Dramatic reading of a break-up letter

Oh man. This is amazing. He even brings drama to the typos.

Southern gothic

Must be the week for scaring myself before sleep - tonight with a piece of crime reportage by the incomparable Truman Capote, called "Handcarved Coffins". HC was written in the late 70s and published as part of an anthology called Music for Chameleons.

Years earlier Capote had invented literary journalism, or as he called it, "the non-fiction novel", with In Cold Blood in 1966. As he wrote in the preface to Music for Chameleons:

For several years I had been increasingly drawn toward journalism as an art form in itself. I had two reasons. First, it didn't seem to me that anything truly innovative had occurred in prose writing, or in writing generally, since the 1920s; second, journalism as art was almost virgin terrain, for the simple reason that very few literary artists ever wrote narrative journalism, and when they did, it took the form of travel essays or autobiography.

Looking back on his body of work years later, Capote felt he could have written everything better; that he'd let himself be hemmed in by conventions when a great writer should be able to summon an entire "palette" of writing styles - prose, poetry, reportage - in any single piece.

From a technical point, the greatest difficulty I'd had in writing In Cold Blood was leaving myself completely out of it. Ordinarily, the reporter has to use himself as a character, an eyewitness observer, in order to retain credibility. But I felt that it was essential to the seemingly detached tone of that book that the author should be absent. Actually, in all my reportage, I had tried to keep myself as invisible as possible.

Now, however, I set myself centre stage, and reconstructed, in a severe, minimal manner, commonplace conversations with everyday people: the superintendent of my building, a masseur at the gym, an old school friend, my dentist. After writing hundreds of pages of this simpleminded sort of thing, I eventually developed a style. I had found a framework into which I could assimilate everything I knew about writing. Later, using a modified version of this technique, I wrote a nonfiction short novel (Handcarved Coffins) and a number of short stories.

So "Handcarved Coffins" is a pacy account of a series of murders in "a western state", and the years-long investigation to uncover the truth. Just as Capote described above, he's in the middle of the story - it's written as a transcript of conversations, mostly between Capote and the detective Jake Pepper, but occasionally with other persons of interest. This style itself is interesting because legend has it that Capote never wrote a note nor recorded a second of his interviews. He claimed to have a photographic memory. Whatever the case, the dialogue of HC is taut and dramatic, ominous and gothic as any invented thriller.

The story's name comes from the killer's calling card - small wooden coffins delivered to the victims before they were murdered in intricate, horrible ways. Rattlesnake. Razor-wire decapitation. Poisoning. All deaths with seemingly nothing to tie them together - except the coffins. It's a cracking, creepy story and as with everything Capote wrote, I strongly encourage you to read it!

It was just interesting to come across Capote's own words about pretty much inventing narrative journalism - a concept that's very popular at the moment through the great work of institutions like the Nieman Foundation. We're coming to blows a bit at work over this, as we plan a major journalism conference for later in the year - whether narrative is the truly essential key to the continued value of journalism, or whether it's just a bullshit word that doesn't really mean anything.

Anyway. Need sleep. Things are afoot.

More soundslides...

This could become an addiction...

Luna Park soundslides

It's taken a week and a number of embarassing conversations with my IT guy at work, but I have finally worked out how to embed my first experiment with SoundSlides. It's a little cheesy but I had a lot of fun making it - let me know what you think!

The monster mash

A late night session of old monster and zombie movies may not have been the best idea for combating insomnia. But it did at least somehow remind me of a weird thing my sister and I used to do when we were little. In a bid to scare each other, we'd lock ourselves in a little passageway between the kitchen and the laundry, where it was pitch black and claustrophobic, and sing at the top of our lungs the wonderfully daggy "Monster Mash", which we'd picked up somewhere along the line. Hmm. Like most things that seem scary late at night, I suspect when I look back at this in tomorrow's hard light I'll be rather embarassed....

Phallusy

(With apologies to McSweeney's "Open Letters to People or Entities that are Unlikely to Respond")

Dear Hens' Nights

Look, we're just starting to get to know each other, and you have years of experience on me, so maybe I just need to give you more time. But really, is all the penis stuff necessary? Can we not send women into the institution of marriage without doodle-shaped cocktail garnishes and draping them in flashing sashes like hotwired beauty pageant entrants?

