Travelling home
Sometimes when I’m travelling home from work on the tram I see a man carrying a painting get on. It’s quite a regular occurrence, sometimes several times a week. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to where he gets on but its usually between 6 and 8 o’clock. The paintings are different every time.
Generally they are A3 size. Sometimes they are framed in decorative gold, sometimes they are not. He always carried them with one hand clutching the string at the back. Yesterday it was wrapped in clear plastic. There is nothing special about the way he looks. His hair is naturally grey but un-naturally burgundy/brown to the eye. His paintings are mostly landscapes, oils I think.
I quite like him. I always get a wry smile when I think about him. Irrespective of what his pictures look like or how you define art, there is something curiously interesting about a man with a painting regularly shuffling across a dark wet street to take his place in the crowded isle of sombre commuters swaying in unison. It makes me think about things.
An open letter to Monsieur Frau
Monsieur Frau,
You don’t know me and I know you only by the noises you make as you sleep, but I think of you often. For five days we shared a room, ate, slept and bathed together. Language a secondary obstruction to us communicating. Your distant gaze and wailing cries in the night tell me that the fog of years had descended on you.
I sometimes ponder the irony. The vomit wiped from your chest by someone young enough to be your daughter as I wait for the elderly matron to remove my bedpan, clean me and replace my sanitary cloth. Dignity is a burden sometimes.
I wish I had known you, Monsieur Frau, when you wore a striped suit to work and drank coffee in pavement cafés. I wish I had seen you picking up your young children having fallen in the snow.
I hope you are sitting quietly in the shadow of the majestic peaks, your hair well groomed, your coloured shirt clean and crisp, and hands gently folded in your lap. I hope the sky is clear for you today Monsieur Frau.
Monsieur Frau, I hope you are well
Richard
Changing sides
Deciding on who to support in this years tour has been a difficult task, eternal bridesmaid Jan?, just stepped out of tha salon Basso?, A patriotic vote for Cadel Evans?, the crab Mancebo?
As of yesterday it became crystal clear. Liberty Seguros. Why? Because they have Avlexander Vinikourov who has the cycling equivalent to ADHD and now the manager and doctor have been done for drugs.
Allez Liberty Seguros
Drawing life
Partially inspired by one of my peers here on the Chimney (hmm, should that be capitalised?) I recently attended my first life drawing class. A 15 minute walk from work is enough time to send the worries of the day tumbling down the street amongst the expiring leaves of Autumn. In their place comes apprehension, self conciousness - memories of school, the legacy of home made trousers and skivvies, a feeble physique and poor hand eye coordination. Shuffling nervously through the door (late) I am anticipating the Tutors empathetic advice. ‘I think you’re in the wrong room Poindexter, Memory enhancement through Sudoku is down the hall.’
Having stumbled through my response to the inevitable and almost patronising question of ‘And so why are you here, what are you hoping to get out of the class?’ I take my place behind the easel. I am seperated from my fellow students by 10 years, a shirt with a collar and approximately 2.5 feet. Oh, and there is a complete stranger casually disrobing in the middle of the room. No, this is going well, really it is.
With a thin sliver of burnt willow in hand we make our first corruption of the virginal butchers paper. Exactly 120 seconds later the torment ends. Staring back at me is a bloated and distorted human form, a series of clumsy marks and corrections. I search for signs of hope, an interesting change in line, the serendipity of breaking charcoal. I find nothing.
With the spell of white broken time is lost to multiple poses, a flurry of mark making, emphasis and erasure. Three hours pass. It intrigues me that the observation and recording process is free of judgement. The figure is neither perfect or imperfect. It has no flaws only different shapes, changes in proportion lightness and shading. We reflect on our peers work. Momentarily we are all the model, nude, the central figure examined by all in the room. Unlike her our bodies slump, we look down and avoid the searching eyes.
