The Descent
Monday, 16th November 2009 by alexSeptember dust storms, 2009
Does this not seem like anger
Over 200 years we have plundered this land
Torn all the life from her ancient soils
Tortured her with thirst as we drank to excess
Carelessly Rubbed salt into her wounds
Infected her with an infestation of clumsy ruminants
Scratching at her dry parched skin
Until she bleeds red soil from her collapsing veins
So when she turns
And tosses all her dust into the sea
Can you not hear her saying
“If you value this so little,
what use do you have for it.....”
Catastrophic failure during the September dust storms brings my dome, shredded and quaking to its knees. After major repairs I relocated to the more sheltered space on the opposite bank of the creek.
Welcome dear reader. Seeking a voyeuristic fix? A dose of alternative reality thru the eyes of another, a brief interlude from the drudgery that makes up too much of your life...? I am only too happy to titillate your existential boredom with my tragic tale.
Consider that it just might be possible that the only reason I am out here is because I am too dissociated from society to conform to routine 9-5 work. My drive to build my security through wealth by hard work so lacking that, like an enlarged financial prostate, only an intermittent dribble of money makes it through at a time. And even that hurts.
In other words, I am a pathologically lazy shit.
With such complete denial of the civil responsibility to work for a living, I am forced into a state of poverty entirely of my own making. After my marriage dissolved my solution to the dilemma of financing the resources needed to survive was only provided by the providence of some capital gain made on the sale of the house. In my determination to avoid the soul festering burden of meaningless employment I endeavour to minimise my financial liabilities. So, having a complete disdain for having to pay bills, I would rather personally invest in the effort of cobbling together a stand alone solar array for my power. I slap those panels onto a trailer, which in the spirit of being a total tight arse, I myself have outfitted with the barest requisites for a functioning kitchen, all built in such a manner that could bring the DIY market to it’s knees with litigation. And because I choose not to pay rent (read can’t afford) myself and my little circus tent, filled with all the demons of my undoing, go off to find all the free places I can camp around Australia.
In order to dampen the frustrated grumblings of my ego at being such a social fuckup, I justify it all through a quest to create a great work of art, something to awaken and mobilise the sleeping masses against our dire predicament as a species, a work of art so appropriately ambitious in it’s conception as to balance out the deep scarring awareness of my own impotent incompetence. Starting to make sense?
To convince the more perceptive of you out there, my deception is laced with legitimacy by cleverly managing to negotiate funding for this great artistic lead balloon. A significant amount by arts funding standards, a poultry amount to sustain expenses in a cosmopolitan environment, enough if you drink from smelly puddles, shit into a hole and sleep under a glorified tarpaulin somewhere where people can’t find you.
My conscience has a fond way to describe all this... conscientiously parasitic...
So there, in that isolation, I do combat with my demons. The illusions I have spun, encircling me....... hungry.... choosing their moments carefully to interrogate this artistic master plan, patiently waiting to bear witness to it’s fraudulent exposure . And a bloody conflict it is. Strewn cross the battle field, countless musical themes, counter melodies, rhythmic motifs, chord progressions...... so much death.... each a sacrifice in the search for perfection, that indescribable quality that will allow this work to flow effortlessly and with utter conviction, a sensual blend of structural discipline and unbridled passion.... the ultimate accompaniment to a stunning and provocative visualisation. All fought while enduring the onslaught of the elements. Wild gale force winds, monsoonal rains and stifling heat.... each paraded over the top of me in succession like a posse of vindictive elephants jumping up and down on that poor little circus act lying on the bed of nails...
The flood.... note the drainage ditches on either side of my dome..... I was sleeping on a water bed for a while there. The creek almost washed me away...
And then there are the legions of living things, as if some bizarre alliance has been formed with those creatures banished from our toxic cities, they thirst for the opportunity to strike.... thick crowds of leeches which have the audacity to infiltrate the sanctity of my plastic stronghold and attack me while I sleep, inching up my chest seeking the tasty vulnerability of my eyes.... squadrons of flying ants battering my head with seemingly harmless ineffectuality, yet their strategy of sleep deprivation viciously effective...... but the elite forces are now being deployed and the masters of stealth creep into my camp at night and with teeth as sharp as razor blades, chew thru anything that is not made of hardened steel, they deplete my stocks and sabotage my food supply with a bombardment of faecal shrapnel, preparing the way for the worst of all weapons... germ warfare.
