In my neighbourhood

the family upstairs were moving their furniture around all through the night. I had words with them on this matter several months ago. In fact they have already been evicted once. But they are a disreputable bunch of scoundrels. Look at the malevolent look in this one's eye.


The above photo and the following both happened during the period I had stopped blogging:

Dame Edna launches cosmetic line-16th January 2009,
The colours of the 17 products in the range are inspired by Dame Edna, with titles like Kanga Rouge and Possum Nose Pink.
“The colour on my eyes is Varicose Violet and it’s inspired by my mother’s legs,” Dame Edna said.

No animals were harmed in the making of this blog. All creatures of the woods were released back where they belong.

In my neighbourhood

anne in army boots.

In my neighbourhood

one of those moths which have a scary face on their backs when you look up close.

In my neighbourhood

here's one for the blog of unneccessary apostrophe's, a close cousin of the blog of unwanted quotation "marks".

In my neighbourhood

hayley Campbell at a cafe table feeding wild lorikeets:

GOD ATTEMPTS TO HALT ANDRE RIEU CONCERT

CITIZENS KEPT OUT PAST THEIR BEDTIMES

Fans at the Brisbane Andre Rieu concert were forced to take refuge inside Suncorp Stadium after the thunderstorm struck, delaying proceedings by one hour.
Damaging winds, large hailstones and severe lightning across South-East Queensland forced Rieu fans standing on the grass and sitting in uncovered sections to take refuge inside the stadium.
The concert, which was scheduled to start at 7pm, did not start until 8pm.
Organisers say they were very close to cancelling the concert as an 8pm starting time meant the concert could go as late as 11.15pm.

"The LORD is slow to anger and great in power and will not at all acquit the wicked; the LORD hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm and the clouds are the dust of his feet." nahum 1:3
(Note from Dan Best, who knows god better than I)

While "Rieu's popularity has distressed many classical music buffs,... Those who got drenched last night will be relieved to learn their favourite will return in October next year, but he'll be indoors at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre at Boondall."
Also, "There would have been smiles from fans (of local footy team The Broncos) watching the Imperial Ballet of Vienna making their stage entrance from the players tunnel behind the stage."

If Rieu is unknown to you, here he is at Radio City knee deep in syrup playing My Way. I like the way the camera keeps going back to the Italian looking geezer in the audience (is he a famous bloke?) with tears running down his mush. He couldn't find a taker for his $250 ticket.

Australians See
Smiley Face
in
Night
Sky

Eddie Campbell too.

Australians are getting a big hello from the heavens as Venus, Jupiter and a waxing crescent moon combine to create a celestial smiley face.
Unfortunately, because North Americans are on the other side of the equator, they'll view the phenomenon another way — as a sad face with downcast mouth.
The best time to see the friendly phenomenon is about 20 to 30 minutes after sunset in both hemispheres, report the News Corporation's Australian newspapers.

(my photos. Lights at bottom are the lamps along our street. Better pictures at the link, but I wanted you to know I was paying attention.)
meanwhile: Happy Face on Mars Exposed: "Spotting things that don't exist -on Mars or in clouds- is called pareidolia. A study last year found that humans are particularly susceptible to seeing human faces where there are none, because our knowledge of the human face is so ingrained in our brains."

Best Pareidolia Ever
Have you seen Jesus today?

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in other news:
'Olympic Village' sex turns toads into athletes

Professor Rick Shine from the University of Sydney studies the pesky creatures and believes the toads are evolving to become faster.
When introduced to Queensland in 1935 in a bid to kill the cane beetle, toads generally travelled at a rate of about 10 kilometres each year, Professor Shine said.
"Now that movement has increased to about 50 or 60 kilometres per year, and those at the front of this invasion have become marathon runners in a sense," he said.
The gene mutation that drives certain toads to venture from their local area has been caused by constant selective breeding between the speediest of each generation.
"Within the first generation, the quickest toads - the athletes - were on the western front and they bred with each other... we call this the Olympic Village effect," he said.
However their new legs and need for speed end up being their downfall.
"A vet in Darwin noticed spinal arthritis and it looks to be the result of toads having pushed the envelope as far as they possibly can," Professor Shine said.

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This chap is having trouble separating his reality from his fiction:

Cartooning and story telling are difficult things in themselves, nonetheless trying to write something funny on top of that. Author Eddie Campbell confesses in his short graphic novel The Fate of the Artist the desperate lengths he went through just to be witty in his comics: “I found myself listening to catch ideas from the conversations of my friends and then I became a harpy, a moloch, a vampire. Anxious. Haggard. Greedy. Let a piquant phrase fall from their lips and I was after it like a hound.” Campbell professes that his life is much easier since he stepped out of the comic business just a few years ago. Art drains the honest artist. Or perhaps it is the act of being honest which is so exhausting.

big storm here last night and the old bridge took a pasting. Usually this creek isn't deep enough to catch a fish in.


