Yule Tide Eco- Fire Place Insert

Not being one for a trad tree, each year my yule tide task is to make something Christmas-esque. And what more evocative of home and hearth, than dancing flames ? Of course for us Southern Hemisphereans, where Xmas is bought to you by Sweat & Swelter, a hale fire ( NB that was not a conscious pun) is hardly to be borne ( ditto) pero pero pero ( but but but) this fake Fire with its sly reference to the conflagration of consumerism, is just right. Warming the cockles but not the skin, visually alluring but not requiring attention or more than a small amount of sacrificial forest.

Merry Christmas !

Nothing Beats an Extra Pair of Hands at Christmas Time

 Eight-feet Pete's Great Aunt Lou-Ella (more properly known as Mrs Woo)  finds, while she is not run off her feet at Christmas, having like Pete eight of them to share the load, that she often feels short handed, and so has adapted  this slightly unwired kitchen whisk to a perfect state of handiness. Exactly what might be done with this needs some  whiskful thinking,
PS Stay tuned to meet Mrs Woo

Lime Spiders for Summer ?

Three spikes of spiderish blooms, speckled, elongate tepals, dark green raised spots on green, a labellum with  the same spots on white.The set seem out of season and so, something of a triumph. One frond was lost to possum pranks, while the whole plant gives lie to the oft-heard axiom that orchids like to be pot bound to flower.  This one has room and then some. Perhaps orchids are the ultimate real estate experts, and it's position, position, position.

Retro Gate

Watergate has a lot to answer for, as soon as wrote 'Retro Gate' that once was a word 'gate'  becomes a suffix for underhand spooks and phone taps.  Unlike this MBC Gate, phone tapping and other assorted forms of eaves dropping, sadly, never goes out of fashion. What happened to good manners? Perhaps it still exists in some vintage form behind this near-bucolic wrought iron gate that leads one on to Mosman Bowling Club. The jaunty paint scheme, the latch and the straight & narrow path all do their bit to reinforce the idea that privacy might be another word for honour.

X to the n

Carol Jenkins's second collection of poetry  Xⁿ is now out, Woo Hoo!
Xⁿ might be the shortest poem possible between two letters, a mathematical metaphor for poetry, shorthand for a process that takes something specific and transforms it into something more intensely itself.
Jenkins’ second collection begins pre-big bang, and proceeds, democratically investigating life. Is she mining the everyday for the sake of linguistic high jinks, or hijacking language to celebrate where we’re at? Here we find a penchant for the absurd, a playful elucidation of everything from the concept of zero to the history of burnt toast, a subversion of historical methods, road trips and set theory, butter and death. Wry and lucid, wide-ranging and witty, this is exactly what you need to read.

So please go directly to via this link to  Puncher & Wattmann's website  where you can buy it. It is also available from Gleebooks, Kinokuniya in Sydney and Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne.

Freesias Concentrating

Leaving aside chrysanthemums and other members of the compisatae family that go from fresh directly to stinky swamp water, there is a point when a vase of flowers which having been sinking past their prime turn start to wither gracefully, roses become crepey, take on a blown beauty, and where these freesias have dried to glassine crisp petals where the colour concentrates, and the litter of fallen racemes and flowers, the pollen dust suggest a homage to things past.

Raining Jacarandahs

In the list of flowers of longevity  the jacaranda falls to the bottom, but oh what a fall. As part of the Match Box Project I made this small scene with one blossom in mid-air  - well, really swinging on its trapeze of Silko.  I made five flowers, one for this box and four to give away as ephemeral brooches. My friend Sybille tells me there is one German word which means a copy of a thing that lasts slightly longer  than the thing! This somehow makes this tiny project complete.

Floriad's Ferris Wheel Iconographic Shadow

Ferris, parts patterned on a central spindle, shadow nearly not exaggerated by the five o'clock light, proves to be made of sterner stuff than the tulips, a mercy since S and I trusted ourselves to rise above it all in a gondola.

Pitched perfectly, an NAB ATM does Dorothy a deal.

At first sight, I wondered was this clever marketing?  Feeling, yes I know it's close to felling, but I felt nearly like a thief stealing this photograph of the NAB ATM in Mosman, its glossy read booth perfectly pitched to flatten a western witch. What was this?  Strangely most people just ignored it, well after all Toto it's not Kansas.  Any shoe shop worth its salt would hire the clever clogs who has put this slipper into banking.

Holography for Beginners

In an odd reflective moment the laser surface of this CD becomes, well, three-D. The charming cone that levitates off the regular reflected image makes one wonder, does it have an equivalence hovering unseen above the CD? Perhaps it's only trace is that sharp line of light.

Consolidated Shadows in Black and White

Perhaps in a presentiment of what will happen to the clothes these forms once wore, this black and white collection loiter late afternoon, post market, like consolidated shadows. The calico covered form in front, without the anatomical chutzpah of its companions, suggests that elegance tells less.