Don't be deceived by the serene calm of this misty morning, these are killing fields....
All the while my mind wrestles with itself, my grand quest, born in virtue of a deeper spiritual purpose? .....provoked by the lingering question over our integrity as a species shitting in its own global nest like some dangerously insane techno cult trying to commit collective suicide by overdosing on fossil fuelled laxatives? ...... or is this just my tragically compromised ego comically grasping at some absurd justification for my miserable inadequacies?
Certainly a pertinent question...... but following the precedent set by that most psychologically constipated mob of all... American creationists.... denial is a wonderfully powerful tool. And so with deft psychological counter manoeuvres I externalise my madness and the world becomes insane instead. My purpose is salvaged and my trajectory towards abject poverty a crusade of honour. It is indeed a convincing case.... very effective in the war of denial. After all, it’s not me who is now in denial. It’s you..... yes you... stayed tuned, for in my next post I will propose my case.
In the mean time, what do you think is really going on inside my head....add your vote in the comments section at the bottom of this post....
Is Alex’s maladjusted ego running the show...
Or has he found GOD!!!!
Nothing like a jesus complex to stir up the mud......
... make up your own mind......
But what does it all mean..... perhaps only that I haven’t finished composing yet...
What the..!?!
Thursday, 24th September 2009 by alexSeptember
So let me reveal some of the artistic process, or should I say, my artistic process.... for those of you who are actually curious.... and why shouldn’t you be... what makes Alex tick? How does some of that manifestly idiotic stuff froth forth into that poor maladapted imagination of his? Indeed I’m glad you asked. Let’s do a little experiment. First I want you to watch the following short clip and try to remember what your impression was......
This work represents the conflict between man and the environment.... the driving pulse, screaming and distorted instrumental voices belonging to the modern ultra energised, frantically paced human experience are juxtaposed against the calm, meditative presence of the natural environment....which in turn is twisted and abstracted into an electric psychedelic wash of pulsing colour and movement, morphing clouds of darkness flow like smoke across and between the mayhem like malevolent shadows stealing something precious and hidden.... the ultimate source of this bizarre transformation revealed in the closing moment of the work.....
Shit! that even has me convinced......
It’s true, this is a piece inspired by a bush walk I made near my first camp spot. It was a beautiful day, I was walking on a remarkably well maintained track that wound down from a saddle, descending through a pristine gully between two sandstone cliffs.... old growth forest on either side, magnificent old trees reaching for the sun in an ancient and timeless prayer, scratching their backs against the weathered cliffs. Originally I decided just to take some reference footage to add to my video library..... so I innocently did a pan in a circle only to be confronted by the “shocking” evidence ...excuse the pun... of human technological invasion.... to which I had to respond.
So.... when I arrived at my second camp spot for my next stint of work, my goal was to record a short piece to match my experience with that video clip and edit the whole lot together into a crazy psychedelic little number before I packed up and moved on. It was an exercise to practice making a different style of music using my electric cello, and to explore some more creative video editing. Indeed, the finished product in those regards accomplished what I set out to do, but not in the way I wanted it to, oh no!
This piece caused me no end of frustration. I learnt to hate it, but I soldiered on like a politician with a catch phrase. The music was my first abscess. I started by trying to be way too clever, penning a 3 part rhythm line, a toe tapping extravaganza that was to shock and awe with it’s cleverness..... then against this rhythmic spine I would weave some chillingly quirky atonal squealing that would have you on the edge of your seat drooling for some form of Wagnerian resolution..... none of that worked... it was dismal in fact, and after having waded far too deep into that ulceress swamp, a voice from within gargled “keep it simple, stupid”....
Well, you have heard the result of that.....
