Tripping over modern art and other weirdness

I was waiting for Libby in a public space in Federation Square last night. We had been in mobile contact. I knew she was somewhere close, but as yet we hadn’t found each other. I resisted the impulse to wander in search of her. Like a lost child, I stood alone in the cold wind reassuring myself that if I stood still, it was more likely that she would find me. 

Resigned, I took up my post in a place where I could see people approaching from three directions: up from the carpark, down the stairs from the interior of the building and down a further wide set of stairs to the bank of the Yarra. Satisified with my positioning, I stood alert for shapes and sounds that resembled Libby. It was then that I saw it. It wasn’t immediately recognisable as sculpture, but I wandered over to it and read the plaque: ‘The Membrane’, part of a modern art exhibition in the public spaces of Federation Square.

The angle shown above in the photo seemed to me to be the ‘front’. It spoke to me from this angle more than the others. From here I could imagine a scene: connected tunnels, openings, burrows, a purpose. Ramshackle but possibly representing activity or some usefulness in its strung-together structure, like something that allowed the dwellers to make do and get on with whatever it was they did. A bit urban, a bit desperate, a bit neglected. 

Libby arrived finally. We embraced in front of The Membrane. She glanced at it. “Is that supposed to be art?”. I answered in the affirmative. She walked over to read the plaque, like me, needing reassurance that its intention was piece-of-art. “The Membrane” she read. “How ridiculous”, she laughed. Dismissing The Membrane with a toss of her head, she turned away and we headed off via the downwards stairs to Southbank. 

I took the photo of The Membrane this morning when I went back to Fed Square to retrieve my car, and reflected on what a weird evening I had had painting the town with girlfriends. Beginning with The Membrane, everything that happened, happenened in unexpected ways. From being stuck in traffic and losing Libby at the start of the evening, to finding ourselves invited to dinner with a large group office workers, to dancing in a bar later to Leo Sayer (!), being unexpectedly reuinted with a colleague/flame after fifteen years and getting home at a quarter to three!

Free ticks

Hello Possums. Have you seen ‘Talk to Me’ yet? Its the best movie I have seen for ages. The dialogue is wonderful and the cinematography is really clever. On top of this, its a great story (and its true!). I laughed (a lot) and cried (in two places). The main actor is to die for and all of the other characters are played to perfection. The sound track is magnificent. Need I say more?

I had free tickets through my MTC subscription and took V along. She adored it too. Afterwards we went to her favorite Vietnamese restaurant on Victoria Street, were she knows the proprieters. There we drank three pots of Chinese tea and talked about her current love interest whilst we feasted upon rice paper rolls with peking duck, crispy chicken ribs and stir fried spinach.

V is a polo fan. I have never seen polo played live before. Her current love interest is one of the players who has been flirting with her from afar for at least six months. She has been in a state of excited suspense. Last week she received an invitation to a polo club luncheon out at one of the vinyards. She had invited me to accompany her but was yet to book the tickets.

Last night she deliberated as to whether she had the guts to go. “There are only twelve places for the dinner”, she exclaimed, “and I’m not even a member of the club!”. She was intrigued as to why she had received the invitation. “What if he’s there! I won’t be able to hide if there are only twelve of us!”. She was really nervous. “Don’t worry”, I said, “I’ll be there to support you. You won’t need to hide”. This afternoon I received a text from her: “We are on for the wine trip. Now I am really in trouble huh?” I texted back, “yeah”. I’ll let you know how it goes, Possums. Its in March.

Art just is. (A bit of social planning too).

