siberian pepper

Antarctic Kingdom of Gondwana Land

2011-10-18T02:46:00.000-07:00

Wanda Gillespie

Antarctic Kingdom of Gondwana Land

21 Oct – 26 Nov 2011
Launch 6pm, 20 October 2011
Gallery Three, Craft Victoria

31 Flinders Lane Melbourne

Please refer to Into the Void for the first instalment of the Antarctic Kingdom of Gondwanaland research

....

One pitfall to current accepted geographical evidence is the prevelance of fossilised flora recovered from digs. These include banksia serrata, a well-known Australian species that has existed in a modern form for 40-50 million years, a time when the continents of Gondwana began to drift apart. As these objects suggest, banksia plants flourished in Antarctica as late as the Quatenary Period, dating from 1.6 million years ago to the current era. lt now seems possible that the geography of Antarctica remained temperate and densely wooded until as recently as the revised ice age date (3500 BCE).

The recovered artefacts reveal that the inhabitants of Queen Maud Land were master carvers, using the wood readily available to them render dieties and figures for totemic worship. The most intriguing and well-preserved artifacts uncovered yet, these figurative statues were rendered primarily in wood with bone and leather. Their circular formation, meditative expressions, fine detail, and other mystifying objects, suggest a religious or spiritual significance. The special reverence paid to the flora, which appeared carefully arranged alongside the phenomenally life-like statues proposes a form of animism common to many indigenous cultures. Most animistic belief systems hold that the spirit survives physical death. The uncovered evidence has led experts to speculate that this culture’s complex belief system included the view that the spirit passed to an easier world of abundant game or ever-ripe crops, or else to stay on in the world as a malignant spirit. The Queen Maud Land relics speak of prescribed rituals, perhaps to ensure that the soul might journey to the spirit world without becoming lost and thus, wandering as a ghost.

GlenRoyalty

2011-08-09T01:10:00.000-07:00

hello from the couch, my lovelies. so late to an exhibition. to use a modern three-letter-acronym, FML. And then some.

I have started a new blog - GlenRoyalty, which is about a suburb just north of where I live. The joke is that it's a long way from being hip like Brunswick or Fitzroy - its pretty, bohemian cousins to the south- east. Glenroy, on first appearance, is the mole on Moreland's back. But I don't want the blog (and the suburb) to be a one joke pony. I hope that I can find art on the streets and showcase small idiosyncrasies that make neighbourhoods unique and defensible to the death. I want to look at the incredibly diverse residents here and prove that postcodes don't define the person, it's the people who have always rocked the suburbs.

Forget Fitzroyalty. There's been a revolution and the crown family is in Glenroy.

New website

2011-05-31T22:21:00.000-07:00

A work in progress - still more design to fiddle with and writing to upload onto this site but have a little look-see.

p.s I am not very computer literate but I try.
www.variakaripoff.com

Bombay honey

2011-05-22T01:22:00.000-07:00

I spent way too long on the inner webs last night and ended up reading the TWO AFRO DADS blog. I am not sure how I got there, I was attempting to research night life in Bombay in the 1930s and what I found was Indian surrogates which proves to me that google succotash Balzac and that I will never write a novel but have lots of general knowledge about IVF and gay love.

I will write this goddamned piece of merdahein> Without talking it up too much I can see it being like Coral Island meets The Devil Wears Prada. It will be a chic lit classic that little boys will read under their bed covers with a pen light. Oh my gosh. I just had a revelation....... I was mocking the Coral Island here (I have three copies of it, long story, but never read it) and just realised that one major scene in my yet-to-be-written masterpiece does in fact, take place on a (mostly) deserted island in the Philippines. But there's an opera house there and immigrants in tattered fur coats eating chicken that tastes like fish because these island chickens eat seaweed. I am going to start saving money so I can travel to China, India and the Philippines, dressed in my fur coat with my little olympus recorder and interview people who knew people that danced in art deco hotels in Bombay and Shanghai instead of trawling this dead sea called the internet. Life is outside my front door, goddammit. Where's my pinemango juice? I'm pretending I'm in the tropics today - heat up - so I can describe the blue waters of Bora Bora.

lady indian summer

2011-05-08T19:02:00.000-07:00

for essentials magazine

Coffee with Alyosha

2011-03-24T00:28:00.000-07:00

I dragged my brother shopping today, he's good in that way. He's not good at finding things in BigW.

- ah Varia, where do they keep their office paper?

- turn your head to the right, yep. the shelf right next to you.

That's ok. I asked who Ke$ha was in the supermarket checkout after spotting her on the cover of a magazine. Alyosha obliged with the chorus of one of her songs. The lady in front of us, with grizzled grey hair, a raincoat that looked lived in and her face a bit skint on teeth, turned around and started singing also.

a little porcelain fox I bought for my daughter, from a junk shop in Clunes

We had coffee at Gloria Jeans. This is suburbia after all. He asked why I hadn't updated my blog in a while and told me which stories he liked. I told him to start his own blog about music. So Alyosha, if you are reading, start blogging. I'll read your stuff.

And on a completely different tangent but sort of related to the picture...
My face will grace a porcelain sculpture of a toddler "Miss Congeniality". I had to wear really insane make up with big falsie eyelashes - it's a send up of those Toddlers and Tiaras pageants, and as the artist, Robyn Hosking said, "the adultification of children."

Reading Tsvetaeva

2011-03-08T19:07:00.000-08:00

Let us wait by the river that
rinses the coloured beads of street-lights:

from You throw your head back, 1916, Marina Tsvetaeva

INSOMNIA: Varia on reading Tsvetaeva

We scratch at the snow
that has closed our eyes
What did I know about peasants
carrying knives in their boots or of the earth
stamped red?
Those that lay trampled, their mouths
filled with gadflies when summer came finally.
The snow melted from emptied eyes,
water ran down whitened bone too late for the eyes
to see what had been done.

And still, the Kremlin is improbably coloured
and at night in summer, the Moscow River runs
grey and still
holding our reflections coolly,
for a time.

goodbye Mrs. Coconut

2011-02-03T19:08:00.000-08:00

Happy Chinese New Year. Put down the knife, keep your hair unwashed, pay off debts, be lucky, red, beautifully stoic and humanely built. Bring the Yellow River back to life, address an ode to unearthed warriors. Dance at Shanghai's Cotton Club, see neon purple, electric shiver in a puddle of water.

Bright is the night

2010-12-02T19:44:00.000-08:00

Bright is the night

The moon by sea

Carnations, desserts and abandoned daughters

like dolls at birthday parties

Even in war there is always a celebration -

a chance to eat cake, slam doors

and uninvite friends

In a forest

in silence

teeth shine like stars

in the head of a soldier

v.k 2010

Strangers/

2010-11-25T16:49:00.000-08:00

China.

Fifty years ago, when my father was a boy,

old women still had bound lily feet

in the south, from a train window

mountains jutted heavenward like dragons' teeth

and fishermen-poets by the river like weathered parchment

spoke,

truth.

Two revolutions to thank for this.

Meaningless digging of a foundation pit.

Until the next chapter erases its predecessor

still. We hold.

On,

and on.

To rivers.

Day 12- Stuck in transit - Artzines, Digitalisation of the Nation

2010-11-18T02:28:00.000-08:00

The reason why I thought Andrei will be back on Friday may be more profound than mere absent mindedness. After heading to the wrong airport, he made it to the right one (in a speeding cab) only to be stuck in transit, followed by a five hour delay. One missed connection - equals a day spent in a dingy hotel room and a day late coming home. Oh the dramas of international travel.
So here is my TWELFTH DAY.

Ed Ruscha | 2009

The artist book. These guys are devoted to the cause. There it is. Sigh of relief.

Books and art are the only two things I really hoard. And postcards. Mix them together and you get brilliantness. I don't really care for the super inventive either. When I get my sweaty paws on an artists book, I like to have text and pictures in the format of a poet's personal diary. Don't need to make Escher-esque or some kind of complicated architectural construct of old-growth forests pummelled into Japanese kimono prints with abstract typography. .

I'd take PinCushion Pete's literally bloody drawings over that. The guy is a cockney nut job but there is no denying he writes well.

Pete Doherty

I love William Blake. My first real experience of English poetry was Blake, to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. This is an Arts Council (England) collaborative work. The future of books may be here.

Day 11 - you are kidding me right?

2010-11-16T23:48:00.000-08:00

And you know what? I get to the ripe old age of 27, manage to graduate school and university, spend months abroad without money, I'm capable of paying rent, holding down jobs, organising dates, burying friends, I got married, had a child........ and I don't know what date it is. Andrei is coming home tomorrow, not Friday. I honest to God thought Friday was the 18th. *taps skull* the light is on but nobody is home.

I've enjoyed thinking about art every day, even though I cheated twice and did double-bills on two occasions because I am more of a crammer than a regular worker.

I'll end my 12 days of contemporary art on the eleventh day with a send off of assorted things I love and want to share, before running away in a panicked frenzy to tidy up for husband's arrival back home.

My tyosha (mother-in-law) always urged Andrei to make his art beautiful. He argued that art needs to wake people up. I think real beauty astounds, delights and rouses the soul from despondence and half-heartedness.

bu-bye for now. I may add a 12th day just because I like religiously symbolic numbers...

image 1: Invisible Cities| Italo Calvino | (this city is named Anastasia, like my sister)

image 2: Communist jokes that only people of that weird borscht eating kind get.

image 3: It's not cool, but I like Stalinist architecture. Stalin himself was a pizdetz. I also like photographs.

image 4: Absent-mindedly doodling stupid things.

image 5: Oscar Wilde fairy tales. An excellent read for those suffering from phenomenon known as baby-brain (that leads you to forget what date it is).

Day 10- Moving Mountains, Francis Alÿs

2010-11-15T23:49:00.000-08:00

On the home streak now. Two more days to go.

Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Cuauhtemoc Medina and Rafael Ortega

When Faith Moves Mountains,

2002

Born in Antwerp in 1959, Francis Alÿs moved to Mexico in the mid '80s, a time of great political unrest. His works deal with the place of art, of its poetic intention, in highly politicised situations - whether it be in border zones in Latin America or the Green Line in Palestine. Many of his works begin with a big idea and a small step. A lone man pushing a giant ice block through the streets of Mexico City only for it to melt - his visions speak of a kind of human perseverance in the face of political stalling, absurdity, and sometimes, of overcoming futility and disappointment. For his 2002 work, When Faith Moves Mountains, 500 people took up shovels in Lima to move a sand dune ten centimetres. The images recall a kind of biblical scene; desert, slaves banding together to see through an extraordinary task while under Pharaohnic tyranny. Unified, in their uniform of jeans and identical shirts, their individuality cast aside, moving as a single file, they are able to accomplish the remarkable. As one of the participants remarked during the making of the film, "...a group of people, on the base of their faith can do things that otherwise would be impossible. Something totally irrational." The recording was exhibited at Tate Modern earlier this year in a large scale exhibition of his works. Alÿs began recording the every day around Mexico City, documenting the lives of street people in slides, perhaps getting a taste for social justice causes and life's more serious questions. Though video work (his actions and their documentation) is integral to his practice, painting and drawing are also mediums central to his art.
You can watch his videos here.

Day 9 ---- dedicated to emerging artists

2010-11-14T20:50:00.000-08:00

I hate the term emerging artist. Really, you have to earn that strange chestnut of a title with a lot of blood-letting, rejection, sleeplessness, organ selling, ~~prostitution~~, shit jobs, brown-nosing, flirting with buyers, anguish, doubt, parental disapproval, bullshitting, self-delusion... and in the end you are flavour of the month for three minutes (the average duration of both the art world's attention span and ... well...say a champagne-imbued emerging artist's personal triumph after a well-received solo show.)

Some, like the guys at Phaidon try to nail down the zippity zeitgeist with its publication Creamier -
you can bet the minute you place it strategically on your coffee table it becomes irrelevant.
Whatever you do. Don't stop being you. Make Art. Make it interesting.

Oh yes and if you have facebook and 30 seconds to spare, vote for me to go overseas and blog for Channel V. Search for Varia. Yes, that's me in the funny hat, slightly askew.

Day 8 - Ahmed Mater, Edge of Arabia

2010-11-14T18:08:00.000-08:00

Playing catch ups again. I tell you what, I applaud those that have the discipline to write everyday. It's new to me and I like it. Husband is in Shanghai, seeing Chinese jazz bands at the Bund, I'm waking up at 9 with a 15 week old baby and drinking coffee like one of Chekhov's provincial ladies of leisure... soon I'll be whining that I want to go to Moscow and indulge in real so-sigh-ah-tea.

Evolution of Man | Lightbox | H79.2 CM X W59.4CM | 2010

"Saudis do not believe in the theory of evolution. Like other conservative societies, they firmly reject Darwin’s theory on the basis that humans are perfect..."

Edge of Arabia is a group of Saudi contemporary artists of which Ahmed Mater is a prominent member. Mater was born in 1979 in the traditional village of Rujal Al-Ma’a in the lush green region of Aseer (to the south of Saudi Arabia) and was raised in its capital Abha. A jack of all trades, aside from being a qualified GP, he is a curator, a landscape photographer and the face of a large telecommunications company. He is just as well-regarded at home as overseas; King Fahad has opened one of his solo shows, while in the West, The British Museum has purchased his work.
Mater's work poignantly uses medical imagery to raise questions that trouble his society like suicide and oil, the effect of consumerism on traditional life and religious identity. Pain and society's sickness are expressed through X-ray here. His colours communicate vividly; stained sepia accompanies traditional Islamic motifs and text, the language of science and x-rays is coldly blue. There seems to be a nostalgia for the 'unstained,' a yearning for the time before commercialism drove the hoards from mosques to malls. In his series, Illumination, the X-rayed people long for the impossible - for their x-rays to show their humanity. The soul is to be found in the contrast to the x-ray- the earthy traditional materials show the chasms between the languages of science and faith, faith and logic...

Illumination (Skull) |105 x 155 cm |Offset X-Ray film print, Tea, Pomegrenate, Dupont Chinese Ink and Watercolour on Arch Archival Paper |2009

Day 7 - Into the Void

2010-11-13T00:54:00.000-08:00

Today it is bucketing down with rain. The continent has reverted to its primordial state; crawling with arachnids, mosquitoes with wet-gauze wings hum, moths beat at the windows to get in. It's like Gondwanaland, overgrown and green.
Will you let me cheat today and read instead my reviews of some shows for Next Wave 2010?
Failing that, I think you all should see (if you are in Melbourne) this show at Linden Gallery.

