Monthly Archives: July 2011

Zzzzz…(head on keyboard, typing with nose and lips)

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july 31st - 5
Whee! Fun! I made a big colorful bunch of these fabric ice-cream bars yesterday—I love them so much, I can’t get over how simple they are to make—and then appliquéd them to some lovely manmade suede, and was up all night covering journals with the resulting fabric.

It was all in a big rush for a craft fair I was supposed to turn up at today. Except that I was still cutting endpapers when the sun came up, and was so exhausted that I didn’t go at all: the prospect of loading the dinghy with a crate of books, a trestle table, a folding chair, tablecloth, water bottle, and a packed lunch, then unloading it all on land—no time for a shower or anything—and then somehow getting myself (no car, don’t drive), with all the market gypsy gear, up to the NT Museum grounds by 7 a.m. made me feel so darn sorry for myself, I wanted to have a little cry. :D

Once I had made up my mind not to go, I felt much better. So much better that I didn’t go to bed and catch up on lost sleep, like any sensible person would, but made another pot of coffee and decided to keep on working…july 31st - 2

…on, of all things, a linocut printing plate that I have wanted to do for years now. It’s to make endpapers for  my handbound journals. I’ve done this sort of thing twice before, and only ever simple designs so, yes, the pencilled-in design above was more than ambitious, it was probably dangerous to my health.

Note: It isn’t really linoleum…it’s some sort of vinyl tile that I get at Jackson’s Drawing Supplies. Much easier to cut and carve into…just the design itself was crazy to work.

july 31st - 1

Five hours later…

It’s a miracle that I’m not lying on the floor of the boat, slowly bleeding my life away into the carpet. If I knew, this morning, what I know now, I would’ve gone to bed instead. Should’ve gone with my first idea: large polka dots. God, it was hard to carve this design! Those *#@%&@$ round beads, especially! And all that negative/positive transition stuff fucked with my head.

Language? Oh, haven’t I sworn on my blog before? Well, sorry but yeah, I swear a good deal. And how. I’m a pirate’s wench, remember? The Captain’s Squeeze. And since we haven’t got a parrot, Kris has had to teach the words to me, instead. He puts me in a cupboard all night with a tape player going, and I get a chocolate-scorched almond for every word I say right the next morning. >:) I know, I’m going to Hell.

It’s okay. I’ve got bookings, tickets, and everything.

july 31st - 4
Have you seen these? They’re travel documents for the dead. I went with the deluxe package and got plane, railway, and cruise ship tickets. The little stub? That’s some sort of boarding pass. And they threw in the passport, gratis! It’s all one-way, so they give you citizenship when you arrive. I’ll be staying at The Hotel California.

The living burn these paper items at funerals and death anniversaries, and the offerings go off in spirit-form with the departed soul…to help the poor sod on his travels through Hell. There, as here, having money, nice things, and the appropriate documents, can get you through all the red tape quicker. There’s Hell currency, paper formal attire, paper Mercedes Benzes, paper houses, paper shoes, even fake paper cigarettes (it would be cheaper to burn the real thing, I’ve compared prices).

july 31st - 3

And here’s a real ticket to Hell, from Trondheim, Norway (with return)…

A return ticket to Hell

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Swallowed by the fog

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setting out

After a coffee and a bit of last-minute cuddling, Kris took leave of our houseboat, SonOfAGun. He rowed over to his sailboat, Kehaar, pulled her rag (sail) up, dropped the mooring lines, and was off. He sailed past me on the way out, and I busied myself with taking pictures so that I wouldn’t burst out bawling. He’ll be gone for about four months, this time, and although we are often apart—he goes on adventures and chases down dreams, while I take more ordinary trips to visit parents and friends—I still snuffle, snort, and weep at departures.

sailing past

Going to Asia in THAT?!

You bet. Kehaar has done 47,000 miles of sailing. She’s been up to Vladivostok, to Busan (Korea), spent years in the fishing harbors of Japan, hopped the islands of Southeast Asia, traversed the Indian Ocean, wiggled up rivers in Madagascar, done some trading in Zanzibar, and lolled in Jo’burg…in fact, we came to Darwin together in this small boat, 6 years ago. These 14 years of unconventional sailing came together in the book Monsoon Dervish, which we finally published (ourselves…the first and second printings were even bound by hand!) in 2009.

The boat has a quarter-inch steel hull with bilge keel, a Chinese junk rig (unstayed). She has no engine or propeller, nor any sort of electronics on board. Hardcore sailing, the old-fashioned way: a concentrated elixir of wits, skill, nerves, patience, fear, and self-reliance.

