Keirle Park, 22 November, 2010, Make-Up Lesson

Followers of the Keirle Park series will see this is the second visit to KP this week, for what is known in the trade as a make-up lesson.  The ambiguity of the term 'make-up lesson'  has always appealed to me and when this woman with the (really it is true) golden leather upholstered car interior and matching groomed blond do, with killer red lipstick and matching nail polish ( ok I am glossing up the lipstick colour but the nails were really killer red) pulled up next to me in the standard Extremely Large 4 ( now why is does that key slip into $) WD vehicle, dropped off a princess and made a few phone calls, so loud I could hear the message machine at the other end, what else could I do but set to with some black, yellowand red ink?  The original person was much better looking, softer, than this drawing suggest.  22 November 2010.

Keirle Park, 19 November, 2010, Callistemon Nuts

I had been for a walk around the lagoon to where it runs into the beach, picking this small bottlebrush nut on the way back.  A teenage pair, boy and girl were fooling around on this funny thing that might be a down-scale soccer goal. I was listening to the skaters, and the car park sounds.

The reference to the Pipe King 's (really that's what it said on the sign) orange pipes (below) reminded me of a pop-up children's book about animated  acrobatic pasta, with names like Milly Macheroni.   19 November 2010 was obviously not a very cohesive day for me.

84 McEvoy Road.

McEvoy Road

[song for Kate McG]

84 McEvoy Road, two bedroom fibro

we moved in with one double bed

that trebled, for dining, for seating,

centre stage of the living room

with a JVC stereo and a cache of vinyl.

Met you one Saturday in April

you were a lesson, a primer in style

how to splice melody, sing skin-tight harmony

and don’t miss a beat, not moving apart, 

somewhere that room’s still the same,

the bed’s still unmade, you say don’t move a thing

we grew wings, we grew wings

In parallel you ran true

it was anna and you,

whole cities, whole states, a whole

life of love climbed — built on solid

and shifting ground

bridge

like indian ink pressed and cut

I was all thumbs and fingers, all think

and I play you again

it’s late but its never too late

for you kate, to sing to me again

You lay your wet bathers, your salt

and your wounds on my floor,

gave me good counsel on southern boys,

shipwrecks and grits, and I speak now direct,

perhaps we’ve never spoken before?

Like good rope, like sweet hope

you sang up whole cities, whole states ,

even then impotent with love and with haste

we grew wings, we grew wings, we grew wings.

 © Carol Jenkins 2010 

I wrote this song last year. It occured to me today, drawing this 4 legged musical pun, just how like life the game of musical chairs really is.

Dinner for One or C'ena Pa Una

 

 Dinner for One

Carol Jenkins

 Lost my key to your door

Lost my sense of style

don’t go out no more

Its seems that I’m a bore

Cry in my sleep

Wake up slow

Close the blinds to the sun

doze til noon and it’s

Dinner for one

What a fix I’ve got me in

My ex best friend says you’re a cheat

And she should know

Lost my sense of style

I don’t go out no more

Lost my key to your door.

Dancing with shadows

Talking with thieves

Who should I believe?

And it’s dinner for one.

My ex best friend says you’re a cheat

And she should know

She should know

and it’s Dinner for one.

 Walking down King street

I just stare

at other people’s shoes

going out in pairs

and it’s dinner for one.

Cry in my sleep

Wake up slow

Close the blinds to the sun

doze til noon and it’s

Dinner for one

Dinner for One

Window seat please

With a paperback romance

I pretend to read

having dinner for one.

 

I wrote this Dinner for One song for my friend Janet Swain, who has written some nifty music for it and added in the great line "dinner for one".  It had quite a few drafts. Her glamorous muso daughter Lila Swain translated it into Spanish -'C'ena Pa Una'.

NB The photo is from as a series which features this stick-man (made of rocket stems and a piece of chicken gristle) running off from a dinner plate.

The Expanding Universe - Written for Sing! 2011

 My friend Mark Walsmely (who you can find at Demo Doctor) asked if I could write lyrics for a science theme song as a candidate for Sing!  the ABCs primary schools song book.  It sounded tricky and I thought I would cheat and adapt a poem I'd written about fossil fish but the first line of this appeared while I was making minestrone and viola!  Mark W. set it brilliantly to music, so it feels like we are listening to Albert E. playing the accordian in a Weimer Republic caberet in 1930.

Note: The photo may look like Tiny Tots stuck together but it really is a large gluon which was found in our kitchen, showing how adaptable to domesticity physics really is.

The Expanding Universe

or

Apples, cheese and fleas

Verse 1

Given gravity’s a form of stretchy glue

so apples fall down, instead of up to you

there’s also something larger  and mysterious

that pushes things apart,  that’s big and serious.

Einstein did not like it but allowed it might be true…

chorus

The dark parts of the universe

the cosmologic stuffing,

you can’t see or feel it

but it’s definitely not nothing,

more mysterious than cheese

far more discreet than fleas

darker than the dark side of the moon

and it’s right here, right now,

streaming through this room.

