It's time we Met

The antidote to Tuesday blues, and indeed a shamefully extended blog inspiration hiatus? A night of great art and fascinating insights to how it's curated. Brisbane's Gallery Of Modern Art tonight hosted a talk by Gary Tinterow, a curator with 25 years' experience at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Now the Met, if you haven't been there, is like heaven on earth. Perched in Central Park, with an impressive facade onto Fifth Avenue, it houses acres of amazing art and artefacts from throughout history. I would happily part with my left pinkie to spend a night locked in the Met. I'd walk around in a suit of armour (til it got too heavy, then I'd switch it out for something from the Costume Institute), play the old musical instruments, have a nap spooning a Rodin sculpture and basically just stare at my favourite paintings til I grew cross-eyed. Watching the sun rise over the Temple of Dendur would have to be pretty spectacular, too.

Tinterow's talk was a meandering stroll through the history of the museum, framed through the evolution of the collection he creates - modern and contemporary art - from 1870 to the present day. As well as being a delicious overview of the art of the past couple hundred years, this was a fascinating insight into how a great museum collection is acquired. And it was peppered with the kind of anecdotes only an experienced curator can collect.

Like the last words of H.O. Havemeyer. He and his second wife Louisine were filthy rich and avid collectors. (There's a fabulous article about her here from TIME Magazine in 1930) Louisine had a fortunate penchant for French art far advanced to what the Met was showing in the 1920s. Courbet, Manet, Degas and Renoir were among her favourites, and the collection at their amazing house on 66th Street (interiors all designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, swoon) had a big impact on the tastes of well-to-do New Yorkers. They tried in vain to lead a friend of theirs, Bingham, into amassing his own collection, starting him off by letting him buy some of the works they coveted - like Degas' famous "The Dance Class". Bingham never did collect with the Havemeyers' enthusiasm, much to their chagrin, and on old Havemeyer's deathbed his last command was to "try to get Bingham's Degas".

When you see grand-sounding names plastered over a wing of a museum you don't tend to think much about these benefactors. How they came to amass such crazy wealth that they could acquire a breath-taking art collection and then leave it to a museum. How curators at that museum might have cultivated those benefactors, perhaps in a decades-long flirtation, a delicate seduction.

There was an eccentric Ms Milton de Groot, who brought with her from Holland an impressive collection. She always intended to leave it to the Met, but until she died she kept it in her modest apartment, where all the museum's curators at some point were forced to take tea.

A sadder story was that of Scofield Thayer, who I visualise as quite the young dandy in the early 1920s when he ran a literary magazine called The Dial, which published the likes of TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Thayer's pal from Harvard ee cummings. Thayer took off for Europe where he collected artworks to use as illustrations in the magazine. He suffered from what Tinterow described as "sexual anxieties" and ended up on the couch of none other than Dr Freud - who encouraged him to collect the erotic works of Klimt and Schiele. Thayer lost his mind and was institutionalised in the mid/late 1920s; his collection came to the Met, but only after his death in the 80s.

There were a few decades of lean years for bequests, until the Annenbergs donated their collection in the 90s. Publishing magnate Walter Annenberg had been Nixon's ambassador in London and to the Brits' delight had redecorated the embassy with his epic collection of French impressionists and post-impressionists. When the Annenbergs returned to the US they had a bunch of museums contest for the right to collection - Tinterow described it as being like a reality TV show competition. Naturally the Met won, and the Annenbergs even helped the museum acquire works above and beyond their collection. Including Van Gogh's "Wheat Field With Cypresses", likely his first painting after being allowed to leave the asylum (after the whole ear thing). Tinterow said when they unwrapped the painting at the Met it was so fresh they found traces of pollen on the surface.

Such is the work of the curators of these great museums - stitching together the grand collections of rich benefactors with smaller donations from individuals, working out the narrative of the overall collection, identifying the gaps and then making acquisitions to fill those gaps.

Making these acquisitions highlights the conflict curators face - pulled in one direction by advanced collectors wanted them to push the boundaries, pulled back by often conservative boards of trustees. Tinterow related how the museum purchased Jasper Johns' amazing "White Flag" for an even more amazing price in the tens of millions of dollars. Decades earlier the same painting had been on loan display, in the 1960s, and was offered to the museum for $15,000 but the trustees declined. "We're at the mercy", Tinterow put it, "of the vagaries of taste and the market".

