Birthday abandon

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Today my twin and I celebrate our birthday. In a stroke of good fortune and good planning we are spending it together in our home town on Melbourne. We had to scratch our heads to try and remember the last time we blew out the candles together on home turf. It could have been as long as 14 years ago. Before work and children I would give the entire day over to celebrations. Now I'm a little busier, I try and give it centre stage for a good half-day and impose a rule. No moderation. Eat? Well! Drink? To excess! Spend? With abandon!

Time's Up

I really love Hamb, Simon Obarzanek's clothing and (limited) accessories brand. I love the fact that Bangladeshi workers will not die in the production of their products (everything is made in Australia) and its love of stripes, strong colours and illustration. But until now I didn't know Hamb had taken on clocks. In my home I check the time against two ugly time pieces. I think they came from Officeworks. For a design graduate this is a source of great shame. Design purists, modernists and lovers of fine things kind of cringe when they catch sight of them. I know I do. I am certain I would feel more at peace with the passing of time if I had Pony Clock on my wall.



Hand-printed 28cm wall clocks made from plywood sourced from Australian renewable plantation pine. Quartz clock movement (made in USA) requires 1 x AA battery (not included). $79

Siri Hayes: Back To Nature

If you are anything like me, at this time of year when days are shorter but the sun still shines strong, you see-saw wildly between the urge to prepare for winter hibernation and squeezing in another cup of tea with kin folk out there. Take Sunday. I caught the train to the country in good company and did not draw breath for 12 hours. About the only moment I wasn't in conversation was when I spied three solitary kangaroos on a distant hilltop. I watched them chew lazily on grass. But even at a safe distance I couldn't help size up their muscular thighs, their fearsome tails. The scene was punctuated by bird sounds, more screech than song actually: the bush really seems to come alive at dusk.

On Monday I took a vow of silence in order to recalibrate my inner world and to give some time and space over to reflection. That's another way of saying I stayed in and cleaned house.

This present frame of mind brought to mind, Siri Hayes exhibition, Back to Nature, currently on at Heide Museum of Art in Bulleen. Her photographs, often of natural environments, take into account human beings their presence, activities and artefacts, but never in a heavy-handed way. If anything they bring to mind stories of undomesticated animals making their way into habited environments in reverse. I see people like myself, city slickers, tentatively relating to nature.

It's a small show – just a handful of photographs – and a short film, but it displays a keen sensitivity to its environment: the gallery space and the Heide grounds that inspired the work. I liked its sense of refinement, its assured understatement. It is perfect for a Sunday.

Siri Hayes: Back to Nature
23 March – 28 July
Heide Museum of Modern Art
7 Templestowe Road,
Bulleen

Beyond cool

images: maja baska

I was just toodling about checking out Maja Baska's website  when I came across these shots. Who are these dudes? And where can I find their leather action? What is that arrow over the crotch?

Let's just say, I love it.


A Cut Stitch
Maja Baska and Jenna Tapia
Back Gallery
Off the Kerb
66B Johnston St
Collingwood 3066
www.offthekerb.com.au

Super

Credit: Ramona Barry



As Oprah would say I have not been in my "right mind" this past fortnight. Stevie Zee caught a superbug during fairly routine and minor surgery and before you could say Methicillin-resistant Stapylococcus aureus, he had clocked up twelve days in hospital (released yesterday, he's now convalescing at home).

My altered, high stress state may have influenced the abnormally excited reaction I experienced at the new Carlton Court Brunetti's. I had naturally heard about its imminent opening, followed the visa kerfuffle in the local paper (importing real I-talians to bring the right amount of strut to the service).  None of this prepared me however for the encounter which was rapturous. I almost wept, though that might have been because it was my first night off round the clock child care duties in one hundred years.

I saw mirrored cabinets with tortes, a twenty meter long coffee bar, and elegantly suited waiters with FBI-like ear pieces working in concert on a raised platform. The bold scale, high-ceilings, luxurious surfaces in terrazzo and marble, not to mention the dizzying circular construction, had me enthralled.  The theatre! The grandeur! I felt like a lowly peasant who had travelled from the French provinces sometime circa 1888 and caught sight of one of those new things, department stores.

I understand Yuri Angelé and his partner have a few years in the business under their belt, like 38 years. They've learnt a thing or two along the way about creating an impression.They've finessed their vision in Singapore and Dubai. But honestly, on this one I felt they'd sat down with an espresso and a napkin and sketched out the pyramids.