The Orchid Stream Steams Ahead

In my imaginary orchid competiition the 2013 winner might be this denbrob with its elegantly elongated petals, that scissor the morning light into a maze of hatchings, or is it that they cross-hatch light amazingly? And if you glossed over the difference in some hypothetical translation would the meaning be changed in some important non-linguistic way. In any cse the picture tells. There is one late runner that still might pip this one to the post, or would that be post a pippance?

In Gratiation -A Smiling Art

Like a cross between a folding screen and two lost smiles flanked by hole-iness this exemplar of elegance is from my friend S's zesty collection of graters.  Holding the possibilities of cheese partitioned into two or three variations, nutmeg and lemon rind this grin and bare it grater, is not something to mince words with.

A Rose is A Real

 An invite to anagram, or riff, this sign might be a  little iambic, that begs for Hired Rose Leers, or is a Rose Real or Real Fire for Hire ? There is something not quite formal in this four by three layout. Does it feel like hell fire or rose by an up and down reading?  This attraction to reform and scramble, and there is no egg in sight, might be an occupational hazard. Or on the upside,diagonal wise, I could say two roses make it alright.

The Hot Seat or Don't Look Now

This opportunity to combust not ones own goose but ones derrier seems to be an offer that most would decline.  Perhaps it might appeal to those wanting to loose a few inches without the cost of surgical procedures?

The hot seat indeed, but perhaps I've read that  'c' too literally and it also means c as in 'see' and this is a fast way for the hotelier to cash in on those patrons who want to check that their gluteous maximus is still in the right place. Better not look I say.

Cloisonne Sky

The coral trees, Erythrina, early August Sunday morming divide a section of cold wind swept sky into cloissones, the tips just breaking into flower, pivot points of season, the next week red brackets of a preemptive spring.

Winter Windfall, doubling up Dendrob Points

When everything else is twigs and sticks, bare branches or plain leaves, the orchids are going speccy with lovely spikes loaded with tepals, petals and labellum, mocking the insect world, or perhaps colluding in a cabaret of insectival innuendo.

Hoola Tree - Annandale Goes Hawaian

There is no skirting the issue, this paperbark  just off Annandale Street has been hoola-ised.  That this tree shimmies is a certain thing, a kind of dance to the music of grass, an every little breeze seems to reveal the tree's knees, a Hopkinian sussuration, a benign and positive form of hooliganism. Will councils create dress codes for trees? Does make this blog post a hoola-gram?

Blinded by the White Light

 

Three days after I had been lucky enough to score a copy of Mark Flynn’s  new collection of short stories White Light,  my son, home from school, cast a knowing eye over me and said, What have you been doing? Nothing I said, a ridiculous smile o n my face, No, he insisted, you’re stoked, you’ve been up to something. It was true,  I had been reading O’Flynn’s story  ‘Stealth’  that morning and the elation had not worn off.

‘Stealth’, like stealth had crept on me. We were jogging along and I was thinking, hey all good but a bit blokey, and what about the kid, he’s not adding up.  But then, well, I can’t tell you what happened that flipped the story from droll to hilarious as that would be a spoiler but, even now a week later, the image of what I am not going to tell you makes me laugh. Then the whole story clicked together and the guy, Barry - the son, Ross Livingstone and the CFA were inter-meshed in a way that mixed the laconic with the absurd, blokey with feminine and the vernacular with the linguistically exhilarating just about perfectly.  When I was laughing a lot I heard myself say.’ I love you Mark O’Flynn.’. What I really meant, of course, was that I loved this short story by Mark O’Flynn, but hey anyone who can make me laugh like that is right up there.

Now I’ve finished the collection and have thought about emailing Mark O’Flynn to ask if he’s got more stories hidden somewhere but that would be a little too much like stalking. But perhaps the sensible thing to do would be to go find one of the novels he’s written!

White Light is published by Spineless Wonders

I'm Being Followed By a Snow Shadow

LIke an odd and hectic electric pole, or a bristling lateral tree, the shadow of the chairlift and its load of skies and skiers, lays down indigo, light navy, mid-tone cobalt, and so one gets to slide up and down the hill.

Idiosyncrasies of Phototaxis

In a spike of Zygopetalums one has rotated in a kind of botanical raspberry to its fellow flowers. Is this a my error in positioning and aspect of the plant, where experience has shown the critical thing is to bring the plant in before possums devour the stems with their honeydew promise.

Tree Bling Iridescence

More iridescent than the eighties these beetles, coleoptera I guess as they look more beetle than bug were swarming out of one tree, across a picnic bench and onto another tree in a beachside Balmoral park last week. Each a ambulatory study of scarab-esque they appear to be either laying these eggs, or perhaps eating some thing else's.Or perahps they are grazing on the just discernable fine film of lichen.