As well as exhorbitant purchases there are other options for acquiring works. Sometimes a private collector will offer to purchase a piece in shares with the museum and they take turns hanging it - two years in my house, two years in your museum, etc. In recent years Tinterow says the museum has done a number of retrospective exhibitions of ageing but still living modern artists, which often end in acquisitions. "And when we can't acquire a work, we'll borrow it," Tinterow says, citing Damien Hirst's shark floating in formaldehyde, "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living", on loan from the Connecticut billionaire who bought it from Charles Saatchi for $8million.

As Tinterow moved into the most recent acquisitions, the idea of participatory art became more common - works that come alive or mean something only when the audience interacts with them. The works currently on show at GOMA are an excellent illustration of this idea, and Tinterow says it's also a parable for the Met itself. Whether on the grand scale of donating a collection, or the simple act of visiting and marvelling: it is communities and people who love art who bring these institutions to life.

Off the wall

So things got a little quiet here for a while, sorry chaps. I was off playing tour guide/tourist for a special envoy from New York. Looking forward to sharing some of our adventures with you now that normal blogging service has resumed, and this seems as good a start as any.

First port of call was the money-shot of Sydney Harbour, from the Glenmore's rooftop - after all, nothing completes a view like a beer and a $10 steak. Somehow, I managed to get us lost. But for me getting lost tends to precede some of my best discoveries, and so it was on this day. Getting our bearings beside the growl of the Cahill Expressway, we were suddenly looking down onto a much calmer scene. A giant hot air balloon, adrift in the King George V recreation centre.

How did I not know about this? I asked myself as we peered down upon the mural's whimsical details; an elephant, a camel, a kite aflutter, some bikes. It's been there since 1983, the work of artist Peter Day. In a cute (and timely) twist, Day returned 27 years later to paint another mural there. "The Great Southern Wall" depicts the early history of The Rocks, and was only unveiled in December. With this latest contribution, and an army of volunteer helpers, the KGV now boasts that it's the world's largest community mural.

Personally though, that dreamy hot air balloon hovering behind the basketball hoops remains my favourite part. When she opened the completed mural late last year, Sydney mayor Clover Moore paid tribute to all the little hands that help finish a work like this. "The first stage in the mid-1980s took a staff of 10 artists and about 500 volunteers – most of them children – nine months to complete."

It's ironic that murals can be so easy to ignore. The 80s were the heyday of this most democratic and public of artforms, when artists and communities came together to splash social comment on bare walls in bold colours. Today the paint has faded, and the messages behind them seem quaint and idealistic. We prefer our street art unofficial and unsanctioned, stencilled secretively and cynically. It's only in places where the authorities work to restore and conserve murals that they stay bright and topical. Like in San Francisco, where Diego Rivera kicked off the whole mural craze in the first place, and whole streets of the Mission still bloom in full colour.

Elsewhere, old brushstrokes fade as small voices debate how best to preserve them. Most grey-beige days we'll walk past them blindly. But every now and then someone will get lost, and see the same old streets in new light, and feel the promise all those paint-stained kids must have felt back before I was even born.

There and then, here and now

From Williamsburg Bridge (1928) by American realist painter, Edward Hopper.

Looking out my window onto Humboldt Street, Williamsburg.

Coasting in the Bike Lane

Thursday night just gone marked the launch of the Sydney Bicycle Film Festival's art night and the Ride: Life In The Bike Lane exhibition. By all accounts it was a great night at District 01 Gallery, and we have the lovely Andrew Quilty to thank for these pics. Quilts himself had a bike on show but was so modest he didn't even send me a shot of his own work!






This one was designed by Ben Brown and is called "Ghost Bike". Meanwhile, a group called The Skeleton Key put together this amazing video about the launch night- looks like we missed a corker.

BFF - RIDE - LIFE IN THE BIKE LANE from Skeleton Key on Vimeo.

Life in the bike lane

The Bicycle Film Festival comes to Sydney November 17-21. Check out the program here, kicking off with an opening night party at the Beresford next Wednesday. For the cinematically inclined, films will screen at the Newtown Dendy on Friday-Saturday November 19-20. There’s also a street fair just off of Bourke Street on the Saturday afternoon, and it all winds up beach-side with a ride to Bondi and a wrap party at the Beach Road.