I have subscribed to the Melbourne Theater Company for the second year in a row. My first production for the year last night was The Season at Sarsaparilla by Patrick White. Dee and I arrived at Federation Square in time for a bite to eat for dinner before the show. It was a warm balmy night. We ate outside. My hot salami pizza was light and delicious with a very thin base, and Dee’s tandoori caesar salad looked mouth watering. Dee looked elegant in a flowing yellow wrap top given to her by her mother on her wedding day. This was the first time she had worn it! I teased her, “waiting for the right occasion were you?”. “No”, she replied,  ”the style just didn’t suit me when I was young”. The moral here – don’t throw anything beautiful out. I wore my orange shirt from Rome again with three quarter pants. Dee wore her three quarter pants as well and we hadn’t even intended to coordinate! There were a lot of people in the city last night. In the open spaces in Fed Square a crowd had gathered. People were sitting around watching the cricket on the big screen. Their ooohs in unison almost echoed around the square. If we weren’t due at the State Theatre in only five minutes we would have stopped for awhile to soak in the great atmosphere. We both enjoyed the play. She hadn’t been to the theatre for fifteen years and was enthusiastic about her reintroduction. The set was remarkable. One house occupied the stage within which the characters of three different households simultaneously performed their lives through a snapshot of their summer. It was nostalgic and contemporary, celebratory and critical. The acting was convincing and the dialogue multilayered, haunting, flippant, succinct, indulgent, knowing… Patrick White. He has the ability to somehow capture the essence of a being.  White’s created world performed by these skillful and intuitive actors resonated with the complexity of life. The best way to describe it really is to say that the overall effect was a piece of art. This year I have done something different with my subscription. Instead of booking all seven plays with Raya, I have booked double tickets to the plays by myself. With the extra ticket I have decided to take different friends along. Dee was great company last night. It was refreshing because we don’t ever get enough social time together. Usually when we spend time together our attention is split at least two ways. Raya still wants to come to three of the plays I’ve chosen. But she wanted to see a few more films this year rather than all seven plays. I know how she feels, actually. Already my list of films to see is growing out of control. Amongst recent releases are Once, Atonement, The Kite Runner, Juno and Sweeney Todd. Why does all the good stuff come out at once? Exciting though, isn’t it Possums? Now this reminds me: I will give Raya a call and organise a night at the movies. In fact I might even invite Dee as well. I have always thought the two of them would get along famously. I just haven’t got around to introducing them. In the past I would have had a dinner party. These days however, with my study and building our new place, dinner parties have been relgated to “after we move” status (like lots of other things)… I have wandered a bit off track with this post. I was intending to atriculate what it means to me to describe something as a piece of art. I will conclude now by just saying that in this context I do not use the word ‘art’ flippantly.

A little on desire and feminism

OK I’m reading two books at the moment. ‘Gender Trouble’ by Judith Butler and fiction: ‘Black Swan Green’ by David Mitchell. The thoughts expressed here, however, have nothing to do with the fictional book, as much as I am enjoying reading it. I have a post brewing on gender and female sexuality. I think I might ask Lia to post it over at the Red Tent. I haven’t quite managed to get my head around my thoughts yet, but they have been prompted by what I have been reading in Gender Trouble, beginning with Butler’s argument about why the project of feminism should not include the delineation of the term ‘woman’ and moving on to her critique of certain structuralist accounts of gender, sexuality and desire. The discourses she critiques pervade our society. I have become aware of them through living; I am an educator, not a philosopher. Wittig takes the masculine as the only sex, and feminine as the absence of sex. De Bouvier takes the feminine as the only sex, masculine being taken as the unmarked norm. Butler’s critique of these and the theories of Lacan and Levi Strauss are thorough and necessary. Theory often seems disconnected from the lives we live, but not only did the theories of Wittig and de Bouvier articulate discourses that accounted for many a women’s lived reality, the concepts from theory filter into everyday lives and help shape the reality of experience with their explanatory power. A classic example of this is the concept of the ego from Freud. Invented for its explanatory power, it is often used in everyday speech as though it is a reality of our psychic lives. Butler brings our attention to the unthinkable and uninhabitable positions brought about by these contemporary theories on gender and sex. One consequence and contingency to their survival is the absence of women’s desire. The scary thing is that not only must women’s desire be absent in order for the theories to hold (particularly Lacan’s theory on bonds between men as the fabric of society), it may be absent from our psychic lives and the discourses we live and think within. Think about it. How often is women’s desire unnameable? unknown? How many of you had to break free from patriarchal, phallocentric, or heternormative rules in order to name and live your own desires freely?  For example, I contributed to a conversation about desire and a man’s need for pornography last year. Some of you might have read Mr Z’s post about his friend who’s internet was down and had been suffering through lack of access. The general male comments in relation to this were sympathetic. I expressed concern for the effect using porn could have on relationships and was met with the (light hearted) justification that men needed variety and the not-so-lighthearted suggestion that I lighten up. I wonder why factoids like this on male sexuality circulate as normal, yet women’s desire remains unknown and unnameable. Why can’t it be conceivable as just as likely that women need variety too? … my latest idea is to try to couch these thoughts within my own experiences. (To be continued on Red Tent).