The Prime Minister calls it a war zone. 4,000 homes damaged, 300 of them seriously, at least 30 beyond repair. When did we start calling them 'homes,' which belongs to the hyperbole of predatory real estate salespeople and sentimental Americans? A home is where they put you when you lose your marbles, such as 'home for the mentally disabled', as in the old George Formby song from the world war 2 years, 'you'd be far better off in a home'
Our Annie's joined up a week come Saturday
Annie's joined up, the Army shouts hooray
She's a F.A.N.Y. cos she's fanny that way
So we chase her all round the barrack square.

You'd be far better off in a home
You'd be far better off in a home
You'd be far better off, far better off
Far better off in a home
Wandering around the house at two in the morning tieing things down, I bump into the wife of my bosom on the verandah, presumably doing the same thing. We laugh and I give her a kiss, with the final conflict between good and evil going on outside.

Grandad's portrait.

it's that time of year and the jacarandas are in bloom again. Those mauve trees are so good that if they didn't exist we'd have to invent one. A print of this one is mounted on our wall:


The original was painted in 1903 by R. Godfrey Rivers, a significant figure in the history of painting locally, and is in the Queensland art gallery. This one is across our street:


Apparently it's descended from the one in the picture, because "ALL of the jacarandas carpeting Brisbane come from a single tree planted in the City Botanic Gardens by superintendent Walter Hill in 1864." ( article last year in the Courier Mail). "It is considered to be the first jacaranda planted in Australia and is featured in perhaps Queensland's most famous painting..."

The jacaranda is not indigenous to Australia, so how did the one in the painting get here?
"Wheat was exported to Argentina, Brazil and Chile in those days and the ships would come back empty except for gneiss ballast rocks," gardens curator Mr McKinnon said. "Hill got the rocks for the gardens and also got a jacaranda seed from a ship's captain. The rocks are still used widely around the gardens."

The tree alas was blown over in a storm in 1980. Mr. McKinnon keeps a slab cut from its bough in his office.


For many years, now-retired John Massey, the gallery's canny senior education officer, would have baskets of blossoms picked up from the park and deposited on the floor in front of the painting, as though they had fallen from it overnight. He would show school children around, exciting them with the mystery of the spring blooms.

in the neighbourhood of my computer:


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In response to yesterday's post, John Coulthart linked me to this essay by M Kingsley:

John Berger built upon the work of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes while describing the collision of advertising and news images in popular media. " The contrast between publicity's interpretation of the world and the world's actual condition is a very stark one, and this sometimes becomes evident in the color magazines which deal with news stories. The shock of such contrasts is considerable: not only because of the coexistence of the two worlds shown, but also because of the cynicism of the culture which shows them one above the other. It can be argued that the juxtaposition of images was not planned. Nevertheless the text, the photographs taken in Pakistan, the photographs taken for the advertisements, the editing of the magazine, the layout of the publicity, the printing of both, the fact that advertiser's pages and news pages cannot be co-ordinated — all these are produced by the same culture."

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wee hayley campbell says the Findus 'Rock'n'rolls ads from 1992 starring Spinal Tap mustn't have appeared in Blighty as she can't find anybody who remembers them. There were at least two, well loved in this house.

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Apatoff on Edgar Degas He has a couple of late landscapes I don't recall seeing before.
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In today's 'Ya made me larf' department, 'And a blind man shall ink them', being a comment on our dear bveloved Vinnie. Posted by the Fake Stan Lee.

from my verandah (click to enlarge).


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The fourth part of How Art made the World aired on the tv here last night. Having enjoyed previous offerings 1, 2, this time I had problems with the whole scheme. His subject was visual storytelling, one that I've had plenty of time to think about myself.

"When we watch a good film, something extraordinary happens. We become so involved with what's going on that we feel we are living the story ourselves. Where did the ingredients of visual storytelling come from?"

Spivey starts with the Gilgamesh carvings in Assyria. "The first story ever written" he says (how can he know?) in the same authoritative way he called the Riace bronzes "the finest statues ever made" (given the near thorough destruction of classical Greek statuary, who can have any grasp of what was 'made'?) On through the sculptures of the Odysseus story at Sperlonga ("It took the Greeks to come up with a visual storytelling style"), to Trajan's column in Rome.

"In the end, however, as impressive as the column may be, it's still missing something - it still lacks the power to captivate. But this missing piece can be found in the non-classical civilization of the Australian Aborigines, whose storytelling combines the visual, as well as music and singing. It is this soundtrack that provides the power for the Aboriginal story to have survived thousands of years, and which is so critical to the success of modern film's ability to transport us into other worlds."