I have absolutely no idea where this post is going. It seems to be some sort of waffling philosophical reflection, maybe the subtle reversal in the title pointed me in that direction or maybe I just felt like banging on about something, anything to no one for a while. Anyway it’s not - intelligent or thought out I mean - It’s just some words about pictures.
Making up numbers
I don’t actually have anything to say but Ben has beed critical of my lack of posts.
I like spectacular theatre of Autumn, a final colourful act before the curtain falls for Winter and we all shuffle listlessly out of our seats and back to our homes.
April fools
On Saturday April 1st Ben and I were among 55 teams of cyclists who departed Mildura as part of the 20th edition of Woody’s Murray to Moyne.
For those who can’t be bothered with the link, the aim is to start at one of three points along the Murray (Echuca, Swan Hill or Mildura) and ride in a relay, arriving in Port Fairy within 24 hours with a mandatory rest stop in Hamilton.
Here are some general thoughts about the experience:
Riding into a headwind is one of the most demoralising experiences a cyclist can have
The best things about country cooking are also the best attributes of the people who live there
Cycling in the darkness beneath the pin-holed blanket of the milky way is a memorable experience
The human spirit is an amazing thing
Paying tribute to volunteers is not a cliche
The human anatomy would be completely different if bicycles existed before the evolution process
Writing a blog the day after will take approximately 11 times the time required for a normal post
It’s a bit like…
What do we have to do to stop the rampant proliferation of ridiculous business analogies?
I have recently had the misfortune of sitting through a meeting of nine extrememely intelligent people where, on being questioned about the progression of the temporary site, the account service person responded with all sincerity ‘we have been spinning the wheels for a couple of weeks now but we really feel like we gained some traction this week’. To which the entire room nodded in satisfaction. I was prepared to forgive this minor indescretion however the same line was regurgitated 3 times in ten minutes in response to any questions about the status of the site. Was I the only one in the room who interpreted this as ‘actually we hadn’t even started it until last Thursday but we did manage to cobble together a really crappy first draft which we will have the work experience placement rework in the coming days and pretend we have gone through an intensive development phase’
Interestingly the (abbreviated) dictionary definition of traction is:
1. the state of being drawn or pulled.
2. The adhesive friction between two surfaces
I think that sums it up perfectly
Bloody ridiculous
Why are the media so bloody stupid that when someone launches a new advertising campaign that has a slightly controversial tagline we plaster it all over the pages of newspapers, post it as a newsworthy item online and feature it in the 6 o clock news ahead of 90 seconds of the clearly insignificant ‘world’ wrap complete with a story about the rescue of an overzealous kitten in St Petersburgh.
Meanwhile the campaign evaluation staff at the overpriced ad agency responsible are popping the top off a few bottles of equally overpriced champagne as they watch the earned ink meter tick over with the speed of a Las Vegas jackpot tally and the PR department are preparing the next award submission.
Why do we have to reward such blatantly unoriginal campaigns with predictable conservative middle class responses. Don’t get me wrong I am not even remotely offended by the campaign and in writing this have negated my argument with hypocracy, but what does drive me completely insane is that in doing so we are handing unwarranted kudos to someone whose business card would be the perfect visual reference to the word contradiction in an illustrated dictionary.
In time I could be proven wrong, obvously I am not the target market but lets look at the visitor numbers before we declare it a bloody success. When you were a child you realised pretty quickly when someone was only visiting you because they wanted to swim in your pool and, more often than not, ended up urinating in it anyway - damn shame the highly educated people that are responsible for what we see and hear are not quite so evolved. Then again maybe that’s just the point, they don’t really care if the majority of us are having to swim around in someones reconstitueted lemonade just as long as we are using their pool.
Cheese
White trousers?
I had a snack of grilled cheese on toast today but unfortunately the vintage tasty I employed left the most horrible excretion all over the grill, plate and through the bread. Now I’ve got that crappy, culinary equivalent to coconut tanning oil feeling and when I puckered up for a drink I noticed some kind of faint old dairy aroma on my top lip.