Ugh, it’s like everything I’m missing from Sydney bundled up into a tasty couple of days. And I mean it – you need to soak this one up for me, I’m so sad I won’t be there. Not least for RIDE: Life in the Bike Lane, which is the official exhibition of the festival. The organisers rounded up a talented bunch of artists and designers and let them loose on some life-sized wooden bicycles. The 17 creative types - including the likes of Andrew Quilty and Beci Orpin - will each customise a bike in their own style, and if you head over to the website they have some fun interviews with the artists including memories of their first bikes! Lots of BMX memories but I think this response from photographer James Alcock is my favourite:

Do you have any childhood memories of riding? Now that you’re older, do you still ride?

I've always had pushies since the time I could walk. It's one of the few constants in my life and my dad was always good at repairing them. My grandfather actually had a pushie shop. I remember really clearly my dad letting me go at the top of a hill in Coogee near my house. I was just off my training wheels but didnt quite have a grasp on the back peddle brake thing.
I flew straight across a busy street at the bottom of the hill just missing cars both ways and ended up going over the handlebars when I hit the oncoming gutter. There was plenty of skin off and my nuts were blue and purple for a week! My brother raced BMX at a national level all through the 80s. I am on my pushie every day and I love riding in summer (sans shirt/backpack) super blazed with Roots Manuva (or Skiphop) bumpin throuh my earbuds.

Don't dilly dally! RSVP for the exhibition opening on Thursday November 18 here on Facebook.

A million little pieces

One of the (many) tiny, unexpected pleasures of New York has been checking out the various mosaic artworks in the city's subway stations. Some are as utilitarian as announcing the station name, but others shatter platform boredom with their cracked colours. Some have been freshly commissioned, others have been preserved from bygone eras. All can be found in a great online directory here. So many I want to go and see now!

These fish were an exciting discovery last night.

And Prince Street's tiny commuters scurrying along the walls were one of my first favourite discoveries. What a clever way to lighten up people's journeys!

America by car

Currently showing at the Whitney Museum of American Art is a fabulous exhibition of photography by Lee Friedlander. Simply titled “America By Car”, the images use a rental car as a framing device for explorations of the many faces of the American landscape, shot over the past 15 years. The black-and-white shots are crisp, so deliciously crisp, and quintessentially American – Friedlander captures a country on the move, all the romance and kitsch and loneliness and grit of life on the road.

Forget geometrically lined up horizons – there’s a warm candidness to these shots that's more about telling moments than organised perfection. Which isn't to say the shots aren't thoughtfully composed - there's a wit to both their individual composition and the visual cues that link the collection together.

Densely hung at Friedlander’s request, the snapshots echo the bombardment of options that is life in America. They range from shimmering cityscapes through rain-streaked windshields to bleak desert vistas. There's something almost iconographic to the attention paid to monuments and burnt out neon signs. Frames packed with gas station signage jostle next to church noticeboards; other images are desolately spare, lacking only the metaphorical tumbleweed.

The elements of the car add another level of personality - you're aware of the photographer whether via a glimpse of his lens in the side mirror, a cigarette burn in the door upholstery, or bits of paperwork and gallery maps in the side pocket. The car itself is a character in this story. Seen through the windscreen, steam and condensation in vertical rivulets render a few trees into a forest. After so many uninhabited landscapes, when you see people it’s jarring – sighted through windows, reflected in side mirrors.

The exhibition takes you across the length and breadth of America, and concludes with a wall of stop signs from a myriad of states, and Friedlander's self portrait. It's a trip.

Friedlander's images are much better than my efforts! Check out a gallery here.

Mystery rambler

Right next door to the Brooklyn Museum is the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Odd as it seems to have to pay to get in (hey, capitalism!), it's well worth a visit. The gardens are huge and varied, including fountains and lily pools...

... a conservatory that houses palms, aquatic plants, and a BONSAI MUSEUM where some of the teeny trees are nearly a century old...

... plus Japanese style gardens, a herb garden, a veggie patch for local kids to get their hands dirty, a grove of magnolias, and much more. When you first enter from the Eastern Parkway you're met by the Osborne Garden - a beautiful Italian-style lawn edged with wisteria-draped pergolas - which today was being gussied up for a Sunday evening wedding.

The park has a bit of an interesting history which you can read about here, the space was an ash-dump in the 1800s. Things are happening in the gardens all year round, like the "Ghouls and Gourds" festival planned for Halloween in a few weeks. My all-time favourite flowers are peonies, so fingers crossed I'll still be here in May when the collection of tree-peonies donated from Japan are in full bloom.

