SPACE 1#

Listening to Bjork’s ‘Utopia’ and Stonefield’s ‘Far from Earth’. Both latest Albums.

Reading – The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan, The Original Folk and FairyTales of the Brothers Grimm and The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. i am also working my way through the works of Cordwainer Smith.

Watching – Many Environmental Doco’s in prep for upcoming film festival.

Having decided to have as little as possible to do with Facebook and its stable mates I have realized I am missing out in regular/irregular talktime with a bunch of people whose company I miss.

I planned, and it still sits sulking on the backburner, to create a custom private social media site. It is time-consuming process and I have yet to find that time. So I am dusting off my much neglected Blog to see if it will reestablish some contact with you people out there.

Since I gave Facebook the flying A my life has continued in its normal breakneck speed. I have made attempts to divest but activity is like water – it seeps in anywhere it can find a space.

On the home front Patric bailed out of Swinburne. he got to far behind and couldn’t catch up. His much broken schooling left him little prepared for the relentless pressure of contemporary tertiary course loads. He has deferred and is working on building a game that he hopes to release and is also concentrating on his writing.

Taliesin is going back to Swinburne on Wednesday to have another go at semester two of his course that he failed last year. We will see what happens.

The plans for the two to share an on campus flat have come to nothing and Tali is moving into the room that Patric has vacated. Max is taking her mother back home and delivering Tali to Swinburne on Wednesday. I wish him luck and hope that he has got the hang of the course expectations and will get through OK. He is going with some trepidation. This is the most alone he will have been in his life. Patric and he are very close and Tali is relentlessly organized by Patric, both will miss each other.

We have a friend of the boys staying with us at the moment and having three large young men obsessed with computer games around the place presents its challenges. The campaign at the moment is to try to instil the, apparently, very difficult concept that communal tasks need to be done based on personal initiative not on authoritarian demands from yours truly. Nagging people repeatedly to do things is aggravating, tiring and depressing.

Current projects include aggregating my writings into one spot so I can see what I have. they are scattered in various folders and apps over the cloud. I am finally attempting to get some of my work published and need to spend some time preparing for that end. I am very surprised at the amount of poetry I have found. I am also pleasantly surprised at the quality. I wrote virtually no poetry in the 90’s and early part of this M but have been quite prolific in the past ten years or so. My short stories take a long time to write. I have two on the go at the moment that have been grinding along for two years or so. I have written other things in between.

I have been entering the odd thing into galleries lately, mostly built around Barbie Dolls with agiprop intentions. I have two on the go for an upcoming exhibition themed around text in art.

On the Facebook/Snapchat schtick – one of the major casualties of my rejections of these ethically and morally bankrupt organizations has been my almost total lack of contact with finc. I regret this enormously. Being hundreds of kilometers away from the epicenter of the activity and fincs almost exclusive use of FB etc as the communications channel leaves me rather out of things. I myslef have not made much in the way of effort to keep up either which is personally frustrating and shameful. Hopefully i can remedy that.

Much the same can be said for regional environmental activism.

The ubiquity of FB/SC is causing the aggregation of activity to one carrier (both sites are owned by one entity) and also sharply defines the nature and potential power of the activity.

The modern iterations of ‘convenience’ are almost always bad for your health, terrible for the environment, socially destructive and relatively trivial. This is, of course, not the case for the invention of machines like vacuum cleaners and washing machines which have freed up people from the time-consuming and arduous aspects of domestic labour. However the fact that people have mostly chosen to use the time subsequently freed to watch TV, imbibe drugs and scroll FB leaves one with food for thought. As is also the rising amount of data that suggests that the more people have the where-with-all to afford and deploy the plethora of life convenient options the less happy they consider themselves to be.

I continue to support touring bands performances within the community and along with local events take advantage of the opportunity to use it to raise funds to support the local school music program and other community-arts related activities. We recently had Totally Gourdgeous here for a performance. They performed on a Monday which is probably the most dubious performance night in the week and I was stoked when we had a full-house. The quartette is of course excellent and they have performed here separately and collectively in many permutations over the years. Some can trace their local history back to the eighties.

Coming up is a performance from Mathew Fagan and the 50th anniversary gig from The New York Public Library.

Over the last few years I have been organizing an ongoing mural project. So far we have a created a backdrop for our outdoor stage at The Muddie, a series of panels on ocean plastic polution, a 40year anniversary mural for the kindergarten called ‘Frogz’ and are currently working on a major repainting of the outside of The Music House at the school.

The antics of the dogs provide endless delight and exasperation. Very much a Laurel and Hardy team in reverse with the big one an ingenuous clown and the smaller an irascible grump disguised as a cute looking fluff ball. The imperial Minerva – the yang cat (all black but for a tiny dot of white) leads a separate existence in the shed with the boys and only makes royal visits when a rodent is foolish enough to stick its nose into the house. Minerva is not allowed out in the wide world, of course, and has a large caged area as her outdoor compound.

This is getting very long.

Hello outthere to all my friends. Living so far away from everywhere else has mixed outcomes. Having lived about equal time in the centre of Melbourne and fairly rural/remote: I miss the former but would not exchange it for the latter. There is a richness in community that far outweighs the cultural distractions of city living. One thing is certain and that is I do miss you people. Rich conversation is a rare thing in small communities., there is also a smaller catchment from which to draw people with meshable attitdes and preoccupations.

Anyway hope you enjoy my ramblings and maybe find the time to respond however briefly. My intention is to make this a regualr thing but we all know about The Road to Hell!

Lux Invicta

Don A.