Sydney Book Launch of Paradiso A Novel July 2022

A great book launch in Sydney. Fifty book lovers turned out on a Thursday night in the middle of a squally Sydney winter to share an hour and a half with Nick Fury and myself at Berkelouw Books in Leichhardt.

Nick and I are old clown mates from way back, so as well as telling some good stories of Italy and travel, and little known aspects of this 19th century Italian-Australian story, we also managed to revisit a few old clown moments. The audience was a little bemused to begin with but warmed up quickly and understood that book launches could be both informative and funny.

Thanks to Co.As.It. and the Sydney Italian Cultural Institute for agreeing to support this event. The result was a mixed audience of descendants, local Italian community members (hi to Joe at Bar Sport who came along with his two daughters) and some general Sydney-siders who were all interested in this remarkable story. In retrospect I must apologize to any native Italian speakers who might have not thought my mock Italian was as funny as I did. It was the best I could do, having lost the language two generations back when speaking English was the only way to fit in.

The novel is now available at the following Sydney Book Stores:

Berkelouw Books. Leichhardt

Abbey's Bookshop,York St Sydney

Gleebooks, Glebe

Gleebooks, Dulwich Hill

Better Read than Dead, Newtown

There is also a spare copy at Anthony Albenese's Electoral Office in Marrickville. I suspect he won't get around to reading it for a couple of terms of Parliament. He seems pretty busy.
 

Doubled winged Turkey Weather Vane

A variation on the theme. A wooden spoon and lengths of western red cedar timber slats - old blinds found on the street as part of the Councils kerbside cleanup.

The next version will have a wooden fork as a head. My local op shop is a treasure trove - though I seem to have bought their full stock of wooden stirring implements..

Time Exposure

Sharon Zwi, Sydney photographer, has an exhibition opening 22May presenting 60 portraits/asemblages of friends and people of note - Eva Cox, Justice Michael Kirby,  John Coetzee etc.

She asked for 25 phtos from earliest image to current. This is mine.

The exhibition:
"Time Exposures - 60 Life Portraits"
Exhibition Space, Level 2, Fisher Library

Camperdown Campus, University of Sydney 

May 22 to 29 June.

Found object man-made

Where flotsam and jetsam meets the eye of the artist. Where intervention makes meaning of rubbish. This assemblage is stuff Tony Rice, kitemaker and artist, has collected from the beaches of North Stradbroke Island. His work is about the damage we do to the environment by our carelessness.

Found Object

Can a found object be a piece of art? I found this tangle of wire on a friend's farm recently. It looked like ready made art to me, so I attached it to a post (plinth?) and let it work its magic on me. At about 3:30pm each day the sun from the west changes it from a dull knot of rusty wire into a lustrous light catcher. It gives me pleasure and it has some of the qualities of an art piece except it was not made consciously. Da Da!

Complaints

 I was laughing out loud at the Queensland Gallery Of Modern Art (GOMA) today because I've just watched a series of video clips of an international community music project - The Complaints Choirs.

Two Finnish mucicians began this movement as a tongue in cheek way of giving local communities an opportunity to VENT. Some people confuse this whinging with, well, whinging, but I'm inclined to read it as a comment on whingers. You know, those people for whom nothing is ever good enough. There are now many choirs across the globe and the numbers are growing.

GOMA had clips of about a dozen - German, Scandanavian, Russian, Singaporean, Australian, British - the list goes on. My favourite was the Sointula, British Columbia choir. It's a small community in the north west of Canada which experiences some pretty extreme weather from year to year so they might have a lot to complain about. The line I like best is where they sing about the three days of summer they experience each year.

The Australian one was boring. I was surprised. I thought our sense of humour would shine in this piece. I was surprised to find that Germans and Finnish people have a great sense of humour and of self deprication. It seems we share a global sense of humour when it comes to whingers. Strangely no Complaints Choir from Mainland China at this stage.

I've also included the Toronto complaints choir for my blog friend Jennifer at Realia. 

Darryl Frost - Anagama Potter

And so what did my Darryl Frost anagama piece look like. Well not so shocking really. As I said, I compromised to ensure it earned a place in the house. I like it. It's still got that rough quality that speaks of energy and fire.