Into the Void: The Antarctic Kingdom of Gondwanaland

Wanda Gillespie

Rising temperatures have seen the unprecedented erosion of age-old ice along a mountain chain on the northern coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctica revealing an archaeological treasure trove. Remnants from an instinct culture have been excavated and are now being reviewed and carbon dated by researchers at the Museum of London. The painstakingly crafted objects recovered from three initial archaeological missions suggest the culture may have been a precursor to such modern-day indigenous cultures of the South Pacific as Maori, Aboriginal Australian, Polynesian and East Indonesian. The uncovered objects can be viewed as the so-called ‘grandmother’ of present tribal art and share similarites in design motifs. Speculation abounds that this ancient culture may have developed simultaneously, yet independently of the dominant ancient civilizations in Sumeria and Egypt, and flourished on the lands of the southern super continent, Gondwanaland.

ceremonial swing, recovered from Queen Maud Land earlier this year

reassembled for Into the Void (by Wanda Gillespie)

The latest findings are beginning to challenge the belief that Antarctica has been under ice for a million years. The discovery of the controversial Piri Reis map in 1929 – a 500 hundred year old map which detailed the northern Antarctic coast from under the existing ice, was the first clue to this scientific inaccuracy. Geological evidence confirms that the latest date Queen Maud Land could have been charted in an ice-free state is 4000 BCE, raising questions about the map’s origins and established scientific ‘truths’ about Antarctica’s ice age.
It is believed that the oncoming ice age, with a revised date around 3500 BCE, played a tragic hand in eradicating this ancient culture. The majority of people, possibly the lower rungs of the society, (be it agrarian workers) are assumed to have fled the areas of Queen Maud Land prior to a major freeze. The relics, collected and reassembled here, are attributed to a reigning religious class; they enact a spiritual drama of perhaps both fear of the impending end and the desire for transcendence. Rudimentary skis were among the icy findings at the site. The nature of the design and the amassing of these objects at specific locations hint that these were produced for a ritual purpose rather than everyday transport. The position of their discovery, at a significant elevation, on the 70th parallel closest to South America, is crucial to the idea that the remaining inhabitants chose to propel themselves away from the earth that had betrayed them. A swing-like structure, again ritualistic in design, stood on the precipice of this chosen site facing a panorama of limitless sky. The standing hypothesis is that this was used as a device by the faithful to swing into the void of heaven and thus cross through the fabric of time and space, that is to say, cross the threshold of reality. Scholars have drawn links between the apparent voluntary suicide of these ancients and the doomsday cults of today. Further excavation at strategic points below the mountain will perhaps shed light on the fate of these lost peoples and whether they indeed experience a final transcendence. As temperatures rise, these initial objects may be the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, of what is to come.

written by Varia Karipoff for Wanda Gillespie

Day 6 - Dare I cover ceramics?

2010-11-11T20:55:00.000-08:00

Whenever I couldn't sleep I used to call my boyfriend (now husband) and ask him very open-ended questions about ceramics - glazes, wood firing, reduction firings, kiln building. I'd be asleep in minutes. The verdict is out on whether it was his soothing voice or the subject matter.

image Shannon Garson

Ceramic-based sculptures and functional pieces are our livelihood and I am needed to remain wide-eyed. No more bed time stories about blue celadon or copper reds. In Australia, ceramics is an art that is slowly trudging after that 'cool again' craft revival - not tearing ahead into the Contemporary Art world as quick as say, taxidermy or crochet. The craft art thing (the second time around, the first occurring after the industrial revolution) is again reactionary - against cheap mass production, faceless mega companies, instant gratification. Tarkovsky put it more profoundly when he said,
Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being
Though I dare say the majority seem content to veer away from questions of spirituality to stitch their own retro owl toys or lino cut bambi to sell on Etsy. Paper boat press has the kind of marketable cutesy craft ceramics that are coming to define the new craft art movement.

jellyfish installation coe & waito

The thing I have come to love about the ceramic world is for all its anxieties about whether it is a functionable craft or art is that it feels like a dysfunctional family. Even the title given to individual practitioners - potter, ceramicist, ceramic artist.... can be the subject of ridicule, debate, snubbing or more occasionally, fraternity.
So I won't deviate into discussions on art or craft but look at some triumphs of functionality, design and art for art's sake in ceramics.

Takeshi Yesuda | Squirrel-tailed Cream jug | White earthenware, with creamware glaze

Edmund de Waal

Edmund de Waal, In a Garden 2010

Edmund de Waal is one of the artists who is using ceramics as the primary medium for eloquent installations that are high art. His work has been exhibited at the Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The artist is also a critically acclaimed author, here is his book The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

Day 5- Ian Fairweather - Le Hermitage

2010-11-10T19:15:00.000-08:00

Monastery 1961

synthetic polymer paint and gouache on cardboard mounted on composition board 144.5 h x 185.5 w

Australian painter Ian Fairweather (29 September 1891 – 20 May 1974) had the kind of extraordinary life story that demanded to be told in the form of (a now revised) biography: From his days as a PoW after being captured by Germans in France during the First World War, to a prestigious art school in London and leading a wandering existence, his is a rich story. Perhaps the most important time in this man's life were the twenty years of solitary existence he lived on remote Bribie Island, off the coast of Queensland. Among the still, dappled trees he spent these last years of his life painting. In this way he reminds me of an ascetic monk, spending his days in quiet reflection, a kind of tanned and hirsute desert father, painting recollections in a rough shack with whatever materials he had on hand. Often he would paint on newspaper, an art conservationist's worst nightmare. His work straddles abstraction, Aboriginal bark painting and Zen Buddhism, taking all his significant cultural and spiritual influences. The resulting work contains calligraphic lines which draw in and divide creating an effect almost like that of a church's stained glass. Suggestions of figures seem to emerge and disappear as on a spiritual plane, the dabs of coloured paint, asking for the viewer's contemplation and stillness. Often wavering between figurative painting and abstraction, Fairweather said, ‘It’s between representation and the other thing, whatever that is, and it’s difficult to keep one’s balance’. One feels that 'other thing' is a highly evolved sensitivity to the spiritual within the man. One story which has become almost as great as the legend himself. After WWII, in a kind of 'dark night of the soul' he constructed a simple raft and departed Darwin for Timor, almost perishing at sea and making headlines in Australia.

Ian Fairweather | Epiphany 1962

"Monastery may be considered a recollection of an experience many years before when the artist stayed briefly at a monastery near Beijing. He described it to his early biographer Nourma Abbott-Smith as a place of spirituality. He recalled that the snow outside covered the monastery while the inside was illuminated by hundreds of candlewicks floating in golden bowls, casting flickering shadows and softening the carved aspect of the statues. In a broader sense, as Murray Bail noted in his later book on the artist, Monasteryalso represents all monasteries, all contemplative silences and so summarises this serious artist’s obsessions."

From: Ron Radford (ed), Collection highlights: National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2008

Day 4- Unreal Country - Ilya Kabakov

2010-11-10T17:38:00.000-08:00

Day 4.
Well it is now day 5! So today is a double bill. I began this yesterday....

I am supposed to be writing an artist's statement for an exhibition this Friday. I thought I would share the artist's inspiration for her one of her major projects, The Museum of Lost Worlds. I myself ran into Kabakov's work as a teenager on art camp, it was a working sketch for his 1999 work, Wings which moved me greatly. It was a very linear, almost Da Vinci-like drawing of a winged contraption that quivered on the borders of invention and imagination.
The art world is a dream world, a fantasy people live in, it is non-stop here. You make this exhibition in the art world, it is not reality. It is a very happy place because it is like a permanent dream, like jazz, non-stop, it just keeps playing.
Born in the Soviet Union in the 1933, Kabakov began his artistic career as a children's book illustrator which allowed him the luxury of dabbling in bboth officially sanctioned art and being present in 'unofficial' art circles. Now living in Long Island, Ilya Kabakov continues to create installation and sculptural works with his wife Emilia. Regarded as one of the most important Russian artists of the 20th century, he was the first living artist to exhibit his work at the Hermitage in St Petersburg. His work often contains a dualism - between what is real and imagined, official and unofficial, arbitrary and non arbitrary. Often he will use literature to create an alternate version of history or reality as in his Albums ('70s-'80s) project , where he creates 10 characters to tell his life story because, in his opinion, nothing ever really happened to him. Much of his work attempts to grapple with his ideas on the birth and death of a civilization, the Soviet Union. The work below, The Flying Komarov (komar - mosquito), shows Soviet people, rendered in coffee-stain, old-book brown fly above their static housing, their confines.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

From the album "The flying Komarov"

From the album "The flying Komarov", 32 sheets, sheet No. 7, 51,5 x 35cm
1981

In an interview, he tried to explain his world-view to a confused American journalist:
America is more reality, this is your hand, this is your head; and in Russia it is absolutely different. In Russia, I look at you and it is my dreams, my fantasy about you. And this is a general point, a general principal. Like in literature, we talk about reality, but it is not reality.

Ilya Kabakov (1999) Wings (How to make yourself better or how to become an angel)

You need to make two wings from white tulle fabric, using the same sketch that is appended to the project, and also leather straps for attaching these wings on your back and fixing them in place. After this, having stayed alone in your room (this condition is fairly important, for both the productivity of the impending activity, as well as for the avoiding undesirable reactions on the part of other people in the family) you should put on the wings, and sit completely without anything to do and in silence for 5-10 minutes, after which you should turn to your usual endeavors without leaving the room. After 2 hours you should repeat the initial pause again. After 2-3 weeks of daily procedures, the affect of the white wings will begin to manifest itself with greater and greater force.

Kabakov creates rich back stories to his sculptural and installation pieces, layering fantasy and unreality and weaving a dream state of possibilities. The result is transcendence; the flight of the cheaply shod, reigned-in, coffee brown homo-Sovieticus above his State version of Utopia. Ilya, an unabashed dreamer, creates a new, imagined, heroically-winged collective history for the Soviet people.

Day 3- A Return to Beauty - Andy Goldsworthy

2010-11-08T19:53:00.000-08:00

DAY 3

After the bad taste of Sherry was left lingering in my mouth, I went to bed slightly befuddled and perhaps a little bit crushed by Art. Can tawdry entertainment be called art? Can a urinal? I looked to etymology, poets and thinkers for answers to what is art or at least, what was art.

Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truths, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned. The revolt of individualism came because the tradition had become degraded, or rather because a spurious copy had been accepted in its stead. [William Butler Yeats]

My husband called me from his "Ceramic Biosphere" in the Chinese countryside where construction dust and burn-off covers orchards with an inch of sediment.

'Who's that Scottish artist who does ephemeral, site specific sculptures with leaves, icicles and twigs?'

'Andy Goldsworthy,' answered the Husband.

So I propose a change of traction. I will look at art which endeavours to return to this original concept of heroic and religious truths. I am taking a departure from the 'spurious copy' we are lead to believe is art. The hollowness, lack lustre, empty individualism found in contemporary art.

sculpture that uses the reflection of the lake to create the impression of a complete circle.

Icicle joined by saliva

If we are looking for a return to beauty we should start as far away from the artifice in art.

Andy Goldsworthy, a baby boomer born in rural Britain worked as a farm labourer before going on to study fine art in college. He likens building a sculpture to picking potatoes, "...you have to get into the rhythm of it." An environmentalist, he creates works from the raw stuff of nature in its location using his bare hands, reeds, teeth and saliva to join natural materials in an extraordinary way. In their impermanence, his sculptures talk about the fragility of beauty and nature. There is a child-like wonder to his work which, through its seeming simplicity and readiness to astound the viewer, has turned off some critics.

L. artem (nom. ars) "art, skill, craft,"

Goldsworthy's skill in gathering, arranging, balancing found objects is exemplary, it is both earthy and painstaking work, no wonder he compares it to picking potatoes. Photography is used to document the natural process of decay - the transient way of the environment. He has also created more permanent sculptures at galleries.

"Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature." Andy Goldsworthy

Day 2 - The "Shit" Show - Ann Liv Young

2010-11-07T20:16:00.000-08:00

Ann Liv Young as polyester-clad bitch, Sherry

photo: Christy Pessagno

Flipping through ARTFORUM (Sepetember 2010 issue) this afternoon I came across an article about performance artist, Ann Liv Young, better known as her belligerent, exhibitionist trashbag character, Sherry.

Sherry is not afraid to interrogate the audience on the extremes of their participation, asking one woman how she would react if somebody were killed on stage. She then demands to know what the woman would do if she were grabbed, hung by a noose and pulled up to the ceiling by "all of us." This prompted the show's booker to jump in in defence of the woman, joining in the free form, yet ultimately contrived drama as a bit player. Young's work is an exercise in extreme behaviour, attracting the kind of fearless deep thinking renegades who murmur, "this is modern art, history being made." And then they can go home and watch it again on DVD because Young records everything to sell as official merchandise. Non-conformists need to pay bills too it seems. An open-minded adult can choose just about any form of entertainment or self expression with other consenting adults, these days you won't raise much ire unless you are using animals or children in an exploitative manner. It will be a sad day when Young's provocative questioning loses its punch or when naked splits do not raise eyebrows anymore. We stand with one foot in the grave of outrage.

Ms Young dances naked on stage as a naked, pregnant Snow White

Now, I was at the point where I was thinking, damn, a lot of modern art is shit while flicking through this magazine and here I was confronted with someone who, with the audience's help, smeared 'faecal matter' over a volunteer's white t-shirt. The irony of 'shit' art imitating art. Whether this boundary pushing, modern-day Sade is merely cashing in on cheap provocation is up to individual scrutiny. We don't argue about taste. Further enquiry revealed among all the dildos, naked handstands and dirt slinging is a deeper controversy (read below). I ask you. When a tacit moral obligation is not fulfilled, do we require a more rigid edict on protecting innocence? Our freedom of expression should not come at the cost of human dignity, particularly of minors.

"Those who know Ms. Young’s work probably assume I must be referring to some as-yet-unperformed (and perhaps, unimagined) sexual activity. Past performances have included vaginal penetration, penile ejaculation, and mammarian gesticulation. But no. Aside from some perfunctory nudity–Young and her cohorts (Isabel Lewis as “Gloria,” and Miguel Guerrero as “Thomas”) wore nothing but shirts and/or robes that splayed open revealing incidental glimpses of their breasts and genitals–there was no live sexual content to speak of. The scandal, for sure, was the inclusion in the performance of Ms. Young’s (and Mr. Guerrero’s) four day-old child."
from
Counter Critic - Ann Live Young: A Cause For Outrage

Twelve days of contemporary art

2010-11-06T23:11:00.000-07:00

Alex Prager, Wendy, 2009, chromogenic print. From the series "Week-end."

The premise is this, for every one of the twelve days my husband is in X'ian and Shanghai I will explore the works of a contemporary artist. Please feel free to suggest someone. Criticise or correct. I'm just thinking out aloud here.

Day 1

Alex Prager, born in 1979 in the back room of her grandma's Los Feliz, CA apartment, is a self-taught, high school drop out whose photographic work featured in this year's "New Photographers" exhibition at NY's Museum of Modern Art. Easy on the eye herself, her images depict heroines of despair and situations that exist in celluloid - a kind of shiny thread of angst and lust binding her series. The manner in which every image is contrived opts for maximum drama, desire, slight incredulity and a recalling of a past we all think we know but never existed. The candy '60s colours remind me of TV series Mad Men. Prager has slipped herself carefully into the stream of today's anxiety - the youngish art set, through misplaced nostalgia appropriate vintage dressing, imagery and objects d'art while living very squarely in the digital age.

Antigone

2010-10-20T19:33:00.000-07:00

listening to Billie Holiday, sun is out. Baby is asleep. Osip speaks to my heart through silent typography.