Cloud Storage - The Plain Facts of Going, Going, Gone

While it serves no purpose, though that raises the spectre of what would rate as proper purpose, Mavis Eggwhistle, who like all the other folk in Lambertville and  Ringoes, has not seen Bart Brassica since January, has been rifling through old photos and found this one of Bart, taken one night when Bart was either guarding his prize crop of over-sized hearts-ease or putting together a floral valentine. This latter idea is entirely Mavis's, a fancy induced by how quickly the past fuzzes up into a jigsaw of missing pieces. Right now she is starting to imagine that Bart Brassica, or even herself, might be a figment, a complex fictitious folly. Granny  Egg has advised Mavis to stop reading So Crates and start eating proper suppers.

Anti -Tea Device: The Kettle as a Dead End

A week ago I made a cup of tea. It had the unmissable taint of formic acid, the pungent signature of the ant. Undrinkable of course. I suspected a stray ant in the teapot. Cut to yesterday afternoon,  I heat the kettle for tepid water to make bread, and along with the 450ml of aqua out comes a dozen ants. Pour out the rest of the water, more ants. Refill and tip, more ants. A series of a dozen refills and each emptying delivers yet more ants. Here you can see one of the last,  washed out at rinse number 17.

Hell, an ant nest in the kettle? Is this like Jonestown for Ants? Was some errant ant leader simply suicidal. Is it an ant cult? More filling and emptying, and while the ants have gone the smell of formic acid remains.  How long had they been there, perhaps their bodies disguised as tea leaves in the teapot?
Post Script: Hunting for an antidote to that persisent formic smell, I've boiled kettle water with a chunk of lemon, twice, then followed up with water and vinegar, ( yes, same citric acid trick).The inside of the kettle is, improved, shiny eve, and the smell, well the best I can say is ameliorated.

Single Flower Theory

Camellias, easily bruised, difficult to arrange, ephemera in a flower. What's not to like? This one , gleaned on a late night walk, was well and truly over the fence, and it might have been a public service, to take it making one less slippery fallen flower underfoot on the morrow. Here it sits, a might be anemone, in this Venetian vase of black and whit glass cane.

Con-Chivances - An a Buddance

Bought for soup, the bundle of yet 

to flower budding chives, 

thrives on its release, each head 

listening for the next move.

Enclave of Sea Glass, Driftwood and Crockery Shards

 

 Like a corner where old memories are washed, there is a tiny Sydney Harbour beach where the tide, the habour currents and the wind contrive to create a home for flotsam, a pantry of cracked crockery, crazed pottery, wave-turned, sea-polished wood and sand-smoothed sea glass. Someone, or someones, have salvaged and arranged the harbour's offerings into a quiet riot of colour and shape, a trove of broken pieces mended by time.

Churning the Sea of Milk - Angkor Watt's Marine Survey

One of the best creation myths,  Angkor Watt's elegant frieze of asuras and devas churning the sea of milk might also double in as a survey of the marine life of the twelfth century commissioned by Khmer king Suryavarman I. The whole relief, a consummate drama of swish and pull, watched over by Amsara, underpinned by fish, runs the length of a colonnade but seems to be longer than its 160 feet length, especially as the doorways ahead recede in a perfect regression, and to the right the open field pulses deep green in the heat.

Beaufort Re-Scales with an Extra Strong Umbrella

Obviously there are great expectations for the paper mermaid kite that came with this advice and safety directions. The prospect that it might reach the same altitude as any plane is an exciting one. Though perhaps there plane envisaged is a paper plane, though this I doubt is something to be warned abut. Then the mermaid kite may be made of the same stern stuff as the model umbrella featured in the After Beaforte Scale.  It may be that I'm a recidiivist buyer of cheap brollies but most mine invert well before somewhere between the  leave rendering, and the stiff flag phase. 

The Other Face of Luna Park -Sydney

The side of the famous front door smile of Luna Park in Sydney is elegantly exuberant art deco tower of geometrically intricated lights and plaster. Here the Chrysler-esque finials are just a a faint arc of  lights,.And that garishly gorgeous grin ? It might be a world away.

One tomato, two tomatoes - virtuosities of flavour

Another summer gone, and all that's left of the garden tomatoes are two sketches, neither of which would make one suspect how truly delicious these tomatoes were. I pick them just as they start to colour pink, getting in before the resident possums.
The yield is maybe one or two tomatoes a day over summer, not much, but the flavour is so deliciously, intensely, sweetly tomato, that when the last one is eaten, and shop bought tomatoes are reluctantly purchased, I find the cut-out shop type now taste just like wet paper.

