what rhymes with chaos?

PROMETHEUS VS PROGENY

Lately I’m beginning to wonder if its normal for artists to have to endure the irritating assumption that not being in a full time job is the result of some kind of personal failure rather than intent. Those who operate exclusively within the generally accepted norms of society (attire, sexual preference, religion, employment, diet etc etc) seem to all too frequently experience difficulty accepting those who elect any kind of alternative to the commonly accepted behaviour.

I know I’ve always found it confusing as hell when I’ve met meat-eaters who take the news that I am vegetarian as though I’ve just told them that I ran over their grandmother with a pick-up truck then stopped only to steal her purse before careening away into the night towards the nearest lentil burger. Why my personal life choices, which have no affect on their individual realities whatsoever, should enrage and aggravate them is beyond me. Perhaps something in the vast quantities of flesh they consume causes them to be so pugilistic.

More recently I’m struggling with articulating the fact that I do not have a permanent full time job because I WANT it that way. The primary reason for this is to allow me time to pursue my life ambition of writing and creating art. Working in education, I’ve found it common for many of my colleagues to transmogrify into proud progenitors before the ink on their shiny new hard earned degrees is even dry. This, obviously, is never questioned as a dubious decision. We have a genetic and social imperative that pushes us towards procreation and so giving up employment to raise children is always socially acceptable. Making the same choice in order to create, however, does not seem to elicit the same response.

My book is my baby. My art baby. I am going to deliver it kicking and screaming into a world that will either adore it or deplore it, embrace it or disgrace it and, much like a parent, there is only so much I can do to control any of these outcomes for my freshly spawned offspring.

I have to go now. It’s feeding time.

ART, FICTION, FASHIONISTAS

It occurs to me that Brisbane is experiencing much the same problem as I did after a growth spurt at age fifteen. Prior to this sudden and unexpected metamorphosis I was the shortest kid in my grade and, to put it lightly, I was carrying more than my fair share of puppy fat. Enough to supply the entire cast of Milo and Otis (http://ask.metafilter.com/65458/Did-animals-die-during-the-making-of-Milo-and-Otis) in fact. In any case, my proportions garnered me the usual playground nicknames; tubby, pork chop, short stuff, butterball, buffet-butt (okay I just made that last one up but I thought it was funny).

However, when the latter effects of puberty finally kicked into high gear and I shot up like mushrooms after a monsoon I was transmogrified into a gangly, emaciated youth. Strangely enough, despite these newly acquired physical attributes, the nicknames still stuck. This would result in conversations such as the following:
“Hey shortstuff what’s up?”
“C’mere.”
“What?”
“Come here and stand next to me.”
“Why wh….oh shit…hey you’re taller than me!”

You get where I’m going with this. Sometimes when change occurs rapidly people have already formed an imprint of an person/object/place so strong that they just can’t adjust their understanding of it even when incontrovertible data demands that they do so.

I couldn’t count the number of times recently I’ve heard people say:
“Brisbane is such a sleepy little town.”
“There’s nothing to do in Brisbane.” Etc etc blah blah blah.
Oddly enough when I will then ask the Whiney Mcwhingeface in question if they’ve checked out Flipbook gallery, livespark, Joshua Levi gallery, Valley Studios, Rumpus room, Lofly hangar, Metro Arts, Jugglers and so on and so forth the answer is inevitably, and unsurprisingly, NO.

You can’t expect cultural events to climb into your living room and juggle and dance in front of you downing weet-bix in your undies. The art and music scene in Brisbane has exploded over the last couple of years but in order to experience that it IS actually necessary for you to venture further than the multiplex at your local Westfield.

Case in point; I recently visited nine lives gallery http://www.wehaveninelives.com/ which is crammed into the space above one of the restaurants in the valley mall. Aside from the overwhelming genius of an art space that has to be accessed speakeasy style, I was pleased to find the opening night was packed with a mass of sweaty fashionistas soaking up the scene.

I have to admit, I was fairly intimidated by the tragically hip crowd who looked as though they had just stumbled off the set of a Frankie shoot to swing by a café with an unpronounceable name for a seven dollar latte on the way to the salon for a $300 haircut BUT it was great to see so many people supporting a new artspace.