I intended the relationship between the image and the music to have a similar type of correspondence as D-F-R (Discovery-Familiarisation-Recognition, which you can view on this site), considering it is the style of visualisation I am intent on developing further, however because the video material was taken without any consideration towards being set to music, and the music was created without any real consideration to the video clip other than the sentiment involved, matching the two up in such a structural fashion had about as much chance of success as me getting laid out here..... or at least the level of complexity involved to do it was so intense I didn’t have either the patience or the time to dedicate to it. I wanted individual trees to have streams of psychedelic colour move up their trunks and then jump to the next tree in relation to the individual musical voices. I wanted the voices to follow the contours of the cliffs.... but I found isolating individual trees while the shonky camera work made them move with annoying irregularity across the screen was a headache, and when I managed to get it to work with one tree, the effect was so mild it was difficult to discern it as having any relationship with the corresponding voice. Ultimately all my permutations to this notion of developing some form of structural representation of the music within the image failed dismally and with great sobs of humbleness, and relief, I conceded defeat, bandaged up my very bruised forehead and allowed the imagery to find its own abstracted relationship by building in a heap of randomness into the various moving components. Although I should note that I did not discard all the work I had done and if you look closely you can still see the creaking bones of what I was intending to achieve, and some pretty obvious compromises I made to include some form of syncopated imagery. The morphing shadows are just an unintended artefact from the multiple shifting composites. At the end of the day, it was a good lesson in assessing my source materials and understanding the limits of their potential. It was also a great effort in exploring the possibilities of composite editing by way of what can be extracted from a single video file.
The question is, now that you know how much of a compromise the final result turned out to be, does it change the way you interpret what you see? Would you rather just have the arty spiel influence your interpretation of the work, let you believe that every nuance was planned and executed with meticulous detail? Does my struggle and dissatisfaction colour your own perception of the quality of the work, to my detriment? These are valid questions for an artist. You, the consumer of my art, do you feel as if you have had some of the mystery of the work diluted by my confessions? And if indeed this is so, than is it not within the interest of the artist never to divulge the true process of making their art? If you feel compelled to respond to these questions in the comments section below, please do, I am most interested in some feedback concerning the issue.
By the way, it is still pretty cool when you can experience it on a bloody big screen in high definition.... these crappy low resolution internet vids just destroy the full impact.
I am now at my third camp spot, somewhere near Taree. I am now fully isolated on a property belonging to a friend of mine, who visits only a few days every fortnight. The nearest neighbour is a few kilometres away. It is wonderfully peaceful, calm, beautiful here. There is delicious silence..... aside from the brain piercing crickets and a hillbilly chorus of amorous frogs. I have cows to keep me company.... we have staring competitions......There is fresh water that trickles from various forested hills, it has an aromatically pungent taste of dung....
After sharpening my claws it is now time to start the hard work on my major project. It is a daunting prospect. One tempered by this idyllic location....
And as my first toe dips in to test the waters..... the dust storm. Oh dear.....
Stay tuned..... if you get bored, read all the earlier posts.... put some perspective on this adventure...don’t whinge.... just do it!
A remarkable few days
Monday, 14th September 2009 by alexJuly
The unofficial reason for this journey is not at all about creating my artistic work, it is in fact an insidious opportunity for me to embark on an insipid navel gazing opportunity of monumental proportions. Whoever said art is a reflection of the soul was a clever wanker and cleverly provided this wanker the opportunity to cleverly justify the worst of his narcissistic indulgences........ thinking. Utterly indulgent because as we all know, spending long periods of time thinking stops us from being productive and earning our way in the world, unless we get payed to think, and then, like all employment, it’s just reduced to an intellectual form of prostitution. I’m sure I am already irritating you, so read on, show some masochistic fortitude.
It was a remarkable few days, an engineer who had found god, a man who died several times over, a woman who everyday witnesses the excruciating ordeals of the diseased and the horribly broken, the finding and losing of god, revelations....
So I have gone for an afternoon stroll beyond the other campground seeking a small orchard that had been planted there in the early 1900’s while the area was still a town, on my way I innocently ask a camper reading in a picnic chair if he gets a lot of wind where he is camped, the exchange is amiable, and what should have been only a short conversation expands and begins to take turns into curious and interesting directions, he’s an engineer, the coal seams in the la Trobe valley are 300 meters thick with absolutely no interspersed layers of sediment , another separate brown coal deposit, being a lower grade of coal still retains the forms of some of the trees and vegetation within. It is astounding, it’s a huge load of bloody coal waiting to be dug up, burnt and asphyxiate the planet..... but what is even more interesting is that the forms of the trees in the brown coal are all jumbled up as if they have all been just picked up and tossed into the mix, like diced broccoli in stir fry. You can walk along the open cut seams and see the chaos right in front of you, my curiosity is really peaked, fascinating, obviously they couldn’t have been ancient swamps as generally understood because there are no layers of sediment as you get with other sedimentary phenomenon in geology, and because of the jumble of trees in the brown coal, it must have all been deposited in one single cataclysmic event........ like a great flood perhaps.....and then came the deluge..... the rejection of evolution, species were designed as they are and don’t evolve, nothing has been proven to actually evolve into a distinctly different species, there is only variation within species, tinkering with DNA which is so infinitely complex ultimately results only in cancer, it can only be intelligent design. Carbon dioxide does not absorb heat so it can’t cause global warming, which the scientists have got all wrong, Jews are constantly persecuted because they are the chosen people, we are facing Armageddon.......and more... it was a barrage, and most people would have bailed early with some lame excuse like a sudden, violent puncturing pain in the bowels and raced off in the vague direction of the pit toilets mumbling purposefully audible curses about the water in the creek. But this character was fascinating, I wanted to know what it was that gave someone like him the motivation to utterly reject the painstaking investigation and hyper analysis that our modern, rational and scientific perspectives have engaged to try and understand the world.
So I let him take me to his world with the mutiny by Satan, the war in heaven, the fallen angles, the coming of the apocalypse, the resurrection of Jesus, the end of the world, Armageddon, and your admission into the presence of God thru the acceptance of Jesus Christ as your saviour. I allowed my disbelief to fade like shadow in twilight and imagined the profundity of all this were it actually true, and it is a colossal rock that shifts within you, the bedrock of your reality has to dissolve. The dark slimy places of my psyche were overwhelmed by the prospect of spending the terror of eternity rejected by God, the creator of all the beauty and majesty of life and the world it inhabits. God who is so full of love , God, who will forgive all your sins as long as you accept Jesus died for you on the cross. In this reality a simple lack of faith has an utterly unacceptable cost....... after all, eternity is endless, infinite, there is no full stop, ever........ So to be amongst the saved, included, chosen to remain beside God..... it becomes a relief of shattering proportions. Consider the emotions born from the reprieve of your condemned soul. I tasted it. And it is as addictive as heroin.
I didn’t confess my short spiritual experiment to my unwitting yet enthusiastic guide, and managed to extricate myself and continue my meandering in privacy with my new found saviour tagging along....... but there were some nagging inconsistencies. A life time of influence by a modern civilisation, shaped by the forces of rational observation and investigation, trickled back into my consciousness like cool water in a forest stream .
My engineer had told the story about how the tower of Babel was destroyed by God because man, in his arrogance, was trying to build a stairway to heaven and raise himself to the same level as Him. It was a calamitous act of destruction to remind us of our humble mortal stature in His world, a lesson which our scientists and academics have assiduously ignored, which will incur the wrath of the Lord and lead all unbelievers into an eternity of damnation. Yet today our supposedly arrogant investigations into the origin of man do no better job at placing us at the most insignificant of levels. Star dust glued together by replicating slime. We are nothing more than ravenous worms that have evolved crunchy bits in order to try and stand up......
My engineer had said that if I accept Jesus as my saviour before I die all my sins will be forgiven. Yet from a magnanimous offer of salvation, why did this seem to become like an ancient marketing ploy. To be accepted into heaven after a life time of misdeeds merely on the confession of my sins and the acceptance of Jesus seemed to contradict the purpose of having all these biblical rules and commandments in the first place. I want to make the world a better place through the preservation of life in all its variety and abundance, I can’t imagine a more noble and spiritual path to tread, yet it seemed as if my little engineer was convinced that my deeds on this earth had no bearing on my admission to the afterlife as long as I confessed my sins and accepted Jesus.
So our God given dominion over the plants and the animals has become manifest in the endless destruction of natural ecosystems, the emptying of the seas of its fish, the hundreds of millions of animals that every year horribly suffer their way onto our dinner plates, the vast expanses of forest laid waste to feed our wants, skies filled with poison and oceans turned to acid, as if we are the progenitors of Armageddon ourselves. And yet all the actions that drag us down into this madness will be forgiven if you confess your sins and accept Jesus before you die. There seems to be an abdication of responsibility here, like some cosmic escape clause that I just couldn’t reconcile. I resolved to read the bible, even if it was only to verify the evangelical claims of this fellow.
So that night I knelt on the ground like so many Muslims do and offered prayer to the lord to help me understand the interesting conflicts that my experiment had stirred up. And with that, the fantastic world inhabited by the armies of God slowly faded back into fantasy land. The next day was a stunningly beautiful, utterly appropriate day for having a reply in my prayer inbox.
Enter Pete and Zoey, what a cracker of a couple. We spent several evenings around the fire exchanging stories. Both Pete and Zoey told their tales with a down to earth humour and joy that lifted the spirits and warmed the chilly evening air with mirth and laughter. These were people who had both lived a tough life, rich in experience, raw in its beauty, a life worth telling.
They had found each other later in life. Zoey, a medical assistant, fed the steak knives to the surgeons as they made a meal of peoples ailments. With long scraggly black hair accenting her punctuations she would tell the stories of her life with a thick Greek accent that flew from a pair of lips never devoid of a cigarette. People dying in her arms, the endless flow of crumpled and diseased bodies, loves lost and found, pain and hardship, escape and abandonment.... and Pete.... in the dark he looked like an emaciated drunk, his jeans were too big and saggy, his hair was a wild spray of thin orange that vibrantly burst forth from his completely reconstructed face..... Pete had a tragic car accident when he was young, he died several times on his way to the hospital and despite his stories of all manner of mischief and vice, Pete was a clever bloke who’s memory was gallantly fending off the ravages of a lifetime of serious living.
He told of his near death experience, floating above his body watching the medical staff tinker with the slithering remains of his carcass..... meeting his deceased grandmother, following the tunnel towards the light and being enveloped by an unfathomable love which told him it wasn’t his time yet, and sent the bastard back.
It was an experience that drove Pete to reading the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, investigate Taoism and Buddhism. And still he didn’t find the god he had already met..... he certainly believed in something, but it wasn’t the god he found lurking in the texts of the ancients.
So here was a man who had come back from the dead, had visited the realm of the impenetrable and returned. A man who, by all accounts, had met God at the very gates themselves, he didn’t return clutching a bible to his chest.
It seemed as if my spiritual side trip had come full circle and I was back where I started. There is something inspiring, beautiful and profound about the universe and everything in it which will never have its secrets divulged through science alone. And any man brandishing whichever texts claiming he knows the mind of God is demonstrating utter hypocrisy and the greatest arrogance. The identity of god has through the ages been endlessly reframed by our struggling little egos to such an extent we have forgotten how to believe in the unbelievable. And yes, the world is unbelievable. When you sit far away from the distraction of humanity, on a hill side and just watch the sun slide lazily under the horizon without having your thoughts raped and pillaged by the superficial trivialities that box our daily lives, if you cannot feel how sacred this life is at moments like this than perhaps you have lost god..... whatever that may mean.
It would indeed be the greatest irony if all the holy texts were the works of Satan. Feeding the weakness of man, convincing us that with a few scribbles on a page we know the mind of God, fuelling our stupidity and arrogance like it were an open and infected wound, inciting us to disagreement and hatred, violence and death.
And upon that happy note, let me introduce you to the trite little ditty I composed in the first phase of my artistic journey. I had purchased a lot of audio equipment to supplement my compositional aspirations and I still had to learn to use it, investigate it’s capabilities and potential. So below you will find a short music video of my 5 weeks in the “wilderness” conveniently distracting you from the shamefully happy clappyiness that oozed from my technical explorations. Except for the drum track, everything you hear was made using my electric cello, routed thru an analogue to midi converter and then into my laptop. It would indeed sound muuuuch more funky if it were played by a group of real people playing real instruments..... but hey, I was playing with myself, what can you expect...
Stay tuned, there is more to come..... soon.
The next chapter
Saturday, 8th August 2009 by alexJuly 2009
So, my friends, here I am, surrounded by magnificent rock cliffs towering like unfathomably majestic sculptures, huge in their scale, ancient in their conception, clothed in a mantle of pristine forest, the wind whispering in seductive lethargy through the infinity of leaves and branches. My adventure, my journey into these wild, empty and stunningly beautiful places of Australia to cobble together my art, has begun.
You may be forgiven for feeling a tad envious, after all, how many of you would not love to leave the drab drudgery of the mundane day to day struggle behind and follow those romantic inspirations that every now and then burst into your consciousness, gasping for breath before ugly reality grabs that whimpering head and pushes those wistful emotions back deep into your subconscious. Indeed, what luck I have.
Yet not all is as it seems, and this journey which seems so perfect, has already revealed its dark side. Let me explain.
