Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Hair on the page

Poetry while she cuts, Foolscap snug in my lap
Hairdresser unfolding her life story overhead
Cutting my hair to precise specifications meanwhile
Hair falling like crescent feathers on foolscap: snip snap...



My hairdresser is drop-dead gorgeous. A pale Cleopatra
She is presently building up the gumption to leave her partner of 20 years
I am helping her, or trying to. She says I help.

Women's mags abound
A man's voice to African drums is male and gravely over the airwaves
Otherwise it's wall-to-wall woman. The feminine is warm and reassuring

She tells me that her husband Seb has become obsessed with making money.
She and their nearly five-year-old son are a distant second and third
He is obsessed, she says.

"It's almost funny" a snide aside. "Almost. Until I smash the car..."

"If you do that again don't bother coming home," he says.

She wants to leave him now.

Vicky has long owned the thriving salon. She employs three and works there full-time herself, even during pregnancy. Together, she and her husband own the up-market salon along with various other properties that he manages as his work.

At forty-three Nicola remains physically perfect. A trophy wife, he says.
He is quite good looking too, apparently. He used to be a mechanic.
She's not about the money. She's really not. She wants a husband.

This is what he expects of her as she remains a full-time earner in the paid job market:

His meals bought, cooked, served, and tidied away
Never to even consider making her any kind of meal
To do none of the clothes-washing and sorting
To clean nothing: sheets, showers, socks, jocks, the lot!


Gender war



I think, on second thoughts, I will call the battle of the sexes a WAR.

Feminists have never thought of it as such, no armed combat or winner-take-all motivations for us. But I think perhaps that's one of the ways we might have gone wrong. Men relate to war.

So war it is...

In the last two days I have been told two true stories of relational, male-female breakdown. I am addressing both as aspects, strategies, and points of fierce conflict in the gender war, as far as I see it

One shows how men can and do wreck their relationships with women, the other how women do the same, allowing for some sweeping, but fairly educated generalisations from these specific cases, of course.

Case A: On Men

My drop-dead gorgeous and relentlessly glamorous hairdresser who owns her own thriving business, works a fifty hour week washing, colouring and cutting other people's hair, sweeping up and making the smallest of talk to keep her customers happy, all the while stood on her feet, is married to a money-obsessed man who was once a mechanic but now spends his time managing their various accumulated properties, including the hair salon.

The couple together own the up-market salon, a spacious modern house, and a number of other properties bought from the proceeds, mostly, of her business. He does well at this managing job, evidently, but it's not that hard, especially when you do NOTHING else. And he does nothing else. Somehow my hairdresser manages to work fifty hours and run the home with next to no help from him. She is finally, after twenty-plus years, sick of it, and sick of him. They have one young son of five.

Her business thrives, she is an amazing hairdresser. Had she not had to look after him all these years she probably would have retired by now and never had to work again. But as it is, he manages their property investments from a home office while she goes out early, before eight every morning, to stand and serve, day after day, including Saturday.

He manages the property that is at least half hers, but she would rather he gave her his time and attention (love and respect) than the profits of his obsessive pursuit of money which they don't have time to enjoy or could ever expect to spend, presuming he has anything left to give, which she is now beginning to doubt. She thinks he's all about himself and the money. She thinks it's too late for them. I think she's right.

He expects her to do all the domestic chores, even though she's the one who works out of the house all day: Her jobs include day care drop-off and pick-ups, daily clothes washing, kitchen dishes, cooking, shopping,  social planning, all of it. Like a spoilt or very young child he even leaves his plate on the table and expects her to tidy it away as if he's in a restaurant. She has put up with this because she is that strong, having lost her mother when young and helped raise her younger sister. She has finally had enough and has confronted him with her grievances to be shown that he is basically unwilling to change. He just expects her to be there for him in a way that he is fundamentally not there for her. Where do some men get off expecting so much from women?

Case B: On women

An old friend pops in, the adopted son of a well-known local engineer who was a friend of my husband's as a boy. He himself is a man of somewhat more modest abilities than his father. Today he's fifty and all talk of his nearly five-year-old daughter. The joy of his life. They've just been to the snow. He has photos. Lots of photos. For work, he once had his own corporate chauffeuring and cab driving business before returning recently to his building maintenance and painting business. He works hard and is most of the time flecked with white paint. He is tall and lean and fairly good-looking, if rather weather-beaten and smoky of complexion.