Another part that must be amazing in full bloom is the Cherry Walk, with stretching rows of different varieties of cherry trees which apparently put on the best cherry blossom display outside of Japan. Next to that, at least the massive collection of roses were out in all their glory.

Then there's this strange sight - a public artwork by Patrick Dougherty. Called "Natural History", it will stand in the gardens for 12 months until August 2011. Dougherty constructed these odd little huts - they're big enough to stand inside and peer out of - from reclaimed non-native tree branches, with the help of volunteers.

It's apparently all about sustainability and nature and the feelings he felt when he spent time in the gardens. But you know what they remind me of? Those crazy woolly monsters in Where The Wild Things Are. I like the quote from Dougherty where he said he wanted the finished work to resemble "lairs; a place for feral children and wayward adults."

Blondie of Arabia

At the last minute my new friend Allison suggested I join her at the Living Theater for something called Blondie Of Arabia on Friday night. At the mention of theatre/performance art I almost baulked - let's face it, we've all been burnt - but I'm so glad I didn't. It was a one-woman-show written and performed by Monica Hunken, who describes herself as an activist, Amazonian blonde with a superhero fetish. The show tells the story of her quest to bike alone through the Middle East, after she scored a trip to a royal wedding in Qatar working for a high-end catering company.

The theatre was tiny and intimate - read: impossible to escape should things turn weird - and the sassy, political opening monologue made me a little nervous. But when the music struck up and Monica rode a bicycle around the audience in superhero costume, it quickly became clear she wasn't going to take herself too seriously. With impeccable accents and mannerisms she reenacted run-ins with the military and the "po-po", couch-surfing with an eccentric Russian woman and handsy arab guys, and a bit of a romance with a scholarly, devout Egyptian tour-guide. She indignantly remembers him making her don his turtleneck to go swimming so she felt like "a drowned bee-keeper", and unconsciously rubbing salt into the wound he mooned: "You know why I know I could marry you Monica? You're not sexy."

Her observations of the different cultures - from the Disney princess decadence of the royal wedding, to a kohl-eyed desert tour guide deviate she dubbed Johnny Depp - were hilarious and also moving. A tiny example that kinda sums up her approach was when she describes a boat ride in Egypt, hip-hop blasting as she watched a woman in full hijab and wondered what, behind the veil, she thought of "The Thong Song". One of the saddest moments was actually when she had to leave her bike behind when flying out of Turkey!

It was a really great show and Monica even answered questions from the audience afterward. Next she hopes to take the show around Europe and dreams of finishing up with a performance in the Middle East. She's also donating to a fascinating cause called Follow The Women, well worth checking out, who demonstrate for peace by doing bikerides.

The weird thing about the night was that on two seperate occasions people stopped me on the street thinking I was Blondie! I guess one amazonian blonde in red lipstick is interchangeable with the next - but I will definitely take it as a compliment!

We finished the night with a late Indian feast at Spice Cove - $10 price fixe three course meal? Yes please! The urban legend about this stretch of East Village they call Little India is that there's just one kitchen hidden out the back, cooking for all the dozens of different restaurants with moody lighting and cushions and sitar players. Admittedly, all the restaurants are on the same side of the street...

Lights, camera...

Saturday just gone brought the Bring To Light NYC festival... New York's first taste of the Nuit Blanche movement, where installations and performances celebrating light illuminate city spaces.

Previously seen in the likes of Paris, Toronto and Atlanta, a semi-industrial area near the wharves of Brooklyn's Green Point became a canvas for projections, sculptures and installations - as well as music, dance and performance.

Songs of innocence & experience

Just as songs can evoke specific memories, certain albums will always recall certain chapters in my life. Radiohead’s OK Computer is finishing school, working in childcare for $7 an hour and finally getting my license, and nights feeling paranoid about the future. The Shins’ Wincing the Night Away is moving to Sydney, feeling lost and lovesick and hopeful and homeless. Florence & The Machine’s Lungs is pounding my bike around Brisbane and Sydney summer streets post-break-up, everything veering between achingly beautiful and just aching. And now Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs will forever be the weeks of delicious release between finishing work, saying goodbye to Sydney, couch-surfing in Brisbane and returning home to the George. Aside from the fact it’s a damn good record that bears constant replays, at a time of returning to the haunts of my younger days - from uni to childhood- I couldn’t have had a better soundtrack.

