it's been a while

 

who hasn't felt like this?

 

getting older, this somehow speaks to me on a visceral level

 

 

commissioned for an event in canberra, the skywhale is now floating (briefly) over various cities

an article about her visit to brisbane (smh)

secretary style

i went to see hitchcock last night, i wasn't hugely impressed by the film (helen mirren did her usual sterling turn, anthony hopkins very good as hitch) but i did enjoy toni collette's character, peggy robertson




her character reminded me of other personal assistants / secretaries i've seen and admired in the (old school) movies

for example, eve arden as the "sardonic" legal secretary maida rutledge in anatomy of a murder

eve arden looking sardonic, as maida rutledge

one of her lines from the film (jimmy stewart's small town lawyer character likes to go fishing),
If this refrigerator gets any more fish in it, it will swim upstream and spawn all by itself. 

like most "secretary / personal assistant" roles, it's very second fiddle.  this film is all murder defence, courtroom drama and a very sultry, girdle-less (shocking for the times) lee remick.
she does have some killer lines though!
Paul Biegler: You're fired.
Maida Rutledge: You can't fire me until you pay me.

other favourites,
thelma ritter in all about eve as Birdie Coonan - she plays Bette Davis/Margot Channing's maid/personal assistant, with some great lines

"I haven't got a union. I'm slave labor."

 She's the first to clock Anne Baxter / Eve Harrington as the cynical grasping climber she is, and gives many sardonic glances and steady looks

"What a story. Everything but the blood hounds snapping at her rear end."

skoda

hope and happiness

today i found out i am known as "monika harmonica" by two little boys.
such a great name - might rename my blog...
pictures from unchanging window

something spooky this way comes

spooky image via fffound
reminded me of various creepy edward gorey illustrations ... anonymous and spooky things floating in the sky, for no good reason


a suitably gothic, wednesday-like fan...,

i know it's not

i know it's not, but this looks like a night sky,
full of stars

opera ears

a few years ago i saw a photo of a french bulldog wearing opera house ears
i couldn't find the photo
so i had to improvise ... i was in sydney for a few days and sent this photo to family & friends "back home" in melbourne

blast off

there's something very banana splits about this.  i love it.

fromhere

photograph by Alexandra Valenti

in the outback, it's gotta be a toyota

In 2005 Tjanpi artists from the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in remote Western Australia won the 22nd Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award with their life-size Tjanpi Toyota

Tjanpi Desert Weavers

(things to do in Alice Springs)

Known for endearing, quirky and beautiful contemporary fibre art work, Tjanpi Desert Weavers use primarily native dry desert grasses (Tjanpi), bound and stitched with string, wool and raffia in their baskets and sculptures. Sometimes the grasses are dyed with native plants, and decorated with Emu feathers and seeds.

Today over 400 women across three states and twenty communities make baskets and sculptures out of local grasses, and working with fibre in this way is now firmly embedded in central and western desert culture.

Tjanpi Desert Weaver's philosophy is to keep culture strong, maintain links with country and provide meaningful employment to the keepers and teachers of desert weaving.

Tjanpi Desert Weavers is an indigenous arts enterprise and profits from sales support the 100 per cent Aboriginal-owned and governed Tjanpi.

In 2005 Tjanpi artists from the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in remote Western Australia won the 22nd Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award with their life-size Tjanpi Toyota. Tjanpi artists are also experienced tutors, sharing their weaving skills and cultural knowledge with people around the world at festivals and conferences.

Open Monday to Friday, 10am to 4pm and closed for the month of January and all public holidays and weekends.

bloc-heads and old volks

i hadn't realised this (until relatively recently*) but the whole idea of "eastern europe" is a fiction of the 20th century.
eastern europe is synonymous with communist europe and the "eastern bloc countries"

Central Europe, circa time of Copernicus

*it was milan kundera who introduced me to this situation.  it's his contention that the countries described as "eastern europe" - his own czech[republic]-o-slovakia, hungary, east germany, poland, romania ... were until then known as central europe "mitteleurope".  The "east" was orthodox - russia, the ukraine - with a very different sensibility.
here's an excerpt of kundera talking to philip roth on the subject
MK: As a concept of cultural history, Eastern Europe is Russia, with its quite specific history anchored in the Byzantine world. Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, just like Austria have never been part of Eastern Europe. From the very beginning they have taken part in the great adventure of Western civilization, with its Gothic, its Renaissance, its Reformation--a movement which has its cradle precisely in this region.  It was here, in Central Europe, that modern culture found its greatest impulses; psychoanalysis, structuralism, dodecaphony, Bartok's music, Kafka's and Musil's new aesthetics of the novel.  The postwar annexation of Central Europe (or at least its major part) by Russian civilization caused Western culture to lose its vital center of gravity.  It is the most significant event in the history of the West in our century, and we cannot dismiss the possibility that the end of Central Europe marked the beginning of the end for Europe as a whole.

anyway, my parents grew up in "communist" poland, and the eastern bloc has a resonance for me even though i've lived all my life in that curious "western" anomaly (geographically in the "far east"), australia.
i'm not sure if it's this heritage, or more a fondness for 70s aesthetic but i like the look of this rally car...

source
it looks like a skoda to me, although the badge is wrong so perhaps it's not (part of it in fact looks like my old 1977 saab 99). aha, it turns out, it's a wartburg, an east german car


this one is definitely a škoda

source

since the berlin wall came down, not only the old eastern bloc has chucked its shackles - eastern bloc cars have been reborn too.  škoda is now quasi-german, a czech volkswagon - it has borrowed its adopted german parent's mechanical credentials



















and i want one ...!

back to gritty romantic 70s history


rally cars ...

old school wiki-leaks

source - ffffound

not really "sean kelly"

one of my search strategies is to search images on google rather than get text results
this works well when looking for bags or skirts or restaurants (it's how i picked the beer garden for a recent birthday lunch)
trying to remember the grafitti in carlton in the 80s-early 90s, huge SEAN KELLY on a picket fence, i ran an image search, "sean kelly" graffiti ...
i didn't find the graffiti but i did find some interesting images ... when i followed up the ones i liked, they weren't disparate images at all,
most were from art blog - fire place chats

Damien Hirst (Bristol England, UK b.1965) Tixylix, 1998.
Household gloss and wax crayon on canvas, 59 7/8 x 59 7/8 in.

(Gary Nader Art Centre)

Erwin Wurm: Beauty Business
December 1, 2011 – March 4, 2012

Will Ryman’s 65rh Street Rose sculpture will be on display at the Sagamore Hotel in Miami Beach during Art Basel Miami Beach 2011

from somewhere else,

Chateau de Bouillon floodlit (friends reunited).

 death of a deli

other not really "sean kelly" results...

royal hotel carlton, bologna

one of many graffiti images

from melbourne art critic blog

Sisterhood, North Carlton, 1974

Apparently, the graffiti on this Carlton North building is an "eye-sore"

something new

pink & yellow are among my favourite combinations... pink & orange are good too







art of emily barletta