Once in a lifetime

I had a brief conversation while out to dinner last night in which I recommended one of my favorite books, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. My conversation although brief has caused me to reflect on one of the ways the book affected me. It is written in three threads which eventually come together with a twist. One of the threads is a piece of fiction written by a character in the book. This piece of fiction shares its title with the title of the novel. The Blind Assassin thread is a story of two lovers. It accurately captures the state of being of a young woman experiencing her first meaningful sexual relationship. The Blind Assassin is the story her lover tells her as a serial from one encounter to the next. That someone could capture this state of obsessive love using language completely blew me away. Prior to reading this, it had remained an unspoken yet all encompassing state of being that I had experienced in a similar way at the age of eighteen. It made me realise that my experience was shared. Thinking that my experience was unique I had previously never shared it with a soul. Yet reading this novel, I realised another person had known it well enough to write it. My experience was with a boy I met at university who enchanted me entirely. I had come to university looking for excitement and I found it in him. He was beautiful to look at, half Chinese and half Scottish, an accomplished musician and he was studying medicine. He first made love to me in his bedroom at his family home. We could hear other family members moving around the house (he was the oldest of four children) and eventhough I was scared someone would walk in I was so overcome by the sensation of it that I let it continue. I was amazed what my body could feel. On the bus to university the next day I remember allowing myself to recall the experience, mind and body. I thought I had discovered something no one else knew. He possessed me in a way no one else ever would again. To me it was as though he was “the only person in the world with a penis” (a line from Blind Assassin). We skipped classes to be together. We made love in unusual places: garden beds, ovals at night, in the Law toilets at uni, in swimming pools… He failed his first year in med. His family sent him against his will to live in Tasmania for the year to study first year at another university, billeting with a family friend to keep an eye on him. We wrote everyday. His letters were poetic. I lived the year as a shell of myself. I carried his photo, read and reread his letters. He refused to study and returned to Melbourne a year later having failed that year too. We moved into a flat together against all of our parents’ wishes at the age of nineteen. I was studying third year by this time and working as a waitress to pay the rent. He played music and read books everyday. When I returned home, I cooked and cleaned. In our three quarter size single bed at night we searched until we knew each other’s bodies intimately. He was like a puppeteer or a sorcerer. He played me like an instrument, owned me like a pet. Some evenings he read to me. The first book he read was The Three Musketeers. He used a French accent and different voice for each character in the novel. I remember his laughter over this. These moments were joyful. Our bubble burst eventually. The pain of the previous year lingered, especially in him. Being together was not enough to lift his spirits after failing his course and letting his family down.  I felt the stress of study and his monetary dependence upon me.  We started to fight and I met someone new. I wonder how we would have fared if we didn’t have to struggle under such pressure. Was such an obsessive relationship doomed to failure?  He completely owned me for almost three years. When I read The Blind Assassin five years ago or more I cried. It was an eye opener to realise other people had experienced this too. (But, strangely, this is the first time I have articulated it for myself).

Enlightenment

On Friday night I went to see the MTC production of Enlightenment by Shelagh Stephenson with my subscriber-buddy, Raya. That evening Melbourne was engulfed in a thick blanket of fog and it was freezing out. Visibility was low. Tops of buildings disappeared into the fog and the lights of the city blinked through it in an eery sort of way. There were heaps of people in the city too. Its funny how fog makes everything appear quieter, but if you actually stood still or went into a bar or restaurant, you were able to see that despite appearances Melbourne was packed and pumping on Friday night. There was almost a full house at the play too.

