the ’sham

A short post simply containing two vignettes: I fill in Tully on the nature of the jelly-wrestling-gone-wrong (which he had missed); I hang out with Vanessa.

It’s funny to look at these posts one year on. Both these people I met during my residency, and both of them I now number among my best friends.

Tully, if you recall, had participated in the hot debate surrounding the male/female chauvinist gaze and the jelly wrestling shermozzle. Despite being heavily involved in the build up to that event, “for some reason he didn’t make it to the Jelly Wrestling on Wednesday night”. Of course, with hindsight, I know that this is no anomaly. Tully is like that. He’ll show up or not, irrespective of how much excitement was generated in the planning and plotting. This moment on the blog simply captured my very first impression of that Tully phenomenon.

Vanessa, too, I now realise, laid her essence out for us blog readers very early on. In this episode, we sit and discuss our relationships with our parents, and she shows me a book about maps. In these maps, geographical locations are overlaid with emotional metaphors. A river, in a map of the path to hell, has a creek running off it, leading nowhere in particular. It’s called the tributary of sloth.

A map is a powerful tool. It has the potential to influence how we encounter a territory, how we anticipate what the place will be like, the routes we choose to reach our destination. It enables us to do something that we could never do: be simultaneously on the ground, and in the air.

But Vanessa and I used maps in quite different ways. When I did my border walks, I used a map to guide my absurd plottings of the limits of the ’sham. My project was fairly literal (”find the edges”) and it allowed chance occurrances to take place and be incorporated.

Vanessa, on the other hand, (in a project she designed during my residency) took a small portion of Parramatta Road and invested it with great meaning, imagining what it might have been like 30 years ago. She used a map clipped from a local paper in 1976 as her stimulus, and then let her mind run with it. Her imagination - and her words - were powerful enough such that, when we actually went on a tour to the shopfronts she had written about, we were able to “map” onto them different lives, in a different time.

Listen to the podcast here.

Read the original post here.

There was a reason this post was originally “annotated” - it’s not easy to conjure in words alone, the things that happened along this walk. So there was a map which it might help to peruse while listening to the podcast: the map is here.

These boundary walks (of which there were 4, each corresponding to a point of the compass) which I completed with various friends and accomplices during the project, were an attempt to define the limits of my territory, by surfing right along the edges. To a certain extent, it was a wilfull exercise in pointlessness: the border between Petersham and Stanmore is hardly charged and political the way the Israel-Palestine borders are. I can’t think of a reason why living on one side or the other might change your life in any great way, the way it would depending whether you live in Tijuana or San Diego. Instead, these are the (largely) invisible borders of banal suburban beaurocracy, designed to make life simpler: to divide a large slab of land into smaller chunks, I suppose making them easier to “administer”. So it’s somewhat wilfull and cheeky to take these maps and see if we can find where the boundary lies.

By “following a rule” — eg to try and walk the border, no matter how tricky and silly the route might be — we shift the bounds of our normal activity, where we’d normally go, and the way we’d normally travel. We begin to use walking for something else, something non-useful, in the classic sense of “use”. Of course, there’s a big tradition of non-useful walking, particularly de Certeau’s famous “walking in the city” essay. I like what he says about how the city, when walked, is not something pre-existing, but comes into being in response to our pedestrian bodies.

To the flâneur urban surroundings suddenly become both familiar and alien, inscribed with a subjective resonance, strange associations and the depth of myth. By making themselves travellers in their own city, these writers believe that they are capable of subverting the dominant image of Paris as grid, plan or spectacle. The walker is held to invite an alternative city to express itself, one that cannot be separated from the pedestrian body.

Chatting with Tully, while making this recording, I realised that this walk, in particular (with me, Tully, Polly, Bec, and Sunny) has become a kind of myth, at least amongst ourselves. Something that bound us pedestrians together. This would not have been possible by simply sitting around drinking tea and perusing the map. We had to walk it.

Listen in here [mp3, 7mb, 17min]
Read the original posting here.

