These are some photographs from the 4A Gallery Chinese NY Event at Sydney’s Chinese Garden of Friendship, held earlier tonight, featuring works by the visiting artist collective, Yangjiang Group.
Face Calligraphy4A’s Twilight Garden PartyCalligraphy with left-over foodCalligraphyOne of the DJs
As noted by the burb on the 4A site…
Celebrate the Chinese New Year with 4A and Chinese artist collective Yangjiang Group as they take over Sydney’s Chinese Garden of Friendship! This one-night-only special event will feature live art performances led by Yangjiang Group, a contemporary art collective hailing from the coastal city of Yangjiang in China’s southern Guangdong province. Featuring DJs as well as food and bar by pioneering Sydney laneway outfit Grasshopper Eating House and Bar, this is a rare opportunity to experience a night of contemporary art and performance set within the beauty of the Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour. Yangjiang Group will be bringing their unique brand of art and reverie to Sydney’s Chinese Garden of Friendship with a series of performances and encounters that take calligraphy off the page and into every aspect of the celebrations
As if the weather today wasn’t depressing enough, when I walked into Torget in Gamla Stan for a late afternoon glass of wine, they were playing Billie Holiday. I was just about ready to jump off Västerbron.
Despite the weather – the technical term was “shitty” – I had a reasonably lovely day. I had great lunch at the well Danish/Swedish chain Jensens Böfhus, I looked around the city and took many photographs and, I went to the Moderna Museet.
As a collection of contemporary of art, it’s quite conservative. The collection is mostly comprised of traditional art – paintings, photographs, sculptures – though they do have some video art. I watched a short film by William Kentridge called “Journey To The Moon” though regrettably I have no idea what it was about. It was interesting though. And although they have quite a bit of European and North American art from the twentieth century – Liechtenstein, Pollack etc – I was more interested in the Swedish art they displayed. So that’s where I concentrated my attention. Particular favourites from the Swedish collection incuded a piece by Öyvind Fahlström called “World Bank” which features a mountain of gold bars surrounded by images from debtor nations. There was also a beautiful piece by Beth Laurin called “State of Mind” which is a long circular sausage made from vinyl (perhaps) where two faces meat. And on a slightly Swedish note, there’s a really lovely photograph of Ingmar Bergman by the American photographer, Irving Penn. Bergman has his eyes closed. There’s also a great piece by the Japanese conceptual artist, On Kawara which is a series of postcards sent to a doctor in Sweden from different parts of the world which simply say, “I got up at….” (and then the time is listed). Loved it.
I spent a few hours at the gallery, and a few hours wandering around the city more generally.
The news today from Sweden
Looking towards the Royal Palace
A group of sailors or something like that doing something
Looking towards AF Chapman
Fade to grey
Signs of spring
Stockholm today
The view from Moderna Museet to the outside
Group of yummy mummys looking at a painting of a school room
I can’t believe how many different types of weather I’ve experienced in Stockholm on both this trip and the last. On Sunday, it snowed. Yesterday it was warm and sunny. Today it’s grey, overcast, and slightly drizzly. In the midst of it all, I thought to myself “could I live here?” And I think the answer is yes. My Swedish needs to improve. But yes, I could.
Tonight I’m off to see Sarah Dawn Finer perform at China Teatern, which I’ll blog about later.
And tomorrow, I’m off to Manly. Or what appears to be Stockholm’s answer to Manly called Saltsjöbaden. After a few days in Hotel Micro, I’m moving into a grand old hotel which has mixed reviews. Some say it’s lovely, romantic and so on. Others say it’s close to Fawlty Towers.
“Have you printed off your vaccination certificate?”, I asked a family member earlier in the week. He’s a tradie who has been living and working in New South Wales for several months, and has been staying with us for about the last four weeks.
Lately, the work he does has started to dry up, and he’s been starting to feel a little homesick, keen to see his closer family. This week he decided he would try to head home, to see if he could cross the tight border into Queensland.