We almost missed the start. After enjoying a catch-up session over a couple of glasses of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and a light meal, Raya and I dashed across to the Arts Centre and found our seats just as the warning chimes were ringing. We had no idea what to expect, having chosen our seven plays last year when we subscribed to the MTC in November last year. Neither of us had refreshed our memories by reading the programs we both have stashed at home. We laughed about this but agreed that having a surprise was also a fun way to go to the theatre. The title Enlightenment, really didn’t give away a lot either.

It started in an odd way and we thought, Oh what have we got here? But we were led surprisingly quickly into the storyline where the weird beginning made sense. It was pleasingly a more contemporary play than any we have seen by the MTC so far this year. Many of the others having had a nineteen sixties sensibility and humour that we found a bit twee.

Enlightenment explores parents’ grief following the recent bombings in Indonesia. It weaves the desires of extraordinarily powerful characters into a suspenseful unraveling of the main character’s desire to do good. The powerful characters are portrayed by powerful actors who were superbly cast for the challenge. Raya and I were moved, chilled to the bone and entertained.

ps. desire is my favorite word at the moment.

Carmen

Hello Possums. Well Carmen was spectacular. Its playing at the Athaneum Theatre in Melbourne and this is a much more intimate venue than the State Theatre. Rather than out of sight in a deep pit, the orchestra is at floor level. This adds a special quality to the experience. I enjoyed being able to catch glimpses of the musicians and having the silhouette of the harp and double bases within my view. The music is familiar. I hadn’t realised that the classic Tango music was from Carmen: If I love you then just beware! The power of this music to invoke seduction is unbelievable. I especially loved the scene where Carmen danced for the officer with castanets. What is it about castanets that is sexy? It works, but I don’t get it. Maybe the sound of the click is like noises from the womb or something?

Here are a couple of happy snaps from the night:

Here we are in the foyer. Our group is known as the ‘talkative women at the school’ abbreviated to t.w.a.t.s. When we clink our champagne glasses this is what we say, but in the foyer of the theatre we thought it wize to just whisper our toast to t.w.a.t.s, lest other patrons overhear and get the wrong idea.

I secretly took a photo without using my flash to show you. Here is the scene of the interior of the inn. Carmen central there:

Afterwards we were highly excited, and were imagining talking to our families tomorrow morning in ‘opera speak’. Imagine singing, ‘what would you like for breakfast dear? weetbix?’ in your best opera voice. Well, that’s what we were doing as we left the Theatre and headed across the road to a cocktail lounge.

The cocktail lounge was fairly empty and the young man and woman behind the bar looked like they had been polishing stuff to pass the time. Our entry was therefore noticed; our group being considerably large and very noisy. We’re here! I announced, as the young man looked over to us and smiled. We chatted and drank cocktails until two in the morning.

I’ve already had a text from one of the ‘talkative women’ to ask, how are you this morning?

Well, lets just say that there was no lively behaviour at the primary school uniform shop this morning!

I’m a subscriber

Hello Possums. Just thought I should reveal that “I’m a subscriber” ( sing to “I’m a Believer”, by the Monkeys).

… to The Melbourne Theater Company (or The MTC, as it is known to Melbournites).

I’ve been keeping this quiet, but it’s time to come clean because being a subscriber has become a key feature of my social calender!

Towards the end of last year I joined MTC with a girlfriend. We chose the group subscription option because its the only way to to be allocated seats together. As part of this process, we had to choose seven plays from the 2007 MTC calendar, and the number of tickets required for each play. We decided to choose two plays to take our hubbies along to (so they wouldn’t feel left out), and to go without them for the remaining five. Neither of our hubbies are megga keen on theater, for example here is my hubbies typical reaction to an invitation:

How many car chases does it have in it?

The men are also not inclined to sit around afterwards and discuss the play, which for us is all part of the enjoyment of the experience (see Review below).

For years, she and I have talked about joining. We finally did it last November, just before the Melbourne Cup Carnival. The inspiration came to us when we realised that it would be another occasion on which to wear a frock! We navigated to the online subscription page on her computer and joined up within half an hour. All we needed were the 2007 school term dates, the play reviews and our credit cards.