He is separated from the mother of his only child. She is in her early thirties, so quite a bit younger than him. She has the daughter most of the time, he gets her every weekend. He pays 25% of his income on child-support and the mother doesn't work. "Hasn't worked a day in her life", he says, ruefully. She claims $600 from the government in living allowance and his child-support goes straight to the government. She says it's not enough to live on, after paying rent, so he says, Get a job. Anything. Work part-time in a shop. "We've all done it." But she complains that the cost of day care would take more than half of what she could earn. There are no family members on hand to look after the child.

The child is nearly five so things might change once she starts school. Might. But at the moment, to our friend, it looks like the mother gets paid by him and the government to spend the day driving around from one coffee get-together to another, same as those other friends who don't work, while he is stuck working all day. He works full-time and long weeks trying to make more than fifty to sixty thousand a year. She and the daughter get more than $10,000 before he even sees it. Income tax takes another 20%.

He lives on the leftover, which is not a lot. He adores his daughter and puts on a brave face: "As long as she's happy. Best thing I ever did" he says, and means it, though he's clearly unhappy with his lot. And it does seem unfair that the mother is not obliged to work at all and he effectively is, even if she's looking after the child - which is work - as well as carrying and breastfeeding the child to begin with.

Case B solution: Our friend could take the child one day a week in exchange for 5% of his income returned to him, while the mother works eight hours a week to qualify for the allowance, which shouldn't be reduced for the extra money she gets working, otherwise all incentive to work is lost. The child would surely benefit from spending more time with the Dad and probably the mother would benefit from a variation on her weekly routine. Employers could hire a whole lot of solo mums (and dads) doing their one day a week work, on different days.

Case A solution is rather more difficult. My hairdresser's husband has been told that he's not doing enough, that she's tired of cooking and caring for him and getting nothing back. He's upped his domestic game a fraction, but he essentially still doesn't get the concept of shared responsibility and care for looking after the home and family in the practical, day-to-day sense. She wants to leave him when they get back from the holiday they're going on with friends (girls and guys separate) that has been in the planning for years, and I think she will - and should - she's done too much and sacrificed too much for him already.  She deserves much better, of course that doesn't mean she'll find it, but an end to the sacrifice is considerable reward in itself. The son will suffer from the separation of his parents, no doubt, but in the long term, as far as making healthy decisions about his own life and relationships goes, he will be better off not seeing his mother serve his father as she has been doing.

As far as the 'gender war' goes, these cases highlight the difficulty of role and responsibility sharing between the genders within relationships - if not life. In each case there is only one child, which should make things easier for parents to move between roles rather than stick to traditional divisions of labour. All adults should know how to clean and care for others, and be prepared to work for money, too, if and when this is needed and possible, given the caring and cleaning responsibilities. It's a constant balancing of workloads that the majority of women and men in relationships struggle to achieve, but on which our collective happiness depends. If any war was ever worth fighting, the gender war is it.

Monday, July 29, 2013

Kate's Back

I don't know if anyone else noticed, but I felt there was something about Kate Middelton's back as she retreated from the first baby shoot, William carrying the baby. Some stiffness, I think of defeat. The kind of stiffness you get against losing all control. As she stood within the double doorway, William and baby's backs beside her, people all around, her blue back looked one way and then, I'm sure, the other. Exactly as if to say: What do I do now? A women, any woman, who has just given birth to a baby should not be asking that question, even if it is her first baby.



Personally, I'd rather look at the shot with them all in it.

Rotten?


It looks worse than it is. Most of this apple was salvageable. But rot and waste of food is a blight alright. Every avocado I buy I wonder if it will be eaten or thrown out. If you don't buy fresh every single day then you will have to watch out for the rotten.

Devonport


Devonport has all the best colours. The sea helps of course. But even here in this simple street scene, apart from the electric blue sea, the street looks colourful, though the Masonic tavern on the right corner is finally being demolished.

We live a few doors up from Devo. But we spend a substantial amount of time there, M's parents used to live in Cheltenham. Every now and again I get to seriously wondering what it would be like to live in Devonport and even think of moving there.  The houses are 20% more, so we'd have to scale down. If I could ever leave this house, which is a major big IF. I think I would miss being able to visit Devonport.

