help each other.

88 and a half seconds later

good time charlie falls
asleep under bruises,
blanketing the garish night.
eyes close on delicates, veined webs
and he watches from the inside as
banks break, and our lies of drought
(farmers falling onto browned grass, hot sun
of our searing plains)
become lies of the departed.
(and the wind curls around him)

sleep clatters like a train on
rusty tracks but
you; you are silent

pilferage of a conversation i once had

you spend your youth
feeling self-indulgently misanthropic
delaying the
making of good or bad decisions.
he says: your twenties, that's the time to explore,
you know? know the world. know yourself.

i don't feel like talking
so i nod, yeah, yeah, the eyes, the cheeks, the nose, i nod
and really - this is all he wants.

innocence is stubble hiding fears
(of friends
youth
passing
by)

a steady drip of information poses
no threat to a sturdy cocoon.

metlink

we rumble past our empty river and the trains congregate, unused, in train yards, and the tinny voice overhead speaks in time with the slow grunts of the engine on tracks and the helicopters catch up with the clouds as we pull into our station. geometries become us.

watercolours and francois

i love this band and the lovely videos they make. nom nom nom.

suburbia

The dog which used to bark as I passed, scaring me every time, lies vacantly behind the mesh metal fence. Afternoon sun pounds heavy on the pavement and my worn black stilettos keep getting stuck in the cracks. Someone is playing piano at the dead boy’s house; though I know it is just a recording. I have heard the slightly off timing and one bad note a thousand times before. A little further down, pouches of flesh, soft and pillowy, hang down the back of an old lady sitting, topless in the shade of her front yard. As I walk past she does not flinch, but simply continues, big band music tinny and quiet from the small radio on the grass.
Last night this street was empty, shadows making holes in the asphalt, cracking open to show the roots of old trees and dust of moon-white bodies stepping, grasping, falling over. I traced with my fingers the quiet blue veins which twisted around the thin arms of a little boy. He didn’t pull away just held his arms heavy with the meaning we assign to trivial things, swinging slowly back and forth in the night. The street lights glared, whilst stillness and wind intertwined through the leaves and branches overlooking thirty-one old houses. Behind fences lay front yards and verandas, hallways and sitting rooms, kitchens and bathrooms with laminexed cabinets. My eyes closed and opened again, every action an eternity whilst the dark-grey ground, still warm from the day, got caught between my toes. A voice like a bird but sadder, very much sadder, was pulled out in the empty street, and it shocked me when I realized it was me who made it.
We pushed and pulled at each other’s bodies, staying awake and never eating, growing thin and dreamy and delirious, speaking and thinking of nothing at all. The emptiness of a clean slate, the beauty of a body reduced to its purest form, floated, and each shaking finger, half-closed eye spoke of something different to each of us.

a whole bunch of quotes from an interview with an artist i don't really like

I don’t like the things I make existing in real life because of all the baggage associated with physical spaces and the problems of perception with the viewer.

Images are not objects for my generation. If we really follow the Pictures Generation’s ideas to their logical conclusion we see that images as objects are just a bastardization of a bastardization.


I also don’t believe objects will be objects for long.

Our cement bridges collapse and our levees disintegrate when confronted with what they’re designed to combat.
Glaciers miles thick have melted away.
Every bit of new technology around me is made obsolete in months.T
he looming threat of global warming is a physical one that threatens the permanence of the ground we stand on.

All of this and people still want to press paint on a canvas that can be ripped, or stitch fibers millimeters wide.

These types of art making art futile. Objects don’t stand a chance. But in the mean time, in the brief historical period before objects are permanently annihilated, they serve as our greatest inconvenience and take up all of our space. One day we’ll run out of space for everything- for our collections of Furbies, for our families of 12, for our 3 ton $2 million dollar reflective egg sculptures and everything else.

- Brad Troemel

c'est eden la.

the earth looks better from above

before i was born i would thrash, says mum, small red legs kicking the sides of her stomach. making indents in overalls, white cottons in summer and her heavy green knitted jumper, kick, kick, kick and she cried out, bent over in pain. my father would crush banana for her, peel apples with a breadknife and watch while she lay, sweating, with feverish face up against the cool brown tiles of the kitchen floor.

later, despite all this, he stopped at too many traffic lights on the way to the hospital and his old blue car rocked back and forth in the rain with the force of two redfaced women screaming to get out.

jsuis rentre chez moi

claustrophobic in these
big wide streets;
it doesn't feel like night.

back home, getting sunburnt while eating breakfast and reacquainting myself with balaclava and degraves street, australian accents and unfinished ends i'd left myself.

i am writing and the matilda one (shedoesitbetter.blogspot.com) is illustrating a zine detailing our shenanigans in europe. You, the anonymous Reader should Buy it. yep.

paris is a good place to create. and there's lots that could be written here about my trip but i think i will save it for the zine. suffice to say it was lovely.