Last night we went to our third play for the year, ‘The History Boys’. I wore a purple jersey frock with a bit of a plunging neckline purchased on sale from Witchery and felt quite glam! Just quietly, I think I’ll drag this one out again for the school reunion in June!

‘The History Boys’. A Review.

The MTC production of ‘The History Boys’ was excellent, although it took both of us a little while to adjust to it. The dialogue was fast and full of simile and innuendo. We had to concentrate much more than we were used to, say for a movie. It went from 6.30 until 10.30, with a brief interval. Strangely, because of the concentration required, I found myself absorbed and the time went really quickly. You couldn’t just sit there and think about what you needed to do tomorrow and expect to keep up!

We found ourselves fully immersed in snap shots of classroom and staffroom dialogue and action, that were expertly threaded together to depict a class of boys’ last year at an all-boy school in the UK. The boys’ loyalty to their eccentric English Master was challenged by a young teacher, employed to train them for university entrance; their desire for success nicely set against the idealistic view of education ingrained upon them by their old Master.

Over hot chocolates afterwards in a bar in Fed Square, we discussed our reactions. I found the boys’ individual and collective power to influence and understand events and people a particularly interesting feature of the play. She found it interesting to reflect upon her own boys’ experiences of high school, and we wondered how accurate a depiction it was. The lack of innocence was alarming, yet at the same time highly amusing – a very different culture than either of us had experienced at school!

I also really enjoyed the part played by Dierdre Rubenstein as the female teacher. Her gutsy and pragmatic character had me in stitches. Her performance provided an entry point upon which the audience member was invited to critique the male culture and consider what is lost and gained within such a system.

The Horse Whisperer

Hello Possums. Do you belong to a book club? Mine has been going for over ten years. We meet in the evening once a month in the lounge of a large hotel in Melbourne, order drinks (sometimes hot chocolate and sometimes wine), lounge back in the comfortable winged arm chairs and sofas and talk about our latest book and each other’s lives.

Amongst the individuals in my book club, I have a reputation for an ability to remember books. We discussed this so-called ability of mine once in the context of a discussion about reading speed:

Fran: Oh I just skimmed that bit because I didn’t think it was important.

Me: Do you skim sections of books?

Vicki: I read quickly and skim occasionally.

Fran: Yeah, I did a speed reading course once. I read quickly because I can’t wait to uncover the plot. That’s why I often reread books: so I can take it more slowly the second time.

Janine: I’m a fast reader too.

Me: Wow, I read every bit, and concentrate on every word. I can’t bear to skim. If I find myself not concentrating on a page I reread it – sometimes more than once.

Lucy: I never reread pages. If I’ve tuned out over a paragraph or so, then I just think it mustn’t have been that important. I often reread entire books though.

Jane: I reread my favorite books over and over again.

Lucy: Me too.

Janine: If I don’t have anything new to read I just reread what’s on my shelf. I can’t bear to have nothing to read.

Me: I never reread a book, because I remember it and I have a reading list stacked to the ceiling anyway.

Fran: It must take you ages to finish a book.

Me: Yeah, I’ve always been a slow reader.

Fran: Well, that’s probably why you always remember the books so well.

It became obvious to me that I was unusual amongst our book club members. I was the only person who never reread books, and I seemed to be the only one who lingered on words and phrasings and could remember books beyond twelve months.

I mention this ability of mine because I want to talk to you about what I remember from reading The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans, even though it was three or four (or more) years ago that I read it. I also saw the film, but the book was better and the scenes I remember are not from the film, but from the book as they impressed me at the time of reading. Overall I did enjoy the book.

An overall impression of the book is that you can tell it was written by a man. It has a masculine quality that is hard to define in words. It is the way he attends to various scenes, what he focuses on and what he leaves out. This is not a criticism, but a point that I found interesting, as a reflection upon my own sensibilities in relation to the author’s.

There are three scenes in the book that stand out to me in my memory of it: The crash at the beginning, the sex scene and the death scene at the end.

