the ’sham

Recorded with Vanessa.

Listen in here.

Read the original post here.

Recorded with Vanessa, Tim, Ben, Fiona.

Listen in here.

Read the original posting here.

Recorded with Vanessa.

Listen in here.

Read the original post here.

Recorded with Vanessa

Listen in here. [5min30sec, mp3, 2.5mb]

Read the original posting here.

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.

Last night I went over to Vanessa’s house for dinner. She made sushi and grilled eggplants with a miso sauce. We talked about thinking, the way our minds process thoughts. And memory. It seems that, even though we are good friends, our brains are utterly different. Vanessa is able to play and replay memories of particular events in her mind, a bit like flipping through a pile of records and choosing one to listen to. I, on the other hand, only rarely rummage through past events, and when I do, it’s a struggle to dredge up the details. Perhaps, I speculated, that’s why I did the sham project (and the Kellerberrin one too) - to lay down a trail of breadcrumbs showing the changing of thoughts over time. Certainly, during these periods, I felt my memory-mind being exercised in a way which improved it - but it’s gotten slack again since. It’s about practice, as all these things seem to be.

Vanessa and I recorded the episode where I first met her - at Darren Hanlon’s backyard where Caxton and The Triangles were playing a gig, just one year ago.

You can listen in to this broadcast here.
And you can read the original posting here.

Having just returned from a trip to Melbourne, I’m catching up on my recordings. The latest development (which emerged from reading aloud together with Lizzie during the trip) is that the recordings are a bit more interesting when they have a live audience. Lizzie was a good audience because she had never read the original stories before.

Today, sitting with Vanessa and Tim in my loungeroom, I recorded “The Lost Vignettes” which was posted last year on the 19th of April. Both V and T are familiar with the stories, so there is some reflection and chatting about the events and places depicted. We share the reading of comments contributed by blog readers - Vanessa does the female voices, and Tim does Alex Bruen, which is kind of fun.

In “The Lost Vignettes” we hear about Marie and Chris, punks, “tag” graffiti, the Palace Pantry, and we sit in the sun with Bruce watching the dogs in Petersham Park.

Listen in to the story here [15min, 15mb, mp3]
Read the original posting here.

Here’s the second installment in the great Petersham podcast project. I have no idea if the quality of the audio is listenable, so please let me know:
April 4th, 2006 [4mb mp3]
…And here is a short audio commentary on what i just read. It’s pretty off the cuff…
April 4th Commentary [4 mins 5mb mp3]

Today (2007) I wandered over to Vanessa’s place to have a cup of tea. On the way I bumped into Glenn, the friendly fellow from the archives. He had a bundle of laminated colour photocopies in his hands and was bustling across Crystal Street to make a presentation to students from Petersham Public School.

Unusually, Vanessa had no cake to offer. In fact, her larder was quite bare, so we decided to head over to south Petersham so I could make us some lunch. On the way back to my place, we bumped into Sarah Sauce, who was riding from her house in Marrickville over to the hospital she works at in Rozelle. We stood on the side of Crystal Street, pretty much in the same place where I’d said hi to Glenn. Sarah said she rides her bike past my house every day, and why did she never see me on my balcony?

At this moment, Anna from the council crossed the street and hollered “Hello Lucas!”

I felt very popular.

(If you want to read the original blog posting in type-written format, it’s here.)

On Thursday, I was late opening the gallery, on account of accompanying Vanessa on the 1976 tour. I had put a notice on the door indicating that I wouldn’t be opening up til noon, but I arrived about ten past noon. Two ladies were standing around the doorway, waiting to come in. I apologised for being late. They said no worries, they had gone off for a coffee while they waited.

They came inside, and looked around, very interested, asked lots of questions, bought one of my folders with all the blog printouts. Then one of them said:

“So, where is Denise’s artwork?”

Denise? I didn’t know what they were talking about. I suggested that they might have got the wrong week – maybe Denise’s show doesn’t start til next week. In fact, I remember seeing that the Glebe and Inner Western Weekly had listed someone else’s show instead of mine. That probably accounts for the error. But they were confused. They had a flyer for Denise’s show in the car, they were sure the dates were right.

Anyway, they stuck around for a while, and we talked about the relative merits of different suburbs. Balmain particularly, and the transformations that have gone on there during the last twenty years. When they were ready to leave, I suggested they show me Denise’s flyer, so I could at least pass on the correct info in case any other punters came along to see her work. They went and fetched it. The flyer read “opening Wednesday May 25th, the exhibition to be launched by her excellency the governor, Marie Bashir.” This was odd, I’m sure we would have known if the Governor was around. Scanning further down, I read: “the exhibition will continue until June 3rd, 2005”.

These ladies were exactly a YEAR late to see Denise’s show.

One of them turned to me and asked: “so…If we came here a year ago…we wouldn’t have met you, then?”

I didn’t feel so bad about being a little late to open the gallery.

There’s still time to book for the second tour of Parramatta Road 1976. Sat 3rd June, 11am. Book on 0423745736
Tour costs $2 and you get freebies.

For pictures of the first tour, which was a thundering success, look here.

[ps: slowlearner has put up some more great pix of the tour, here.]

[pps: you can download a PODCAST of Vanessa's tour, here:
http://squatspace.com/petersham/documents/vanessa/vanessa_berry_parramatta_road.mp3 [about 5 mb]

Whack it on yer i-pod thingy, head down to the corner of Petersham St and Parramatta Road, press play, and away you go: your very own self-guided tour! For extra value, print out this map]…