More Devo pics...    

It's a boy! II Sexism in NZ


It's good to see that sexism is alive and well in New Zealand, Aotearoa. Found this today (28. 7. 13) in an Auckland supermarket, the Top Gear sticker impossible to remove.

Kate the courier.

Men can be so childish. Even the baby is obliterated.

It explains, in one defiant tactless swoop, the reason why I am a feminist, and why feminism and feminists who don't stand up and against this kind of thing are doomed to live a suck it up or piss off to your own world, kind of life. I can't still believe this, in New Zealand Aotearoa, the country to first grant women the right to vote.


Sunday, July 28, 2013

It's a boy! (for now)

It's a boy! And we're wearing the boy colour to prove it. Little does the wee chap know what's in store for him! At least he comes into this world a little less privileged by being male than the worlds into which his father and grandfather were born.
"In 
primogeniture (or more precisely male primogeniture), the monarch's eldest son and his descendants take precedence over his siblings and their descendants. Elder sons take precedence over younger sons, but all sons take precedence over all daughters."  Will and Kate put an end to this in England, bravo to them for that, though we won't now see the benefit of that change in our lifetimes. Drat to that.
So now we know. There's not much else to distinguish a newborn baby, as far as any surprises go, other than its gender, if not known in vitro. In this case, some might guess that the royal couple knew they were having a boy and decided to bring the change of law about while they could, even as it won't affect their children. Good on them. Hopefully the change spreads its liberating tentacles across the globe.

The night's muscle


The power of the night feels like
the power of a well trained muscle



Lately, all I can 'see' is the night's muscle,
You could say I'm obsessed.

The darkness seems to need
material explanation,
Air is insufficient.

Muscle well trained is my material explanation.

I have also been greatly taken lately
by the night's slow undressing -
or dressing - be she Black.

Changed a line in a story
for that.




Saturday, July 27, 2013

Winter colours

Narnia!

Perhaps you might say, these are some typical winter photos. Nothing but white bright, though you can't beat that snow blue sky for brightness. These are a few of the shots taken on our winter three-day jaunt to New Plymouth recently. If I put captions it rearranges the photos tediously. The tower is the original water tower to store the town's water more than 100 years ago. So Goth! The snow garden our teenage daughter remarked, as we romped down these snow-dressed pathways in the virgin forest of recent snowfall without company: "Narnia!" Exactly.

A staunch survivor

This was taken a few minutes earlier of a plant that has been with us for the entire twenty years that we've been on this land and survived various transplants, shrinking a little each time. It hadn't been thriving in its latest, and hopefully final plot, unless we sell, then I might well take it. I don't know which berry it is.



The white rose is almost as white as the mountain. Almost. But these winter flowers thriving in our front winter garden are a great comfort and inspiration. Often I want to get out of Auckland, sell the house, but not today. Not if it means leaving this winter garden



Hem

I want to tug on the hem of the sea today
Smooth out the one kink in the slinky silver skirt

Two likely gulls, ankle deep in my slinky sea
Eye me suspiciously, as if they'd have something to say about that.
Legs like coloured pencils: the colour of feminine rage.



Children run as if a hand of encouragement at their backs
Flashes of colour along the sand, darting, squealing, enough to confuse the dogs.

Time takes pleasure in the young, enjoys rushing them
Later on its hand becomes so stretched from so much encouragement it becomes like elastic that's lost it's elasticity, not strong or quick enough to snatch back the pressure with any control or panache, then there's less fun in it.

Another day of rejection. A day of reckoning. A faceless, spaceless email, barely two lines 'long'. Warm regards, I don't think so. I toss it to the sea: the wind accepts the message into its folds and sends it forthwith out on the tugging tide, before swallowing it for sustenance.

Time, in spirit at least, is always on one's side.


The Side that Seethes

Across a thick and solemn road
Two houses stand, utterly opposed

The one side seethes with shades of green light,
The other side, in stark off-white, and grey highlights,
Stands open-mouthed and staring as if wanting to be found.

The side that seethes also cackles and chats with last season's leaves
And birds discussing this, discussing that.

The side stark and still seems bold and daring,
Exposed in its off-white skin, barely a shred of clothing...


Now I've seen everything

The side that seethes is overgrown with English-Garden clichés.
The half buried brick path winds,
The cluster of unruly, well-arranged plants
Rampage in varying stages of flouncy overgrowth.