The crash at the beginning was so graphically described and so suspenseful that I couldn’t put the book down. It caused a pit in my stomach and when the truck hit the girls and the author described the slow, gruesome, drawn-out aftermath, I cried and cried. Because of this first scene and the consequences, I put my life on hold for that day and sat at home on the couch by the bay window in the lounge room and read the entire book in one sitting. This is not usual practice for me. I generally read in the evenings in bed, and only during the day when I’m on holidays.

The sex scene struck me because, as I said to Miss M, as far as female fantasy goes, the author lost the plot here. Let me see if I can find a direct quote for you. I have remembered the gist of it, but word for word might be more fun…

Bindi takes a short break grabs the book off her shelf and flicks through to about where she would expect to find the sex scene, about half way through…

OK, I found it, pp410-414 of the Corgi edition, 1996…

Phew, maybe I was wrong! It’s definitely more steamy than I remembered, and I now think I’ve been conflating this with the scene on pp388-89, which really was penis-centric (but for a good reason, I now see, hmmm). Too graphic to quote here…

Wow. I might have to reread this!

But before I do, I better finish this post. Yes where was I…

The last scene, oh yes. At book club, we discussed the logic of killing him off in the last scene. I thought it was futile and too dramatic and that making a martyr of the Horse Whisperer was not necessary to the thread of the story. For me, such an esoteric ending didn’t gel with the gravelly, realistic quality conjured in the rest of the book. Fran thought that it was necessary for him to die, as a sacrifice to the well being of the family unit. She also felt that it was a correct ending for the the Horse Whisperer himself, who now found himself incomplete without Annie. After discussing this at length she and I agreed to disagree. Martyrdom makes me cringe, big time. And I believe there is always a life to live, even after love and loss.

Now back to that section of the book, see ya.

Collapse

Hello Possums. It was a hot day in Melbourne today. A hot north wind was blowing and on my ride home from uni I had to peddle against it.The wind has dropped now. I went outside about an hour ago to hang out another load of washing and all was still. Some thunder clouds were brewing and it was still warm. Unfortunately over the last couple of weeks the pattern has been for the clouds to dissipate and no rain has fallen. Tonight I figured that I would do my bit for the drought and hang out my washing – that way it will rain tonight! (Murphy’s Law, Possums).We are desperately waiting for some rain. In Melbourne we’re in the middle of stage 4 water restrictions.There are rumors that a cold stream of water has been detected in South America and that this heralds the end of El Nino. For those of you not from Australia, El Nino is part of our weather pattern. Instead of getting predictable rain every year like the changes of the seasons, our weather is governed by the El Nino/La Nina pattern. The hot, dry conditions of El Nino can last for years. The end of El Nino would mean rain for Australia.Providing enough water for our cities is not just a geographical problem, but also a political one. In Queensland the Government wants to build new dams. There have been heated protests about which towns should or should not be flooded. I found the arguments against the new dam compelling. Apart from people losing their homes, there seemed to be no evidence to suggest that there would be enough rainfall to fill the dam if built anyway.This is just the tip of the iceberg, Possums. Building more dams won’t save us. Other suggestions to conserve our drinking water supplies have included industry using grey water (for cooling towers in power plants, for example) and rethinking our use of water for hydroelectricity. I have read Collapse, by Jarred Diamond, and am worried that we need to change our practices much much sooner than later. These concerns are not just for our plight during this drought, but also around the world as we face global warming.It is still very hot outside. Hard for the children to get to sleep in this weather. I usually read to them before they go to bed. Tonight we all lay on my bed and finished ‘Rohan of Rin’. Lying down was my idea because I was exhausted after my ride in the heat. It was a great ending to the book. Rohan became the hero of his town and it brought tears to my eyes. The kids now expect me to misty up at these bits. They look across when my voice wavers because they love to tease me about it:Mum, are you crying? laughterNo, of course not, its only a book!Oh yeah, sure! I can tell. You’re crying!Am not! cheeky grinWe read the entire Deltora Quest series prior to Rohan of Rin, all whilst waiting for Harry Potter 7! The wait is driving us crazy! For those of you who are not into Harry Potter, you won’t know that Voldemort is back! Dumbledore is dead!! And it’s not looking good for Harry… Will it mean the end of the Wizarding World as we know it?