A couple of weeks ago, he wasn’t planning to get a vaccination. Not because he’s not a anti-vaxxer (or at least I don’t think so), he said he felt he didn’t “need it”. But I urged him to get vaccinated, knowing it will become an increasingly important part of work and travel in the future.
I’d also been told by a friend (who lives in NSW, but has a business in Queensland), people seem to have more of a chance of getting through the border check quickly if they are able to show evidence of vaccination.
I even made the appointment for him at the nearby pharmacy in South Lismore. He’s back home tonight, and I hope it played a part in getting him successfully back home to Queensland.
We’ll miss him, as it’s been great to re-connect with him in a face-to-face sense. I think Jack, in particular, will miss him. I think he’s enjoyed having someone to talk about “mechanics and other manly stuff with”. I’m not very good at that kind of conversation.
As for me, I’ve been wondering if I should “risk it” and return home to Sydney, too. I’m also feeling a little homesick. This is now the longest period of time I’ve spent back in Lismore since I finished university at the end of 1986!
“Don’t you even dare think about returning to Sydney”, Pat has said to me on a couple of occasions this week. “It’s too dangerous down there”, she’s added.
Every day we sit and watch on television the 11am NSW COVID media conference and sigh, as there’s never much good news, despite the “positive spin” put on everything.
In the midst of the ever-increasing numbers we also have a bit of fun. Just before the press conference I’ll ask everyone to guess the number of new cases. There’s no “prize” per se, but it brings a moment of joy into a depressing story. On the day the figure passed 1,000 daily cases none of us came even close to guessing.
The advice of friends and colleagues is that I should stay here. “There’s no reason to come back”, they’ve all said.
And indeed, I have a lovely life here.
“I’ve got a lovely daily routine here”, I told colleagues on our weekly team hook-up today. “I’ll go for a walk down the street and grab a coffee. The woman who runs the coffee shop used to work with my niece. The brother of her grandson (who works with her) is best friends with the son of my niece. We all like to have a chat/gossip.”
Bowen’s Pie Shop
“And then I’ll pop in to the post office, the chemist, and the bakery, doing some odd jobs for my family. I’ll call in to the pie shop, too. That’s been owned by the Bowen Family since 1949, and I went to school with Tracey who now runs the shop. We have a chat, too”, I’ve told them.
All in all, what could take 15 minutes, sometmes turns into close to an hour.
The cake shop/bakery at South Lismore has some good “old school treats” on display.The apple cream turnovers are extraordinary!The other day I called in and said hello to the people at the new food truck, now located outside the old railway station. “Welcome to South Lismore”, I told them, only to discover they previously had a “bricks and mortar cafe just down the road at NORCO”.Food truck at the South Lismore Railway StationToday I called into the bottle shop, as I noticed there was already a lengthy queue developing, with cars going down the street, awaiting the entry to the drive through.
“How’s it going?, I asked the bloke behind the counter. “The same number of customers”, he told me. “It’s just that everyone is drinking a hell of a lot more”, he added.
Minutes after observing the “Christmas Party Invitation” on the notice board at work, as I headed home, I overhead the telephone conversation of a nearby bloke.
“It’s quietening down now”, he said, adding, “we won’t do much now until late January”. When I overheard heard these words, I looked over at him. “Who was lucky enough not to have ‘not much to do’ for two months of the year?, I wondered to myself. He was a youngish bloke, quite well dressed. I assumed he worked in some kind of professional environment.
While the rest of the world “quietens down for Christmas”, my job remains quite busy. For me, the lead-up to summer is probably the busiest time of my working life. At the moment, my head is half of the time in the world of complex negotiation, and half of the time in the complex world of spreadsheets, as I document everything that needs to be communicated and “do the sums”.
As I’ve worked most summers for the better part of a decade I find it hard to remember the last time I had a proper Christmas holiday. I think it may have been December 2003, just before I headed off to Perth for a year.
