nostalgia

Today I'm attending an audition workshop. I put on make-up for this. It takes about an hour (I screw it up several times.)

First there's foundation, then some powder so you don't look shiny on camera, than some red for your cheeks which have disappeared under the foundation and the powder, then a touch of eye shadow so that you look even less dead, then some mascara, then clear lip gloss so that your mouth isn't buried in imitation skin colour. What a farce.

Lomomotion

These are the photos I took on Yann's old LOMO in Paris. Starring Adrian, Alice and Yann as glamorous Parisians:

lucky just to keep afloat

Brisbane - For my birthday, I get hail. When Nick Tee and I leave his apartment it is the end of a breezy, sunny day, and by the time we get to The Alibi Room all we can do is sit in his car and wait until big marbles of ice have stopped smacking against the roof before making a break for it. From the safety of the bar, we watch people wading through a flooded intersection, failed traffic lights blinking orange. Once, when the rain abates for a moment, we see the unmistakable shape of an inch-long cockroach crawling along the footpath. I'm 24, and the end is nigh.


Auckland - At the old bookshop I buy a great stack to add to the stack I amassed from working there five years ago. The stack is unread, neverending. Karel and I have coffee behind the counter and incidentally a few people buy books.

Home Sated

Bite-sized Italy and Spain for someone with a really big mouth...
Between Venice and Rome I spent a weekend in Bologna. In his tour of the city, my host Andrea showed me San Petrono's - a basilica which began as a beautiful marble construction, but then took on a rustic aesthetic when the jealous Vatican refused further funding. So the story goes. The tour also included standing at opposite sides of a portico, facing away from each other, whispering into the wall and having our words meet the other's ear as if we were standing right beside each other. (This reminded me of being in the igloo at Bimbo's.) There are two towers in Bologna which, Andrea informed me, were built by two important families in the 12th century - the taller Asinelli Tower (97m), and the Garisenda Tower (48m). Bologna is a student town, and traditionally the Arts students cannot climb the Asinelli Tower before the end of their degree; superstition has it that their studies could last indefinitely if they do. So I climbed the tower on my own, and had my first bona fide experience of vertigo, complete with racing heart and sickening downward glances, as I ascended the wooden stairs to the lookout. I thought of forgetting it a few times, but pride kicked in and I was rewarded with a stunning view of the red student town, spread out all medieval-like before me in the 9am sun.

Starstruck/Chloe from 9 to 5

This afternoon Yann showed me his friend's short film about growing up in Brittany. The style was very personal and simple - lots of hand-held stuff. I thought of Agnès Varda as I watched it, and how much I enjoyed studying her films in that one film subject I made such a mess of at uni. I thought I'd quite like to see more of her films, and the thought of spending my Australian summer hunting down Varda DVDs made me excited to be coming home.

Then I mentioned her to Yann. Yann told me she lives on his street. Agnès Varda lives on his street. She has a studio near the Vietnamese place on the corner. The day I went with Yann to get bo bun in said Vietnamese place, she was actually sitting there enjoying her lunch, and I missed her. 

Definitely moving to Paris.

Cole Portering

Pre-Berlin II, I revisited Paris. The weather was mostly rainy; I made use of it by catching up on adminy-type things and seeing the stuff I missed last time. The Pompidou Centre was predictably impressive. The Palais de Tokyo was full of strange things for me to note in my wee book and make esoteric allusions to in later writings. The Cite de la Musique was holding a Serge Gainsbourg exhibition - titillating. Afterwards I wandered through the autumnal Parc des Buttes Chaumont and around Belleville, using up the last of the film in Yann´s camera on wistful shots of young families enjoying the last hours of sunlight.

Dee, my work friend from home, was also in Paris, and we timed our Eiffel Tower ascent perfectly - looking out over twilit Paris from the second level just as the lights above us started their hourly five-minute flash fest.

Yann and Juliette took me to bars and parties with their lovely French friends, all of whom apologise for their English even though my French is clearly so much worse.

Kicking through the fallen leaves in Parisian parks must be one of the best things about living there. It´s insanely beautiful. In the Jardin du Luxembourg little kids use sticks to prod little sail boats across the Grand Bassin. Those lucky little bastards.

Paris Paris Paris. So nice, in fact, that I´m heading back there today to enjoy my last weekend in the northern hemisphere. The longer I´m away from London, the more unbearably bleak that city seems, so I´ve chosen to spend as little time there as possible, getting the Eurostar early on Monday and jumping straight on my plane at Heathrow without looking twice at the various circuses.

Next edition: Spain and Italy, really.

Bite-sized Deutsch - contains nudity

No one likes reading a long blog. This potato isn´t very good at motivating herself to write long blogs, either. So we will cut our memoir into digestible pieces. Beginning with the latest: Germany II.


I returned to Berlin and the ravishing company of Amy and Adrian the Saturday before last. Our week was filled with arty stuff - multiple exhibition openings which we attended with Vivian and Liz, also visiting from Oz.


Berlin was well and truly freezing by the time my second visit began, and it was a wonderful, warm relief to spend one evening in a German sauna, where the five of us paraded around nude with the best of them. We withstood the hourly towel-twirling - what a strange job that would be, ladling water and tea tree oil over the hot coals and making a helicopter while about thirty naked people sweat and flinch and rub ice all over themselves. We hurried into the cold showers. We sat unperturbed in the freezing courtyard and watched the steam rising from our legs. We dozed under enormous cream blankets, then woke up and started all over again. Afterwards we went for curry at a tiny place that Amy knew. I thought I´d never be cold again.

slangin'

I am defiantly having a day at 'home' (Yann's apartment) today.