The stark and still side has a simplistic style to it. Functional and flat, rather like an oversized appliance. The first-ever computer that filled a large room, perhaps. Obsolete and cold, even in its own time.

The side that seethes also sings and smells sweet as it hides behind a dark, faintly fermenting garden cover. Taking over, like long hair on a guy, the garden veils in deep green the solid stucco bungalow, except for one attractive bay window to be seen.

The side stark and still allows one fern and one tree. The fern is cut, as if at the neck, to keep level with the front wall. The tree is barely half a tree, a berry of some sort, various vaginal wounds of amputated limbs, recent and old, seem borne bitterly if the wounds are anything to go by. Folded and frustrated, like a quarter fan, it stands permanently half-furled. You feel its stiff frustration. And all in the name of a double driveway and garage - another flat and faceless wall. Poor cut and closed-up tree, it appears to hanker to be on the other side of the road, with more of its kind, living, rather than standing guard like this.

On the side that seethes, one gets to wondering what it is like to live such an overgrown life. The letterbox stands on one leg with an elderly lean. The garage is practically comic. So ramshackle and shrunken, so lean and crusty, with a wedge of too-green hair rakishly dragged over one eye, it appears to mind its own business, keeping well out of traffic.

On the side stark and still the letterbox is a hole in a wall with a 3-D number pasted on in large, shining dark silver. Next to that stands a thin gate with actual vertical bars, as if a slim, slice-of-cell admission of borderline practices, however there's nothing but more off-white and grey concrete to be seen through it.

The stark and still house appears exposed, splayed open to the world, but a closer looks reveals angles and lines calculated with such care as to appear open while being firmly shut. The horizontal bars on the large front windows double as sun deflectors and cover for the occupants to hide while watching. Keeps them one step ahead, I suppose, or presumes to at least.

The side that seethes, probably struggles to see at all. The garden, at once a grand and quaint affair at the same time, no doubt, in that English-country-garden fashion, is now in charge - while being out of control. Derelict England, yet another cultural cliché. This house is almost derelict. The house, at least on this side facing the stark and the still from which it probably draws some unearned and possibly unknown credit, is mostly obscured from the road. The birds seem to favour it all the more and enjoy themselves with even more enthusiasm than usual. As if they too have raised a family, or maybe are still raising a family there.

An aside: Sometimes I find myself overwhelmed with the sense that birds, small birds in the sun in particular, are actually talking, not just twittering; forming what amount to words. In fact, so convinced of this and attracted by the idea I wrote a 70,000 word, young adult fable about a family of orphaned sparrows, who were effectively 'talking birds',  living in the remote South Island of New Zealand. The story is kind of written from the perspective of the author, who is living remotely in Drybread (actual place) and who claims that the main parts of the story, especially the dramatic ending, are true, as observed and experienced personally by the author, who remains, throughout, genderless. But that's another story...

These birds across the road from the stark and still, first-computer, appliance-like house, in the house that seethes, seem to be talking. I feel almost privileged to be party to it. The dry, left-over leaves make a pleasant scurrying clatter in the wind, all the while as if children playing some children's game, like musical chairs. Indeed the house that seethes lives.

The stark and still house appears to watch more than live. And it stands watch, primarily, over the house that seethes. The house that opposes it in every way, as far as character goes. If it were down to the houses alone one presumes they would detest each other, one brash and flash Big Brother, the other wise and wizened Old Man or Woman. The stark and still house appears masculine in its limited, clearly-defined style, the house that seethes is genderless in the way that some old folk are. The stark and still house wants to appear friendly and clean and honest, but it tries too hard and winds up seeming deceitful, cold and closed-in instead. Quintessentially masculine traits.

One house sags and seethes
the sweet mystery of material neglect,

The other stands stark and staring,
Stiff with the cheap secrets of material success.

I ride roughshod through their opposition on my way
along the thick black road, heading for the beach.






Friday, July 26, 2013

Words and Electricity







   
I did a good and a bad thing today
They were the same thing,
The same thing.    

I cannot explain explicitly,
All I can say is
Words and Electricity

I did a good and a bad thing today,
They were the same thing,
The same thing.