Despite the splendour of my location, I sit here tapping out my tale a tired, worn and tortured soul. My enthusiasm for this project sucked to a desiccated crumple by the endless expectation for an electric cello that just never turned up. A year and 2 months after the scheduled commencement of this project, the damn thing turns up and I finally manage to pack my gear and start driving, only to find the wheels of my trailer are rubbing against the sides because the bastards who built the damn thing made the axle too short, so it can’t cope with the full weight of my gear. With Taoist patience I return to the clammy folds of Canberra’s suburbs in order to fix this engineering fuckup. Then I discover it is still possible to receive the government’s $900 cash splash (god bless the Global Financial Crisis) as long as my 07/08 tax return is in before July 09. My poor accountant was no doubt stabbing pins into a doll with my name on it after receiving my late and terrifyingly disorganised financial slurry.
So another month later and again I pack and attempt to leave our consumer capitalist democracy behind. It is a grand day for all the strings have been tied, there are no loose ends and the trailer has two axles! nothing is getting in my bloody way! But fate is a bitch, and just to remind me how weak and feeble I am, I slice the tip off my pointer finger on my right hand while making “the last breakfast”. Half my finger nail is sawn off, dangling mockingly off the end of my finger, blood gushing out everywhere. I fold that flap back into place and hope to hell it will graft back onto itself as I wrap it up in metres of blood soaked bandage. Alas, as it turns out, over a week later my medical experiment in “ignore it and it will heal” fails miserably and I am forced to rip the now blackened and pustulating abomination off the end of my finger.
This wound, this farewell gift, however, had the striking capacity to bang against absolutely everything possible. Not helped by the fact that only 1km out from my destination the right brake on my trailer (yes, my trailer has brakes) locks and the tire starts skidding along the road. One of the bolts holding the brake assembly to the axle shaft had come loose and fallen off, allowing it to swing down and clamp itself onto the disc, snapping the entire brake assembly like a twig in the process. So naturally my incapacitated hand had to confront some greasy undercarriage work in the middle of a dirt road, leaving behind trails of blood over the ground as if fresh road kill had been malevolently dragged around by a sadistic child, splatter marks all over the disc of the offending wheel. Any forensic team would have had a field day with this scenario......
Unfortunately it doesn’t end there, for shortly afterwards in the effort to cross what is by all accounts a pathetically weak and shallow stream to get to a special 4wd camp spot, I get bogged in the sand, smack bang in the middle of the piddley thing!! How is this possible with the monstrous 5 litre V8 4wd fuel guzzling panzer tank I enlisted to stride over these insignificant obstacles?! I had the damn thing engaged in 4wd mode, front wheels locked.... but they weren’t turning, my heart sank as I confronted the real possibility that my drive train had failed, the machine was, after all, over 20 years old. Not to let a challenge slip past, I grabbed my incurable optimism and hauled out my winch cable thinking this was a prime opportunity to practice some good old winching.... and then 3 guys in a 4wd turned up from the other side wanting to cross, well my testicles shrank and my masculinity scuppered this stranded soul.... ran away and hid in a box. My embarrassment was, however, well camouflaged behind the flawless assessment of the engineering failures causing the situation, to which they responded by suggesting connection of the winch to their ute and they would reverse while I winched and spun my rear wheels........... the winch broke, with an almighty metallic clang of sheer stubbornness. The bastards didn’t even laugh, they probably thought I was mad, guffawing away like that, a man on the edge. I guess they weren’t privy to my litany of woes, they just wanted to get across, I was just some amateur fool with annoyingly old and unreliable equipment getting in the way. Bless those lads tho, they had a hefty tow rope that got hooked up in place of the winch cable and eventually, with much spraying of sand, my circus was hauled out of its predicament. When I was securely on dry land, one fellow suggested I drop the pressure on my tyres to get more traction in the last of the sand, which I dutifully do, on the front wheels, which of course weren’t working.....he did the rear....
It turns out my front wheels do work, my gears just hadn’t locked into place properly, and the winch has a security pin which shears off if the load is too great, the fault of being pulled by an impatient sack of testosterone. So there is some reassurance that I am not entirely to blame. Yet I sit here in the cold, cloudy, rain pestered beauty of this place, fretting the day when I have to pack up, leave and renegotiate that stream. The mole hill has become a mountain.....