This year I have quite a good work/life compromise. As I do a national job, I can pretty much work from anywhere. So long as I’ve got a phone and an email connection, my job is possible. So this year I’m going home to visit my family on the North Coast, and will work daytime from the office there. During daytime hours I can go to work and do my job, but at night I can see my family. I might even pop home for lunch on a few days. It’s not quite the same as having a good holiday break, but it’s a good compromise. I liken it to the days when Doug Anthony used to act as Prime Minister from his North Coast caravan.
For a few weeks each year the country was run from the Anthony’s caravan on the coast.
LARRY ANTHONY: We didn’t even have a telephone, he refused to have one, so the calls would have to go through to the corner store and the lady from the corner store would have to come ’round and knock at all hours of the day saying ‘Mr Anthony could you please call the prime minister’, so then Doug would have to go ’round to the Public telephone box and queue up with the others with his 20 cent slots to ring whoever, so this charade went on for years.
DOUG ANTHONY: But the country ran well I, I always say to myself well it’s never better [laughs]. But uh…it almost brought the nation down to a, a festival atmosphere. The nation sort of relaxed after all the tense period of living uh.. and getting ready for Christmas that here the nation was relaxing too with me in the caravan running the country.
I figure if Doug Anthony can run the country from a caravan (and use the public phone), I can do my job too. It’s just the same, isn’t it? Well almost, as I doubt Doug Anthony spent New Years Eve at Tropical Fruits NYE at the Lismore Showground.
But despite this “short break”, I’m going to be working quite hard. and probably lots of out-of-hours phone calls. For me, summer is one of the busiest times of the year. My “brief quiet moment” tends to be half way through the year.
Sometimes I wonder about the image to the world I project from this blog. Do I come across as some kind of cliched poof with a penchant for the campness associated with Swedish pop?
As much as I love Swedish pop music – with its associated campness – there’s lots of other Swedish music I like also.
In fact, I was chatting about it today with some colleagues. I mentioned the rather odd interesting/odd statistic that, just a few weeks ago, Max Martin had been responsible for 5 of the Top 10 songs in America. As part of the general chatter, I’d mentioned that Max Martin was actually the Swedish-born and Stokcholm-based Martin Karl Sandberg, and that he’d written songs for the likes of Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, *NSYNC, Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry, Pink and others.
“So why do you think the Swedes are so successful at pop music?”, was the question in response. And so I replied I thought it had a lot to do with the different cultural influences – US, UK, European – over the years which had allowed the Swedes to blend a universality/internationalism in their musical style than translated well for the modern times. I’m not sure if that’s entirely right, or that it holds much water as a theory, but it’s my theory nonetheless.
Which brings me to the perception – in Australia at least- that when it comes to Swedish music, it’s all about pop music. I LOVE POP MUSIC. The brashy, the camp, the Eurovision. I love it, due to the absolute joy in the music. But there’s also something about Swedish music that touches me in many ways. I think it’s the melancholy. Sometimes I think the Swedes compose the pop in the endless daylight of summer, and the melancholy during the long months of winter. Again, a theory which probably doesn’t hold much to scrutiny, but it’s out there anyway.
So I thought I’d post a few Youtube clips to demonstrate there’s more to Svensk pop musik than Melodifestivalen. Here’s a few of my current favourites.
carl noren – the anger
Smalfilm – Johan Borgert
Veronica Maggio, Snook, Petter – Inga problem (Remix)
Säkert – Fredrik (official video)
I hope you’ve enjoyed them.
And let’s not begin to talk about Swedish jazz, folk, classical, country music and so on. There’s a massive discussion to be had there, today’s was just about pop.
I’ve just spent an hour or so listening to “Angels In The City”, a new CD by Genevieve Lemon, an Australian singer-actor, having appeared in a number of Australian soap-operas, as well as films, including Jane Campion’s “The Piano”. I’m quite a fan of Genevieve’s work, having previously seen her act in a couple of plays, including her knock-out role as Shirley in the Broken Hill bar in “Priscilla – The Musical”. Also last year I saw her perform a couple of times as part of “Lemon Tart”.