I don't remember the word I wished to say

I don’t remember the word I wished to say.
The blind swallow returns to the hall of shadow,
on shorn wings, with the translucent ones to play.
The song of night is sung without memory, though.

No birds. No blossoms on the dried flowers.
The manes of night’s horses are translucent.
An empty boat drifts on the naked river.
Lost among grasshoppers the word’s quiescent.

It swells slowly like a shrine, or a canvas sheet,
hurling itself down, mad, like Antigone,
or falls, now, a dead swallow at our feet.
with a twig of greenness, and a Stygian sympathy.

O, to bring back the diffidence of the intuitive caress,
and the full delight of recognition.
I am so fearful of the sobs of The Muses,
the mist, the bell-sounds, perdition.

Mortal creatures can love and recognise: sound may
pour out, for them, through their fingers, and overflow:
I don’t remember the word I wished to say,
and a fleshless thought returns to the house of shadow.

The translucent one speaks in another guise,
always the swallow, dear one, Antigone....
on the lips the burning of black ice,
and Stygian sounds in the memory.

Osip Mandelstam

thoughts from central asia.

2010-10-17T00:09:00.000-07:00

my mama's cousin. some time in the mid '60s when they all relocated to siberia from central asia. The album where I got this foto was gifted to my mama for the christmas of '64 when they were in Abakan, Russia.

record covers, made in the ussr

2010-07-19T04:39:00.000-07:00

Monday nights suck. My husband is shooting Nazi Zombies on the Xbox and is about to cop a swift one to the side of the head from yours truly. I got real bored and started flipping through old records at home - I was duly impressed with some of the artwork on old Soviet record sleeves.

P. Tchaikovsky

Dances from the ballet,

Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra

Conductor Y. Fayer

Voronezh Russian Folk Chorus

soloist M. Mordasova

The Cat's House

Story by S. Marshak, Music N. Aleksandrov

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils with Wild Geese

Selma Lagerlöf

Voices of Birds in The Nature

(translation found in cover...)

(a five lp set- first record - Birds of the Far East)

photos from my sweetheart the drunk

2010-07-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

DAISY
DAISY STANDS SLIM
ON HER STEM
TOW-HEADED
UNAWARE-
THAT THE GREEKS CALL HER
MARGARITA.

Daphne fled from Apollo

she knew blood and foam
on bedding, screams accompanying
her birth, she prayed for laurel leaves
Transfigured into knotted branches,
Maiden hair to coarseness, skin to bark
to evade rape

But Daisy, my baby
Margarita
Sleep.

The Metamorphosis of Daphne into a Laurel tree by Apollo
Charles Sims

winter

2010-07-16T17:49:00.000-07:00

woollen cardies, hot tea, cool blue skies, silhouettes of trees

Best things about a dreary winter in the city

1. Melbourne International Film Festival -
My pick? Deeper than yesterday a short film by recent VCA graduate Ariel Kleiman, it was one of only 2 Aussie films chosen for Cannes this year where it scored a prix. What's long, hard and full of seamen? Set on a Russian submarine, the trailer promises Slavic hot bloodedness, skinny guys in tightie whities and some even tighter acting.
Running in the Accelerator 1 program Saturday 31 July.

2. Reading. I like to head to the The State Library in my best nerd getup. There's always something to see and do. I like to breathe in the old tomes... mmm sexy.

3. Stay indoors and get crafty. Nikki Gabriel takes the nonna out of knitting with her high fashion patterns. I was the victim of many a Patton's pattern - my mum loved to dress my sister and me in matching outfits. Looking back though, wool is cool.

4. TEA TIME.

Bring back high tea, Devonshire Tea, a cup of Lipton with your best mate. Get to know your tea cups and read tea leaves. Get a samovar. Read stories while drinking tea in the misty cold, rugged up like Catherine on the moors.

Go to a country town and sample their home made cakes and tea.

enjoy hibernating!
xx Varia

dreams of my russian summers

2010-07-14T19:57:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from a short story that is threatening to evolve into something much larger...

...

Before Vienna there was St Petersburg. Under the boulevards and canals of the city was an underground Georgian restaurant with beer on tap and simple blonde wooden furniture. Most traktirs are held in ill-repute, seen by the aspirational class as little more than subterranean drinking dens. This class preferred sushi shops and Euro-renovations on their tiny pre-Perestroika apartments. The ceiling in this place was so smoke darkened that when you threw your eyes up, it disappeared into itself. Licks of red paint on folk decorations became like Chagall’s fantastical flying goats, their apple cheeks resting on the wood of violins. Once, artists seemed to take inspiration from the smoke curling from an opium pipe – slowly and deliberately, into thick, still air. Smoke curl even formed the pattern on brocade curtains at Tsarist theatres before they were rent in half by concrete and Communism. Smoke seemed appropriate – it was impermanent and untouchable like empires or dreams. Smoke only leaves stains behind as a memory of itself.

Boston Marriage

2010-07-12T19:06:00.000-07:00

MTC gets a pretty bad rap, at least at my school where it as seen as a populist, pedestrian theatre company... Well screw it. As far as a good night out goes, you can't beat a night at the theatre and if it is a well-produced show attended by well-heeled ageing lefties and suits trying to impress their younger starlings with cul-cha - I'll take it with a grain of salt.

Boston Marriage was written by American playwright David Mamet after he was brow beaten for only ever writing about men. The play centres on the relationship between two women in one of those Victorian euphemisms for feminism and lesbian relationships. Actually some women just lived with other women in marraige-like arrangements because men were dolts. Conventional heterosexual marriage insisted upon the woman's submissiveness, not to mention, abandoning career prospects.
The drawing room conversations between the two heroines Anna and Claire are in Victorian high-brow with National Geographic (circa 1892) references to potato famines, geo-politics and exotic Indian mammals - with a dash of cussing and pillow book raunchiness. Vibrators were invented in the Victorian era to treat hysteria in women. Beneath high necklines, sexuality simmered.
In this story, Anna has secured a wealthy male benefactor and hopes to install Claire permanently into her home. Alas, Claire has her eye on a young thing. Slinging amusing insults at one another, Anna finally relents to a cunning seduction plan for the heavily chaperoned girl. It all goes to the shitter when the said young thing spies the necklace Anna is wearing...
The dialogue is acerbic, the punch lines coming faster than those tennis ball shooting machines - pow-pow- pow. Mamet is showing off here but he's very entertaining. The characters - including Catherine the poor Scottish maid that is often reduced to tears by her cruel mistress - are scheming, sex-starved, consume mountains of sweet meats but are saved by their wit. It could have been a very misogynistic representation of a Boston Marriage but it's forgiven by being so lavish and scathingly funny.

Boston Marriage
Fairfax - Art Centre Melbourne
4 June - 24 July
Running Time: 2 hours including a 20 minute interval
SEASON EXTENDED - BEST SEATS 19-24 JULY

AndreiDavidoff.com

2010-06-06T22:41:00.000-07:00

I have spent today building a website :

Andrei Davidoff ceramic artist

This is one of Andrei's vases, we called her the Muse before she was purchased by a discerning architect.

She was wood fired as you can see from the natural green ash glaze adorning her feminine curves.

Hello gorgeous

2010-05-31T16:05:00.000-07:00

Duff's parents dropped a bombshell. "Guys, we know you have a baby coming and all of that but don't give up on your dreams. We don't want you working shit jobs to pay rent and buy nappies. Go abroad next year."
So we thought about it.
...
and pretty much, two tears in a bucket, let's go to Japan. Kyoto or Shigaraki, something like that, working on contacts.

Still a LOT to sort out but, I suppose transience is the way of the artist.
I love love love Duff's ceramics and he will learn so much from Japanese potters. I started writing this short story and my teach. told me to keep going with it - I do think I have a novel in me. Perhaps this is a Paullina Simons thing, babies and pregnancy bring out words and books. I love my baby already.

Lullaby

2010-05-16T21:54:00.000-07:00

I carry you over broken slate
the river below.
watch my feet
I climb a fallen down tree
carefully with you.
I breathe in alpine air for you
so you can love this place too.

you are so small, a bisque fired figurine
elbows and feet are all I know of you

Richard III

2010-05-05T00:06:00.000-07:00

In the title role of MTC's production of Richard III, actor Ewen Leslie spits and snarls, dragging his bung leg over incredible revolving sets. The physicality he brings to the role is fearless; from furious heads shakes that muss up his very Hitler haircut to a one-handed climb up a cyclone fence in the final scene, his performance is nothing short of brilliant. He's got the grotesqueness down pat with a dose of sardonic wit as the scheming and murderous monarch.

Richard III is a long play - stretching almost three hours here - but I sat transfixed by the glorious spray of spittle and blood to the very last. Adapted as a 'contemporary political thriller,' it is startling to hear how the speeches of the ruling elite have changed so little in 400 years. Behind all that -icide (add prefix, it's all there - homicide, fratricide, infanticide) and marriage, the machinations and scheming wickedness that accompany an assent to the top ring all too familiar in today's world. When Richmond - who plans to usurp the cruel Richard using military force - stands to deliver his 'rousing the troops' monologue there are traces of Obama during the presidential election. Right down to the red tie/charcoal suit combo and Southern preacher gravity. Stylistically, the production could be a summary of the 20th Century classic style - sharp suits for males and Chanel jackets for the women. The sets are a mix of wood panelled board rooms and white-walled institution which rotate mechanically, allowing the action to flow seamlessly from scene to scene. This mostly grim tale is often lightened by unexpected humour. In one scene, a mobile phone beeps to which a character exclaims in ye olde English accent, "A messenger!" Shakespeare himself intended moments of mirth in Richard III and it translates well into the 21st century. Music and moving image are utilised well to progress the story and lend the play a textural richness.

In a solid cast, Jennifer Hagan (right) is a stand out performer. Her turn as Queen Margaret (here, as a ranting palliative care escapee complete with IV drip) was unique and unnerving - her voice lends her multiple characters a sort of beaten down rage.

Showing until 12th June, Sumner Theatre

NB.

Admittedly, I am somewhat unfamiliar with the majority of The Bard's canon. The closest I got to Shakespeare as a kid was dancing to Young Hearts Run Free (from Baz's film soundtrack to Romeo and Juliet), in a friend's garage. That and Zeffirelli's 1968 film, Romeo and Juliet. And seeing a modern theatre adaptation to Romeo and Juliet whilst studying said play (and let's not talk about Paltrow's movie, Shakespeare In Love).... you get the drift. But I'm hooked, this is gold.

- Varia

Babooshka!!!! YAAAYAAAA!

2010-04-30T03:25:00.000-07:00

Memories of working at a Russian doll shop.

All the faces - unblinking and dark-eyed, stare back from the glass shelves. The spotlights swathe the figures in a too-close warmth, the bodies swagger and huddle. Was this store always so red? Garish flashes of paint and lacquer form lips on dolls' faces, posies of flowers, lace; artistic flourish dissolves into a curl of opium smoke or the shaved linden wood discarded at artisans' feet. Firebirds cavort on aprons, horses with muscular necks curved like swans' snort and stamp on reflective black surfaces, glossy as frozen lakes. A Persian princess sips chai from a samovar. The Russian dolls clamour around like a red army, staring, unbreathing with their dark eyes.

back.

2010-04-26T17:15:00.000-07:00

Back from travels,
shoes still unpacked all over a floor already littered with tickets and odd socks.
Back from curving mountain roads where Balkan women hold their dead husbands
as their children bleed life.
I walked in, pregnant and smiling like a knife to the chest for grieving dears.
I'm back from where sirens are silenced by the inkiness of night.
Where the river has not flowed for several years now and the yellow poplars stand sentinel
and I sleep, sleep

on the smooth pebbles in the sun with my child curled up inside me.

Mainstreams and Side streets (a zine)

2010-04-12T19:38:00.000-07:00

I am taking the plunge and creating a zine :

Issue 1 will focus on Starlets. Marlene Deitrich? Bacall? There's just something about them
I'll be looking at Bafta winner Carey Mulligan and my new favourite gal, Tamara Toumanova.
In the science section I will delve into research on Locust Swarms and wind forces. Riveting shit.
There'll be a map of Cambodia and Vietnam from a Soviet rip-off of National Geographic (it's called GLOBUS) 1971 (the map is illustrated and quite poignant. Leave our fellow commies alone!)
and perhaps I'll throw in a poem or two and some pictures I drawed.

I must have something to do while I'm in the bush for 6 days (no electricity, no phone lines)...with only paper, pencils and a glue stick for entertainment.

My international readers will be able to also have a copy of this zine if they so wish. It comes in a red envelope.

The Incredible Lightness of Being

2010-04-11T01:40:00.000-07:00

Tamara Toumanova, Siberian born Georgian ballerina (and she starred alongside Paul Newman in a Hitchcock movie), dancing on a beach in Sydney.

Shtuff!

2010-03-25T16:07:00.000-07:00

One of the most underrated bands of all time. Mazzy Star. Must start listening to Chopin or something...isn't that what pregnant ladies do?

I got this off Three Thousand yesterday, what do you get when you mix crochet and taxidermy? Here is a peak at Shauna Richardson's work. Meanwhile, there is a three year waiting list in Melbourne to get pets taxidermied. Think of all those Moggies in the freezer. How do you explain that one to your in-laws?

Ok well I have to go make some sammiches for my husband and me to eat at the front of State Library and then go to class.

2:10pm on a quiet too-warm Thursday in late March

2010-03-24T20:01:00.000-07:00

(image from Parasol Magazine)

Reading Evgeny Onegin, well namely, Tatiana's letter to Onegin.(here in English) to le foetus in utero aka my bubi. I want Russian to be her first language. I couldn't find a good children's story in the house and Pushkin just has a lilt that reads like the very essence of our desire to make language. I should be reading folklore and fairy tales instead of love gone wrong in prose... but no mother is perfect.

Learning the road rules
I am going for my learner permit. I know, hell should be freezing over already. My sister (one year older) has been driving for 12 years. What can I say? I am a late bloomer.

Writing
just finished my journalism assignment (literary non-fiction). I missed out on having my story looked over in class so now I have to kind of wing this. eek.
and am now working on a big fat short story which is huffing along, getting a structural overhaul and writhing with life and anguish.
Stay tuned.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

2010-03-04T21:41:00.000-08:00

In town for the screening of his new film Micmacs à tire-larigot at ALLIANCE FRANÇAISE French Film Festival director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie, Delicatessen, City of Lost Children) cuts an amiable figure. His unguarded English sparkles with his trademark humour as he talks freely about scouting locations by scooter, living in Montmatre and the influence of comedian Buster Keaton on his work. Self-taught in his craft, he has a healthy disdain for realism, reviews and promotion.

On his most famous movie : "I am Amélie." The breakout local and international success of the film was a personal triumph for Jeunet, the story is the most close to him and his long time collaborating script-writer, Guillame Lauvant. "It is the film of my life," he says after the giggling subsides at his first proclamation. It is hard to imagine this 50-something olive-skinned Frenchman inhabiting the lithe, shy being that is Amélie. The director was itching to make this film for years, derailed from beginning it by his first Hollywood project, Alien Resurrection. With Lauvant, stories take shape organically. They collect notes over a long period of time, filling a box with the funny moments that make up every day and a generous sprinkling of details. When the box is full, they pick the best jokes and details. He credits Lauvant with the idea of the Glass Man (the painter who paints the same Renoir over and over) in Amélie.