Arcade Fire have always made albums that are thematic, though Funeral and Neon Bible tackled quite different ideas. But I feel like they’ve never done anything as strongly tied together as The Suburbs. I’m not sure you’d call it a concept album per se. These are songs of innocence and experience. The suburbs mean different things at different times of your life – there’s sepia-tinted nostalgia for the streets where you played as a child, but then those same streets grew suffocating in adolescence’s grip. Things come full circle in adulthood, when you might even consider returning to the suburbs to settle with children of your own. These are songs about returning home – and seeing how much has changed, and how much has stayed just the same.

The opening line sets the scene: In the suburbs / I learned to drive. Images like this recur, and it’s rather genius to lean lyrics and songs on experiences that are so universal and evocative: learning to drive, childhood haunts, schoolyard loves, feeling trapped , running away, returning home. Lyrical callbacks add to the album’s cohesiveness – whole couplets are repeated in different songs. The closing track is an eerie acapella version of the first, title track.

The tracking is cheeky too – strings swell while Win declares himself a “Modern Man”, but in the next track “Rococo” he’s scathing of “the modern kids”: let’s go downtown and talk to the modern kids / they will eat right out of your hand / using big words that they don’t understand.

I love the two-song set piece of “The Sprawl”. Part one, “Flatland”, is a minor key lament of the “get off my lawn” variety – returning home to see your old place and finding it gone. It moons on moody, cinematic strings, a baroque ballad that would make a neat little film. I love the reminiscence of that first taste of freedom on a bike:

Cops shone their lights
On the reflectors of our bikes
Said do you kids know what time it is?
Well sir, it’s the first time I felt like something is mine
Like I had something to give
The last defender of the sprawl
Said "Well, where do you kids live?"
Well, sir, if you only knew what the answer's worth
Been searching every corner of the earth...

Then things change up as Regine takes vocals joyously for part two, “Mountains Beyond Mountains” – they heard me singing and they told me to stop / quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock. There’s a synth arpeggio that I feel owes something to The Knife’s “Heartbeats” and I could be imagining it, but the breakdown reminds me of “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy”!

Throughout the album there are traces of Neil Young, Tom Petty, even the Byrds in the chiming riff of what i think is my favourite track, “Suburban War”. But there are also lots of retro electronic touches, bearing out a quote from the band I saw where they said they wanted the record to be some kind of mix of Neil Young and Depeche Mode.

The suburbs have long been a muse for all kinds of artists – from Jeffrey Smart’s flat, uninhabited paintings, to the prescription sedation of The Virgin Suicides; from the suffocating communities of Cheever and Updike, to the family doldrums of Daves Eggers and Sedaris. For mine, this album helps explain why the suburbs are such fertile ground for creativity – their streets are paved with childhood memories, nothing is done far from the watchful eyes of parents and teachers. The same nurturing that makes you feel safe as a child, represents limitation as you get older. A friend noted recently that it seems as though books must concern children and young people to be considered great literature. Obviously there are exceptions, but it’s a solid theory. Is it the limitless worldview of children that’s so seductive? That moment of coming-of-age, just before anything-is-possible becomes loss-of-innocence?

Apologies for such a long post (and I already wrote earlier about the video for "We Used To Wait"). But The Suburbs really got me thinking about youth, aging, nostalgia, creativity and escape. I reckon it could stir a lot for you as well, if you haven't already fallen for it.

Frock n roll

Powerhouse Museum is all about fashion at the moment. The "Frockstars" exhibition takes you behind the scenes of Australian Fashion Week, from the designer's studio to the make-up mirrors to a front-row seat just a few claws away from the catwalk. As per the Powerhouse's usual excellent curation, it's all very interactive - you can choose to sit in a fashion buyer or magazine editor's seat in the front row, pop on some headphones and hear anecdotes from the real fashionistas. Or make Easton Pearson paper dolls, or peruse Nicola Finetti pattern pieces, or test out hair and make-up techniques.

Up a level, things get a little more historical with a stunning collection of fashion photography by Bruno Benini. Again, the museum's presentation really brings the photography to life - you can go into Benini's darkroom, snap your friends in a replica studio, and get an up-close view of his negatives with a magnifying glass and lightbox.

Perhaps most fabulous of all is an installation of projected images in a room of mirrors that seems to go on forever. You can lose yourself in the prismatic refracted light, as classic black and white images loop through a sequence that goes for eight or nine minutes in full.