Big ship

                 



A big ship on the horizon
Nose forward, listing to one side    
Looks tired and unsteady,
Heavy with life's uneven load

The thin blue line cuts
A cruel dash across
Indifferent in its flat perfection
To the weight of its cargo
Of slumped souls on board.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Strings


Attached, balled and breathless
Cut, sharp as a scream
Knotted, clotted, blotted

Short as a tail tied to
A bald balloon 
Plump with hope let go
Up, on a waving farewell

Long as a hot white tooth
Endured and gritted on
A double-edged sword, 
An open-edged door
Of truth and pain ignored

Short as a tooth-picked ship
Painstakingly pincered inside
A glass green bottle
Tugged upright,
Set free on a sea,
Tied to a wish, as long as the world is wide.









Sunday, July 21, 2013

A lie in the sky


    
A jet plane
scratches the sky
A fingernail drawn
A-cross
God's great chalkboard
Lie

A kingdom of clouds
Silver linings of stainless steel
Packed and stacked so
Tight with promise
They peel

What's real
Is the sun's burn,
The pink and painful
Lessons learned

The magician disappeared
Leaves the sinner's stain
Burnt and broken skin
Cells and seashells to blame.

Getting warmer


     

Wet winter washing hanging
Heavy on a tight white line
Angling, aching, to be let go
To drop in happy heaped defeat
To the undemanding ground.

Perky pink, upright pegs
Are having none of that, they're not
Holding tight
To their weighty, weary load
Knowing patience and persistence pay
For a peg - as well as a prince -
And a toad.

The washing waits and works away,
The pegs hold on and on
For a whisper in Winter's bone-white ear
Getting warmer, keep on going,
Be Christ-like, strong.

Clouds cold and complacent hang
Mottled grey and grim
A load of washing ruined
A dark-shirted doubt flung in -
The virgin whitewash sin.

A breath of breeze won't do it
The want is wild for wind
To prove the peg and lighten the load
Before Spring's sunny soldiers swipe
The slated stains of Winter's labours
Clean, like a grin.






Friday, July 19, 2013

New Plymouth


Like many "new" things in New Zealand, New Plymouth is not exactly new. It's new in relation to the England and Europe its name springs from but with many buildings dating back to the mid 1800's and claiming the oldest cathedral in the country, it's an old town at least by Antipodean standards. Quaint, pre-capitalist cottages abound throughout the wider Taranaki district of which it is the main urban hub, and altogether the place exudes a resistance to the pushy capitalist take 'n' make, buy 'n' sell mantra, drawing artists from around the country as a result.  And where would we be without art...

Christchurch-born artist Len Lye's Wind Wand in New Plymouth  captured earlier this week by yours truly. "A narrow red fibre glass tube, 200mm in diameter, the Windwand stands 45 metres high... Weighing approximately 900kg, the Wind Wand can bend at least 20 metres. At night, a light at the top of the Wand emits a soft red glow."
For instance... It must have been a great artist indeed who happened to be visiting the town on this pristine day, so abundantly blue, its famous Wind Wand could be clearly captured bending down to kiss the crescent moon. I only wish I'd also captured it lit up at night on our arrival when record high winds were testing its engineering ingenuity to the max, looking like Mad-Eye Moody on a bender.

Like much of New Plymouth itself the wand suggests a successful marriage between something old and something new; between art, science and nature, surely the basis for all the best marriages.

The politics of the place, the location for the brutal Taranaki land wars between Maori and Pakeha, are decidedly less happy. But that's politics, it seems. Still, a curator at the old cathedral, that turns out not to be quite so old with only one wall left of the original tiny church, informed us that reconciliation between the local Tangata Whenua and descendants of early Pakeha settlers in the region has made significant progress in recent years.


This 1960s picture, on life-size display in the entrance of the local museum for people to stick their heads through and photograph, I'm not so sure about... In fact, I'd say it's an example of art, science and nature at war, no doubt thanks to the interference of the profit motive,  being sponsored by a local photographic business. 