Reality vs. Aesthetics: Jeunet wants to continue the tradition of 1940s cinema, where the visual qualities outstrip reality, giving the film a poetic air. Children of Paradise is one such film that he cites as an inspiration for his quirky style. In fact he prefers directors with a strong style; Kusturica, Burton, Welles and Lione and don't get him started on New Wave. He's not a fan. Jeunet's Paris is fantastical, the real Paris, he explains - rains, there's dog shit on the streets. His films are about creating worlds, City of Lost Children perhaps being the greatest example of this. The set is sprawling dark place in a childish imagination, a fractured fairy-tale world inhabited by an unlikely couple, a Thumbelina and a giant pitted against a dream-stealing villain.
In production design, there are often surprises. It's no wonder, his movies require between 80-100 sets! When it came to the boudoir of Amelie (see above) he was shocked to see it red but it soon grew on him and became rather iconic. In the case of the follow-up movie, A Very Long Engagement, which is based in the years after World War One it is more or less grounded in reality. Luckily for Jeunet, the 1920s are an aesthetic goldmine with ample opportunities for building elaborate sets and getting the texture right. Here, war and violence is counterbalanced by romance and beauty lending it that intimitable Jeunet style. At any rate, Jeunet pays fastidious attention to detail spending weeks getting the colour right for each film.

Dominque Pinon

On casting : Jeunet saw over 40 actors to fill a one-line role in Amelie ("ticket please"), many of the professional actors were deeply offended by him being so finnicky over such small a role. Casting is of the highest importance to him, finding the right character is crucial to the feel of his films. Jeunet has a thing for interesting faces and character actors -Dominique Pinon has appeared in all six of his movies. Having character actors allows his films to delve into something other than reality. Again, this is typical of 1940s cinema. Audrey Tautou, star of two of his feature films, appears in a commercial for Chanel No.5 directed by him below.

On film reviews. "The difference between making a film and writing a film review is like the difference between giving birth and farting in the bath," he says amid peals of laughter. Some two years after the unbridled success of Amélie, one critic came out to call the film "fascist" (according to Jeunet). By simply coming out and destroying the biggest French movie of all time this critic became a star. Farting in the bath, clearly.

On voice overs: It was quite risky starting Amélie with a 20 minute voice-over stating the likes and dislikes of the characters. For Jeunet, voice overs are an integral part of his style, "It's like hearing a story."

On shooting: As much as he hates promotion (one film requires 800 interviews with the same twenty questions he explains), shooting is like a drug to Jeunet. Just like an exam, you have to be at your peak performance for six month. Although some directors detest watching their own films, seeing only what is wrong with them for this director they bring back good memories.
This is what I learnt at a talk at VCA, 3rd March 2010 - Varia Karipoff

The Banff

2010-02-25T14:21:00.000-08:00

Everything is a story, an opportunity, a memory being created, trimmed down and altered by longing.
I've not felt this creative in a long time.

Last night, walking home from Fitzroy Street just before the witching hour and the taxi loads of pale Irish girls in the best of H&M. Late summer sea in all the palm trees and bougainvilleas and hushed facades of Spanish missionary houses and deco apartments- some curved like cruise liners. I'm home sick before I've even left here, for the air by the sea. For the houses who are friends to me with stories I'll learn eventually, as real as familiar passengers on the same train every morning. Leaving a place is waking up and not seeing that passenger on the train anymore. Did I make the most of it all? Did I talk to that passenger with the beaten leather satchel who breathed fog alongside me last July on the platform?

How to keep stylin' during your pregnancy

2010-02-24T21:01:00.000-08:00

This isn't some tabloid BS about yummy mummies or amazing post-partum figures. I'm just sharing some things I am learning about looking after myself during the long months of pregnancy.
I'm 26, a Melburnian, a student and a freelance writer. In my circle of friends there is one other lovely lady having a baby - I thought I'd throw this out there for anyone who is (or considering becoming) pregnant and doesn't have an overabundance of mates in the same boat.

Hair:

I come from the Bob Geldof school of hair - that is, genetically predisposed to looking seriously unkempt even when I try. Kind of. All that vomitting in the first trimester can leech the protein goodness out of hair. Pregnancy can make your hair go either way - "gawjus" ie. shiny and luscious or dry and brittle aka a shit fight. What is guaranteed is that it will get thicker.

What I recommend:

for a shampoo free from all those chemical nasties like sulfates, parabens and artificial stuff, try Nourish (from health food shops). It comes in formulas for every perceivable hair type (dry, dyed red hair, natural blonde... seriously) and works better than that sodium lauryl sulphate paint stripper that is normal supermarket quality shampoo.
Kerastase products are a pretty sure bet too and you might relent and purchase some of their magic potions to sort your tresses out.

Get a hair cut with a treatment. What's not to love about being pampered for an hour? And before you walk out that door make another appointment for 8 weeks time. As my lovely hairdresser said today, "When you look after hair, it looks after you." Yes, fetch me a cup of tea, hair.

Boobs: or norks as we called them in high school.

By about 3 months your boobs will probably outgrow your old bras. You'll have fabulously big, sore-ass breastini which will be getting unwanted attention.

What to do:

Maternity bras can be scary looking. They have these clasps which undo so you can flop down the cup fabric and feed your bambino when it arrives. Your partner may think this is an amusing toy for a while, much to your mounting annoyance and feelings of unattractiveness. Thank goodness not all of them are like this (bras I mean). Elle "The Body" McPherson has some comfy and non-threatening ones. The main thing is to try to avoid underwire for the time being, especially if you are hoping to breastfeed. You'll actually love maternity bras. They are amazingly snuggly and comfortable and sturdy. Some are even... dare I say it, sexy.
If your boobs are annoying you at night, throw on a cotton crop top bra (or sports bra) - Cotton On Body sells fun cheapies to keep your goods together.

Schepping around pants:

I'm not a fan of trackie dacks (sweat pants). They're pretty hideous in fact. But on your down time at home you need that comfy love that only the trackies are capable of.
Enter "jogging pants," or what was known a few seasons ago as "the poo catcher" or "harem pant." Jogging pants can be worn with pink stilettos and a eurotrash-tastic tshirt, or maybe, just... whatever you like...

more later!

matryoshka baby

2010-02-22T01:25:00.000-08:00

This whole having a baby thing. Strange things happen.
I've been eating central European food, it's all schnitzels mitt kartofel, and I have a cabbage obsession. Is my unborn child a Kraut? Not that that's a bad thing. Sure, half my elderly Russian and Ukrainian friends in Australia were Ostarbeiters - kidnapped by Germans to be worked to death in labour camps. (They don't hold grudges because that's just not right). I know that somewhere there is Finnish blood in my ancestry, the only hint of Germanic we've got I think.

Apart from the food preferences, I'm getting (justifiably) a wee bit clucky. ~~It's freakin crazy, there's another body inside mine, getting built all new and it's a bit of me and a bit of the man I love and it's an enormous and frightening thing.~~ I've been selling stuff that I don't need, mainly ridiculously ~~gorgeous~~ impractical shoes.
I have a few Russian dolls that are in mint condition, hand-painted and all that jazz. Cannot part with them for the sake of the baby. So instead I bought Japanese fabric with matryoshki on it to compensate for even thinking about selling my dolls and also because their little eskimo faces comfort me.

when music comes from windows

2010-02-18T23:03:00.000-08:00

Summer has this intoxicating effect on northerners, out of the open window across the alley, music streams like a ribbon in a May Day march. You find yourself singing along after at first frowning at the improbability of the happiness found in fleeting chart songs.The subways are full of old ladies selling parsley and dill from their country cottages, their fragrance follows you for a while as do the ladies' weather beaten brows and paisley kerchiefs. Among the restless hustle of a big city you stop to take in an impromptu trumpet solo after seeing a ballet. Others stop with you, perhaps forming their own memories. The weightless nature of the soul is palpable in the eternal light of summer.

cleaning up

2010-02-17T21:05:00.000-08:00

I'm cleaning up my detritis; diaries from over a decade ago, old photographs and unsent postcards. Found this photo taken by my sister when I was probably 15 or 16 years old. For some reason she decided to permanent marker my boob tube which caused her photography teacher to think it was a nude photo shoot. Right. I'm leafing through my journal from my mid teens...

22nd August 1998

I found this notebook in the bungalow, it smells funny and the pages are already yellowing but I don't mind. I think my diaries are all I have. Apparently Nastya read my other diary and my poem book. Good. I'm happy for her. She just doesn't know how much she hurts me.

Tuesday 8th February 2000

It's 8:15pm and I'm sitting outside my bungalow bathroom near the orange tree making fires with Alli and Nina. I came out here with the purpose of writing something but it ain't working.

Burial day speech

Back in high school my friend and I had a tradition of writing a rant and then meeting up to 'bury' all of our frustration. Once we snuck out of our bedrooms at night to do this, went down to the creek, built a fire, smoked a joint and spewed forth our frothing diatribes of teenage pain. Needless to say, we soon grew wary of suburban creek noises: was that a frog? Can this sewer hole of a creek even support amphibian life forms? Is it the Sewer Man from X-Files?

Here is an excerpt rant from a 1998 rant, aged 15:

This is to racist, fascist arseholes, to NATO and the U.S. You didn't lift a finger to save half a million innocent Rwandans from being slaughtered yet you act like world saviours, flashing your fat fascist arse around Kosovo. YOU KILL MORE THAN ANYONE. All those missfires and regrettable accidents. Fuck you.

fiery little shit I was.

sunless gaze

2010-02-12T18:44:00.000-08:00

Christ is in you,
though your brow is not blackened for Lent
your head bowed low, a sunless gaze
rain has cleared the path of dust into muddy rivulets
our overcast garden smells of cinnamon and autumn
not far, birds from Siberia have finished fattening up
and will return without news.
Perhaps it'd be easier to dampen our thoughts -
admit defeat now, migrate on.
I pray, we never hang ourselves from despair and famine -
broken down and unable to provide for a child..

v.k
2010

From INSOMNIA - Marina Tsvetaeva

2010-02-11T13:57:00.000-08:00

As I love to

kiss hands, and

to name everything, I

love to open

doors!

Wide-into the night!

Pressing my head

as I listen to some

heavy step grow softer

or the wind shaking

the sleepy and sleepless

woods.

Ah, night

small rivers of water rise

and bend towards-sleep.

(I am nearly sleeping.)

Somewhere in the night a

human being is drowning.

short soup,

2010-02-09T20:26:00.000-08:00

Word association 2 for the day. Play time in Art Decos by the sea before I have to steal away to the streets that raised me so effin tough. According to Fiddy Cent, "nothing good ever came out of the hood." Well isn't he just a self-fulfilling prophesy?
Back to my bohemian lair in the suburbs then.

photo taken at a restaurant in Melbourne's Chinatown 2009

loves you all, Varia Karipoff

Hungarian doll

2010-02-09T16:53:00.000-08:00

click to enlarge poem

jindabyne

2010-02-08T23:29:00.000-08:00

grapefruit juice

2010-01-29T21:23:00.000-08:00

I was one of them.

Summer dresses and bottles of cider in a park,
oversized sunglasses and as many close friends as new faces.
I wore patterned blouses and the brightest blue jeans
and sometimes even funny animal ears or strange make up, twisting
around a washing-line may pole, stoned with hispanics.
I wore tiny shorts with gold ballet slippers in Warsaw when I was chasing
a boy in the tightest black jeans to a jazz club and I had a bottle of pink grapefruit juice under my arm. The summer air and Stalin's towers watching me dance over cars.
They all look like strangers now. Insects before a great frost, they writhe around in pollen, overgrown and unsure if they are with the right one or if they are too old to wear that or to wake up drunk with a 22 year old. All of their fears are closely guarded, they ride their bikes down to the pub in playsuits. They talk a bit about art or someone's cocktail ring... they wake up drunk, they watch a vampire series, they get marked on their appearance, they drink pinot with dinner now because it's hot. The hole in their culture is too big to fill with chitter chatter and they get this and turn to Buddhism for a bit, or go to Thailand to soak up sun with a twist of asian culture. They contemplate India before realising they are just consumer cosmopolitans and not at all like the ancient Athenians and they're all washed up in a dreamtime and will only wake up as grey as their parents.

and a stone word fell

2010-01-28T16:04:00.000-08:00

And a stone word fell
on my still living breast
It's alright, I was ready
I'll deal with it somehow.
Today I have a lot to do:
Need to kill memory to its end,
Need the soul to harden
Need to learn to live again.
And not... the hot rustle of summer
As if there is a holiday beyond my window
I long since had a presentiment of this
Bright day and deserted house.

1939
Anna Akhmatova

(on the go translation)

white peonies

2010-01-27T19:23:00.000-08:00

white peonies, aqua glass jug
in a sun filled lounge,
I'm new again
hope puffs the lungs
like a mama bird,
I'm new at this feeling

all are an unbroken line
to the end and beginning
of humanity
yet we begin with such small steps

varia karipoff 2010

in the old times...

2010-01-12T21:46:00.000-08:00

She was Queen of Harbin, with hair down to the small of her back in an auburn plait. She was not like a Russian girl or a Chinese one. She was at once petite but also long limbed, with narrow hips and a sort of wiriness that might have looked better on a boy. Every year they would choose the prettiest girl of the city as part of summer festivities by the river. While the other girls fretted over their hems tattering on the bull rushes she wore her brother's pants held up with old rope. They chose her as Princess of the Songhua River that year as she stood to the side of a pavilion in her brother's pants. They took a photograph which her mother later saw and laughed at heartily. They weren't land owners anymore and they left their factory in Siberia to the proletariat after being tipped off by loyal workers. The old country was deeply entrenched into their conciousness, more so by the violent nature in which it had made exiles of them. They lived in a smokey flat above a furniture store on Main Street, the proprietor was a Chinaman who Yulia sometimes spent the afternoon with, playing Mahjong and smoking hand rolled cigarettes.While 1930's Shanghai was a pleasure den for expats and exiles, Harbin was a sleepier northern cousin.

Cherry Orchard

2010-01-05T02:44:00.000-08:00

Watching far too much television this summer, my current guilty secret is Carnivàle. Quite risque viewing for some (what do you expect from HBO?), but it's all about the atmosphere, the sumptuous set design, the evocation of a bygone era and much maligned tradespeople - carnies. As the carnival rolls into yet another dust bowl town in Texas, I stretch out on couch-bed with a fan strategically directed to sweep across from head to toes. Sort of blissful way to spend evenings since I'm all baba-like these days. I'm comatose by 9pm and have the most fitful dreams ever when I finally get to sleep. Polar bears chasing me down ravines, crashing a car into an ice shelf, running away from a pedophile. Honestly. I should keep a dream diary, you couldn't come up with half that shite on acid and a 3 week stint in the jungle as a Viet Cong.