Small stories, big picture

A couple weeks ago, Alison and I applied to be part of Small Stories Big Picture - an initiative as part of Sydney Design to encourage people to explore the hidden design gems of Surry Hills. Over 250 people applied to spend a Saturday with a bike, a LOMO camera and a passport of destinations to visit. We were lucky enough to make the cut, and BYO'd bikes and got a fish-eye camera to share for the day. It was so pretty, and I love that it has a fish on it:


Our journey started at Metalab, a gallery and workshop tucked in Fitzroy Place, a laneway off Crown Street just opposite Bill's. As the name suggests, the focus is on all things metallic, and they even run classes where you can learn to make jewellery.


Object Gallery on Bourke Street has a very colourful shop on the ground floor, and some really interesting exhibitions upstairs. First you hit an exhibition where nine different artists had to create something around theme "blue". Blue the colour, blue the feeling, something borrowed something blue, etc. Then up another level, were these amazing little magnifying viewers you could look through to see a tiny photo of an artist's workspace.


Reverse Garbage is a Sydney institution, making bulk industrial refuse available for artists to play with and students to decorate their sharehouses. RG now lives in Taylor Square.


Koskela was tucked away upstairs on Campbell Street, a place we'd never have found ourselves. It's a gorgeous space full of covetable furniture, homewares, light fittings, books, gardening bits and bobs and kids' toys. The emphasis is on sustainability, often reclaimed materials and Australian-designed and made products.

Spring Court is a teeny little shop that sells French sneakers and rad desert boots.

We stopped for a much needed coffee and late breakfast at Bang Bang cafe on Reservoir St... Owner Alan is an ex-DJ, and his background shows through in both the design (giant illustrations of headphones on the white walls) and a Brit-influenced menu that includes the likes of bacon butties and black puddings. Some bastard just beat me to the last rosti-filled, pancetta-topped breakfast stack, but my avocado, tomato and basil on toast was simple but deliciously tasty, and by all accounts the buttie is a beauty.


At this point we realised getting to all 24 destinations was going to be an epic mission, so we narrowed it down to the places we just had to see. Published Art on Mary Street has an eye-popping selection of art and design related books... I'd barely walked in the door before I found a book just about bike culture and design. Heaven!


We looped around Elizabeth Street and came up Cleveland to I Ran The Wrong Way (which is getting a post all its own) and Bird Textile. Bird is one of those places I've been passing on the bus for three years; always intrigued by the well-dressed bike they keep outside on the pavement, but never managed to actually go into the shop. They have a lovely range of eco-friendly fabrics and buttons (and clothes, bags, upholstery) in earthy greens and reds, with bold prints I'd say are a bit Japanese-influenced.


After Bird we went off map to David Met Nicole (another post in itself) then back up to Crown Street to Collector (clothes, homewares) and Paper2 (which titillated my current fetish for rubber stamps - and can you imagine anything more luxurious than having personalised stationery printed?).


We handed in our camera and finished the day with a cheeky pint amid the beer-garden plantlife and paper lanterns of the Beresford. It was the kind of sunbright, balmy Sydney winter Saturday that leaves you wondering why anyone would want to live anywhere else. It was so fun to be part of Small Stories Big Picture, but it's not over yet! There will be two more Saturdays of people shooting on LOMOs, and the resulting images will be on show at the Beresford over the coming weeks. There will be a party there to celebrate the full installation on August 18. See you there?

Everything but temptation

Measure For Measure is one of the bard’s lesser known plays; a Shakespeare B-side if you will (if I seem wittier than usual on this topic, it’s because I’m totally plagiarising the commentary of my learned theatre-going companion). It’s all about sex and power, politics and corruption, with ample use of Shakespeare’s favoured devices – mistaken identity, disguises, the scene at the end where every character is inexplicably in one place (not unlike Gossip Girl, now I think of it) and some multiple weddings. But mostly, the switcheroo. Old Bill loved the switcheroo.

The duke of Vienna (Robert Menzies) goes undercover as a friar after handing over control of the city to his puritanical deputy Angelo (Damien Gameau). Angelo amps up the vice squad and sets out to make an example of Claudio (Chris Ryan), sentencing him to death for fornication after he knocks up Julietta (Maeve Dermody). Claudio’s mate Lucio (Toby Schmitz) goes to Claud’s sister Isabella (Robin McLeavy) and encourages her to beg Angelo for mercy; Angelo falls in love with her and his sudden discovery of desire undoes everything he’s about. His confusion becomes hypocrisy and he offers to save her brother’s life in return for her virginity. Throw in some prostitutes and confetti and that about sums it up.

