Pear Shaped

Hmmm....dear me...that last post, only my bloody SECOND, certainly took a turn for the worse...

Never mind, I will straighten this ship up right now, because guess what – it’s Friday! Yay! All Friday’s deserve a Yay! because they make our little hearts do a little dance right in our little chests.

Here's a song. It's from London artist, the lovely Johnny Flynn. His newest album is Been Listening, worth a checking out (available in Australia from iTunes, Amazon, etc., you know the drill ye young peeps of the internet).

Echo....e c h o...e c h o.....

So, yesterday’s post was my maiden foray into the blog-o-sphere. Good? Bad? I will push on regardless. It seems to me this blogging caper might be the sound of a tree falling in the forest, ie. if no-one reads it then have I actually even written it, etc, yada yada, and so on and so forth... I plan to write about whatever current obsessions and pre-occupations are fizzing about in my brain-o-sphere, for I am an expert on nothing.

An expert on nothing.

Notice I didn’t say ‘I’m not an expert on anything’. Ooh...subtle....

Subtle distinction, but HUGE nonetheless. Are we not all kinda experts on nothing: Twitter. Facebook. TV. Fiddling with our mobile phones. Housework. All of it a whole lotta nothing. And we know it. And we spend monumental slabs of time doing it. And we love it! For what else is there to do?

VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?

ESTRAGON: Yes, lets go.

(They do not move.)

CURTAIN

End of Act two, Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett

Philistines....

Good one Melbourne city council!

Street art...ppffftt!

Last week they sent in the "anti-grafitti" crew to clean up the walls in Hosier lane, behind the Forum theatre. They painted over a valuable piece of stencil art left by UK street-artist Banksy.

This appeared in Tuesday's The Age:

THOMAS HUNTER, April 27, 2010

In a massive blow to fans of Melbourne's vibrant, CBD street-art scene, City of Melbourne workers have destroyed a little-known piece of stencil art left by world-renowned graffiti artist Banksy.
Local businesspeople were alerted to the mistake this morning, after the image of a parachute-wearing rat floating down the wall of a building behind the Forum Theatre in Hosier Lane was painted over by council workers as part of a maintenance program.
"Our cleaning contractors were instructed to clean the wall as part of their regular street cleaning schedule," City Of Melbourne CEO Kathy Alexander said.

Well here's something that lord mayor Robert Doyle and City of Melbourne CEO Kathy Alexander could do with knowing:

a) Melbourne is the Australian - if not world - capital of stencil art.

b) This is the third, and probably last, Bansky original that has been destroyed in Melbourne.

c) Robert and Kathy, you are idiots.

d) How embarrassing.

Yesterday, Mr. Doyle said this was a shame but "it's not the Mona Lisa, is it"?

He'd probably say this is just a toilet:

But anyone with a passing interest in modern culture knows it as Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917), the famous work that shocked and challenged art traditionalists: This is a urinal. Why can it not also be art?

In fact, to Duchamp, the Mona Lisa was not THE Mona Lisa. According to his re-working of Davinci's mysterious lady, he turned her into an ambiguous lady-man by pencilling in a goatee and moustache and renaming her L.H.O.O.Q., 1919. The name when pronounced in French is a coarse French pun — "elle a chaud au cul" - translating colloquially as "She's got a hot ass."

The moral of the story is this: