Well, he did it with the Mike Oldfield Five and now it’s time for Davey aka Clint the 1980s Budgie Smuggler to strut his stuff once again. This pic was taken by STW (who else?) on the weekend during a video shoot for “Strike A Prose”, a show being held as part of this year’s Fringe Festival. Click here for more details. Oh, and by the way, I am dressed as I would have appeared in “Cats”. Sniff.
Tag: friends (page 7 of 7)
A few months ago I was asked to be part of a renga with Keiji Minato (a Kyoto-based poet whom I had the great pleasure to meet last year) and another Japanese poet named Hiroshi. We wrote ku in turns, with Keiji translating between Hiroshi and myself. Here’s what we wrote. The letters in brackets at the end of the first three ku indicate who wrote it – the order is preserved throughout.
hello haikunauts!
i write to you in autumn
golden leaves flying (D)
a sun’s stroke has just arrived
over the seas in three lines (K)
over the seas in three lines (K)
look! that shooting star
lets someone in love wonder
where all’s going to (H)
make an unseasonal wish
blowing out birthday candles
blowing out birthday candles
on penguins turning
their back to the north the snow
in spring starts to fall
unfeathered painters line up
their mouths unable to keep closed
their mouths unable to keep closed
birds sprout on the bough
their throats swallow the new sun
spring sings in the trees
all peek out and see the light
no exception, even moles
no exception, even moles
in one-sided love
you are to shoot a water
pistol at the moon
the arc of our wet passions
causes eerie eclipses
causes eerie eclipses
the earth’s axis
in such a lonesome ballet
leans on nothingness
yes, this is my lucky day!
best tarot I found with google
best tarot I found with google
in the cold darkness
light is like a paper bag
popped between god’s hands
firework drops have turned into
golden sparkling of champagne
golden sparkling of champagne
Pretty good, huh?
Last year my friend Victoria Stanton, whose righteous Bank of Victoria site is an absolute classic of the genre, paid a visit to our house in Fitzroy, all the way from Montreal.
I met Victoria in NYC as part of the Short Fuse book launch. She’s a great performer, writer and spoken word historian. Anyway, enough preliminaries.
While she was here, Victoria dared me and my housemates to engage in a bit of spontaneous art. So we went on down to the Captain Snooze warehouse to buy a bed for five people.
The result is catalogued on Victoria’s website:
What happens when five people go shopping for one bed? A direct lead-up to the performance series (Being) One Thing at a Time, this site-specific intervention bluntly attempted to disrupt quotidian behaviours and expectations within a place of business.
‘Untitled (Captain Snooze) April 2003’ is a searing comment on Western commercial aspirations, as well as a sly revisionist parable aka Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Or should that be dwarves?
Anyway, you can check out more of Victoria’s interventions on the website. My favourite: Drug – “Six couples (of varying sexual orientations) stood on the sidewalk, kissing, in front of the Export A tobacco factory for one hour.” Go Victoria!
Former Cordite editor and all-round good bloke Adrian Wiggins has just updated his website. Adrian’s first book of poems “The Beggar’s Codex” came out through FIP in 1994. I once saw him wipe the floor of a Southern Highlands hotel with the artist formerly known as Les Murray but that’s another story. Since then Adrian’s been pretty snowed under what with raising a family and working his butt off for Massive, a Sydney-based web design company (he’s responsible for the kick-arse Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race website, amongst others. Nevertheless, he’s somehow found the time to write a few more poems, which you can read on this ultra-minimalist website. Oh, and like me, Adrian’s from Dubbo, “The Hub of the West”. Czech it out.
Yesterday I had the rare pleasure of seeing Hot Soup Girl live in poetic performance, reading some of her classic pieces, including the one about handkerchiefs. The Babble venue in Fitzroy was pretty packed for a Sunday, which was encouraging to see (though I suspect most of the attendees were part of the Visible Ink entourage).
The second reader was Mike Farrell, who managed to invoke the ghost of Robert Palmer at one point during his mammoth recital. Boy, that guy has a lot of poems up his sleeve! He told me afterwards he’d even managed to sell one copy of his book (doubtless due to his extremely generous offer of $1 off for students). Apparently Mike has also taken up weights training. I shudder at the thought of how tough this tough guy is about to become. He’s the prop forward for all occasions.
Afterwords the three of us trooped downstairs and plotted the demise of Australian literature together with Brett Dionysius, a former QLD poetry apparatchik who has seen the light and moved to Melbourne. He mentioned the new Papertiger CD (of which I am lucky to be a part) which made me envious, as I have not yet received my copy. Brett also claims to be a rugby league player. I do not.