Russian Christmas is upon us, I've got my brown paper to tie up all the packages with string here.

looks like christmas morning

2009-12-31T15:55:00.000-08:00

I'll write how I am. Sitting by the sea, a thousand voices having traipsed the boardwalk already this morning. Woke up with two drunks at home, ate cereal standing in the kitchen. Someone was asleep on the lounge and I couldn't turn on the light to read in our tiny place. I had to leave for a bit. I forgot my sunglasses. It's bright and cool by the sea. Tiny frequent waves are white maned horses in a Pushkin fairytale, their riders- or the wind, roar softly, familiar. Two men rub sunscreen into each other's balding heads, they look like genderless newborn twins.
I take my time with things. Forgotten how to write this.
I wrap a scarf around my head, wrap my arms around my middle. Watch the cargo ships from the pier.

Tea and biscuits

2009-12-23T23:35:00.000-08:00

We pretended to be grown up. Wake up at eleven, shake ash and cat fur off our clothes and put it on the French news on SBS. Or was it Telediario? Language was always a sticky point, we'd paste over many subtleties to communicate in the only language we both shared. Romain understood the riots in Algerian neighbourhoods, picket lines and art students holed up in school buildings. Once I told him how to make tea to soothe a sore throat and he put the lemon in after the milk. Did he think I was a yurt-dwelling, curdled milk drinker? He called me on the telephone, spluttering, "Milk and lemon? What? It doesn't go very well." I forgot that in some countries, even ours, they drink tea with milk. I still over-pour milk into tea. "A dash! A dash!"

The house was pokey. We joked that our bedrooms at our family homes were bigger. Inside it, sometimes I'd grow frightened at how perfectly isolated we were, a brown old continent straddling the world's most formidable ocean. I'd imagine getting a rare disease and having to be airlifted to the nearest country like Vanuatu or New Zealand. I'd eat toast and sniff organic unhomogenised milk in his less than pristine fridge and appraise half rotted groceries that he bought on his dad's Amex. Then it'd dawn on me that we lived in a civilized country that had ATMs and ERs with defibrillators and catheters. He'd clean out the fridge and try to start again. We could only buy food to last us the day ever and forget about the leftovers. He smoked Marlboros and maybe roll the first joint of the morning as he explained like a grown up, all these things on the TV. It'd be cold out so I'd take his woollen scarf and wrap it around my throat to walk to school. He'd walk me and we'd stop for coffee and then maybe I'd have a cigarette too. I'd watch an old lady with an Ashkenazi nose and tattered hippy clothes scrape cigarette ash after smoking and it made me shake, like she was digging through the remains of her relatives. I'd remember mama and that I wasn't supposed to be here.

Balaclava noon

2009-12-15T01:28:00.000-08:00

They sit on the bench, early afternoon, under a tree that somehow reminds them of home. The street is hot and smells of coffee grinds, slightly rotting garbage and brake fluid. A sea breeze wafts it all clean. One man is old, grey and slim with an aqualine nose. He sits cross-legged, face in profile, reminding me of a pedigree cat or a French aristocrat. The other man is new school, body mass slightly having outgrown his frame, a tee shirt that could have cost $300 or come as a care parcel via St Vinnies when he received permanent resident status. New man takes out a maroon jeweller's pouch, glances around and empties it into his hand like a crack dealer. An elegant gold band catches the hot sun.
"All original stones," he says in a language that I speak but in a tone of voice I do not understand.

morning at the medical clinic

2009-12-14T23:33:00.000-08:00

Like most ethnics, I will travel across the city to visit a doctor with a family connection. Mine is the super clinic. Not only is my mother the medical receptionist there, one of the doctors is an honourary aunt and super-diagnostician who saved my life. Apparently she was born in a Turkish prison as her parents were fleeing the Union during WW2. Her parents moved to Western Australia from Europe where her mother was promptly widowed after a mining accident. The miners' wives, mostly non-English speaking women, were piled into a ute and taken to the site to identify their dead husbands. She was widowed with five children in a foreign land. And W.A isn't cool like Melbourne or Sydney. You don't live there, you do time. (Note: The story goes something like that. Forgive me if I've got it wrong.)
Naturally, she always makes me feel like my problems are miniscule. "I also had haemoglobin of 7 and I was running up and down ten flights of stairs doing 100 hour weeks as a med student." Having a hb of 7 feels like you're on the verge of a heart attack or a coma and it is very dangerous. Every time I run into her she inevitably brings up my drama and her part in rescuing me.
"You came in wanting to be treated for pimples." (Actually, a staph infection that turned my whole ear into a blister).
"I have table cloths which are less white than you that day." (Turns out, I'm not naturally alabaster).
"I asked you if you had been a languid child and you said that everyone just assumed you were lazy, poor girl." (At least it got me staying indoors more and I got good at drawing and reading).

This medical clinic is located in a rather well-to-do inner city suburb frequented by many university students from the neighbouring Melbourne Uni campus. My mother likes to case potential husband material for her youngest daughter in between answering phone calls and explaining medicare rebates. I'll be reading a Vogue in the waiting room when she'll pipe up in Russian over some unsuspecting boy's shoulder, "Varia, see this boy here? He is uncommonly polite and well-mannered for his age. He is Czech. Maybe he will suit Nina." I want to say, "Mama if he is Czech he can probably understand 40% of this conversation." Instead I snort a laugh into the well-thumbed April 2008 Vogue or at least snot onto a photo of a picture-perfect polo family in Tattler. Then she'll flick her bobbed hair to the direction of her sullen co-worker sitting on a stool like a hysteric Victorian lady in a dusty portrait. Again in Russian, "That woman is enervating me. Look at her. It's like she ate lemons for breakfast."

Sparrow Hills

2009-12-13T02:29:00.000-08:00

Left to right - Tatiana, Anastasia, Olga, Marie. Centre: Alexei

Evenings: cicada calls across browning Christmas lawns. In pyjamas and freshly washed hair we'd crowd around the icons in the lounge room for evening prayers. Mama taught us to pray for the living and the departed. The names of the dead seemed to ring and rhyme (nearly everything does in Russian after a while).. Angelina, Nina, Zoya, Kapitalina, Galya, Galina, Evgeniya, Venyamin, Venedikt, Sofia, Elena, Otrok Sergiy (otrok meaning youth)...

What's in a name? Do you live up to the etymology of your name? Do the vowel sounds and the syllables shape your character in strength and weakness, femininity and masculinity? Is it the biggest gift you can give to your child?

Kolpakovs

2009-12-03T05:04:00.000-08:00

what dinner at home sounds like.
we have four guitarists in the family

I don't wear lipstick

2009-12-03T04:03:00.000-08:00

Returned from a pilgrimage to suburbia. My parents live 25 kms away and I haven't been to their house in a month. The rain has been good for lawns out there, it's like walking into some kind of overgrown tropical Gondwana. I came by the morning train and walked into the house feeling slightly overgrown myself. Is it possible that I am growing taller in my mid twenties?
*    * *    *
жди меня и я вернусь
только очень жди
* * *
I tumbled into my sister's car, she was going to the hospital for a night shift and I walked through the cool 9 pm still bright summer streets. Past Carlton gardens with its romantic Victorian street lamps dotting the elms. Through the theatre precinct, the chink chink of glasses at the Windsor Hotel and the Princess Theatre. Past Ermenegildo Zegna, louis V, Hermès, Gucci and Chanel. Home home home home. Skip the main streets by zig zagging through cobbled side lanes and staircases behind cathedrals my worn out black summer dress puffing up in a breeze, my brother's borrowed woollen jumper over it .Through crowds of school kids leaving vespers at Saint Paul's with happy smiling parents, huddling, bubbling, chatting excitedly. "'Scuse me. 'Scuse ME," I shout at their brace-happy faces, (dentally-conscious middle income parents). My teeth, vampirishly sharp and slightly crooked as I do yell, half serious. I have three minutes to catch my train and two streets to cross and a station to jog through. I don't wear lipstick. Except when I think I look too tired-eyed.

* * * * * * * * * ****          *         ****                 ***        *morse code*** * * * *        ***
Speaking of pilgrimage and cathedrals. In the Holy Land, cobbled, curved Jerusalem streets with pastel green window shutters I fell asleep at the Holy Sepulchre during a midnight liturgy. I sat down on the worn, thousand year old slanted marble floor, slid into a sort of trance amid incense and chants and slept without dreams. My aunt found me and I had communion at Christ's tomb, blinking awake, shivering slightly against the cool marble sleep.

* * * ****          ****         ****         **** **********

IIII IIIIIIIII I I I I IIIII I III I I I I I II

Am not sure if it is a Russian malady, not sure what it is. Someone please help me. But I could not give a damn for things right now. I don't want anything.
пфу! всю эту дрянь

funeral march

2009-11-29T16:19:00.000-08:00

One of the most unfair* parts of being a PK (priest's kid) is having to tag along to funerals. You get a cold and school is out of the question, all your relatives are going to a funeral. Guess what. So are you. By the age of 12 you are able to judge a corpse on its presentation like some beauty pageant of death and you've sorted your casket and clothing choices for this big day. Cheap pine box, linen wrap, Jordan river whites baptismal cross, no make up. Although, I wore my auntie's paisley nightie when I went for a dip in the Jordon so a subsequent visit is inevitable. I do not call the bodies of the dearly departed corpses out of disrespect. You realise from an early age that the body is just a shell for the soul. Looking at your grandfather laying in state (grade 2?) reiterates the meaningless and fleeting nature of our existence. The body without life is no longer a person. Of course though, in our tradition the body is seen as sacred as it is intended for resurrection at the end of the world - so no cremation. I do not mean to sound immune to the effect of seeing so many deaths. There have of course been times when funerals broke my heart. I've seen old women try to throw themselves into the grave pit when their child had died before them. My favourite teacher died of a brain tumour when I was young and she called and called for me in hospital and so I saw her in the pallative wing with her head shaved and dying. I loved her so much. I loved helping her to remove the lids off whiteboard markers because she had only one functioning arm. I loved her stories of fainting in front of monks that she had crushes on. I loved how she teased me about going through puberty when I'd be moody in class (I was ten, puberty came much later). I loved that on the last day of Russian school she'd buy icecreams for the class and let us play hide and seek in Fitzroy Gardens. Memory Eternal Nadezhda Grigorevna.

I have many fond and strange memories of time spent at cemeteries. A few summers ago, waking up from New Years day everybody had a hankering to go fishing. Someone recalled the overbloated carp at Fawkner cemetery. So off we went with our rods and reels to cast our lines into a narrow, grave backwash creek among the drapey weeping willows. The carp were so enormous they snapped our lines, we did however catch one yabbie. Later we spent the afternoon exploring gaudy mausoleums and lamenting sad, abandoned graves.

When my brother was yet a wee fellow, my parents packed him up in the car for a long trip to send off an old friend or perhaps, the Russian relative of an Anglo. At the sea-side cemetery, Alexey absconded from the incense-laden burial ceremony drawn away by the maze of plastic flowers and grey headstones. My parents were to find him blissfully dancing atop a marble grave in his little boy mary-janes. I like to think of him as a gypsy in that moment, pouring his juice from a baby bottle onto the stone in remembrance.

And so today I think of death. Perhaps because Lent just started.

* I think really, the most unfair part was being overloaded with superstition (thanks to all the babas out there) and End of the World talk as we were growing up. Repeating this in the school yard was a bad idea. I once had to see the school nurse on behalf of my brother as she thought he was suffering religious delusions. NO YOU IDIOT. HE HAD A BAD DREAM LIKE MOST 5 YEAR OLDS HAVE.

three-four-time

2009-11-25T20:14:00.001-08:00

cigarette stop on the way to the backdrop,
a car, rolled on its side, danced in three-four-time
buzzed out, you're splayed and ready for riot
a coked-up divorcee eating key lime pie
she's never cheated, except on diets
someone's painted a landscape on your wall that lies
this burn, this burned out floor's a stage for you all
but she copped all the stonings because of her age
his kiss is gnashing teeth against innocence as she sleeps
it's like splinters for shoeless ballerinas,
and she pulls down her dress and leaves
riding a chair down night time china town
and they all dream while
governments divide opiates between the poor and hungry
and they go
crumbling a piece of berlin in their pockets

First Love

2009-11-23T14:12:00.000-08:00

Phillip Island is close to Melbourne's soul. The size of Malta (apparently), it's mostly known for penguins, Australian fur seals, Japanese tourists and of course, surfing. While one part of the island has gentle lapping waves (perfect for bobbing around in a little inflatable boat), the other has the kind of windswept cliffs and barrelling cold surf that hardens our grommets.
Claire Gorman is a cinematographer and director from Phillip Island who heard whispers about three young surfers with loads of promise. Gorman's film, First Love follows India Payne, Nikki van Dijk and Jess Laing, as they tour the Victorian surf comps before heading to tropical Hawaii to test their mettle.

I spoke to Clare Plueckhahn, still photographer and producer for First Love as the Hawaii part of the filming began.

1. What the hell? the girls, India, Jess and that are 13? and you are living in a house with them? Tell me a bit about that..

So two of the girls are 14 and the other is 17. We are staying at the moment with Nikki van Dijk and family @ Sunset Beach. It sort of reminds me of being on a family holiday. Including all the sibling arguments.

2. So they're like in year 7 or 8 and they are going on this massive adventure?

I know. I am trying to remember what I was doing at that age and all I can think about is hanging out at Westfield, riding my bike to get slurpies and having sleepovers.

3. Ok I am finally over the fact that they are nearly half our age. How did y'all find them?

Claire Gorman from Liquid Pictures lives at Phillip Island so being a small town, when there are 3 girls ripping it up in the surfing world everybody knows about it.

4. Whose idea was it to make the movie and why?

It was originally Claire Gormans idea. Claire was sick of the lack of girl surfing movies out there so decided it was time to make one of her own. The name First Love came from the idea that surfing is like your first love, it never leaves you.

5. When did you start filming? Did you initially get financial backing to make it or did you go out on a limb?

Claire started filming in March and I came into the picture around June. Although we originally went out on a limb to make the film happen, we now have a few companies sponsoring us. Gaining sponsorship is almost a job in it-self, so when Fran started working on the film in August, her marketing know-how definitely gave us a leg up.

6. What is different about this surf film to other surf flicks?

It actually has an interesting storyline. It's not just another surfing film full of music clips. Plus it's a girl's surfing movie which is a first for Australia.

7. why will your average joe blogg want to watch this?

Stunning imagery and an intriguing lifestlye....

People are always curious about other people lives.

8. what do the girls hope to achieve in hawaii?

Hawaii has always been seen as a bit of a proving ground for surfers. The girls from First Love decided to come to Hawaii to see how they could handle the waves and also see some of the Triple Crown.

9. what has been the hardest part of making this film happen?

Getting funded and working around the surfers schedules. It has also been hard balancing act working on this project and my photography business.

10. would you date a puppet?

Hahaha. Sooty is kinda cool. I like the silent types.