Camus in Conte and Pencil

Another sketch in the famous author series, taken from a photograph in the Little Black  Book of Books.. Camus is perhaps someone to read in one's twenties, as I did, diligently consuming The Plague and A Happy Death, thinking of him as an ancient. Now I see he died at 46.  Not, ahem, that old at all. The heavy overcoat, worn in this photo, hints at Eastern Bloc winters and perhaps, the TB which hounded, one might say plagued him.
The distortion in these redos gives one a false sense of ownership. Obviously, rereading is needed. 

The Brassica Plot Thickens

As many of you will now be sadly all too aware of, Bart Brassica has gone AWOL, which Mavis Eggwhistle says stands for Absent With Out Leaving a Note. This leaves the Brassica Farm in a Predicament, most of the farm animals followed the literary tradition they know from Animal Farm and Charlotte's Webb, and set up a committee, which in their case has formed a Search Party and Base Camp, see the last episode. 

All this is well and good, says Mr Farmhand, [leaving aside that the horses have ordered ordered two cases of beer from the local liquor shop by ringing up and impersonating Bart, explaining to the other animals by saying 'Hey come on, it's a party.'] but says Mr Farmhand, 'Bart or No Bart, things need hoeing.' This has cheered the horses and other animals up substantially, and the word has gone out on the Range that it's a Hoe Down and they expect a Jug Band or at least Two Fiddlers and Spoonerism to arrive at any moment.
Thanks to Ms Ingrid Periz for nipping in and getting this photograph. 

Home on The Range - Bart's Search Party

 For quite some time now, Bart Brassica has been missing. At first it was thought he'd was perhaps sleeping off a tad too much fermented beet liquor in some shady corner, or was taking a rare holiday to the Annual Cabbage Festival and Sauerkraut Soiree held in Hooterville. But after seven weeks of complete invisibility all the local farm creatures have organised themselves into a search party and have consequentially set up a base camp on the Range Hood.

 This dramatic night search shot show their complete vigilance and close attention to all compass points. The East facing search party, above, never so much as blink, while the Northern Scouts ( below) in difficult arid country-side have curiosity down to a fine art. Find Bart? Well, I hope so.

Grennan Castle subsides into its pasturage.

The road from Ballyduff to Thomastown in County Kilkenny, runs along the valley of the River Nore, past Grennan Castle , now  a picturesque ruin, the roof top grass as lush as any meadow. The castle's proud position is undeterred by the loss of carved lintels and window arches by vandals, its moat  a remote memory in the ground and  Cromwell's two day siege in 1650, of which he wrote of declaring after two days the enemy, left, agreeing 'never to again bear arms against England'. It can't only be in retrospect that that would be a hard thing to believe.

Sixties Dandelion Yellow at Tanpopo

There was something about the way this young woman's hair framed her face, that reminded me of a a character in an Ishiguro novel, a kind of demure resoluteness. But perhaps this a bit of wistful retro-fitting, a kind of post-hoc intertextuality bought on by finishing Ishiguro's short story collection 'Nocturnes'. After being so smitten with 'Never Let Me Go' this felt like Ishiguro going through the motions, stuck in a room of people he had no sympathy for, like cooking with slightly rotten vegetables, no good can come of it.

Owlish Viewpoint in the Blue Mountains

Spheroidal weathering, water wear, torsions of time and place, have given this outcrop, just below the ridge before Leura Falls, this owlish face creating a wide-eyed observer of valley.

A Metaphor for Analysis

At first it seemed obvious which one of these two parties had it together, who was the counsel and who the counselled, but then the more I consider each position, the more ambiguous it becomes.

Two Motifs for Urban Loneliness

Why does the railway line curving away in the distance to nothing read as lonely?  Perhaps it's the vision paradoxical endpoint, you believe it keeps going but your eyes tell you something else. Another contestant in Cliches of Urban Loneliness game is the desultory street fire. The Hanoians are good at these, the one below giving off a nasty wavering smoke, most likely some parts formaldehyde and worst from burning particle board. The immediate locale here doubling, and then some,  as footpath and garage, and of course the ubiquitous parking lot.

Built to Cast

Pure treasure, candelabras that celebrate and create a shadow garden of birds, flickering in the candlelight through trees that oscillate mildly.

A Chekovian Moment in Hanoi's Military Museum

There is something eerily elegant about this French pistol, suspended as if floating in time, in the Military Museum in Hanoi.  In one way it can be seen as a  potted history lesson - a French 'pistole' captured by a Vietnamese man used to fight the Chinese and Japanese. And in  fulfillment of Chekhov's principle, if you bring a gun into a country it becomes a theatre of war.

Politic Reqest to Maintain Political Awareness in Hoi Anefuse

Travelling around Vietnam one is conscious that one's political opinions may not always be the best thing to shout out about but this polite note in a historic 'tube' house in Hoi An insists that we maintain our view. The arrows above it, just out of frame, broadmindedly offer both the left and the right as ways of seeing.