Lunch at Tanpopo - Bento Boxing, and Notes for another day

Last week the penultimate page in my sketch book was this louche sketch of the salad and miso soup, the two sized stacks of plates. It is all pretty hazy, as if it wasn't quite real, the looseness of each item an aid to remember it rather than the scene itself.  We both had bento boxes, and they were very good,  my one with baked pumpkin and bok choy, some grilled silver cod ( I guess ) glazed with miso, some tender simmered pork belly with mustard, and fresh slices of sashimi. Am I forgetting something?  Shiro miso, rice and a small salad.  I think Tanpopo is turning into my Dan Dan replacement.

Night Blossoming Heaters -

The night blossoming heater, like some wild weed, has invaded sidewalks cafes and pizza places in Sydney. During the day they are mostly mere observors, small metallic umbrellas that are short on shade. By night they flare up, big bunsen burners, radiant efflorescence of blue, yellow and red.  While they make pavement tables a cosier proposition, I am not sure about all that heat being pumped out into the plein air, warming mostly ones face. Though one looks less chic, wrapped in  the rugs put out by many thoughtful cafes, I think it might be less taxing on our climate.

Crocodile Tears and the River Nile

For reasons both practical and nostalgic, I bought this gift set of vintage Nile Hankies. For running noses, yes - oi there it goes - come back Nose* - no  I mean of course the nose that leaks a bit when the legs are running, or one might say, joins in that game. Unlike its modern counterpart, the tissue, that has launched a million fissures, with it's half-life of ten seconds running backwards, the lady's hankie, embroidered, is in for the long run.
* At this point I would recommend reading Gogol's The Nose

Buried Treasure - Dig Deep, Plant and leave: Jolly Rotten

My friend found this mysterious item on the beach, I gravitated to it last Friday. It was cold and windy, the sky was organising itself for a serious Nil Visibility Deluge. Intrigued and careless of warnings about the smell, I took it home, leaving it out in the rain. Next day at sea..... as they say...

It had been my intention to draw this, a kind of get-to-know-you, getting-to-feel-at-home-about-you thing. It was all that I could do to take these photographs, and then dash inside to scan this. While what I think is two species of sponge, cungevoi and a sea-tulip, with barnacles welded in, was quickly sent back outside, the pong of it, the unrelenting olid stench, with its air of rotted prawn and festered crab, its whiffy overtures of putrescine, its glued-in on-the-bugle high notes, were not so easily dismissed. I got a shovel and dug deep into the vacant vege garden bed, buried it deep and packed in the earth on top, with a blessing and an apology to the poor innocent herbs in the next bed.

Then I scrubbed  the gloves  I was wearing and then my hands. The scent lingered as they say in romance novels.  Took a shower, washed my hair. Put on clean clothes. The smell kept coming back to me. Maybe it was a stray molecule or  perhaps it was not a real smell, but the memory of the foetid odour that had etched itself on an incredulous neural loop that kept replaying like a scene from a car accident that killed the family dog when you were seven. The thing itself is still morbidly fascinating, and sometime soon, when my brain has stopped revivifying its dead-dog stink, I am going to draw it.

Egg Sitting Strategy

A while back Bart Brassica fancied himself as a Chicken Scientist, and set out to cross a Black Orpington with a Leghorn to get really large eggs.  The Leghorns avoided Bart to such an extent that one day the whole flock of them walked over to Granny Eggwhistle's place, where she invited them into her hen house. The Orpingtons, laid a few eggs but there were not all that big. Bart had these oversize paper mache eggs built to inspire the hens to greater things. The Orpingtons have cackled about these monoliths amongst themselves, and can still be seen shaking their heads over Farmer Brassica's scheme. 
Mavis Eggwhistle, picking up some eggs from her Granny, said  Bart must have some other motive, to which Granny Eggwhistle, who rarely agrees on principle, concurred, adding that motive was To Make a Fool of Himself.

Orchids Showing Off - As I was going to St Ives

Setting off on Friday to St Ives  Showground for the annual Orchid Show the rain blitzing Wakehurst Parkway in that unpleasant, now-you-see the-road now-you-dont-way, I gave up on the prospect of a pleasant treat and waited to Saturday's better weather.  While the Orchid Show is certainly not drawing the chi-chi crowd I loved the displays, the orchids, the delightfully chatty older ladies on the desk - "Aren't  you Excited ?", one asks, "Oh Yes!" I say, and it's true.  There was actually a display set up with a faux treasure chest, pirates's map, skull and gold coings, the chest filled with orchids. This fellow, large and leering, has not been distorted all that much by the camera angle. While this year's show is over, watch out for next years!

A Shoe-In: No 1. Words that sound like what they do.

Like many words 'shoe' starts to sound odd if you say it for a while, it starts to shuffle along like slippers, leave meaning's room, shooed out, showing signs of wear and tear, as the open 'oe's fade to leave the 'sh'.  And saying that suggests some conflation between the foot's sole and and toe, to make up the outer casing, the second skin, of skins, that sometimes stand around alone, in  pairs.

Mayfair Mornings' Chancey Re-Do as Skid Row

This wheat paste is past it's use by date, peeled and peeling corners, faded text, but you get the gist. It's Newtown, a grungier lane behind The Hub ( what would that be called now?) but it does seem very Brit.

A Short Walk in the Hillocky Moss

A boat shaped Japanese dish, bearing an unseen cargo of gold fish, two types of moss - one in spore the other not, a woman anonymous in her coat perpetually afloat on the breeze made by her forward progress, sunlight powering chlorophyll, add up to a short walk in the hillocky moss.

Out for a Duck ?

 

The sketch from Thursday night's dinner at Billie Swings might nearly be one of those New Yorker style cartoon captioning capers. For example  " What is this Duck Wall Dorf? " or " That's the last time I go out with the Ducks Mother!"