One Second Fireworks

2009-11-16T16:49:00.000-08:00

WATCH: ONE SECOND FIREWORKS IN JARDIN DES TUILERIES, PARIS

Fireworks are like watching cash go up in flames; they are expensive, dangerous, yet popular entertainment. Every New Years Eve, cities across the globe vie for pyrotechnic supremacy; essentially, it's a burning offering to their citizens, paid by taxpayer dollars. Giraud and Siboni, the young contemporary artists behind the spectacle probably got a massive kick out of staging this right on the doorstep of the Louvre. Whether you take it as a comment on shortening attention spans, our fleeting lives or premature ejaculation, they're ok with that.

The question perhaps is, what would it look like if you got a gazillion tonnes of fireworks and set them off simultaneously? Have you ever wanted to do something irrational? Like throw a cup of hot tea at someone just to see their reaction? Or bite a stranger standing too close to you on the train? They are crazy ~~motherfuckers~~ Frenchmen and they make some big art.

photo: Clare Plueckhahn

Portrait of the artist as a young man... Jackson Rowe

2009-11-15T20:22:00.000-08:00

Rowe, 23, is a VCA graduate, an award winning painter and grandson of the late Roger Kemp (a transcendental painter whose work is part of the permanent collection at the National Gallery of Australia). He is also the lead singer of blues/rock band, The Rackets. For the last couple of years he’s been working on a project which he has dubbed his ‘sci-fi’; a multimedia downloadable application that creates a fictional world of Melbourne as you are physically walking a city block.

The virtual tour, which he envisages being played on an iPhone, starts in Hosier Lane and consists of 660 steps which are taken to a beat and cover approximately 50 locations. ‘It’s quite composed writing; it’s more like a song. It’s very rhythmic...like poetry.’ Cities are ever changing and as Rowe found, little of the history he learnt about his block was relevant to the project. Instead, his Melbourne is a dark place where the veneer of civility can slip into an uncontrolled unravelling of reality. Spoken word, sounds effects and graphics will combine to create an “overload experience.”
In visual arts, perception is either immediate or delayed. Writing takes place mostly in the third section of perception; mimetic perception, that is, of the make believe.
Rowe talks about writing his sci-fi and it makes a lot more sense that way. Being dyslexic, he acknowledges that most of his learning has come from mentors rather than books, which he can read, but finds difficult to “consume”- especially character development. It’s clear that his thought process diverges from that of most book-learned people.
When I ask him which artists have influenced his work, he suggests that everything visual can be art before half joking that he’s not interested in which artists are responsible for the images on postcards in galleries, ‘I’m enjoying the experience of spinning the postcard stand around and looking at the images and .... If there is anyone to thank it’s the person working at the store.’ Later he describes borrowing a myriad of objects from his local library, laying them out and staring at them, ‘You know, I’m not going to force myself to consume information, it’s so easy, it’s everywhere.’
His words freewheel, seeming to skirt questions before honing in on something unexpected. He plays with words like “wi-fi gypsy” to describe creatives who want to pay no more than three dollars for a coffee but are loaded up with expensive technology as they sip their coffee. I’m sure that this is not an insult- he loves technology.
Dyslexics are often known to be create and multidimensional thinkers; a few cases in point, Da Vinci, Picasso and Robert Rauschenberg. Rowe’s dyslexia was diagnosed when he was about eight. For his final exams he had one person reading the exam questions, one person supervising and someone scribing his answers. ‘That whole experience from grade 3 to year 12, you can link it all together [as] a progression and the final stage is this really bizarre situation where you are in a room with three other people in a private space all trying to get this paper done.’ In a way, his ‘sci-fi sound-walk’ links back to that strange experience; it’s another step in an unorthodox way of communicating with the world.
His works have been well received; in 2007 he was awarded the Stella Dilger Trust prize from VCA, the year before that, a visual art prize from The Melbourne Fringe Festival. Currently he is playing video loops of Bladerunner in slow motion over canvas and painting the figures as they move; he describes the result as “gestural”, a bit like Jackson Pollock.
Throughout our conversation he mentions “referencing” a lot. There seems to be an urge to create content that is a reference point and a meeting place between his way of seeing the world and his audience’s. This extends both to his art and his secondary passion, music. The chorus from The Racket’s song Kill your TV hints at his frustration in communicating, ‘We’re all different people, you can say something to someone and they’ll hear a different thing.’ The band has featured on Triple J’s Unearthed competition and have frequent gigs around the city. As lead singer with no guitar to hide behind, Rowe uses his body as an instrument. He’s a fearless performer; there are costume changes, unbridled dancing, fake blood and theatrics. Most young men would shirk at that level of scrutiny and judgment. Rowe remains realistic, ‘A lot of people have really loved it, a lot of people have really hated it.’
For all his gifts, Rowe is humble. He’s terrified of blank canvas, still lives with his parents and when I tell him I want the interview to be a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he hopes it is a “truthful representation” of him.

Rusalka

2009-11-13T15:57:00.000-08:00

those girls will go and break your skull
they will drag you under water
those girls have hands for just one thing
they will laugh as they pull wet hair in clumps
and stuff it in each other's mouths
those girls in willow trees too long start choking
and clawing at their breasts for air

your skull will lay broken and you will
watch with one good eye
those girls

image credit: Ivan Bilibin

How To...

2009-11-13T14:47:00.000-08:00

...make a really good zine

Makyla Curtis and Ya-Wen Ho on Potroast

Makyla: I studied Performing and Screen Arts, majoring in writing and directing. My husband is a sculptor, and I dabble in the visual arts so I have also gotten involved in Fine arts, organising several exhibitions before coming to the UK. I was one of the creators and organisers for Metonymy08. I was a regular at Poetry Live, and have published a couple of chapbooks. I am currently writing short stories for a collection and comic scripts which my husband is drawing.

Ya-Wen: I'm currently a fourth year BA/BFA student at the University of Auckland. Breaking this down, I study English Literature, Economics (and implicitly, maths!) under my BA and I've worked in several mediums from illustration to video to installation under my BFA. I've always written, but it's recently that I've been developing this in public!

Makyla: The Philosophy! Well, I might be best leaving that one to Ya-Wen. But essentially we're trying to provide a medium for visual and literary artists to showcase their work. And of course we're working to build a coherent tone with a high standard of work for Potroast.

Ya-Wen: Potroast wants to support emerging writers and artists who are working experimentally. We like to get fresh, innovative work that may have a hard time finding publishing opportunities because it's not conventional. We also like our contributors to have fun!

Makyla: Support? Well, none really. The zine culture is really the only support. People who are interested will hopefully further promote Potroast.

Ya-Wen: Within the zine community there's a lot of respect for taking the plunge to start a zine. Whether your zine continues to receive respect depends on its own worth and merits. I guess if it's a bit camp, people will politely refer to it as your 'hobby'. My biggest fear for Potroast is that it may become regarded as such, but thankfully I think we've gotten off to a good start and are building a good reputation.

Makyla: The hard part of publishing is time. It's always against you. And on top of that, once we get our edited proofs to people, we need confirmation of the changes before we can print their work. The other hard part is giving critique to people that is constructive and will actually be useful. And then hoping they'll still send in new works, even if we didn't accept the last one - It's such a fine line between useful critique and just offending someone.

Ya-Wen: What's next? Well, Potroast is a long term project. Eventually I want to apply for Creative NZ funding and to do so Potroast will need a formalised organisational structure. Things like setting up a decision-making board, making sound financial records and making these transparent so our readers and contributors know where their money is going. I was managing director under the Young Enterprise Scheme in 2005 so it'd be quite awesome to do that again with Potroast i.e make it a registered business so when either Micky or I decide to move on we can pass Potroast on more easily and reduce the chances of Potroast just disappearing.

november

2009-11-10T16:53:00.000-08:00

we bought a fan
it swept the unkempt ceiling
sending dust angels down on
our naked bodies
we woke in a net
of our half blinking dreams
some hot november morning

* * * *

my love, I don't want to collect fleeces
from gnarled trees on rocky islands
but I swam here myself. It's mine.

Swi Gunting - Wanda Gillespie

2009-11-08T16:53:00.000-08:00

WANDA GILLESPIE is a New Zealand born, Melbourne-based artist who has quietly emerged as one of our city's finest. Her work is on display at Seventh gallery until 21st November.

In their latest discovery, the Museum of Lost Worlds present, Swi Gunting, new artefacts used in ritual, from the lost island of Tana Swiwi.

I went on a 4 month Asialink residency to Indonesia in 2007 and that's when I made a prototype for the Swi Gunting sculptures, so its been a long time coming. The residency was based at the university art school in Bandung (ITB), but as I was keen to learn traditional wood carving skills, (these weren't part of the program at ITB) my hosts sent me to the Jatiwangi Arts Factory in Jatiwangi, West Java.

Working in Indonesia has totally changed my art practice. I was once quite hermetic in my process but have learnt to collaborate. Because of the language barrier I had to become good at drawing again to be understood. I made detailed drawings of the sculptures and the final designs were then taken to a copy shop and blown up to the right size. From there the wood carvers traced around the drawings into the soft wood and began carving. I chose paint colours and painted over the drawings on paper, the craftsmen painted the objects as well.

The initial inspiration to create the Museum of Lost Worlds came from reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Jorge Luis Borges, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis, Teritus. Calvino’s magical descriptions of various cities are actually interpretations of one city, Venice. Borges, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis, Teritus describes the discovery of a previously unheard of civilisation and its imaginary planet that eventually rewrites history and therefore reality. I've found that Borges's fiction has had the most influence over artists working in this field of archaeological fiction.

My first exhibition was in 2006, I exhibited artefacts from a crashed Kingdom of Wandaland aeroplane (Westspace gallery) and then in 2007 I presented passports from the Kingdom of Wandaland, the Republic of Zanasthina, and Habibistan (Bus gallery Melbourne). Creating a fictional world allowed me to make my own rules and give my works a structure with which to read the works outside the usual relationships to art history - hopefully making it accessible to a broader audience. I'm also very interested in the malleable nature of history, creating my own worlds with their histories is an opportunity to highlight the inconsistencies and subjective nature of history and in turn ideas of truth and reality...

summertime somewhere else

2009-11-08T16:34:00.000-08:00

Suzdal', Moscow State
airing out

Bandits

2009-11-04T19:10:00.000-08:00

On our second evening on Solovki a man knocked on our door. Sister Nektaria answered. He wished to speak to the “girl.” I was somewhat reluctant to go meet a stranger, but I ambled out into the cluttered corridor outside our apartment.
“Are you a nun too?” He looked like the type of guy that back home would outside a pharmacy on Carlisle Street before 9 am, eagerly sniffing at the closed doors to get his methadone supply.

“No,” I muttered.
“But you believe in God?” When I nodded carefully, appraising a blue tattoo peeking out of his flannel sleeve, he asked why. I don’t remember my answer, how do you talk about something as personal as faith? Whatever I straggled out in uncertain Russian seemed to satisfy him.
“I’ve done bad things,” he began and lit a Pyotr 1 cigarette. He told me about his life as a bandit in Odessa and the people he had hurt. His life had led him to murder. He wanted me to understand that clearly. I stood beside a broken bicycle on an island near the Arctic and heard the confession of a fugitive. We agreed to meet the following evening on the garden bench outside the block.
I awoke only to discover dread-heavy limbs. The cause of my consternation was the sight of the arc of the low lying sun coursing its ancient path and not the island's dark history. I was underqualified to discuss salvation and sin. The bandit, as I dubbed him, had refused the counsel of my aunt and Sister Nektaria. I tried to listen to a tour guide but all the details of 16th century church life and architecture were lost on me. I climbed rickety ladders into bell towers and watched dully as ladies in head scarves white washed great boulders of stone that make up the Kremlin's walls. The late afternoon light penetrated dense cloud with a sort of biblical effect – rays of golden light sprayed out like heaven’s daggers across the still cold water of the sea. Almost instinctively I could find the right dirt path home from the edge of the Kremlin. Sister Nektaria said I have the sense of direction of a dog and it didn’t sound at all like an insult.
Exhausted and full of fresh air I trudged to the bench after dinner. My companions warned me not to stay up too late chatting to bandits and went inside the apartment for tea. I watched the light in our place turn on, glanced at the marigolds and carnations on their last legs. A Ural motorcycle churned the dirt as it came down the side lane. Stray dogs with shaggy coats sniffed around front yards with carved picket fences. I waited until the sea breeze flipped direction with the onset of night and I could not see the slightly funereal flowers any more. Then I got up and joined the others for tea.

Survival Down Under

2009-11-03T19:03:00.000-08:00

With summer fast approaching and a plethora of tourists about to descend upon us, I thought I would write some hints about preserving yourself in Australia. A list of Personal Safety items for your trip can be found here.

1. Thongs. That is what a flip flop is called in Terra Australis. A type of rubber footwear which worn by all and sundry Down Under, has made Havaianas a Fortune 500 company. Known as the Australian safety slipper it can, however, get you into trouble when crossing a tarred road that has melted in 46 degree heat. A g-string is what we call a thong. G-banger is what pervy office types smashing down bevvies at Young and Jackson's call a g-string.

2. Poisonous things. Most spiders are harmless in Australia. The further north you go, the more spiders blend into their surrounds by adopting attractive tutti fruiti colour themes. I once had a spider with a thorax like an orange golf ball hanging next to my head at a backyard party. In situations like these it is recommended to perform the epileptic manoeuvre. Shake. Shake. Thrust. Shake and thrust your body to remove any spiders that may have started breeding in the folds of your tee. Here is a chart to peruse and familiarise yourself with your poisonous pals.
You will also want a similar chart for poisonous sea, insect, plant and reptile life. Sorry, can't help you there.

3. Aeroguard Tropical strength Aeroguard has afrodesiac qualities and can be used as both perfume and insect repellent. It does not keep snakes away unfortunately. Whilst wearing your Australian safety shoes (thongs) in long grass, carry a stick to beat a path in front of you, thus aggravating any potential predators.

4. The bogan. In the US they have White Trash, a horrible term containing racist undertones. We look to our bogans affectionately as the result of middle class aspirations piled onto a race of convicts and cockney nutjobs. You will inevitably be swayed by the brash charms of the bogan as long as you like Alcopops and patriotic tattoos. Read about it here: http://thingsboganslike.wordpress.com/

5. No. Nobody in Australia speaks your language. We can however, confidently order take-away food from any menu you throw at us.

6. Football teams. Usually consisting of groups of bogans, this subgroup of humanity is fond of pack sex involving barely legal girls. Their wags must all work at terracotta tile factories in between regular breast augmentations as they appear orange year round. Avoid the above mentioned at all costs - whilst in Australia do not step foot into bars or casinos.

7. Criminals. Due to our convict past, our criminals are well paid celebrities who have award winning drama shows depicting their greatest achievements. Upon meeting a criminal it is customary to request an autograph and photo. Chopper (a guy jailed for murder who cut someone's ears off - or something) hangs out in Collingwood, Melbourne. I once bumped straight into him whilst distracted. Stay alert. Carry your expensive digital SLR at all times in Collingwood, preferably late at night to not miss photo ops.

c/o Roger Berry & Co. 14 York Street, Sydney

2009-10-29T21:40:00.000-07:00

[letter undated. Found in garage of a Federation home in Sydney's west)

Dear [T?]ease,

Thanks for the letter. Next time you write, tell me how many mails you get each week and I'll try to write to you each mail. There's really not much news but perhaps I can find something to write about.
I don't know your father, but one of the fellows at the P.O. said that his name was Larkin, and he was short so I thought it was your father. Perhaps I was mistaken though...