A heavy fog rolled into the harbor as Kris was sailing out, and my photos went from ‘clear morning sunlight on the water’ shots , to grey and hazy milk-soused scenes, in a matter of minutes. Before I knew it, Kris and his boat had disappeared into the sea smoke.
swallowed by the fog

Bon voyage, my love.

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Patchwork journals, and A Portrait of the Artist’s Dinner

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Goal for the day.

Started the day with a small pile of text blocks (stitched, taped, glued yesterday) and 8 pieces of machine-stitched crazy patchwork. There’s a craft market on the grounds of the NT Museum and Crafts Council this Sunday, and I wanted to offer something new for the Dry Season.

Also, I finished Danielle’s barn owl journal. It needed something, so I painted some curly tendrils and leaves over the rainbow of owl silhouettes. What do you think? I hope D. likes it, anyway.

danielle's owl journal

stack of finished books by sundown

Towards lunchtime Kris went over to the mangroves and pulled up our crab trap (sometimes—not very often—we take the time to bait and set out a trap for the mudcrabs in this area). He came home with three monstrous crabs…all in our one trap! Yay! The timing was perfect, as Kris sets sail tomorrow morning for the Philippines, so we were going to have a memorable last dinner together (and for the four months that he’ll be gone there is no way that I am going crabbing myself!) They were big. And man, they were angry! Not that I blame them.

three massive (and angry) mud crabs!

We had two of them for dinner. Chilli crab! The third we just steamed, for ‘snacks’ tomorrow. One of tonight’s crabs was just stuffed to bursting with deep orange fat…Kris was going to throw it all overboard! I let out an alarmed scream: “Crazy white man! Throwing out the best part!” You can buy crab fat—just crab fat—in bottles back home. It’s expensive and precious and decadent, with a squeeze of lime, a dash of fish sauce, and some chopped chillies, on fresh hot steamed rice. (Instructions to Soul: Die. Go to Heaven.)

*shaking head* Honestly! Throwing away the crab’s rich fat…or removing the beautiful heads of large fish…or boiling wonderful big prawns in plain water, and then chilling them on ice, and eating them between slices of horrible white bread, with cold butter, and lettuce leaves. Blarggghhh! No wonder England has had to adopt vindaloo as its national dish.

Take an egg. So many wonderful things can be done with an egg. At the place where I work, the elderly unfailingly ask for one hard-boiled egg, sliced, in a sandwich of soft, white, chemical bread, with nothing else but lettuce and some butter. “Salt?” I ask…a desperate, pleading look in my eyes. “No, no salt. No pepper, either.” Ye gods. In the kitchen out back, we refer to this as “Fart Sandwich”. ;)

dinner

Chilli Crab

  • 1 Tbs ginger, minced
  • 4 garlic cloves, minced
  • 4 fresh red chillies
  • 8 Tbs sunflower oil
  • 4 fresh raw mud crabs, cleaned and quartered
  • 2 Tbs sugar
  • 1 Tbs salt
  • 2 Tbs tomato paste
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • to garnish: coriander leaves, roughly chopped

Blend the first three ingredients in a  food processor (or with a mortar and pestle)  to make the spice paste. Add a little oil to make it smooth.

Mix the last four ingredients together (not counting the coriander garnish), to make the sauce.

Heat a wok in high heat until smoking hot. Add the oil. Stirfry the pieces of crab until the shells change color (2 minutes or so). Remove and set aside, turning the stove down to medium. Stirfry the blended spice paste for a minute or two. Add the sauce mixture to the wok and stir well. Put the crab pieces back in, and simmer for three minutes, adding a sprinkle of water now and then if the sauce gets too thick.

Finally, stir in the beaten eggs and cook until they set into strands dispersed throughout the gravy. Move to a large, wide dish or platter. Sprinkle coriander over the dish, and serve immediately (with steamed basmati rice.)

Hint: If you don’t want to cook a frozen or long-dead crab (inferior, even unacceptable, to Asian cooks…and don’t even think about those plastic trays of  white and orange ‘crab meat’! They’re made of fish.) put your live crabs on top of lots of ice in a cooler for at least an hour. They will turn catatonic and very placid, but won’t die. When you’re ready to cook them, you can pick them up easily, they won’t put up a fight. Take extreme care if you are going to pick up an angry, alert mud crab with your bare hands…they may look small, but those pincers will crush the bones in your hand. As I was moving these monsters into the cooler, I used a wooden spoon to push them out of their buckets. The smallest of the three grabbed my wooden spoon and cracked it.

