Archive for people
July 25, 2008 at 7:40 am · tag/s : blog, death, melbourne, money, people
we live here - the tree on the left is gone now. so is the old weird guy in the flat underneath us. i saw what must have been his body lying on the couch through his window as i walked past one day.
he had just built an elaborate construction for growing tomatoes in the tiny square of green outside his window with much banging and smoking. he smoked like a trooper. you never saw him without a cigarette in his mouth. the smell that came from the flat was incredible. we called him mr.stinky.
one day they came along and delivered two large skips and started throwing all his stuff into them. now the place has been renovated and they want $320 a week for it. this is the real estate agent’s photograph which shows the front of the building. mr.stinky’s flat is at the back. some good looking tomatoes gradually ripened, but no one was game to pick them.
July 7, 2008 at 8:09 pm · tag/s : blog, doubt, life, melbourne, money, people
it is exactly the sort of day when you have every right to be miserable and/or worried. what with the petrol prices and the drought and the interest rates and the cost of housing and drug queen roberta williams turns cover girl.
my appointment with the dental hygienist in outer western mongolia is actually with the aptly named dr.goldberg who’s talent is not cleaning teeth but wearing a worried expression after he has looked in your mouth and poked around a bit. he tries to sell me thirty thousand dollars worth of dental work.
all of a sudden it is a bad day. not that i wasn’t expecting it, nor was i fooled by its auspicious beginning.
it starts raining. i have a bad coffee in a cafe. for no apparent reason they prop the door open with a brick and the cold air streams in. an old, old lady is munching on a sandwich. she looks worried too. she hides the uneaten half of her sandwich in a serviette.
but it is the meaninglessness of my activities and their inconsequential nature which is the cause of my misery today.
April 19, 2008 at 12:46 pm · tag/s : art, blog, death, doubt, loss, people, reading, writing
a much more engaging and humble piece by alex james in the independent about the suicide of his friend angus fairhurst (4.10.1966 - 29.3.2008) than the annoying self-serving piece by tracy emin which i linked some time ago to in ephemeral.
unlike his close friends damien hirst and sarah lucas, fairhurst was full of doubt. a few weeks ago he went alone to scotland and “with a ladder and a rope that he’d handwoven in silk, climbed the ladder and hanged himself in a meticulously planned grisly piece of theatre.”
April 10, 2008 at 8:23 am · tag/s : amerika, australia, death, life, loss, love, people
a story is doing the rounds of the internets about an 80 year old man in new york who has been calling his late wife’s answering service every day since she died in 2005 just to hear her voice. unfortunately the phone company deleted the message and the old man was heartbroken. tough shit said verizon when he rang them asking if they could restore the message. then the story hit the internets and hey presto, the phone company found a backup of the message and restored it. where there is a will (or a potential public relations disaster) there is a way. there are a number of variants of the story, some of which claim the voice said : “the whitings aren’t home…” and in others “this is catherine whiting…” but no matter it is a great story. how long before there is service where you can record a message before you die so people can ring a number and hear your voice after you have passed away?
December 5, 2007 at 8:09 am · tag/s : amerika, image, life, people
cue : a random post about two sets of photographs of people : one - the life’s work of the german photographer august sander (1876-1964) currently the subject of a major exhibition at the art gallery of new south wales which contains a sizeable portion of the 1200 of his photographs owned by the j.paul getty museum - for obvious reasons these were interesting times for a german photographer to be plying his trade although the allies made a significant dent in his legacy when 30,000 of his negatives were destroyed during the bombing of cologne - call me old fashioned but this is a refreshingly sober hang too, the curator having chosen not to be creative and to simply exhibit the photographs at eye height, equidistantly spaced in plain black frames. here are a few nice examples of sander’s work i found on the net.
two - portraits by the anonymous officials of us law enforcement agencies of arrested people wearing t-shirts with slogans. i think they are meant to be funny, but mostly they just made me sad.
October 26, 2007 at 11:51 am · tag/s : blog, people, web, writing
Here is an interview with web guru Mark Frauenfelder, blogger, Wired editor, writer and publisher of bOiNG bOiNG, from Michael Bank’s forthcoming book, Blogging Heroes (Wiley 2007). He is also the author of one of the fullest, most unreserved and unconditional public apologies it is possible to imagine : An apology to Ursula K Le Guin … Last I heard it hadn’t worked : Ursula is still cranky. Jeez. What does a bloke have to do?
September 7, 2007 at 12:57 pm · tag/s : doubt, life, people, reading, strange, thinking
as a kind of ex-cyberpunk i should be a science fiction fan, but i am just not … something about being unwilling to suspend my disbelief. however william gibson explains why science fiction is about the present, and his observations on the strange kind of reality we live in this recent interview in the washington post make for a great read.
A taste :
“…EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It’s like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement…”
via boingboing
July 31, 2007 at 7:59 am · tag/s : blog, computers, people, travel
aargh i wake up and find that all my styles and other carefully wrought plaintext theme mods are stuffed since i upgraded wordpress to fix a problem blogging from within macjournal that had developed. and this is at a time when i am in the last days of my gig as artist and writer in residence at ashfield in sydney : i am on dialup and i have neither bandwidth nor time to fix it … even the stupid default sponsorship message the plaintext theme puts at the bottom of your page is back … scott you know i love you but … ah well a good excuse to link to a much more interesting blog : ryszard dabek is writing from paris in modulation ….
edit : fixed … i can do css :p
April 17, 2007 at 5:39 am · tag/s : amerika, art, death, pain, people
despite a whole melatonin i wake very early from a very strong vivid dream about my friend simone who teaches at virginia technical university in the usa and i can’t get back to sleep : it is before 5am, i am still rubbing the sleep from my eyes when i see the surreal news headline on the net : 32 dead people … 32 people who got “what they obviously did not deserve…” in the words of one witness
and the people who were wounded jumping out of windows didn’t deserve it either.
nor did the people who were scared out of their wits. or those who have lost friends or family.
and neither did any of the people of blacksburg and the students and staff at virginia tech, who were without any exception, amongst the most friendly and civilized people i have met, when i was a guest lecturer there in december 2006.
in my dream we are arguing about art, as usual, whilst the tragedy which is the real world continues to happen all around us.
March 24, 2007 at 10:01 am · tag/s : australia, death, people
more than one aussie has been ribbing me this week following the loss of the netherlandic team of cricket minnows by 229 runs in their world cup match against australia - since then the event has become completely overshadowed by the murder of the pakistan coach following their loss against ireland - and no one is in the slightest bit interested that the men in orange booked their second ever world cup victory, against scotland - in an inspired and heroic move, the depressed and under-performing captain luke van troost (whose name coincidentally means solace or consolation) dropped himself for their final match in the tournament, with his replacement almost single-handedly destroying the scots batting
meanwhile, despite the win, van troost remains depressed, as do most people who have ever liked cricket, including the entertaining and articulate (if at times alarmingly right wing) commentator peter roebuck who, in the age today lyrically laments the passing of the innocence of a game in which
A bloke armed with a hunk of leather tries to hit three sticks protected by another fellow bearing a lump of wood.
ah if only it was that simple
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