Ian fell down a flight of stairs last night, but he said he didn't hurt himself. I thought he looked sick but if he said he wasn't sick, he wasn't, he'd know, wouldn't he. We had quite the argument in the train last night. I told the boys that if they spoke to Mac while I was with them they needn't speak to me. Mac is detestable. You've got no idea of some of the things he says.
Well so much for my troubles. How are you. Remember me to Jock will you?
I'm sorry dear that you have no visitors, but when you come home, we will see if we can make up for that. I really didn't doubt that what you put in your wasn't right, still, thanks for confirming it. I think it is swell. I haven't seen Ron since you were home last; I don't know whether he thinks I'm poison or not.
Well dear you must excuse this scribble as I am writing this at work and it is nearly 4-45pm, and I want to catch the mail. I hope to have some news to put in my next letter, and also to have more time to write it.
So lots of love
from Rona

Zines, Readings and Blogs

2009-10-26T17:14:00.000-07:00

I have a new addiction; zines. I write for a few, I buy a tonne and I pass on some more. The first time around at school my friend Ivana and I would hang out at Missing Link record store and pore over them for hours. Afterwards we'd go to Pepperonis and get 2 slices of pizza at one dollar each, then head across to coles for 90 cent drinks. We'd sit outside like old Greek men outside the zaharaplasteion reading our zines and papers over cans of coke. We promised to rebel when the drinks went up to one dollar. Would you believe, the drinks went up to $1.40 overnight? Outrage. So I was thinking of self-publishing, why not? Musicians do it all the time. For some reason writers feel they need to be validated by the publishing industry.
errm. And readings, good fun. Went along to Read You Bastards at the Empress Hotel in North Carlton. Really well-organised, great performances, some naive, some polished, some lesbian menstrual rant-style,(not really). There is some amazing writing talent coming out of Melbourne right now and it's giving me the warm and fuzzies being surrounded by it.

and lastly before I dash off to work. Blogs! Read more blogs. Read more everything.... you bloody bastards

Borderlands

2009-10-25T21:13:00.000-07:00

I think I am done with my poetry cycle, I've called it Borderlands for the crossroads of memories of a suburban childhood, lucid dreaming and travel.
I am sleepy and I'm drinking coffee and wondering perhaps maybe I bit off more than I could choose.

Writer’s block

Cold, cold, cold
I’ve kept the window open for you Chagall
Klezmer music from a distance wakes me
Skipping in strains above wind rustling leaves

The neighbours are feasting in tinsel covered tents
Aeroplanes overhead going somewhere else
Low rumbles and tired eyes, cuckoo calls
It’s too quiet inside. I have no one to talk to

The lilacs are really black as night falls
There is a party under an ancient arbour
Where radish salad is served in a blue plastic tub
We eat watermelon and know all the words to old songs

New mission, Bad Art

2009-10-21T17:53:00.001-07:00

2 weeks of school left for the year
(after doing Editing 1, I now know you should not begin a sentence with a number)
but I also know that Arundhati Roy said:

Rule One for a writer, as far as I’m concerned, is “There Are No Rules.” And Rule Two (since Rule One was made to be broken) is “There Are No Excuses for Bad Art.”

"
The strange use of English is often the domain of immigrant writers who use narrative to explore semi-imaginary selves and communities. Nabakov championed the writer in exile schtick, he claims to have never been fluent at English at the same time that critics and readers were lauding him for his literary daring and mannered prose. According to former literature students who had Nabokov as a professor at Cornell university, he spoke in a monstrously thick Russian accent. A Russian immigrant to the US, his earlier English texts all hint at a kind of double psyche and his love/hate relationship with English. For instance in his novel Pnin, he describes his emotional crisis with English through the eyes of a Russian immigrant suffering from linguistic dysfunction. In the novel he misspells words to mimic an accent and employs parentheses - switching between translating English and Russian phrases as though he cannot decide which should dominate. He called his most famous work, Lolita, his “love affair with the English language.” Here the teenage protagonist is a metaphor for the English language that the ageing European man molests.
"
Varia Karipoff on weird english with the help of Chien.

and speaking of bad art, my mission for summer is to start an art blog, a layman's view on the contemporary Melbourne art scene.

the beginning of an ode

2009-10-14T22:56:00.000-07:00

You are just like that
Too pretty to keep pressed between pages.
A mouth that is an artful slash
A fruit too good, leave it on the dish
By the window with lace curtains...

about to go to the opening of Ricky Swallow: The Bricoleur exhibition at the NGV. He's a sculptor who works with wood, plaster and bronze. Need a glass of champanskaya to celebrate a new jop. Dzhob. Job.

Salad Days, RIcky Swallow 2005

The day my husband caught on fire. Or, les choses qui tombent

2009-10-14T03:18:00.000-07:00

My husband, Duff, (a derivative of Davidoff) has a very high body temperature. My skin is mostly cool therefore I dubbed him 'inferno of heat.' My cousin found this very amusing last Saturday as we sat having high tea in my front yard (well it was just salmon bagels and hahn super dry). Cue silly snickering about inferno de la amore and blah blah all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Forward 5 hours and this comment is apropos all over again. I was a bit nervous going to a gallery director's house for a party honouring two Parisian artists, Giraud and Siboni. Duff had assisted in creating ceramic sculptures for their installation(part of this year's Melbourne International Art Festival). I put on a new dress and debated wearing heels - I chose ivory brogues, you know, I was feeling pretty ok at this point. We got to the address, a small laneway right near a schmick brasserie and punched in the door code, seconds later we were in a great open plan apartment decorated very thoughtfully with modern art and fashionable artifacts. Balinese Buddhas, small pieces of deco furniture and an illustration of a young girl losing her heart through her poon (not for the kiddies). After passing a bottle of Polish vodka to the hostess we ambled past the ginormous dining room table lit by a semisvechnik which I believe is a menorah in a language other than russki. The table was full of incredible food: blue cheese with a sprig of dried grapes, succulent oysters garnished with fat wedges of lemon and sea salt and all manner of antipasta. Duff scored himself a martini in a tall glass and we went over to the open window to greet our new French mates. Fabien was sitting on the window ledge smoking a cigarette so Duff thought he would imitate him and jumped up on the ledge also. I went off to investigate non-flammable spirit options (can't do gin - there is a reason the english tried to ban it). I returned untriumphant to a commotion. My husband is standing there looking confused as he is engulfed in flames (ok, maybe a largish portion of his jacket is on FIRE but it's a big fire). Before I have time to react in a hysterical manner, Andrei tears the jacket off (it's a thick padded affair) my eyes follow the trajectory of his throw - there is a shagpile carpet nearby on the hardwood. Somehow the boys managed to stomp out the flames like little baby rhinos and not set the carpet alight.

Ok so this a Romanian gypsy man with his shirt on fire and not my husband but you get the picture.

A crowd gathers to inspect the damage and there is a bit of a cheer. All this in the first five minutes of us being in a room with people we don't know. Hello. This is Duff, my inferno of heat. I am Varia.
Maybe we wouldn't have lived it down but then the martinis started flowing, Dengue Fever was on the stereo and a girl from Allianz Francaise started doing interpretive dance on the shagpile by crawling, sliding, writhing and energetic stockinged kicks (oblivious to the fact everyone could see her undies).

Les Choses Qui Tombent
Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni
Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces
200 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne
on til the 14th November
www.gertrude.org.au

American Gothic?

2009-10-12T21:38:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Bram Stoker's Dracula, as a classic in the vampire genre it sits with Murnaus's 1922 film, Nosferatu. I have to say, I prefer my vampires to remain as grotesques; pointed ears, pasty faces, ugly toothed, wicked, debauched, debonair, elderly and eastern European. One (small) exception is the original and very funny, Buffy - The Vampire Slayer film with that '90s uber hottie -- whatsisface 90210. I want to say Luke Wilson but that was the basketball hottie at primary school. As much as I enjoyed the stupid gags and karate manoeuvres of the Buffy movie (which we used to replicate in my lounge room by judo rolling over couches and floors with our stakes - Derwent pencils in our case) - it was the inroad countless shit teen vampire enterprises needed.
It seems I can't blow my nose these days without hitting a Stephenie Meyer book or a Who Weekly with that smug, faux-scowling Edward character.
So I concede the possibility that Bronte's Heathcliff was a vampire and eternal love has always been a theme in vampire story-telling...so the romantic swooning has as much place as the spine tingling. At least Heathcliff had fire in his loins and a dark effin soul - what's with these toy boy scrawny juveniles pouting and posing in Twilight?

Leave it to the experts kids...
Like Klaus Kinsky who did the Werner Herzog version of Nosferatu. He is, himself, worthy of as much white nightie sleep-wandering along rugged English cliffs as the Graf (Count). When I was but young, maybe 13 or 14 I purchased a Marie Claire magazine at the hospital. I'm not sure if they still do it but they used to run a bio on the last few pages. That's when I learnt about this Klaus. And my oh my was a small part of my innocence stolen by his story. It had everything; nymphomania, German cinema, war orphans...he even got it on with his sister when he was a kid. And shut your ears if you want to keep your innocence but I've never been able to shrug this image -- he said something about her punani being like a moist living clam beckoning to him *shudders*
If you are after a vampire or a bad ass son of a bratch, put down your copy of New Moon and take a walk after midnight.

Akhmatova

2009-09-28T18:47:00.000-07:00

Dining room at Akhmatova's residence in St Petersburg
my grandma in Siberia has a similar colour scheme in her dining room.

Monumental proposal

2009-09-27T04:10:00.000-07:00

Monument 03 in the series Monument for a future generation by Andrei Davidoff

" Wandering the streets of any major town or city it is inevitable but to come across a myriad of monuments. Pieces of public art which once celebrated a distant victory, the passing of an ill fated explorer, the opening of a now demolished building, are now simply aesthetic objects, sculptures which have lost their conceptual worth to the community in which they exist. The question must then be posed; what if these works never had a meaning, moment or individual, behind them? What if through the simple act of being positioned in a prominent cultural location, conceptual value is placed upon them, with the help of plaques, dates and inscriptions. How would the relationship of the ever swirling community to these works change, if at all? "

IN SIBERIA THEY HAVE PERMAFROST

2009-09-24T04:15:00.000-07:00

IN MELBOURNE WE HAVE PERMA-TAN
(save me from footy season)

Rainy September

2009-09-23T19:05:00.000-07:00

Old yellow telephone on the windowsill,
bottle of surplus gallery wine, an after thought
late september, rains come, go by the city's sea
the city sleeps and breathes with ease
we dream of sweet things in white sheets again
love you slow again, holiday rain day glow
dance leaves, guide the drops to rivulets flow
down love, got to go, there's this lace leotard I saw...

denmark> france> germany

2009-09-20T01:12:00.000-07:00

So the proverbial fork in the road. I've tried to make it work here, I love it because it's my home by the sea and I will always come back. I've talked to other people about it, a little too sensitive people like me (we always choose who we talk to so that we get the opinion that we want) - belonging is one thing and then there's all these thoughts, is there more?

My top three countries to move to:

Denmark - I've decided to follow Jen and Paul, a young Hitler Jungend-esque couple from Austria who have moved to Copenhagen
Lots of photos of bicycles (i like- I don't drive and detest motor vehicles)
"But being here in Copenhagen now for about 2 months, it is so worth it! What is a small space compared to what you gain from living in the middle of the city, but also having enough green space and water to relax, go swimming, have a glass of wine at the canals…"

In short: I'm warming to Denmark. Efficient, climate-focused, good dressers.

Bonus points- The princess of Denmark is none other than Tasmanian-born, Mary Elizabeth Donaldson.

France - I am editing a manuscript about a fellow classmate's year in Paris, he claims there is still a lot of (passive) racism and forget trying to crack the French job market. I've read Almost French (Sarah Turnbull an Aussie freelance writer) and it sort of scared me.
In short: a baguette carrying nation with a similar psychological make up to (older) cultured Russians.
Bonus points - Aunty Lou Lou lives there

Germany-

one word, Berlin...

The Rudi Marie Cafe in Reuterkiez, an emerging boho area near the Kreuzberg section of Berlin. (courtesy, New York Times) Every week, another layer of awesomeness is spread thickly over this city - like the icing on a good slice of mille-feuille.

bu-bye winter

2009-09-19T02:29:00.000-07:00

POST 2009
16 September to 10 October

Worth checking out this exhibition til the 10th Oct, it's a kind of collaborative exhibition. Well, a bunch of emerging artists were sent an Australia Post package to fill/create/and nut over. My cousin Serge and his fiancee have come up with a magical floating parcel from Wandaland (it levitates by magnetic power).

Relocating a whole store, torrential spring rain, ran out into the street this evening with a giant man-size umbrella which naturally flipped inside-out. I danced a little bit with this bummed out umbrella to make my boss laugh. Work has been such a massive shit fight, just need to laugh at something. But bu-bye winter no more woolly hats I hope. Thinking of moving to Europe in a year, I love Melbourne but it's boring like the US, eat eat shop stay numb get fat get medicated die in your paid-off mortgage. enjoy your slavery to the Reserve Bank feed the Rothschild fortune watch the environment die... no habitat is permanent (watching The Baader Meinhof Complex)

Little duck

2009-09-16T04:48:00.000-07:00

Stalin said the death of one man is a tragedy
And there we were, in socks on my parents' porch
Some had guitars in their hands and others still cigarettes
You with three crosses around your neck, almost a seventh child

And the other part of Stalin’s truth was about numbers-
the impossibility of mourning many.
After you were hung, then down in the ground
I rode a bus out of Krakow along flat summer fields,
Saw a thousand shoes, a jumbled stock count
Of frail leather, tangled laces
All trapped in glass

All those feet.
Some that had limped after a fall
Others had confident strides
Maybe there was a velvet stiletto tango
Of a Last Sunday

I can’t love them all,
Those shoes are dry like parchment
How did the corners of all those mouths curl?
Your smile was like a little duck’s

Collective unconscious

2009-09-13T04:01:00.000-07:00

Week to week, our indelible teacher, Ania Walwicz http://www.textbase.net/walwicz.html gets us to write stream of consciousness poetry in class after covering poets as far ranging as Cohen, Heaney and Buson.
Recently, we were looking at myths and were required to close our eyes and let an image come to us. I saw a river with ice breaking up, extremely loud and incredibly close, yeah. I have not seen this at all during the course of my life, being dinky-di Aussie raised, apart from in movies. In particular, there is a memorable montage in the hilariously surreal fairy tale Varvara Krasa of images of changing seasons (with requisite Slavic fetishisation of nature poetry like 'ti nesi menya reka'... you carry me river....)

i wrote this in class,

River

Great ice floes,
The ice flows with a jostle
All speed downstream
The river is a raging horse
His white mane whips
The ice tumbles and smacks
In the darkness
Deafening, sharp
Dull, clear and
Turbine murkiness
The river is a brute horse
That storms by the centre
His magic hooves crack ice
Sending winter out.
My pale horse river
Amid pine needles and rock
He dashes away snow
With the wind of his stallion soul.