July 22 2009
Having just survived a rain storm, I tap this next entry with some relief. There weren’t too many leaks in this worn plastic bubble. And if it can survive the targeted urinations of a gang of spiteful possums, it can survive a tsunami. All furry on the outside, all fury on the inside. Those little buggers will crawl up your leg to get at something to eat, those claws were so made for scratching on blackboards.....
So if you have read thru the earlier entries you may have noticed a gap of around two years.... well, life kind of gets in the way. I travelled to Europe in 2007 for some conferences related to my PrioritySpace work, my marriage dissolved, our house got sold and I spent a year twiddling my thumbs ever so slowly descending into madness as I waited for my electric cello. In the meantime I acquired my trailer, purchased some solar panels and bolted them to the top.
Built a small kitchenette on one side including a fold out table and a Waeco fridge (basically a large esky with a compressor), installed three back crushingly heavy batteries and wired them up with all the associated paraphernalia to my photovoltaics.
As I sit here the rain starts again, the spider’s web of tangled wires and audio equipment around me glow with the gentle reassurance that all that power came directly from the glorious sun..... all precariously parked under a stretched, aging and torn collection of overlapping plastic sheets held together with string and pvc tubing..... and it’s raining.....hmmmm.
Just as well I have the inside lined with thick polar fleece material. Being so horribly synthetic any drops of water bead and run off rather than get absorbed, forming a wet patch. Nobody likes the wet patch....
So why am I actually here? A question you may have been screaming to have answered as you read my collection of quaint little distractions. At this moment, as the fat rain drops pummel my delicate bubble like a million sperm laying siege to an unwilling egg, I am wondering the same thing. There are many reasons. I shall start with the official version.
In a nutshell, I’m travelling around the country, composing, recording and animating as I go. Drawing inspiration from the places I stay and the characters I meet on the way. This next work, and the journey of its creation is my response to the dire portent that is climate change. So in stark contrast to the wealth addicted consumer mania which so many are witless slaves to, I endeavour to live purchasing only what I need to survive and to maintain a functional studio. With any luck I can survive on less than $10,000 a year. Stay tuned, I will post my budget on this site as it evolves. I will also be posting video vignettes and music as accompaniment to what will become a relentlessly odious narrative.
As far as my financial independence is concerned, I must confess, that I am to a significant degree sponsored by the ACT government through their arts funding. In fact I must give great credit to Helen at artsACT for showing such leniency and compassion when I had to request for an extension on this grant because of one missing vital ingredient, that bloody electric cello. Bless her soul, on my first desperate attempt to escape the gravity well that is Canberra I found myself with all my gear strewn around a dirt car park trying to redistribute the weight from my trailer to my tank so I could limp back home to have the axles fixed, when Helen calls, and in my moment of darkness she shines a small ray of goodwill as she offers me that extension.
Today is Saturday the 8th of August, I am in Lithgow. I have successfully replaced my broken brakes on the trailer. Tomorrow I stock up on supplies and push further north, where the warmth will thaw my frozen arse. What was I doing during the last 5 weeks? Learning to use all my equipment, exploring what my new instrument can do (and despite it's lateness, it is a quality piece of work) and building my library of videos and images, to be brief. I will be posting the trite ditty I composed during this exploratory session in the coming few days when I have added some footage of my ordeal, so stay tuned.
Woodford
Saturday, 13th October 2007 by alexWoodford, what a great festival, despite the stifling heat of the summer, the heavy thick rain. Woodford is an experience worth throwing yourself into. It is huge, which on one level can be a little daunting, my little Dome in this endless bonanza of music, dance, poetry, film, writing, singing, acrobats, you name it, it pretty much happens at Woodford.
So after a madly insane dash up to Brisbane, leaving a battle field of traumatised drivers and insurance claims in a sprawled wake behind us, we arrive at the promised land. It was raining.........
.........had been for ages, heavy thick relentless rain. My van hadn't been this clean since I bought it. I had wanted a sofa in my Dome, so I studiously researched where the nearest recycling depo to Woodford was so I could pick up an unloved sofa. And blessed be, there was a depo about 15 minutes away from the festival. But it was closed, despite assurances on their website. And it was raining. Heavily.
But I wanted a bloody sofa. So at the drop off zone we discovered a very large skip with lots of rubbish, perched on top of which was, glory be, a sofa. It was raining. The sofa was wet.