What I remember most about the first time I saw “Lemon Tart” was their spectacular version of “Blue Sky Mining”, a fairly big hit for “Midnight Oil” in the 1990s. On this night, in particular, Genevieve transformed what I thought was a fairly typical Midnight Oil rock and roll protest song about corporate intransigence into a beautiful ballad. I’d never really listened to the lyrics until Genevieve brought them to life….
“The candy store paupers lie to the share holders
They’re crossing their fingers they pay the truth makers
The balance sheet is breaking up the sky
So I’m caught at the junction still waiting for medicine
The sweat of my brow keeps on feeding the engine
Hope the crumbs in my pocket can keep me for another night
And if the blue sky mining company won’t come to my rescue
If the sugar refining company won’t save me
Who’s gonna save me?”
Audio: Brief excerpt of “Blue Sky Mining”
This new CD demonstrates effectively what a great story-teller Genevieve is. Also on songs like Tom Waits’ “Tom Traubert’s Blues” and Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel”, she articulates both the strength and fragility of human nature. In many respects, Genevieve reminds me of the kind of thoughtful left-leaning singer-songwriters who are no longer so popular in Australia, like Judy Small, Margaret Roadknight and Norma Murphy. There are also shades of early Bette Midler in the way in which she takes well-known songs and makes them her own.
She also has a great sense of comedy. In her version, for example, of Lou Reid’s “Walk On The Wild Side”, she takes the line “But she never lost her head even when she was giving head”, and turns it into…
“But she never lost her head even when she was tucked in bed
she said, hey babe this is a kids show”
I’ve just arrived home from the April Meetup for the Sydney Weblogger Group. And you know, surprisingly, all of the people I met seemed quite nice and there were no apparent freaks. At least no one that I spoke to. Nonetheless, I’ve posted a fairly anonymous photograph, since many of the people I met tonight were fairly new to blogging and many of them have chosen to remain anonymous, unlike myself!
As Miss Andrea observed, the night started off with
the opening (with drinks) of an art exhibition featuring painter Angus McDonald and ceramicist Fiona Myer in collaboration. Martin and his SO Amanda knew Angus when they were living in NE NSW; the third member of our party was James, who grew up in that area. Martin also introduced us to his Sydney friends and erstwhile temp-house-hosts, Paul and Penny, who were there. Wow, too much confluence. I enjoyed the sparse, lovely artwork, which made me think about technique and light. Then we stood on the street outside the Tim Olsen Gallery Annex in Paddington where drinks were served on the naturestrip under a mini-marquee. The Janz bubbly was a welcome Tasnarnian touch.
From there, we headed off to the Blogger Meetup.
Both my good buddy Mark and I felt like old-timers when we reflected on the number of years we’ve been revealing our lives to the public. In stark contrast to some of the newer bloggers who were doing it for work-related reasons, we kinda felt like old-timer freaks. Well, I did, if Mark didn’t.
Blogging Meeting at the Arthouse Hotel.
Since I have such poor social skills I was grateful for the presence of my friend and colleague Miss Andrea, who is visiting from Tasmania. I mean, Miss Andrea and I had checked out some of the blog links this afternoon to make sure there were no potential stalkers or freaks attending, and we had decided most of the names and blogs we had surfed seemed like reasonable people. As it was, Miss Andrea had gone to university with one of the participants Brad Howarth
Sydney Blogger Meetup
But thanks to her ability to discuss fashion (I shop at Lowes), politics, and online identities and such, I was able to meet the likes of Icy, John, Bryan and supreme organiser (she did a great job) Sara who told us about her media experiences. Though I missed meeting Therin of Andor with whom I share an interest in Number 96. Without Miss Andrea, I’m sure I would have been Mr Loser, tucked away in the corner.
So yeah, it was a good night, and I reckon I’ll be back for the next one in May, especially since I noticed a couple of cute (possibly gay) guys in the room who I didn’t get the chance to talk to!!
PS. Emily has posted a photograph of me, Mark, Brad and Miss Andrea, which demonstrates what a loud, boorish person I obviously am. Holding court, I am either fascinatingly telling an anecdote or boring the pants off everyone. The person with the best caption wins a dinner date with me, and the person with the second best caption has to live with me for the rest of my life.