The art itself wasn’t my kind of thing; the street art thing seems to have taken hold pretty strongly at present and most of the work here was street photos. Personally I think if you are going to decide to exhibit photos of the empty beer bottles on your kitchen table and your friends smoking cigarettes then those photos have to be really fucking good. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but you want those words to be eloquent and cohesively arranged rather than just a a garbled collection of linguistic mutants torn from the pages of dolly magazine (OMG WTF did you’re BF say 2 U?) I have a few friends who can pull this off and when done well it’s incredibly captivating: http://www.flickr.com/photos/28176650@N06/

Whilst this event wasn’t my personal cup of tea, (which for future reference is coca leaf tea which a supply of which I had to illegally sneak into the country and have unfortunately exhausted), the unexpected and most welcome opening of yet another art space in Brisbane is a sure indicator of an art movement which is experiencing growth of soon-to-be-gangly adolescent male rapidity.

Nothing truly exists until you choose to make it part of your personal reality. So, what are you doing this week?

On Love and Mediocrity.

So with the yearly celebration of the decline of modern romance (aka Valentine’s day) fast approaching I find myself asking whether or not we all have a dichotomous choice to be single, individual and creative or fat, lazy and in love.

There are those who would accuse me of being cynical and maudlin because I won’t have a companion to exchange sappy teddy bear cards with on this particular Hallmark holiday. Given the fact that the last girl I fell in love with is about to get married to some guy she has been dating for less time than most people take to decide on an evening outfit I can see how you’d make that erroneous assumption. However, I would be quick to point out the fact that I am a tragic, fanatic, emphatic romantic. In India I once stole a flower from a forbidden garden in a Maharaja’s palace beneath the watch of armed guards for a girl I was at the time entangled with. Try and package and mass-produce THAT Hallmark.

When I was thirteen I read Wuthering Heights and basically treated it as a manual for romance. To my churlish, hormone saturated teenage brain nothing made more sense than a love that was overwhelming, enrapturing and ultimately tragic. A few years transpired and I was jettisoned unexpectedly into the real world where all of a sudden it became apparent that when searching for potential partners people actually considered things like income, style of dress and choice of residence, as if romance were some sort of credit card plan to be decided upon by a series of ticked boxes. I’ve always thought of it as an insurmountable tidal wave of force that can no more be reasoned with than a grizzly bear can be taught to play guitar hero.

At this point in my life I find many of the beloved people I surround myself with are, (with a few notable exceptions, you know who you are,) either coupling up, settling down and erecting cages out of white picket fences or staying single and living in a constant whirlwind of dizzying debauchery and, more importantly, losing themselves in wild storms of violent creative outbursts. It appears that many around me are rapidly transmogrifying into progenitors and newlyweds, and I am starting to wonder if the incessant barrage of revelry and debauchery that I have lately been basking in will decline at an exponential rate.

The ultimate goal, as far as I can see, is not to find someone who makes you content, dependant and repentant but rather one who makes you wild, resplendent and relentless. I have a particular fondness for bands led by married couples such as Sonic Youth and Viva Voce. Anyone who can manage to find someone that they want to spend the rest of their life with not only reading Sunday papers and getting fat but making art and continuing to greedily devour the world that is their oyster deserves some sort of mountain made of pancakes as a reward.

hand me my dreams on a platter please.

Lately I've become frustrated with people who respond to the information 'I am a writer' with "oooooh! I've always wanted to be a writer I think could write a really good book, I've just never tried really..."

Uh-huh. This is basically the equivalent of me saying "oooh! You are an olympic marathon runner! I've always wanted to win gold in the olympics, but I've never really tried or anything." Just because you can basically operate a keyboard or pen doesn't neccessarily mean that you can construct an interesting, entertaining, thought provoking piece of fiction. In much the same way, just because I jog around my block a couple of nights a week doesn not mean I can run 10k in record time.

I think a lot of it stems from the whole American/Australian idol mentality of 'hand me my dreams on a platter and put me on TV please.' "Oh yes, being a singer has always been my DREAM! I mean, I haven't ever auditioned for a band, or sung in a choir, or played open mic nights, or gone to vocal training, but y'know, I'm pretty good at singstar n stuff...."

If you have a dream, a real ambition, then you do whatever it takes to make that happen. Sacrifice sleep, spend money, train, practice, fail and start again, whatever. You put that one ambition at the centre of your life and you do not stop until you have accomplished what you set out to do.

Now if only there was a reality TV show where you could get your debut novel on Oprah....

It was a day that promised medicority, but did so with its fingers covertly crossed behind its back and its face illuminated by a roguish grin....