The importance of the penis to our society is not lost on me. The vast majority of the world's architecture, and feats of historial stupidity, bear testament to our phallocentric culture. So do you really need to put me in situations where I'm trying to make conversation with an (awesome) 80-year-old nanna-of-the-bride who's drinking her sangria through a schlong-shaped straw?

The "peppermint pecker" mints were, I grant you, rather cute... and not unwelcome after garlic-laced tapas. But all the pin-the-dick-on-the-dude parlour games, and cream-filled cock sponge cakes are a little tacky, no?

I hope we can still be friends - I know we're going to be bumping into each other pretty regularly for at least the next decade. And hey, I admire a lot of your work. Without you, there would be at least 400% less high pitched squealing in bars on Saturday nights. The novelty veil and male-stripper industries would be destroyed. The world would be robbed of any number of novelties in the shape of penises. And I would never know what it's like to spend much of the wee hours of a Sunday morning wearing a sailor's hat and demanding to be referred to as "El Capitano".

xoxo

Clare

Gallery bonanza

Spent a gorgeous Autumn Saturday checking out a handful of galleries. First stop was Blender, tucked in a Paddington back street, which features lovely little exhibitions of photography in a converted two-story terrace. There are classic rock portraits in the dunny, and a droolworthy display of Lomo cameras and accessories. The current exhibition is "Ludlites Love Water", where photographers used plastic cameras like Dianas and Holgas to capture water-themed images with summery colour distortion and softened light. The Ludlites are a collective of eight photographers who eschew digital photography for the dreamy lo-fi shots of plastic cameras. The result is a collection of images that could have been shot yesterday or thirty years ago, hazy like memories, and capturing both a sense of nostalgia for long-ago family beach holidays and unsettling, moody seascapes.


After a jaunt through the Paddington markets, I then stopped by the Australian Centre for Photography on Oxford street. ACP hosts our exhibition of Walkley photographic finalists every year and it's a beautiful space for photography, always stylishly curated. With the Head On photographic festival just kicking off, ACP is currently showing all the finalists and winners from Head On's portrait competition. Couldn't pick a favourite from the exhibition, they were all so different. There was an interesting shot of Geoff Ostling, a retired history teacher who has his body tattooed all over, and has bequeathed his skin to the National Gallery.

I have a kind of obsession with the idea of curation, and the little explanations that go with images or objects being exhibited. Those words don't just give context or explanation; they can completely change the way you see an artwork or artefact. With many of the Head On portraits, knowing the background of the person posing for the portrait, or the circumstances of the shot, added a poignancy you might have missed from just seeing the image. There was a beautiful photograph by Steven Siewert of his son, rendered even more lovely by the words he wrote about it... describing his love for his child and how, when he first felt the hollow between his shoulder blades, he knew it was the spot where there had once been angel wings attached.

In print publications, the written captions that accompany photographs are generally much more factual. But the captions of exhibitions have the potential to completely reframe people's perceptions. Occasionally, the blurbs soar a little too esoteric, bulging with the double-speak and beauroblab of artists forced to justify the cultural significance of their work in order to fund it. But for the most part they help you appreciate the stories of artists, their subjects, and the moments that bind them together for eternity.

The same principle was at play at the NSW Art Gallery, where the portrait theme continued as we took in the Archibald Prize finalists. The tattoed man was there again ("The Bequest" by Nick Stathopoulos), along with portraits of people from all walks of life - and in all different styles. My favourite was Carla Fletcher's stylised portrait of CW Stoneking, with pencil cross-hatching detail topping off a simple palette dominated by white space.

It's always fascinating to examine a painting and try to understand how the artist worked. Up close, the surfaces swathed in tactile sweeps and splodges of paint are often like landscapes in themselves. You can tell brushstrokes that have been made with haste, yet even the quickest marks have an element of precision, and you wonder how a painter reaches that zone where they're slapping paint around almost blindly but know exactly what they're doing.

Robert Malherbe's impressionistic portrait of artist Luke Siberras, completed in a couple of hours, hangs in hasty contrast with canvases that were six months in the making. Then there are wry touches like Greg Somers' "Self Portrait With Picture of Dory in Grey", a painting you just know was made to measure up to the punny title he'd first come up with.

Interesting that of all the massive canvases, it was the relatively tiny portrait of Tim Minchin (by Sam Leach) that was named the winner. There's still time to get to the gallery and vote for the viewer's choice award (to be announced on May 20), so get down and check it out if you haven't already.