Going from an ancient Roman emperor glorifying himself to the simple honesty of indigenous Australian sacred culture leaves enough of a sour taste, but by trying to make all of this into a unified story the point ends up being that the glory of the Hollywood movie owes its thanks to all these other folk providing the parts that go into its making. This is getting it upside down. The beauty of the Aboriginal culture of Arnhem Land that he investigates lies in the fact that all of its social custom and history and personal interrelationships and people's relation to the land are bound and maintained and celebrated and lived in the dance/music/painting ritual of the storytelling. This is on a different level from the sedentary watching of a DVD fantasy. As Sacheverall Sitwell wrote (in the 1940s) (quoted by my favorite diarist Walter James) "Compared to us, the Aboriginals are like muses crowned with flowers. They take part in their ceremonies. We merely sit and gape."

This is not my photo, but a circulating one. Persons unknown, perhaps foreign students, have apparently failed to correctly identify the species Trichosurus vulpecula.


In my neighbourhood you don't mess with these characters. You call in an expert with a long pole and heavy-duty gloves.

I've pinched this from a CGU insurance circular. "One of the CGU safety and Risk Services team was driving along the Eastern Freeway in Melbourne on the Australia day long weekend when they came across a driver on his way to an Australia Day barbecue. Can you guess what he was asked to bring?"


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wee hayley campbell suggested I should "link" to The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks: misinterpreting bad punctuation since 2005.
Look and weep.

LOOK! Trees.

Here's one of those trees that will keep Campbell out of trouble while his head is on the mend. He'd always photograph something like that, saying you could never rememember it or make it up. In fact, we're not sure how you'd go about drawing it either.
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In his absence we should mention this event:
Posy Simmonds Signing at Page 45! Thursday, October 25, 2007

Ladies And Gentlemen, We Have Comicbook Royalty! That's Posy Simmonds MBE (for services to the newspaper industries), creator of GEMMA BOVERY, LITERARY LIFE and TAMARA DREWE (out early November), as serialised in The Guardian. Posy Simmonds does not sign at comic shops! She rarely even signs in posho shops like Waterstones! Do you remember during the Bryan Talbot interview, that I promised you news? Here is the news: Posy Simmonds is coming to sign and sketch with us for free! "How The...?!"
Bryan. Bryan Talbot. I don't have that sort of clout!
Bryan asked her as a favour for us, and she said yes.
This a very, very rare opportunity to come and chat with one of the most respected comicbook creators that Britain has ever known.

We suspect that Campbell would not approve of sullying the great cartoonist Posy Simmonds with the description of 'comicbook creator'*, in fact we're pretty sure of it but durst not mention the matter to him lest we aggravate his condition.
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We're pretty sure Campbell would applaud Tom Tomorrow at the Huffington Post with his long summary of the Nate Fisher business in Conneticut. He's the teacher who gave Clowes' Ice Haven to a thirteen year old student and had to resign. Graphic Novels: Threat or Menace? - Posted October 25.
Falls somewhat short of the obvious: the teacher should be hired back, with an abject public apology and full back pay.
DAMN RIGHT!
While in the vicinity of that post we came across this one by Jonathan Schwartz, explaining how Edmund Burke wrote in support of blogging in 1770.
(from long quote within long article) "No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens."
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Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer- By DORIS LESSING- NY Times- October 13, 2007 (republished from June 1992)

WHILE we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness.
The first point: language. It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. .. Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the conservative and liberal press that were Marxist, but the writers did not know it. But there is an aspect of this heritage that is much harder to see... the heritage of dead and empty language these days is to be found in academia, and particularly in some areas of sociology and psychology.

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*When he said he thought ‘comic book’ is still one of the useful terms he meant it’s useful because everybody knows what it means: American style comic books that are almost always about superheroes, so much so that you can use it to mean a genre of popular fiction; as you would say a ‘western movie’ or ‘a gangster movie’, so can you say ‘a comic book movie.’

In my neighbourhood.

C ampbell's lobotomy went as well as could be expected, and the doctors are hoping for a speedy recovery. The patient has been confined to his verandah and disallowed from going anywhere near a computer, so we're putting today's post together from scraps found in his drafts folder. This is a view taken on an earlier occasion from his verandah at sunset, where he will be allowed one gin and tonic as a sedative before being retired to bed at eight:


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His pal Best, lawyer of note, thought his team were being complimented when the judge passed down the following:
"The pettifogging casuistry exhibited by the defendants' arguments is to be deprecated."

why, thank you, m'lud.

In my neighbourhood.

The jacarandas are in bloom.