       

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Country


                


A windsock points a fleshy finger
As slow-coming coffee sips 
Beside a fast-moving river

Happy fruit trees burst
With smiley-faced lemons
Hedges toe the line,
Big trees stand a chillin'

Velvet green fields
Fling far and wide
Horizontal bars for fencing
Laid-back inmates inside

A brown boy sits on a
Black dog smiling
A man of stone looks on
Stooped for the shearing

Black, brown, cream-curdled,
Patch-worked cows
Crowd a backstage wing
Awaiting the fur-fashion show to begin


Two cows sit kissing, preparing for rain
Beside a barn bent over,            
An aluminium igloo, supervising the hay

A crunchy Cornflake carpet,
Left-over leaves do make
No vacancy here 
For suburban suckers/blowers to rake

A burnt-out house stands high on a hill
1800s stylised still
Glamorous glassless windows cast
A dark and sensuous invitation to the past

In town a purple roadside house
Upholds a ubiquitous billboard brand
A young faded female sucks
A Cock bottle in her hand

White-backed, black-faced-and-footed sheep    
Have a bob and a baa each way
Beside stacked mint marshmallow bales
Packed tight with the sweet summer hay

Cast off, road-worn, licorice tyres
Smother a white-plastic mound
Black Fruit Loops in morning milk
For the cows to ponder and to frown.

Now grand fern-filled gorges rise       
Stern and steep either side
Nature's high-minded untouchables,
A thin grey arm daring to reach deep inside.

Four clean white crosses upright
On a sharp bend stand
Felled in one fast and furious turn,
Jesus stamps his weary brand.

Our Learner meek and tortoise-like
Keeps steady to the signs
Impatience rides behind on a bike - overtakes
In burka-black, brakes, unblinking, blind.



Sassy Signs

I do like a sassy sign, I do. Driving from east coast to west coast NZ earlier this week for a three-day getaway, we came across a few:

"Horse Poo $2"
"Cream Boat"
"Welcome to Whatawhata"
"Slow down, winter's here"
"Woo hoo"
"Whale cafe"
"0800 Bullhire"
"Mighty Makau"
"Be patient"
"Crafty cups"

And no doubt a fair few more that I missed while focused on the road and concentrating on my patience.

This one outside a New Plymouth dry cleaners I was able to appreciate while stationary. Had it been a little less chilly I may well have dropped my dacks here, too, sassy signs can be pretty darned persuasive. This also reminds me of the "Do Drop Inn" (I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings) from Maya Angelou's childhood in the southern states of the US, quite likely the headquarters of sass.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Assuming the pose


Cars on all fours scurrying home
Bums up, heads down
Assuming the pose

Arrows funnel us
Into uniform rows
Like armies - medals blazing -
In a war without toes

In which anything
And everything
Goes

When I'm Ugly


 

When I'm ugly it will be easy
To look into your face

To solve the mystery
Join the dots,
Read the lines,
Map the race.

For now I must continue
Waiting for your cue,

Looking in the mirror
Knowing that's not you.

Driving the day

Driving the day is a dream:

Invariably dressed for company,
Its wares on proud display
Travellers and tourists together alike
Are welcomed by the day

But not by the night...



The night sends trespassers packing,
Wanting to be left alone

Its large lands looming 
Like a bad bruise brewing
The light sky succumbs
For those darker souls and soils to stew

And trucks take charge of traffic
Corralling cars like little lost sheep
Darting into tidy queues
Frightened eyes blinking
Puny horns baa-baa-beep 

As Venus watches, warns and waits, like -  
A tiny ray of day.




Lost at sea



The tamed land
In womanly waves

Lies
Naked and curvaceous

Stretched out
Open and
Legless

To be stroked,
Stared at and
Suppressed

Inviting,
Iridescent
Indecent

Hair in coy
Clustered
Crevices

For men to mow
Stick a flag in
And play golf on

For cows to cavort,
Bulls to make moo
And sheep,
Like maggots,
To chew

Beauty beheld
But not to be
Born

In womanly waves
Lost at sea
Shorn

Friday, July 12, 2013

From Rock 'n' Roll to Right 'n' Wrong

 As I clearly know more about the former subject than the latter, I'm going to draw your attention to these documentaries that I think have something worthy to say on that pesky old perennial: right 'n' wrong...


 





I've penned a fair few words on the subjects covered in these documentaries and read many many more, but sometimes, I reckon, it's better to tell it in pictures.

Although set in the US, the messages in these documentaries have far-reaching implications for the west and across the globe. The first two are 2011 film-festival docos that you'll have to track down at your libraries and the third, on the misrepresentation of men and masculinity in the US media, is still in production, but the on-line preview looks promising.  