Benedict Andrews’ production for Company B put a very modern twist on the show. The set was a pared down hotel room that rotated at varying speeds, which added some choreographic challenges for the actors and became a great dramatic device as things were revealed and concealed from the audience. Then there was the use of video cameras, both hidden in the set and wielded by the actors: giving a more intimate view of the action and tapping into the ideas of surveillance, sex tapes and invasion of privacy. It worked incredibly in a scene between brother and sister Claudio and Isabella, the glass shower wall between them representing his prison cell. On the darkened stage, the camera caught their distraught reflections in Blair Witch night-vision as they desperately pleaded with each other as to who faced the greater sacrifice; her purity or his life.

The first scene was a sex scene, then there was an orgy with some prostitutes, and probably most confronting was when death-row inmate Barnadine was told he’d be hanged the next day and went a bit nuts. As in full-frontal nudity, poo-smearing, fake blood-spitting, set-trashing while Nick Cave wailed at high volume and the set spun at top speed, nuts. Considering I’d last seen the actor, Colin Moody, in the gentle ABC serial beloved by my mum called Something In The Air, it was quite powerful.

One thing that fascinates me about theatre is a show’s potential to evolve over its run. That’s why it was great to chat to some of the actors after the play, to hear some of the stories from behind the scenes. I mean, this is three hours of Shakespeare every day, sometimes twice a day, for six weeks (the last performance is tonight): things are bound to be honed. The word Barnadine wrote with his poo was always “shit”, but other scenes had changed over the weeks. When we saw the scene between Claudio and Isabella there was a weirdly intense kiss, but early in the run it was much more explicitly incestuous. And Toby Schmitz’s bawdy Lucio was originally more of a sex pest, but eventually this was distilled down to a single, insane scene where he performed cunnilingus on a lily.

Spotted in the city

An Alexander Calder tapestry. Who knew?!

Friday night rager

There was a time I thought I was ok at drawing. Sketchbooks filled up effortlessly with graphite, ink and charcoal lines; some precisely etched, most hurriedly ragged. But that time, it seems, is long gone!

That said, multiple hours just disappeared while I christened a new visual diary... I drew a fish, some bicycles, what was supposed to be an umbrella, and played around with designs from a very sexy Taschen book of typography. It's time to get back into the drawing habit, and hopefully some semblance of skill will return.

Could definitely handle more nights like this - snuggled under the covers scribbling with a mug of sweet hot tea while the rain lashes outside. And it may have taken a week, but my enormous bundle of lilies is finally opening and they smell exquisite...

Sorry I've been neglecting you blog. I missed you, I really did. I'll make it up to you. Tomorrow brings Creative Sydney (just when I thought I couldn't crush on Jess Scully any harder, her program this year includes Chris Ying from McSweeneys), a trip to the travel agent and Dappled Cities. And probably more rain...

Uniform

There I was in uniform
Looking at the art teacher
I was just a girl then...
Never have I loved since then.
He was not that much older than I was
He had
Taken our class to the Metropolitan Museum.
He asked us
What our favourite work of art was
Never could I tell him
It was him.
Though I wish I could tell him...
Oh, I wish I could've told him.
I looked at
The Reubens, and Rembrandts
I liked
The John Singer Sargeants.
He told me
He liked Turner.
And never have I
Turned since then
No, never have I turned to
Any other man.
All this having been said
I married an executive company head.
All this having been done
A Turner,
I own one.
And here I am
In this uniform-ish pantsuit sorta thing
Thinking of the art teacher...
I was just a girl then
And never have I
Loved since then
No, never have I loved
Any other man

Staunch / Hallelujah / A tale of many segues

Much was made recently, particularly around the time of the Commonwealth games in Canada, of the canonisation of Leonard Cohen's classic song "Hallelujah". This may be sacreligious, but I came to the song via a circuitous route and didn't even realise for some time that it was by Cohen. I first heard Rufus Wainwright's version.

I hadn't heard of Rufus before I heard his cover "One Man Guy", an incredible song by his father, Loudon Wainwright III, which the openly gay Rufus brought a whole new meaning to. The song was also my first introduction to his sister Martha Wainwright, a star in her own right, when she sang backing vocals. Radio National was playing a radio tribute to Nick Hornby's book 31 Songs, which in a rather self-explanatory way explored Hornby's critical and personal responses to 31 random tracks of different eras and styles.