Verse 2

It’s dark energy that keeps us from imploding

it’s dark matters which prove to be consoling

it isn’t energy or matter as we know it

it’s hard to hold and harder to throw it

Verse 3

Since the Big Bang we’ve been getting faster

we’re speeding up but it’s hardly a disaster

oh the fun of being in an accelerating universe

without the dark side things would be much worse.

In the Lyric Mode - The Mood Museum Notebook for No-One

From time to time I write song lyrics, mostly because friends ask and then it's as if  I am hypnotised; straight away lyrics start scrolling in, as if I am really an automaton.  I wrote this song  for a girl or boy band. It's about resilience, and toenail polish.

Johny Jay

Johny Jay Dalway Medway

paints her toenails in the winter sun,

writes down the feeling in her Mood Museum

Notebook for No-One but J J Dalway Medway

Johny Jay Dalway Medway

shops for her Nana at the IGA

Black and Gold butter, Cadbury’s Roses

thinks about the boy with air guitar

at her morning bus stop.

bridge

            She’s whistling Coldplay, eyes half closed

            waiting for the 448, smiles and blinks

            ‘hope springs eternal’ thinks Johny Jay.

Johny Jay s got 99 photos

blu-tacked to her bedroom wall

sends a message to her sister’s phone

‘sending failed, check details’, she’s on her own.

It’s disconnecting, it’s disconnecting.

Johny Jay keeps the P-plate

in her chest of drawers, nobody at school

talks about it anymore.

It’s disconnected, it’s disconnected.

Johny Jay Dalway Medway

starts to know grief’s forever,

smiles and blinks, writes down the feeling

in her Mood Museum Notebook for No-One

but J J Dalway Medway.

Collected Works , Poetry & Ideas Bookshop, Blogspot & Ezine

 

 The wonderful Melbourne bookshop Collected Works, Poetry & Ideas  had some scary moments late last year when it seemed it might go down the fiscal gurgler.  But a call for help has seen a rush of punters buying books, readings, browsings and a general renaissance of what must be the best poetry bookshop in the world.  If you can't get to Melbourne, for a chat, a new book and the latest literary news, the next best thing is to visit tKris Hemensley's  Collected Works blog which includes the ezine The Merri Creek, where I've got a new poem in the December issue on the vicarious joy of the post. PS If you are wondering what the crinum and soy sauce fish image has to do with Collected Works, I can safely say I don't know.  

Keirle Park, 13 September, 2010, Skate side

The skate park seems to be inhabited by figures from a seventies architectural drawing, perhaps it's the heavy handed black brush strokes that invite this comparison.That strange calligraphic daub above the 'R' is the remnants of someone taking off into the bowl.  13 September 2010

Keirle Park, September, 2010, Coloured Pencils

 

The trees edging the park on this September afternoon might have existed simply as a support structure for clouds. These mottled, almost sunset clouds, appeared to melt into ach other. The coloured pencils made this sketch, even the paper, seem like primary school art.  20 September 2010 

Keirle Park, September 2010 - Cheap Black Ink

In July I'd  stayed for a short time at Bundanon, working with a team of people from Macau Uni, headed up by Kit Kelen, getting some of my poems translated into Chinese (yipppee- that is Mandarin for excited) . Kit and Carol Archer were great fun to sit and draw with & Kit introduced me to what he describes as cheap black ink. This sketch is slapped on with ink, foregrounded with the ubiquitous  trashed water bottle and entirely out of whack perspective-wise. Naturally I spilt a deal of ink in the car. It dried to a brown-blue iridescent stain.  6 September 2010

PS Check out  the excellent  Macau -Elsewhere Project  Blog , which blogs some of the art work being produced in the collaborative  Macau-Elsewhere postcard project initiated by Carol Archer.

Keirle Park, August , 2010 - Back to Square One

Seemingly by accident I've sketched the tree where I started off. Same but different. 30 August 2010

Keirle Park, August, 2010 - Inside Out

What is it about the car? Though I am reluctant to say it here the car, my very shabby BMW, is both lounge room and cocoon, an aperture to the world and a scene in itself. The odd perspective here is looking up and out from the driver's seat , through both the passenger window and the sun roof.  Night falls all over the place (again)- as they say in a certain book.  9 August 2010

Keirle Park, 2 August, 2010

One person out trying their foot at kicking a few goals, it must have been getting dark because all the colour has leaked out and the trees are silhouettes. The Norfolk pine steals the scene. 2 August 2010.

Keirle Park, August, 2010

This is the game with the pointy ball, perhaps this is why it involves a lot of pointing. It seems it rained all of July and most of May so this is the was the first time back at Keirle Park after an absence. 6 August 2010

Keirle Park, May, 2010

Back from school holidays. I was parked facing towards Pittwater Road and Lagoon Park, so that is how the moving cars got in, the other things were seen in the rear view mirror. The No Signs-ing sign may have something to do with the Brunhilda-esque skateboarder, each being modifications of the moment. 5 May 2010

Keirle Park, 29 March, 2010

Why did I imagine an irregular, tennis racquet  island with high cliffs and high seas pounding in from the east?  An island with varied terrain, that if hit by an oversize tennis ball would bounce it back into orbit, or at least out to sea? Hard to say, but put it down to Idle Folly and being  close to the Tennis Courts. 29 March 2010.