Seriously,
Sacha

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Rock 'n' Roll Housekeeping

Rock 'n' roll couch
Clothes sorting postponed. Housekeeping at the best of times in our house is not exactly rock 'n' roll. Leaving (clean) washing unsorted, on the other hand, is definitely rock 'n roll. Note, too, the cat's contribution to the rock 'n' roll couch. Clipping a cat's claws for the sake of a couch not being ripped to shreds by said cat's claws is definitely not rock 'n' roll.

You might call it sloth, I call it, in honour of Iggy (see previous post) evidence of a Lust for life.

MONEY doesn't talk...

Rock 'n' Rolling Stone Sunday:

I was going to take a picture of our winter garden looking lovely lit by the morning sun, tough winter flowers of various pretty names and faces doing their sweet staunch thing, then it thought, no. An ageing rocker's audacious fingers to all that is vain and pompous in our world better captures my mood, as the nasty neighbour's head off for church to get their weekly fix of all-is-forgiven narcotic.

Lust for Life @ 66
Now, I can't pretend to know diddley about Iggy Pop's music, although in my capacity as lead singer for a part-part-part-time ageing rock-pop-funk band in which my rock 'n' rolling husband plays guitar, I did attempt to cover his classic single 'Lust for Life' - and failed miserably. However, all was not lost. Along the way I learnt to respect the guy. In this recent Rolling Stone interview I think I found the key to the man's rock 'n' roll lust for life in his punchline: "I didn't do this expecting to make money...This is my teenage dream. That's still the glory of it." And he means it. 

Dylan of course said "Money doesn't talk, it swears" which, ironically, rock 'n' rollers do rather a lot of, too. The difference is that when MONEY swears there's no censorship and everybody gets royally fucked. 

Again, the key details of the modern manifestation of this collective fucking are provided in this edition of RS in the long and well-researched article on the big bad banks: 'Everything is Rigged', the conspiratorialists - including my 20-year-old son - were right. Because, in short: "When prices are set by companies (owned by banks) that can profit from them, we're fucked." I can't help thinking that if MONEY swore like that, namely in a rock 'n' roll fashion aimed at telling it like it is, ties and suits off, we wouldn't have a problem.    


Friday, July 5, 2013

Art harder

Truth in a tube

What is art? How do artists in the broadest sense 'art harder', as advised by writer Chuck Wendig, my favourite nerdy on-line sage? I don't know. But this artist does.    

Thursday, July 4, 2013

An angry sea


 
Black waves
charge the shore
Heavy booted,
bumptious roar

Lighthouse lost,
no candy-cane core
Flashes warning,
Red-eye sore

Amber-lit street
Lures walkers home
A sinister safe
The Ripper's M.O.

A child on the radio
cried for his mum
Wanting to climb
into her coffin

Hands that choked 
had stroked her before
An angry sea
cannot ignore

Climbs the night street
a monster in heat
Quickens the step,
no rest in peace.











Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Flowers over fists



Daisies, a gift from a friend, kissed by the early-morning winter sun..., a sweet
and simple antidote to the bitter battling and bullying of the bad boys' world.
Pity they must die...


Monday, July 1, 2013

Unwanted hair



What I object to most, as a woman, and a feminist, is thigh hair... There's no good reason for it that I can see, unlike everything else in the world that makes perfect, pristine, poetic, and political SENSE! 





What I enjoy most is making up sentences like these that I can be fairly sure no one has ever penned/punched before, even if this says more about my tenuous grasp on what reasonable people think worthy of comment, general lack of Life, and all-round strangeness (not to mention hairiness) than it says about my creative abilities. Butt, seriously...

I've been away from the blog a week or so (profuse apologies to my one loyal follower) and in that relatively short period of time, and among other gorgeous and reassuring developments in our fair and totally fine world, my country of origin has proven itself to be the biggest bloody ARSE of a country since the US claimed that, apparently much prized title by refusing to modify its antiquated and asinine gun laws in the wake of yet another school massacre - which is a pretty big arse.

If you don't know to which specific country and evil-arse event I'm referring WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU? (You're lucky). For those fellow sufferers who do know, I'm sure you will join me in wishing our two finest arses, Rudd and Abbot, a very happy time together screwing up the country - or simply screwing - they do seem to make a rather fine couple, having in common an intimate acquaintance with their own bottom hair - to return to the unwanted hair theme...

Unwanted hair