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Nana wheels and some lively kishka…

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26" doily wheels

Little has been made   
of the soft, skirting action   
of magnets reversed,   
while much has been   
made of attraction.   
But is it not this pillowy   
principle of repulsion   
that produces the   
doily edges of oceans   
or the arabesques of thought?   
And do these cutout coasts   
and incurved rhetorical beaches   
not baffle the onslaught   
of the sea or objectionable people   
and give private life   
what small protection it’s got?   
Praise then the oiled motions   
of avoidance, the pearly   
convolutions of all that   
slides off or takes a   
wide berth; praise every   
eddying vacancy of Earth,   
all the dimpled depths   
of pooling space, the whole   
swirl set up by fending-off—   
extending far beyond the personal,   
I’m convinced—   
immense and good   
in a cosmological sense:   
unpressing us against   
each other, lending   
the necessary never
to never-ending.

—Repulsive Theory By Kay Ryan

today brought 26″ crocheted doily wheels…

pushieand snakey things that Kris says are кишечник (‘kishka‘…intestines). I prefer to think of them as happy spaghetti and mie goreng noodles… :)

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Dreams.

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pink bicycle

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

Franz Kafka

Was halfheartedly painting today. All I have to show for it is this pink version of my bicycle, which is red in reality (a Ruby Belle retro bicycle by ProGear, Melbourne.) This is just a small detail from the larger painting Moulin D’or, which is coming along very slowly.

I’m at that point where I don’t know what it’s about, or why I’m doing it, or whether each new thing that I add to the painting is right. Unsure about everything. Unhappy with everything. Ready to turn back. I know from the last painting that I have to push ahead, regardless of how I feel; I cannot expect to be happy with everything I do to this piece of canvas…especially not at the beginning. I never am. I need to get to that place Kafka refers to…the point where everything pulls together, and I’m not working blind anymore.

The Golden Mill…grinding dirt into gold…spinning a dream. Was thinking about this visit I’m making to Malaysia, and how I’ve decided to take my bike along, and cycle from KL to Butterworth: 367 kms. I’ve never done more than 25 kilometers at one time…and here I want to do 367 in the equatorial heat of an unfamiliar Southeast Asian country? What started as a crazy idea has turned into intense longing. I really want to do this. It’s taking on the proportion of a dream. Not a massive, life-altering dream, but a compact, concrete and doable one. A dream with a definite goal, a finish line. It’s good to have a mix of small and big dreams…pepper your long journey through deserts of heroic effort with little oases dreams…like a rest and a snack before setting off again.

I haven’t had many dreams in my life…at least not that I was ever aware of. I’m not a very ambitious nor competitive person. I’m actually really happy with who I am and what my everyday life is like—which can be a good thing—but it makes me pretty complacent. My parents seemed a bit scared to dream, and I think I’ve inherited that meekness. Nothing wrong with being happy with what I’ve got and where I am, but I think I should still be incubating a few little dreams…even if it’s just to find out what my limitations are when I hit a wall chasing the dream. After all, there’s just this one life (that I’m sure about, anyway)…this may be my only chance.

The words scrawled to the right of the bicycle is Kris’s personal motto. “Dream. Without dreams you are as good as dead.” Kris has a zillion dreams. And he’s one of the few people I know who actually works methodically through the list. So I know that it’s not impossible and I don’t want to be the sort of person who talks, for the rest of her life, about the one big thing she did when she was in her 20s!

patchwork journal

Other bits from the day: I’ve put a patchwork journal together…

handcut stencilled Shucho

and found this is old silkscreened print that I did a few years ago. The stencils (3 colors) were cut by hand, the design is Shucho’s “Girl with A Mouse”. I’ve posted this photograph because the print was lying around, and when I picked it up to put it away, I got some funny ideas involving ukiyo-e. I need to work on the ideas before I shoot my mouth off here. So this is just a teaser. :)

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At The Show

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Didn’t see any cowboys, but then I was too busy giving bookbinding demonstrations in the craft pavilion. Kris and I did a quick walk around the show before my demo started…we had 20 minutes, so I mostly shot on the trot…

This is all probably very commonplace stuff for people who have been to a Royal Show (or a Country Fair), but it was my first Show, and I loved the color and busy-ness and kiddie-ness of it all…totally appealed to my inner child. I just wish I’d gone on a ride, but there was no time. There’s always next year!

P.S. There are a few more pics in my Flickr photoset for the Royal Darwin Show.

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Your ugliness is what makes you special…

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time for soda?

In a blogging universe where everybody is trying to outdo each other in chic, trendy, or beautiful accessories for the home, I am posting pics of the wall clock that my better half brought home today. Tres chic, n’est-ce pas?