Pina

I have always been embarrassed by my back. From the front I am normal ( I am making some assumptions there but I can probably get away with that claim). Behind me lurks my secret shame. My scoliosis. It's not major. Nor is it minor. If I was a woman I'd be horrified but as a bloke I can get away with clothes that don't accentuate this deformity. I could never carry off a slinky silk number with form hugging low cut back. I've worn some weird stuff in my years but that I haven't tried. Maybe my back has protected me from some terrible decisions. I should be thankful.

So there I am in the fourth row of the audience waiting for the lights to dim on a dance piece celebrating one of my favourite choreographers of all time, the late Pina Bausch. Pina was famous for her non mainstream approach to dance using voice and ritual and gesture to evoke essences that catch you off guard. I only saw one piece in 1981 and I can still conjure up that experience - a dancer standing facing the audience cutting up an onion on a china plate held close to his eyes, a strange parade of dancers weaving in and around the audience doing repetive hand gestures drawn from everyday life.. That piece ("1980") as it turned out was quite lyrical.

Last night's piece "Out of Context - Pina" was about the boundary between the animal kingdom and we humans and at a fundamental level about opposites = Beauty and Ugliness. The performer's movements were not graceful. Their bodies jerked and convulsed and tic'd and took on groteque forms. At the same time their animal/human instinct to connect, to mate, to bond played out. It was both beautiful and harrowing.

And then, without any pause in the performance, a young woman rose from the audience and slowly, painfully, with the help of a pair of sticks, made her way to the stage. On the way she was offered a chair and carried it to centre stage. Dressed in a dark blue silk dress she sat and arranged her slim body in readiness. I knew what was coming but I was still not prepared for it. I was already silently sobbing.

She began to move her arms, tracing curves and angles through the space around her. She very deliberately crossed one knee over the other with the help of her mobile hands. She uncrossed them and, tilting her head to one side, allowing her long dark hair to fall towards the floor, she traced a final movement with her upper body.

Once an outstanding dancer who had worked with Australian choreographer Meryl Tankard, who herself had been in that 1981 Pina Bausch show I had seen in Melbourne, this young woman has Multiple Sclerosis. She has not danced since her diagnosis. It made the dancers, working so hard to achieve distorted forms, seem both technically amazing and at the same time irrelevant.

How she could sit in the audience and see her pain portrayed on stage I can't start to comprehend. The joy she showed helped me comprehend that there is a power in us that allows us to meet the most challenging events in life with dignity and a positive spirit if we can tap that aspect of ourselves.

For my part, as I get older my vanity has fallen away a bit. Though I still don't like department store change rooms or getting undressed in front of strangers (the first time). Funny I still love swimming at the beach in my budgie smugglers, so my ego must be pretty healthy.

Waste Wealth and Art

I read an interesting article in the Weekend Australian last weekend about wealth and art. It argued that collecting art has, for some people, become a substitute for spirituality; swapping mere money for something on a higher plane.

The poor, he argued, buy things they need; the rich pay large sums of money for things they don't need. He argued that the spiritual conversion rate was higher when the work purchased is intrinsically worthless: "Spending on nothing is the ultimate demonstration of wealth". He refers to the work of Michael Landy shown here on the left, "No Frills Drawing", as a good example of paying a lot for nothing. I can't see this piece surviving the test of time myself.

Why do people buy art? Why do I buy art?

Well it does mean I have disposable income beyond my basic needs. It might indicate that I am seeking some deeper connection with meanings beyond the immediate and the everyday.

I recently bought two small pieces by an artist friend, Tony Rice. Tony has been an artist all his life, beginning as a potter then drawing and painting and then, over the past twenty years, making kites as artworks. Now he has become absorbed in the detritis of the beach. That and the impact of our waste on the wildlife on our doorstep.

Tony makes art because he has to. He's obsessed. He sees everything as colour and form. He has spent the past twelve months collecting rubbish from beaches and has studied the impact of these discards from our material lives on marine life.He has combined his kite-making talents with his sculpting skills and created a series of large pieces - dolphins, manta rays and dugong using cane and wire - and then threaded a tube of rubbish through the guts of the each piece. The result is quite evocative.

What did I buy? Well I couldn't afford these beautiful pieces so I bought a set of sun bleached cigarette lighters arranged to follow a rainbow sequence. That, and an abstract piece made of string and foam and a cigarette lighter and plastic.
Why? My search for beauty perhaps? The excitement of seeing one man's imagination caught in a moment of time.? Some sense of finding meaning in nothing? And a desire to support Tony and make some recompence for the works he had given me in previous years for nothing.