Everybody was there. I saw Italian mammas and their formally attired offspring, fusty academics, stylish queens and gen Y hipsters. In a tribal town like Melbourne this felt like some kind of triumph. I felt glad to be a city girl, glad to be out after dark, glad to be alive.

Polka dot: Brighter Later

For most of the year, penciled in my diary under Sunday 24 March has been 'Brighter Later album launch N'cote Social Club'. Being the nun that I am these days (early to bed, early to rise) I eyed it warily. There was no way I was going to miss it – I would go to the opening of an envelope if Brighter Later's front lady Jaye Kranz was somehow involved – but my stamina after the moon tracks its way across the sky is notoriously poor. Still. There is something to be said for going hard sometimes. It creates its own momentum. I put in a good effort on Saturday night at a fancy black tie affair. By Sunday night it was a way of life.

I spend most of my time either with my children or colleagues these days. And while these are peeps I love and respect I am generally my G-rated self in their company. Was it the pub environment? The Twin Peaks soundtrack between acts? The fact I spent most of the early nineties with half of the people in that room? At the Northcote Social Club on Sunday night in the company of old friends I felt like I opened a little storage unit in my head, a place where  my dirty twenties are stored. It was good to give those M 15 + memories an airing.

Then the stage curtains parted. In the centre Jaye sat bent over a keyboard with Brighter Later's Virginia Bott to her  right. The two of them were flanked by six musicians, all men, tightly packed around them. Shane O'Mara (legend?), Dan Marsh (Human Face), Patrick Dunn (Lower Spectrun) Sean Albers (regular Brighter Later drummer), Simon Baily (Pony Face frontman) and hairy Cameron Potts (best known for his drumming with Ninety Nine). On this occasion I saw him clap his hands and play a book with uncommon gusto. Though I couldn't tear my eyes away from him, they were all wonderful. For someone who sees little live music I was struck by a few things. The sight of eleven guitars, neatly stacked like bikes along a rack. The sheer number of cords and electrical equipment. The glances between musicians as they spoke to each other with instruments.

The band launched into 'All the World', track one from the The Wolves. Jaye's ethereal sweet voice filling the room, the thick, dense sound of the band creating a rich soundscape. Their music evoked a sublime and forbidding landscape. They followed it with the Woods and Satellite. At the end of that song Jaye looked up and said "That was nice. She said it like a perfectionist pleased with what she'd heard. I liked her solemn, though not humourless, stage presence. It was a powerful contrast to the cocksure swagger of supporting act Tommy Spender who had entertained the crowd with a guitar and a gutsy Bruce Springsteen cover an hour earlier. At the end of the night, between 'Another Day' and the encore, 'Zigi Song', dedicated to her grandfather, she flashed a big, bright smile. It was a smile of joy and maybe a little relief.

Oh, the top. The polkadot top? Gorman, naturally.

The Wolves by Brighter Later out now.

The party whisperer

Hazel often has trouble falling asleep. Stevie Zee likes to help her in that direction through a series of visualisation exercises that usually involve who is awake (The owls are awake, the possums are awake...) and who is asleep (Coco is aselep, Arki is asleep...). That way together they map Hazel's universe. 

Recently, with Hazel's birthday approaching, it's involved birthday party preparations (what Hazel will wear, who will be in attendance, games played). Usually I am on the couch watching Air Crash Investigators, feeling glad someone can use their imagination and speak coherently after 8pm. But as the party draws near, I've become concerned: what kind of fantasy have those two constructed? And will it match reality? I don't usually outsource services of any kind other than taxation but this called for some professional advice.  Thankfully Belinda of littlechair is like, my neighbour and sometimes collaborator. I turned up at her door in a state of high anxiety pretty well masked until I spilt my tea all over the table.

I know what you are thinking. Get a grip. But I feel like I have a bit of overcompensating to do. I wasn't there for Hazel's first or second birthday. Interstate! Not present. Belinda didn't know any of this but like a good medical practitioner, she asked the right questions, listened to the answers and then put forward a number of sensible suggestions at just the right speed. We workshopped furniture (children sized table and chairs), table decorations, activities and games. Hazel got the final say on the palette (pink, no real surprise there but we drilled down to pastel rather than fuscia). Through all of it Belinda was a calm, encouraging guide. 

We will play a game that Belinda and I created, a version of pin the tail on the...this involves popping birds into a nest. The one below is in yellow but I am working on a version with a red balloon and pink birds for Hazel's big day.

Bird in nest, A2 with 12 birds on a sheet and adhesive stickers $26 + postage

Email me if you'd like to order one.