(click for larger, Mum)
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Regarding my blather of Sunday last, I closed down the comments when once again it looked like everybody thought I was just arguing about words. I then decided that the whole concept is an artistic dead end and that I would never mention it again, but today I find a useful article (via Tom Spurgeon):
Interview with Steven Heller, Critic- at the Gothamist- October 22, 2007
Author, critic and journalist Steven Heller ... launched the careers of some of our most well-known illustrators, but also chronicled graphic design in more than 100 books. Heller also has been a contributing editor to Print, Eye, Baseline and I.D.,...

Do you think illustration is dying?
I did a couple of years ago. I think it’s coming back. Marshall Arisman and I are kind of suffering over a book about the new illustration, suffering because Marshall is in his late 60s and he’s set in his very creative ways and doesn’t really see all of what’s going out there that’s new. It’s coming back in a different way.
How? How are illustrators finding relevance?
More as entrepreneurs and visual essayists. In childrens’ books and graphic novels. In toys, games, T-shirts, hats, street fashion. An awful lot is going on where illustrators’ hands, eyes and minds are being used in way that we would consider are not traditional ways. Go into Giant Robot and take a look around. Go to Paris and see graphic novels galore.

I have already written about and linked to articles regarding what is called in design circles 'authorial illustration', a way of thinking which embraces the 'graphic novel' as one of its modes. This relates to what I was saying in that it was my intention to inspire the reader to think outside of comic book culture. That is, the task is NOT to invent new terms or clarify the old ones but to shift one's whole point of view. To stand in a new position in order to make visible what was previously obscured behind other objects, and NOT to just to stand in the same spot and change one's socks.

In my neighbourhood.

We saw this chap when we went for a picnic recently. He's a goanna, about the size of a small dog. He made love to female of the species who then lay there dead. We felt we should have done something about it instead of just watching, like stopping the bastard or something. Then after about a half hour, while we were wondering what authorities should be called, she pulled herself together, got up a shuffled off.

In my neighbourhood.

I normally wouldn't take photographs in the middle of a church service, even a wedding, but I knew I wouldn't be able to recreate from memory this effect made by sunlight through stained glass windows onto stone wall.


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Book Autopsies: Brian Dettmer carves into books revealing the artwork inside, creating complex layered three-dimensional sculptures.


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Anne Campbell works in the office of a big law firm. Today one of her colleagues came up and asked if that was her husband on the teevee on Sunday afternoon. Anne sighed and said, yes that was him.
"Tell me," said the other lady, "What's a 'graphic novel'?"
(bloodcurdling scream, exit).

In my neighbourhood.

In fact, right across the street from my front gate. A Graham-Paige 1928, with extended wheel base. And to say whether that was a manufacturer's option or a contemporary or latter day customisation would be just too esoteric to get into here, though certainly the sort of thing Campbell would enjoy getting into. Indeed, he attempted to get into it with the driver, who also happened to be the restorer of this magnificent piece of work, but some teenagers were to be driven to their school formal.

In my neighbourhood

This gem is on the rear of a sportsground shed facing a creek and then a forest. Very few people would see it.


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DAN CLOWES COMIC BOOK CAUSES FUROR IN CONNECTICUT

American Children being brought up by brainless bullying parents. Something should be done about it.
Parents like Jenny Ginns are outraged that a teacher provided a comic book to a freshman student..."If that was my daughter that came home and showed this to me I honestly believe my husband would hurt the man," said Amy.

The girl’s mother said her daughter has been "crying every night" and asking not to go to school because students who liked the teacher are blaming her. "He’s the cool, favorite teacher of all the kids," the father said. His wife said she became especially concerned when her daughter told her Fisher asked her "how the book made her feel," although the mother added that she has no idea "what his intention was."

What I don't get is: How did the parents know anything about this? Don't kids know how to keep secrets any more? My father once confiscated a James Bond paperback I picked up at a garage sale when I was about ten. From that moment on I reallised that my reading adventures needed to be done in secrecy. I started by reading all the James Bond novels, at first trying to psychoanalyse my father, figuring out exactly what it was about the book that worried him. If my dad's reading this, I'm sure he can't remember anything about it.

Charles Brownstein, executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund in New York City, said that Clowes is a well known graphic novelist. "The book (Ice Haven) was basically a profile of a town and its various oddball personalities and it was drawn in a wide variety of illustrative styles to create a psychological portrait of the goings on in this town," Brownstein said. "It certainly is not pornographic." He added: "Frankly, I find the fact that somebody has left their job over this particular work deeply troubling."

I love to compare the way Charles expresses it in his official capacity with the way he'll express it next time I talk to him in a bar.

(links via Tom Spurgeon)