With a slight shudder, I carried my body across the intersection of Livingstone and Frazer, and into Marrickville. I looked up and saw one of those white stripes left in the sky by an aeroplane. There was a stillness in the air, and the light seemed sharply focussed. The day was warm, I was out of the house by ten. I hate to say it, but it felt good to leave Petersham.
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Hi Lucas
Bec mentined you are walking the Petersham border. I would love to join you sometime. Let me know when you plan the next walk. xxSue

Dear Sue
well, I’ve still got the northern border to go. Why don’t you come out sometime and we’ll walk it.
X L

Sue arrived five minutes early. I was just returning from WenChai publications (who are going to print my exhibition flyer) when she showed up on her bike. We drank tea, and I rolled a map out over all the dirty dishes. I don’t think Sue had realised that the northern border of Petersham is, in fact, just Parramatta Road. The boundary between Petersham and Leichhardt runs smack down the middle of Sydney’s great artery (or, as it has been described, varicose vein). I think she was a bit disappointed. Sure, on the surface, it doesn’t look as interesting as all those little variegations, twists and turns and inaccessible fenceline runs which characterise the other three borders. But looks can…well, you know the cliché…
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AM
I call up Tully. For some reason he didn’t make it to the Jelly Wrestling on Wednesday night. I’d sent him a teasing text message from the pub, saying:

I can’t believe
you are missing
this…You of all
people

to which he replied:

What are you
kidding? I’ve got
jelly and a lack
of clothes at
home!

But given how it all panned out, I do wish he could have made it along. And now I want to debrief. We meet at Sweet Belem for coffee and chess, and I tell him the whole story. Phew, he sighs. Wow. I do wish I was there.

He has to scoot: more essays to procrastinate over. As we part at the lights, we make a tentative arrangement to meet again, to drive around Petersham scoping out photogenic sites. He’s a keen photographer, you see…

PM
After we visit Geoff at the church, Vanessa and I go for a coffee at Papa Cafe on Crystal Street. This place is famous for being a mecca for soccer fans around World Cup time. Apparently, hundreds of people come, they block off the whole street. And this year is no exception. Posters and news articles plastered all over the walls. A TV set pipes in an Italian talk show on cable, the topic is “New Haircut, New Man?”

We talk about our relationships with our parents. Vanessa has a book to show me, all about maps. One map, my favourite, shows the layout of the territory of the path to hell, including the Creek of Gambling, the Tributory of Sloth, and the Falls of Final Damnation. Another good one is the Map of a Woman’s Heart. I walk her home and she gives me some home made biscuits. “I can’t stop baking at the moment!” she says…

[A technical note about images: often within blog posts, I include links to images which are hosted at my Flickr site. If you're browsing with Mozilla Firefox, you might want to try this: right-click on the link and then "open link in a new tab". This way you can keep on reading while the image loads in the new tab.

If, on the other hand, you're still clinging belligerently to Internet Explorer, I'm fresh out of ideas.]
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[This post was written on Sunday, and "the afternoon" to which it refers is last Saturday arvo. My poor image manipulation skills have delayed the launch of this one - it took me a few days to put together the maps which appear below. Cheerio! - Lucas]

In the afternoon, the Cake Lady came to visit, bearing natas fresh from Sweet Belem. I made us coffee and we sat in the kitchen chatting away. She’s staying at the Regent’s Court Hotel in the Cross, its a kind of artist-in-residence where the hotel puts you up in exchange for watering the plants in their beautiful rooftop garden. Not a bad exchange. The Cake Lady’s working on some new animated films, which generally channel her rich vault of memories growing up in North Queensland. Recently she’s been running art workshops with the kids who travel around with circuses. But the conversation meandered wildly and I forgot to interrogate her about that. Which is a pity, cos I reckon it’d be an interesting story.

The Cake Lady had suggested an assignment to be carried out in the ’sham:

You and a friend/partner arrange to arrive in a foreign city on the same day. Take different forms of transport to get there. Do not make a place to meet. Try and find your friend/partner.

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On Friday morning, I knocked on Luciana’s door. I had two things in mind. First, to debrief about the real estate visit. And second, to get her to help me carry the bench from our balcony at the back of the building, out to the front porch. That way, we can sit out there in the morning and drink our coffee. This serves three purposes. First, we catch the morning sun. At this time of year in Sydney, the air is cool, and to spend time in the sunshine is a pleasure. All humidity has disappeared. Second, we get to check out the neighbourhood - we become local “vecchietti” ( little old men and women who sit on their front porches and watch the world go by). And third, by occupying the porch, we send a message to would-be burglars that this place is not empty - so they better not try any shenanigans on us.

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