But hey, an opportunity not taken is an opportunity lost. So we annexed that wet baby and strapped her down to my bulging trailer.
We arrived at the festival sight with my heavy load straddled unceremoniously by a trussed, wet, used, sofa. "PrioritySpace?" yeah that's me. Very clean van though.
A few hours after deciphering the hieroglyphic directions to my site and digging the van out of a quagmire, we rolled onto the flat green little grass patch that would be my lair for the next week. Very square, flat despite being on a gentle hill, well drained, lush with growth, my own little meadow.
And as if it were a sign, the rain stopped falling and the sun punched a few holes in the clouds......... and screamed...... "GET THAT FUCKING TENT UP NOW!!!!!!.......".
Being wise and humble enough to know my place in things I obeyed this grand invitation to haste, my Dome and all its innards popped up as if an enormous kernel of popcorn had exploded.
Now my very good friend who so very unselfishly agreed to assist me on this little adventure, had in a rare moment of almost mystic clarity, suggested hiring some portable air conditioners to run in the dome. A stinking hot Dome, baking from the heat off a spiders web of electrical equipment, the accumulated contribution of a constantly replenishing source of hot sweaty bodies, a wet sofa and lots of very good insulation........ inspired images of a visciously unsubtle form of sick torture.
Now my good friend decided to contribute his engineering genius and skillful research to this problem by working out that the combined heat output of about 25 people, plus equipment, expressed in BTU's (British Thermal Units, one of the few measurements the British didn't concede to the French) could be handled by two condensing air conditioners. The idea of a wet sofa in those conditions actually terrified me. I imagined some vexing mold spore to evolve from that fetid and toxic concoction and, if not wipe out humanity, at least knock off a few of the public.... All my dreams, schemes, plans for an epic conquest of global proportions, slain by a virulent sofa ....
So in a wildly optimistic attempt to ignore this issue, I decided to invest in a barrage of drop sheets (used for painting indoors), and mercilessly wrap that sofa in great psychopathic sheets of choking plastic. Further covered the sofa with large drapes of spare black lining........ and wait, in hope, the public none the wiser they were reclining, ever so comfortably, on a violently asphyxiating lounge.
The festival started. "How much to go in?" the first question of the festival. "How much to go in?" the second question of the festival..... and third.... after many similar enquiries it became apparent people thought I was a stall of sorts. Perhaps selling some dark titillating thrill. I should have ridden this wave, teased the curious public with enigmatic hints designed to provoke their own salacious imaginations, then part them with their money as they seek to satisfy their voyeuristic urges by entering my little deception. But I declined the temptation of untold wealth, and instead employed the creative talents of two 12 year old girls to draw some "FREE" signs for me.
And the crowds grew, and the people started to ask questions about my work. And the response was just fantastic. I would have 5 people standing around waiting for one session to finish, and the moment people started to disgorge from my bubble, a great crowd of punters dissolve out of the crowd and jostle to find a place in the queue. I estimated between 5000 and 6000 people came through my Dome. It only holds around 20, max 25 people a session. I was very happy. It was very successful.
Which is probably why that sycophantic bastard friend of mine tried to poison me with off yoghurt. For simplicity, and security, we slept in the Dome at the end of the night. Now that I was out of commission for a whole day and evening, with a dome on a repetitive wash cycle for the masses, I was left, like some pathetic, groveling, vomiting worm, to endure my ordeal alone, on a nearby hill, somewhere in the festival.
But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, Nietzsche was a con man.
The festival ended. I had few opportunities to experience it. But I was happy, everything had gone well, very well. But there was one thing left to do. Dismantle, then exhume the sofa. We decided to pack as much away as we could, before we released the hell that had been brewing in our make shift plastic sarcophagus. It was one of those moments, it had the tension of an Australian Idol winner announcement, or a big brother eviction.....
Peeling away the plastic..... great forests of green and mottled white, stretching like a fuzzy carpet sprouting with evil intent from the innards of this tomb, as if stretching for warm flesh, smelling it, seeking it........ well that didn't happen. In fact it was surprisingly dry, my theory being that the constant condensation of the moisture inside the Dome by these air conditioners accelerated the evaporation of the water in the sofa....... that's my story anyway, and my mate will corroborate it..........
On the way home from the festival we returned the sofa, drier than we took it..... it had been well loved by the punters....