...using as many names and euphemisms for drugs as I could - but also writing about rebirth and spring blah blah. Oh and the magic hooves are a reference to a Russian fairy tale called Konek Gorbunok (little hump-backed pony). Ania is writing a book based on this Russian tale, it was translated into Polish- Konik Garbusek - it was the first book she read back in Poland and another one of my favourite childhood movies.

Later in the class I came across an entry in a book of mythology about Buri, the name caught my eye because it means "storms" in Russian. Buri is a Norse god who was licked out of the ice by a primeval cow over the course of three days. It resonated a bit with the poem I had written earlier, except here, there is a cow rather than a horse bringing in the end of winter. In the conspiracy-heavy Zeitgeist program, they point to such ancient myths as proof of the unoriginality of Christian ideas (or collective unconscious, really, if I could tap into it in 5 seconds with no prior knowledge of Buri... it's not mythological 'borrowing').

I wrote this for Buri

The god is carved
For a million frozen stars
It’s cold
Waiting in the northern light
with the grey sea thrashing
Under the ice, time is endless
waiting for the thaw
His eyes are unblinking as he lies
Waiting for her step to click
Closer
She licks him
Wake!
Her breath is like milk

and I used to think Norse mythology was the refuge of LOTR fangirls and Cornell Latin-speaking undergrad virgins... seems I've tapped into the collective unconcious of the Norse.

Balaclava shuffle

2009-09-13T00:22:00.000-07:00

Noticed today, since I've always walked with a barely perceptible limp (slight scoliosis) how funny it is when I have also pulled a muscle in my leg. Sometimes it's a strain from salsa lessons or something of its ridiculous ilk. Usually from other, less organised forms of dancing that take place at various shindigs. Walking down the street all I can do is concentrate on my every step. The pain barrier is easily overcome, the next target is to overcome the new limp that creates itself on some kind of chaos theory. The muscles rebel against the control centre of the brain and throw out a foot; sharp angle to the hip, askew from the knee, a silly hobble. To combat the rebellion, I try to walk slower and urge muscles to comply to a smoother, more gracious gait. I force the toe in instead of out, overcompensating with a pigeon-toe effect. I look around casually, checking to see if anybody of note has witnessed my seasick elephant swagger. Elderly gents overtake me at crossings, quickly I check if the barista in the window has spied this. He nods hello. This neighbourhood is a bloody village. The springtime wind ruffles my hair into a bird nest of tangles, I'm wearing Andrei's coffee-stained jumper. I switch shopping bag to the 'good side' to level out the wonkiness and shuffle home slowly.

black and white soliloquy

2009-09-12T21:56:00.000-07:00

The morning was tentative, a non-committal milky grey like second-rate tea. I soft boiled an egg and spread it on toast staring out at the distant roof tops. My flatmate was up hours earlier and there was an extra echo to everything in her absence. The cups clattered loudly and my footsteps rang out on the downstairs ceiling. Why the neighbours never complained about our lounge room dancing, gentleman callers, arguments and all-nighters was a mystery. Aside from our impiety to the snooty suburban religion of silence; we never took the bins to the nature strip. There were a few Nevers we tried to live by. The cook never cleans. Never rat on each other. We would often run into the grounds of stately mansions at night, breathless and whooping on the inside.
I tried to leave the apartment soundlessly.

It was getting to the end of winter, passersby were still clad in marsupial palettes; brush tail possum brown, common wombat (common woman) umber. The city opened inwards to let me into its fold...

The day I fell in love with the sea

2009-09-10T17:09:00.000-07:00

1.
On a boat on the White Sea
climbed onto the deck to see
what I could sea sea sea
the see was like fishing in the Bay
as a kid, petrol and salt, queasy, happy
sun gloaming, going down, down, now
Arctic sun so pure, cold, love me, God Love
ME, sea.

2. Promenading, sunning,
legendary loves
on the sea shore in good shoes,
on a Sunday the sea is warm with life
azure, golubinka moya
from the carousels and rails there are small
cries and gulls fly

3.
the sea would not drown me

the sea is at my window as a blue line

to remind me where I am

Sisterhood

2009-09-09T04:44:00.000-07:00

I have three sisters:
We liked to invent languages, for instance we would write english words in cyrillic. it's impossible to get the depth of the million vowels of English in Russian transliteration - (fAHk u dYik-HaireD). Nabokov is a better expert on this. Also we played a game called "the writing game" where we'd each get a piece of paper and write:

1. a boy's name (cover and pass on)
2. a girl's name (cover and pass on + continue to do so after each turn writing)
3. where they met
4. what he said
5. what she said
6. what he did
7. what she did
8. what happened in the end

the aim of the game was not to write the most snivelling romantic story. no siree. the aim of the game was to make fun of people and their personal quirks. As daughters of a preacher man we had a rich pool of cranky babushkas, bejewelled spinsters, unwashed musicians, genius/and or overly adored children and "stage moms" to choose from. It would be all the more hilarious because our writings would be mashed into obscene constructions through passing it along.

PREY (2009)

2009-09-07T21:44:00.000-07:00

Released 7th May 2009
Out on DVD 30th June.
(Directed by George T. Miller, written by Miller and John V. Soto, Topcat Films)

Posters for Prey plague train stations in the inner south east like a bad hangover. Prey is a schlock candy horror film featuring an unintelligible Aboriginal curse, Natalie Bassingthwaighte, CGI black snakes and a lesbian kiss. It hopes so bad to be a cult film. It ran for one week in three Australian cinemas taking an abysmal $342 in its opening weekend. Some movies fail in their intended form and then experience a revival as cult; a lesson is the 1930s anti marijuana propaganda film that became a runaway comedy hit four decades later. Reefer Madness, this is not.

Candy horror sells because it is bad; hammy dialogue, joyously dismembered jocks and more corn syrup than Coca Cola Amatil USA (Fact: Coke in the US does not contain sugar cane but corn syrup, something about subsidising corn farmers). These flicks feature the kind of imagery the government should use in anti drug advertising; we’re talking ice and crank- let alone the humble cannabis sativa. So why do people gorge on this stuff like a fat Spanish kid on chorizo sausage? It’s pure escapism; whether well produced or not, it is supposed to be obscene yet entertaining. Very occasionally candy horror is successful as a cautionary tale like Teeth (2007), directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, which features a young a girl cursed with ‘vagina dentata.’ Men beware of the female that creates eunuchs.

Prey starts as a 4WD road movie; six characters are pulled together in a useless and jarring montage of their daily lives to ‘go out west for a surf.’ Cue disjointed back story about a road accident twenty years earlier and a revenge seeking Driza-Bone wearing orphan out for blood. The characters are as predictable as they are cardboard –cardboard ready to be scrapped in the recycle bin of senseless homicide. Included in the doomed posse is a gay guy, a hippy and the token Asian but we couldn’t care if any of them die. People cheered when Paris Hilton’s character was expunged in House of Wax. Here, you will yawn as they bloodlessly perish with little imagination or movie magic. The story telling is as incoherent as it is narcoleptic. Visually shoddy and bland; this film is the Kraft Singles of horror and pulls no punches. This film could have been funded by the Mormons- there is no gore, sex or swearing. This leaves the viewer feeling empty and cheated of thrills, however cheap.

Here, the Australian bush comes off static, devoid of the tension and mystery that made Wolf Creek work. Unfortunately, the bush is not the most underdeveloped character in this movie. Natalie Bassingthwaighte, in her feature film debut, blunders as Kate. Kate isn’t in need of a visit to a combined gyno/dentist like the heroine of Teeth. An obstetrician is more fitting, as is later not all too clearly implied, her boyfriend’s sperm has been imbued with a malevolent snake’s. Bassingthwaighte’s performance, punctuated by half-arsed shrieks and laziness, just cacks. It fails to meet the lowest expectations, even for those familiar with her Xanax-numb television skills.
Producer, Iowan expat Bobby Gelinksy confessed that 40% of the film’s four million dollar budget was spent on securing Jesse Johnson in a lead role. Jesse’s claim to fame is being Don ‘Miami Vice’ Johnson’s son. In one scene he approaches Indigenous art with dim-witted derisiveness and you get the feeling he’s not acting. Irreverence is one thing but the scenes involving references to Indigenous culture are uncomfortable viewing. The Driza-Bone killer uses rock art and an incantation to summon the said CGI black snakes; “Spider eats the fly, bird eats the spider...” Who’s writing this stuff? White supremacist Mother Hubbard?

Prey misses the mark by an excruciating distance in a genre that revels in being low brow. The opening credits feature previews of cult horror flicks; the Freddy Kruegar films, Fire Starter, The Exorcist and the freaky Jeff Goldblum movie, The Fly. All this serves is to make you wish you were watching one of the classics.

photografia 9 na 12- DALI in Melbourne

2009-07-30T00:35:00.001-07:00

who needs a lobster telephone anyway?

Claude Maus AW09

2009-06-08T20:04:00.000-07:00

Anthony Licuria APL Photography

Great Expectations

What can we expect from boutique Australian fashion this winter?
Claude Maus has a deft touch when it comes to androgyny. What is good for the boys in jumpers, coats and jeans translates across to the girls’ line. The winter collection takes cues from The Classics and we’re talking Charles Dickens here. There are tees that are layered and long sleeved with a kind of draping effect at the back; almost like coat tails. Another link with Victorian England is the austerity of the colours. There is a splendid tunic in a deep purple plaid that my sister-in-law called “an orphan’s tunic.” In a good way. The male version is more of the same fabric in a shirt length. There is much to do about natural fibre whether animal or vegetable; a stand out is what looks like a deconstructed vest made of kangaroo- it’s actually calf. The vest comes with a cropped soft leather tan jacket that slides on underneath. It’s a good take on the fuzzy faux fur coat that’s featured recently on New Yorkers and Parisians alike on The Sartorialist. There are dresses of panelled raw silk, which merely allude to being a dress shape and invite layering during the colder months. Another favourite was a vintage look leather skirt that would look sharp with tights and a turtleneck. Claude Maus’s collection has an ‘easy to wear’ air about it; there are loungey tracky pants which look like instant design student staples- as do the cotton jumpers with leather hoods. The coats are quite traditional, carrying a flourish or two from the classic Burberry trench in charcoal and black. Putting one on, you become aware of just how luxurious cashmere and wool is before noticing very modern tailoring that turns classics on their head.

For www.stylemelbourne.com
http://stylemelbourne.com/2009/06/event-great-expectations-at-claude-maus-winter-09-preview/#more-1787

ALMA ATA

2009-06-01T19:55:00.000-07:00

When my mother was eight years old, with a black pinafore and giant white bow in her hair like every other Soviet girl, a stocky, porcine-featured teacher informed the class;

“The Vygovsky children are excellent pupils. It is a pity that their father is a priest.”

My mother, who is barely five foot tall as an adult, stood up to address the teacher.

“My father is a good man!”

After this, her older brothers would scurry off when they spotted her in the school grounds- too mortified to be associated with her. Several times my mother’s family had to leave a city after the local papers published articles denouncing them. To glean something more of my mother’s life I pored over black and white photographs after school, learning the names of uncles and ancestors I'd never met. Mama was born in China like thousands of other Russians escaping the brutality of the Soviet regime. Two years after her birth, Stalin died and her family was amongst thousands of émigrés that tentatively returned to their county. First settling in a large city in the Ural Mountains, they embarked on a tour of Central Asia, shunted around by the government who were afraid of the influence a priest could yield over a parish. The names of the cities my mother lived in read like poetry; Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. Frunze, Kyrgyzstan. Abakan, Khakassia. Novosibirsk. Leningrad. Alma-Ata means Father of the Apples; my mother fondly recalls the unbelievably aromatic fruits of the region, the mountains and the bubbling melody of speech in bazaars.

Poetry

2009-04-15T16:25:00.000-07:00

Melbourne

In my city
I'm further away from myself
and my words
which dried up in the clouds
over the Nullabor.

I was twenty when I wasted
my procession in the desert.
Three months of cypress trees and solitude
waiting for that lick of rain
to send me home.

Watching the war waged in the streets
bus bombs and shoot outs among neighbours
made front page news in Paris,
the Times and in Haaretz.

I carry the sand from Jericho with me
a small scratch, hidden from lovers
and the mother who bore me
new and whole into this city.

Solovki (excerpt)

On that northern island

watermelons grew in winter

before the fathers were thrown down stairs

discarded fruit, but

hollow-ribbed and hungry

and the victors gouged the eyes of my saints

with bayonets.

out of the closet

2009-04-09T01:12:00.000-07:00

What is there to do on Easter holidays in the city? Why, prepare for winter by handwashing shite loads of warm clothes + old faithfuls and rearranging the wardrobe for the new season, of course. Down to the junk store I ran for some wooden coat hangers. Out to the leather man I ran to see if he could redye a jacket (yes, anything is possible if you have a king's ransome.) Guess the jacket is staying British racing green.

During the course of this (throwing out old punky clothes) I had a mini pre-midlife crisis; how do we dress our age in our mid twenties? I'm not old enough for the monotone, layers and orthopedic kumfs. Or the crazy cat lady who takes inspiration from the colour palette of exotic bird life. I am old enough, however, to know what clothes are bought in China, roughed up, detagged and shipped to Australia to sell at purveyors of 'vintage' clothing. I don't like 'street'. Viscose doesn't thrill me. I don't work corporate.... What to do?
Inspired by style matriarch Maggie Alderson's rules of thumb, I took a turn down Chapel Street scoured multitude stores, bumped into Teresa Liano and came up with a few alternatives.

T.L Wood http://tlwoodaustralia.com/ structured, classic, quality. A Melbourne classic. I tried on every little black dress here helped by the designer (she was super- I invited her to come visit us at Duff's cafe). I figure the price of my dream dress is around 3 cheapish dresses that you'd wear for one season. Invest in one good one to take you through the years.?!

http://www.manningcartell.com.au/ is beautifully realised clothing by the Manning sisters. Hello Black Widow Lace dress. I was very impressed with their show at LMFF.

http://www.arnsdorf.com.au/ ah Arnsdof. Designer Jade Sarita Anrnott got a few items into this month's Vogue modelled by the sublime Abby Lee Kershaw. There's lots of lovely 'boy' shirts, blousey dresses slim jeans. I especially am fond of stone/bone this year.

Duff is currently looking through our kenwood mixer instruction manual, amazed at its ability to julienne carrots. Ah tomorrow (Good Friday= city in lockdown) is going to be a joy!

you and me, by the sea

2009-04-02T15:34:00.000-07:00

Aireys Inlet, West coast Victoria. Under the guise of art director, tagged along with my bestie, Clare Plueckhahn for a vintage themed bikini shoot. The weather was just lush mid autumn sunshine. These are my shitty shots from my digital, Clare's work can be found at CI studios (see "Recommended by Surgeon General") and also her website www.clareplueckhahn.com