It’s not for our home and houseboat, thankfully…Kris needed a wall clock for his sailboat, to time his sextant shots with; the last clock he had melted when some molten steel from his above-deck welding dripped into the boat and set the bed, and then the built-in furniture, on fire. That wall clock, amazingly, still works…but the face is black beyond reading, and it is shaped like a Dali timepiece, now. A tribute to the resilience of Time.

Conceivable Soda

Enter Strawberry Soda clock. The elbowed straw sticking out at the top has its own battery, so that it can wave left-right-left, in time with the tick-tocking of the second hand. The pink beverage this box is supposed to contain has a shelf life of 180 months, and besides being “vacuumize” and “Appetizing”, is also “conceivable”. Well, that explains China’s population, right there.

Ugliness beyond belief, but it was the only large wall clock he could find in a hurry, and he paid all of $8 for it. You get what you pay for, I mumbled. (Terry Pratchett would counter “You get what you deserve.”) I was compelled to photograph it; I don’t think I’ve seen any home accessory so ghastly in my life. I can’t believe it’s ours. In a funny way, I feel proud. I’ll betcha Design*Sponge hasn’t got one of these! ;)

But Kris couldn’t stand it either, and he cracked the straw off…says he will paint the box white, tomorrow. So these may be the last Strawberry Soda Wall Clock photographs the world will ever see. Naturally I just had to share them with you. Now isn’t that special?

Not increase the antiseptic.

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Loop The Loop

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Loop The Loop poster

The radio interview with Loop The Loop’s musicians, Gene Peterson and Adam Page, that I had managed to hear snatches of—over the clang and clatter of the kitchen at work—simply did not do this show justice. There was, I recall, some banter about rubber squeeze toys, and a brief tootle on a zucchini flute…but the radio announcer didn’t manage to describe the show with more than the usual adjectives “amazing” and “wonderful”, already used indiscriminately on everything—from charity concerts for Japan, to Sunday churchyard cupcake sales.

Which turned out a good thing, because I went to last night’s show expecting 100 minutes of 1930s Jewish-American television humor by two doped-up ex-surfies, pulling homemade instruments out of their Wicked Camper Van. I expected a lot of “Whoa!” and “Hey, Dude,” and to witness musical skills equal or slightly better than those of Toad Suck, Arkansas’ 5th grade band class.

It was nice to be wrong. Peterson and Page cobbled real, dance-able, enjoyable musical pieces together last night, using about 30 instruments—classical, traditional, vocal and body instruments, besides the bizarre ones made from zucchinis, typewriters, or vacuum cleaner pipes—combined with funk, reggae, and carib rhythms. And The Loop, of course.

Performance oriented Liveloopers will take real-time audio samples, and loop these samples on the fly, allowing the musician to sample new material while the current loop is playing.  It’s a quick way to extend half-a-dozen sampled instruments: a phrase of saxophone, some toots across the open mouth of a glass pop bottle, some righteous percussion, a bit of spoken word, beatboxing, vocal turntablism, and singing…into one big, rich, layered, harmonious sound…immediately, in real-time, onstage, using whatever you’ve got on hand.  Or on your chin.

The Beard
Highlights of last night’s show, for me, were:

  • Adam Page’s rock Tribute to his beard (included Tibetan throat singing!), using samples taken of ‘microphone+beard+mustachio’ encounters
  • a groovy rendition of “Harry John Grove”…the name was provided by a member of the audience, and if I were that eight- or nine-year-old boy, hearing Page beatbox, sing, and embellish my name in funkadelic sounds would probably have changed my life forever. Would not be surprised if Harry doesn’t want to be a pilot, anymore, but wants a Real-Time Looper for Christmas, instead.
  • Grant Peterson’s live and loop-free playing of the drums with one hand, and a keyboard with the other (hence the appellation “Phenomenal Percussionist”)
  • A showdown between the two that saw Grant playing the life out of a typewriter, bath toys, spoons, and Adam rocking the zucchini, a miniature harmonica (the kind that comes on a keychain) and some awesome didgeridoo using a vacuum cleaner’s pipe.

Barbie guitars

  • A musical confrontation between a child’s pink battery-operated keyboard, and a small pink ukelele
  • There was, of course, some very grand music, as well: jazz piano, saxophone, a drum solo of Animal the Muppet energy, flute, and ukelele music.

miniature drumset and power drill

I’m sorry if you missed this one-night only show…it was a feast for the senses, and good fun, too. Shame people weren’t told more about it, it was really too good to miss, not something you’re likely to experience everyday (not in Darwin, not anywhere, really): two consummate musicians, a hundred minutes of creative, fearless, masterful music, a rich and substantial performance rounded out by a sauce of cheeky fun.

Loop The Loop T-shirts

Find Loop the Loop on Facebook, and on their website.