People will know
When they see this show
The kind of a guy I am
They'll recognise just what I stand for
And what I just can't stand
They'll percieve what I believe in
And what I know is true
They'll recognise that I'm a one man guy
Always was, through and through.
People meditate,
Hey, that's just great
Tryin' to find the inner you
People depend on
Family and friends
And other folks to pull them through
I don't know why I'm a one man guy
Or why this is a one man show.
But these three cubic feet
Of bone and blood and meat
Are all I love and know
Cos I'm a one man guy in the morning
Same in the afternoon
A one man guy when the sun goes down
I whistle me a one man tune
One man guy, a one man guy
Only kinda guy to be
I'm a one man guy, I'm a one man guy
I'm a one man guy is me.
I'm gonna bathe
And shave
And dress myself and eat solo every night
Unplug the phone,
Sleep alone,
Stay away out of sight.
Sure it's kinda lonely
Yeah, it's sorta sick
Being your own one and only
Is a selfish dirty trick.

From "One Man Guy" I discovered Rufus Wainwright's album Poses, which included his quite faithful piano cover of "Hallelujah". (Soon after I would happen upon Jeff Buckley's idiosyncratic version of the song, perhaps the best known among my generation.) Poses was a fitting introduction to Rufus, swelling with cinematic strings and showtime choruses. Nestled mid-album was a song which I never quite understood but loved nonetheless, called "Grey Gardens".

And with segue number four (or possibly five), we come to the real reason for this post. Because, again, sacreligious as it seems, I've only just discovered what I suspect will be a long-term obsession in the form of Grey Gardens and its unique inhabitants.

Here's the original Grey Gardens trailer:


I'm criminally late to this phenomenon, most recently revived with Drew Barrymore's 2009 HBO television movie of the same name, which I watched last night. It's weird, I never thought much of Drew but between Donnie Darko and this I'm totally fan-girl crushing on her. For the uninitiated, Grey Gardens was the East Hampton estate of Little and Big Edie Beale Bouvier, the first cousin and aunt of Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis.

There they lived in a mansion near the sea, high-bred socialites who tuned out of the scene to be "artists". "Big Edie" was a well-known singer whose ill-fated marriage turned out two sons and the gorgeous "Little Edie", a frustrated dancer and actress. The major theme of the original documentary and 2009 dramatisation was Little Edie's thwarted dreams of stardom, and the state of squalour the two eventually lived in in the dilapidated mansion. Overrun with feral cats and raccoons, their home was eventually raided in the early 1970s by Suffolk County authorities for health and safety issues. Only after a New York Magazine article by Gail Sheehy did their plight become viral and capture the attention of their well-to-do relatives.

After their story became news the documentary film-makers the Maysle brothers approached the Edies to make their seminal film Grey Gardens. Little Edie clearly saw the documentary as her opportunity to finally find stardom as a still-stunning middle-aged woman. The way the two women coquettishly played to the camera despite their surroundings - a five-foot pile of empty cans, opossum and raccoons and wild cats prowling the decrepit architecture crumbling around them - is testament to their eccentric socialite instincts. It's the stuff of Tennessee Williams, these ill-fated bohemiennes beset by lost loves, misspent youth and the modern authorities.



I'm desperately keen to see the original doco and can only urge you to do the same. The film I watched was beautifully pitched, climaxing with a fight between Little and Big Edie on the eve of the documentary's launch. Little Edie was desperate to attend the New York premiere of the Maysle's film, but Big Edie taunted her that for all her talk about leaving Grey Gardens she'd never left her. There was a tumultous scene where Little Edie fled, leaving Big Edie wracked with sobs. Later they made up and Little Edie proudly wore the family wedding jewels to the premiere. Big Edie went on to die at Grey Gardens, which she refused to sell, before Little Edie moved around, settling in Florida before her death a few years ago. The HBO film closed with faux footage of Little Edie performing a cabaret in the East Village, a middle-aged woman still intoxicated by her own vitality in the 80s.

It got me thinking to the fraught relationships between daughters and mothers. The tension between "you wouldn't let me leave here" and "you could have left any time, but you didn't". And for all the magnificence of these two wonderful women, I thought only of the generosity of my own mother. Who, for all her own difficulties, never stopped me from leaving, from making my own spectacular mistakes.