On the food front my  duck liver parfait with fresh lime for starters was excellent and the main act- silver dory with saffron cauliflower, squid and black eyed beans, delicious.  The only thing that puzzles me about Billie Swings [ Spit Road, Mosman]  is why it's not full of locals.

Job Lot of Express Draw - Bridges, Bus Types, Scenes from the Garden

 

 

The Express Draw app is one of my favourite bus and train diversions, though this set might suggest I should catch public transport more often to get some practice it. What is it that makes the symetry function yield such rigidly sinister faces?

Mighty Like a Rose - Mavis Eggwhistle's Tag

Mavis Eggwhistle, as readers might remember, has a flower shop. Mavis has decided to redoctor The Whistle-Stop Floriste, in a edgey urban style but with a floral theme, so she has painted the side wall with pink climbing roses and jonquils, what she calls street art. Her cousin Betty-Lui Whistle has told her it looks more like wrapping paper and consequently Mavis is not speaking to her.
Mavis was worried about doing this this work in watercolour paints - she bought a larged boxed set from Michaels Craft and Art Supermarket but Frank Winkler - who is back in Hunterdon County -  assured her that all art is emphemera and after it rains this will be genuine street art, adding, with a wild flourish of his hoe,"We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars".

Bart Brassica and the Wild-Eyed Pindos Pony

For some time Bart Brassica has nursed the notion that he could turn what he calls the Three Acres Corrall   into either a Dude Ranch or a replica of The Painted Dessert. One of the limitations of having one eye, is that Bart is no judge of distance and the Corrall is not much bigger than a good sized front porch.  Undettered by facts, Bart has been decorating the Corral and trying to convince Hamlet, his Pindos Pony, to climb an old stair case he has installed to a lookout, which is really the barn roof.  And in case you're wondering about his name, Bart called his pony Hamlet, to suggest a rural village, and is a little puzzled when folks start getting all fancy with stage quotes. Hamlet, has his own ideas and wisely refuses to climb up anything Bart has built. Here you can see Hamlet is rolling his eyes, and deciding whether or not he should bite Bart, to speed up his comprehension on the matter of him climbing stairs.

Azul Press - First Issue of Azul's international literary magazine

Azul Press, a Dutch based international literary publisher have released the first issue of their e-zine Azul, it will be published twice a year and is available for free from Azul Press. (www.azulpress.com) The e-zine  includes poetry, prose and one or more portfolios of art and/or photography.eaturing work by poets and visual artists.  The work is published in English  and Dutch,with poets from Odessa, Maastiicht, Mexico, Bagdad, Montreal, Adelaide and Sydney - I am very pleasesd to have  poems in the # 1 Issue.

Louring Sky Heightened by Clouds

Late Sunday afternoon, coming out of Art Gallery of NSW, a little heady already from a largish dose of images, the whole kaleidoscopic effect of jamming Margaret Olly on top of Sol del Witt, Christo, Simyrn Gill, Jeff Koons  to say just a few, the dizzy orientation of it slightly countered by a soothing visit to the lady polo players of the Tang dynasty, naturally the sky is that ominous state often called louring - or if you prefer lowering.  The illusion here, or, more precisely over on the ridge more usually called Kings Cross, is amplified as it seems the sky, really the clouds, are almost upon the apartments. These clouds though, accumulate both depth and height, filling up a great swathe of sky ( though that term is usually reserved for vegetation, but why not give the clouds the use of it), so the sky is both towering and lowering.

Five Eight Time

The new Tama drum kit in the music room, cymbals holding their brass faces, expectant, to the sky, while two pairs of sticks, parked on the bass drums, wait. A brush holds still, out of sight, while I scribble this in the gaps of audio editing.

I Shall Wear a Crown!

This emphatic crowning sticker, crows its suave curves curbside at the corner of Spit and Ourimbah Road in Mosman. True ephemera there was a flurry of these stickers around Cremorne and Nuetural Bay, duecedly neat things that weep colour when it rains.

Wombats of Bundanon - Translating 20 Australian Poets into Chinese

Wombats of Bundanon, translating a generous selection of Australian poets into Chinese is just out from Association of Stories of Macau, China  and Cerberus Press, Australia. It is part of an ongoing program of translating Australian poetry organised by Kit Kelen and a team of wonderful translators from the University of  Macau. I'm pleased to have six poems in this collection. Macau is obviously a  happening place for poetry, collaborations and art.

The cover art for this is a covetable charcoal drawing by Carol Archer, which I saw taking shape when I visited Bundanon for the rigorial residential workshop to translate my poems.

Faulkner's Blue Period

This is the 23rd after-Robert-Capa sketch I've done,Faulkner in his blue phase, which I believe lasted for his whole life, or at leastwise as long has he had a type-writer.

Where the expression is unreadable ?

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Continuing my pursuit of catching Robert Capa's oevre in Prussian Blue, this drawing of a captured German officer, the details of the three eagles on each side of his collar, the swastika monogrammed below the eagle insignia on the breast of his coat, make a strange conundrum with the headscarf and woollen mittens. Naturally it is snow white ground with a spinney of dry sticks in the background. I am some way off catching the expression of this young man, or his handsome good looks, he might be disgusted at having his photo taken or numb with the misery of it all.

The Mathematics of Decision Making

Like one of those problems that ask; if a man buys three bottles of ginger beer, and saves $2.77 how much does each bottle cost and what kind of equation is this?  A quadratic perhaps?.  This nifty number conundrum seemed to be a test by the Shell Service Station in Davidson about altruism. Ginger beer was bought ( how could one resist), there was a discussion about the price,  bit of disgruntlement, and it was a good thing photo was taken pre-purchase because shortly after it got short shrift, or a quick rip.