The Sesqui Show?

No, I don't think it's a brilliant title for an art show either. Never mind. We visited Gallery Adagio in Glebe Point Road this evening to attend the opening of an event described as The Sesqui Show - 150 Year Celebration: A response by artists to the history of Glebe. Maybe it was, Maybe it wasn't. That hardly matters.

Our friend Craig was exhibiting four of his vividly coloured works; Fauvist pieces that begin with a photograph. I was able to catch less than half of the show, most of it being upstairs in the small gallery. Not to worry. I may not have missed much. I did like some of the Peter Travis ceramics on show. I suspect they may have been the best of all that was on offer.

Dinner after the show was, to say the best one can, thoroughly ordinary. We joined Craig and a few of his friends at a cheap and cheerful pasta, pide and pizza place called More's a little farther along Glebe Point Road. Not the best in the strip. Not by a long chalk.

On the way back to the bus ... yes, the van is STILL off the road ... I ignored a dog that barked at me from a pavement cafe. I was aware that Spike paused, I thought to pat the dog. It turns out that her glass-blowing tutor Uri was sitting with the woman who owns the gallery in which we bought our Holly Grace. I pushed on regardless while Spike chatted, thereby missing an opportunity to maybe be sociable and meet some people of importance in Spike's life. I can be an insufferable and stubborn old fool at times. I will NOT be that rude again and just because I was not aware of who the dog's owner was I have no damn excuse for being a dickhead.
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Second city blues

So, I took a mid-morning QANTAS flight to the nation's second city. Co-incidentally, the Disability Discrimination Commissioner boarded the same flight. I sat in 5D. Graham and his guide dog occupied 5A & B. An airline employee placed two incontinence pads on the floor in case one of the most intensively and comprehensively trained assistance animals known to man spontaneously peed at 35,000 feet. Still, at least the unexpected co-incidence of us being booked on the same plane meant I had someone to chat with as the taxi sped towards St Kilda Road.

The less said about the dire event that drew me to Melbourne the better. What a ghastly exercise in self-aggrandising pomposity it was. A truly woeful report (which plays perfectly to every sloppy thought, over-statement, contradictory posture and ghastly stereotype one could conceive) was presented and received as if it were a reflection of the real world. Shut Out (as it's entitled)? Shut up ... please. I will be in the minority, of course. The conventional wisdom will develop (has already formed) that it's an important document of historic importance. It simply isn't so.

I was glad to leave to catch the 4:30 p.m. flight home. Spike was attending a couple of openings (one at the SCA, the other on the university's main campus). Rather than hurry home to an empty apartment and some toast I bought some hot & sour soup and a plate of noodles with tofu vegetables before leaving the airport. A young woman joined me at the table. She wolfed down a carton of fried rice with chicken (I think). About half way through her fast-food meal at the end of a working day, the woman sat back in her seat, looked up and over to me the said , rather guiltily, "this is SO good!" She dug her fork back in to the spined rice without another word.

Wok On Air at Sydney Airport's Terminal Three. The surprising highlight of a dull day until, thank whatever lucky stars shine in my universe, I was drawn to a shelf at home by a vision in black.
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Ovid

The Creation of the World

Of bodies chang'd to various forms, I sing:
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
'Till I my long laborious work compleat:
And add perpetual tenour to my rhimes,
Deduc'd from Nature's birth, to Caesar's times.
Before the seas, and this terrestrial ball,
And Heav'n's high canopy, that covers all,
One was the face of Nature; if a face:
Rather a rude and indigested mass:
A lifeless lump, unfashion'd, and unfram'd,
Of jarring seeds; and justly Chaos nam'd.
No sun was lighted up, the world to view;
No moon did yet her blunted horns renew:
Nor yet was Earth suspended in the sky,
Nor pois'd, did on her own foundations lye:
Nor seas about the shores their arms had thrown;
But earth, and air, and water, were in one.
Thus air was void of light, and earth unstable,
And water's dark abyss unnavigable.
No certain form on any was imprest;
All were confus'd, and each disturb'd the rest.
For hot and cold were in one body fixt;
And soft with hard, and light with heavy mixt.


The beginning of Book 1 from the version translated by Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al
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David Malouf

Tonight's university class was the second of two on David Malouf's An Imaginary Life. I read it for the first time about two year's ago (which is the last time I thought about preparing to return to university). I have to admit that before then I had never read anything by Australia great Romantic; never even heard of his imagined life of Ovid. Well, now I have.

It's an impressive read. I've no idea if the text takes me inside the head of the exiled Roman poet. Who could know such a thing? But the short novel certainly did take me inside the head of some imaginary other. I believed I was with someone crossing the frozen land of a hostile Black Sea hinterland. I could picture the Shaman drifting into a trance. I felt the scorn and suspicion of hard-working woman who felt the arrival of the wild child posed some kind of threat.

That seems even more impressive to me (as a late reader) given that so much of the novel evokes the tensions of post-colonial Australia. In some senses only an Australian could have conceived and written the text. Good stuff. Well worth the read.

I let loose my worse nature in tonight's class (although I doubt that anyone noticed). I struck a pose; made an observation about sentence construction in the novel and asked a question that was too clever by half (about what constitutes good or bad writing ... as if I didn't already know what ideologically loaded terms those are). It would have been better for me and more interesting for everyone else if I'd used this brain of mine (size of a small planet in a far off galaxy) to real effect. There is no need or benefit to underplay one's interest, intellect or perception. Why bother Dougie? You'd still have much to learn by asking questions that you don't actually know the kind of answer a tutor is likely to give (which she did).
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Yum Cha

There was me, Spike, Liana, Sharon, Ken, Stuart, Patrick (Ken's teenage sons) and ten squillion little dim sum trundling around the vast cavern that is the Pheonix restaurant at the Rhodes shopping mall. Us, several million other customers, ten thousand busy waiters, trolley pushers, floor walkers, bill takers plus several bored-looking carp, a dozen or so irritated lobsters treading over one another and a solitary crab in a bank of wall-mounted fish tanks. Sunday morning in Sydney. There are worse ways to live a life (unless you're a bored carp, an irritated lobster or a solitary crab).

Can you irritate a crustacean?
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A work in progress

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

(Franklin D Roosevelt)

The world seemed younger then ...