Keirle Park, 22 March, 2010

This was looking straight up, out of my car sunroof, into the Norfolk pine. Drawing things directly above one's head is literally a pain in the neck.  The lines in the back were the power lines though they look remarkably like mistakes.  It was tempting to paint this later at home, to make it work better, or so I imagined.  22 March 2010.

Keirle Park, March, 2010

This seems remarkably wooden, even for a tree. Something went wrong with the leaves, but I kept digging the hole. It seems to have come out out of bad 1950's commemorative dinner set. 12 March 2010.

Keirle Park, 15 February, 2010

Various qualities of this Norfolk Pine, how it seems to soak up light or emit darkness, the pattern of its fronds, the texture of the bark, is something I find fascinating. 15 February 2010

Keirle Park, February, 2010

 

This fellow and another were living out of a van and had just made dinner, nothing too fancy either. They lent the park an air of domesticity that I liked, sitting out in the late afternoon, eating and watching a group kick a ball around.

8 February 2010

Keirle Park, December, 2009

 

This was touch footie, where the players have tags the opposing players

can  rip off, whereas in normal footie it's usually skin or a body part. 

This was one of the few games where there was on-lookers. 7 December 2009

Keirle Park, 30 June, 2009

This was a kendo group, an elegant set of master and students, going through their forms. This was the only time i saw them in the park.  30 June 2009

Keirle Park, August, 2009

 I was sitting in my car in the Keirle Park carpoark when  this enormous four wheel drive thing pulled up next to me.It reminded me of the giant front-end loader  machines I saw when i was doing some consultancy work in a nickel mine , Mt Keith, in the Wheat Belt. It was a fly in- fly out place, and as the shift started at 6am i flew in the day before and had some time to look around, at the plants and machinery. This car is monumentally stupid.

Keirle Park, June, 2009

 

This is a favourite, not sure why i had this stamp in my kit but it seemed postcard right for the pencil and text sketch of the Norfok pine. It must have been getting dark very quickly for me to race through this and jot down the time.

Keirle Park, May , 2009

 Why did it take so long for me to draw to the edge of what I could see? In May the light fades early and here there is that lovely effect of how shadowed things lose colour first.  11 May 2009

Keirle Park, April, 2009

The skaters and the touch footie crowd, not sure why they are in different colours. 9 April 2009

Keirle Park, April, 2009

 

!st April, 2009. I've got a new packet of textas with brush tips.

The text reads ( well, I am guessing a bit here):

A part of the park

hides in the sedan

pine branches, grass

a serried line of trunks,

a street lamp just edging in.

Keirle Park, February, 2009

 

Whoa, pretty dizzy on the perspective, and it seems all I had was a green pen and 3 minutes.

Keirle Park, November 2008

This one is odd, I am still tending to draw what is inside the car, like my left arm, but I've also scribbled quick sketches of two figures. 3 November 2008

Keirle Park, October 2008

I picked this stem of lancelote leaves with small white flowers from the tree, might be a peppermint gum but is a member of the Myrtacaea family, through the sun-roof of my car.   27 October 2008

Keirle Park, July 2008

 

The car in winter, thermos o'tea. 

Monday Afternoons, Keirle Park

Introduction

Most every Monday afternoon during the school term I take Theo to his tennis lesson at Keirle Park and occupy myself in some way for an hour. Mostly I walk around the lagoon and along the beach promenade or take some work and edit it sitting in the car, or both.  Two and a half years ago, on the 25th August 2008,  I started making a quick sketch while I was waiting.  Series of things, poems and drawings, always interest me, in the way they  progress and build up complexity. While the art work here is rough and hasty, my rule is to sketch quickly, so I have time for other things, and leave the drawing once I drive home, it is observing what is happening, or how my attention changes over time which is what interests me.

This is the first drawing, 25 August 2008.

When Years Take the Stars Away

If you’re reading this in one-hundred-million,

two-thousand and seven AD, that is, after all the stars

have inched away, taking their tails of light with them,

far off to where the universe strikes a light against

what, at the time of writing, has no dimension, the timeless

place that time is coming to, I want to tell you

that here – right now – the sky is prinked

with nebulae in clusters and symposium,

the light is mostly white, so you get the true idea of blackness

and the abundance is such that it presses infinities

into the foreheads of children lying safe in their beds at night, 

and those who can get out from the cities

and take the time to sit outside, make up elaborate

stories, concerning these embroideries of starlight, and if

a meteorite rushes, burning, into the earth’s air,

wonderment bubbles up, into this strange satisfaction

which might be happiness. I want you to know, as you sit

reading this on your black and starless planet

that you should not find that blank

blanket of night a reason to believe that stars do not exist,

the galaxies, the Milky Ways and the jewel of Magellan’s Clouds,

still shine and burn abundant in distant orbits.

This is one of the poems that often gets a run when I am invited to give a reading. Of course, while it is ostensibly about the expanding universe, it is a love poem.