Before he left for work, Yann scolded me for not having practised my French at all, except for that one time in Madrid when I booked a room through a French proprietress.

Yann, on the other hand, rapidly incorporates new words into his everyday vocabulary. Within an hour of my arrival he had already used three kitsch colloquialisms imparted by Adrian and myself a month ago. He puts me to shame.

Text book examples of the three words might look like this:

Those who bushwalk in Norway are seldom snappy dressers.

This cheese is especially stinky.

That guy on the beach in Barcelona was creepy.

handbag protection unit

Visiting Barcelona at the tail end of my trip means that I've had time to hear many stories about the muggers and their various methods. Brits and Americans and Australians in France and Norway and Germany have warned me that you can't walk more than a few metres without someone trying to take your things by pretending to hit on you, or play soccer with you, or by just coming up and sticking their hand in your pocket. I'd managed to avoid these incidents until last night.

My Canadian friend Denis was celebrating his birthday. We were sitting on the beach with an earphone each, staring at my ipod screen and trying to remember which soundtrack 'Just Like Honey' is on apart from Lost in Translation. When Denis asked me for a pen I turned to see what can only be described as a cheeky fellow sitting nearby, quietly going through my bag. I sprang up in a flurry of orange coat and lunged towards him with a shrill 'Motherf-cker!' As the silhouette fled he tossed my journal, the only thing he'd managed to get hold of, comically into the air.

sad day in Rome

After leaving the Palatine, we find ourselves a long, hot way from any Metro station. My fellow tourists Marion and Amil put their thumbs out and almost immediately we get a welcoming toot from a little green car. Our benefactor is a middle-aged woman with t-shirts stretched over the front seats as covers, and a photograph of a young Italian man stuck to the dashboard. She drives us all the way into the central station, asking us about our lives in her stilted but determined English. When Marion asks the woman if the man in the photo is her son, the woman replies that he is, and that he died of lung cancer in June last year. She says it kindly, but unapologetically; she's said it a thousand times before. I sit there dumbly and don't say anything about Alex. Rome is sunny and sad.

friends, fjords, Frenchies, Firenze, frenzy

September was a frenzy of travel, beginning in Norway. Norway is a very pretty, subdued place that makes me feel ashamed to have eschewed the incredible southern landscapes of my home country. The most memorable parts of Oslo were the mmm heated mmm floor mmm of Nick's bathroom, and the 'artic blueberry' cordial (which we didn't realise was concentrate at first, and so drank as it was) mixed with vodka. Vodka! In Norway, this is like drinking cocaine, it's so expensive. (Guess that also depends where you get your cocaine.) One of the best parts of Norway was seeing the Dah crew again, in Porsgrunn, where they were touring In/Visible City internationally for the first time. Nick and I searched frantically for accommodation and ended up staying in a deserted equestrian camp, where horses' heads occasionally bobbed past our window. And of course the other best part of Norway was our weekend away in Bergen. All so mindnumbingly bea-u-tiful! Fjords, mountains, ludicrously good weather (apparently in Bergen it rains 310 days per year; we had none of that.) At the open air markets we were bemused by elk burgers and whale toast. At the top of the Bergen furnicular we napped in a green glade where the grass was so cushiony it felt like fairyland. One especially hilarious moment was on the way back to Oslo, winding through the mountains on the reknowned Flåmsbana, when the driver announced that we were coming up alongside an enormous waterfall where, legend has it, sirens of old used to lure men off the tracks... So the train stopped here and we all piled out to take photos, and then a melodic voice came singing out through the mist of the waterfall. Of course I find this sort of bizarre kitsch touristy stuff totally hilarious, and we stood there laughing for a while. Then, cherry on top, we see a person appear over the crest of the hill in flowing blue nordic robes, complete with long flaxen wig, and our siren throws up her arms and dances to the cheesy siren music while a trainload of toursits looks on. Perfect ham.

After Norway I choo-chooed down to Berlin (a long way - if you're watching from space you can see the red perforated trail I leave across the big pastel-coloured map of Europe). Amy took me into her fabulous nest and we hooted and hollered and flitted about town for a week, overdoing the cheap cocktails - you can get a very decent Long Island Iced Tea from any number of Indian restaurants for about 3 euro 80 - and dancing our hearts out to trashy pop at SO36, with fellow Australasian trashbag Jimmy. The Turkish markets were amazing and I came THIS close to buying a sack of fresh lychees. And Berlin has this lovely open feeling to it - all the civic spaces are welcoming and nuanced and it seems like such a personable sort of place. I will be returning at the end of October - perhaps I'll do a better job of describing it then.

About seven years ago, I finished high school. Until then, I'd been learning high school French, and since then, I haven't spoken a word except (pardon) in jest. After leaving Berlin I found myself on the mean streets of Paris, struggling to buy stamps and make train reservations in my paltry parlez-vous. Lucky for me - and for Adrian, my still-favourite and ever-stimulating travelling sisduh - I was couchsurfing with Yann. Yann is one of this trip's best new experiences. I saw some of the most beautiful sights in Paris all lit up blue and golden as we flew through the streets on his Vespa. I drank two enormous cups of black coffee for breakfast when I woke up, and blew pungent cigarette smoke through the window of his troisieme-etage apartment before going to sleep. I even learned a few more nouns. Une assiette, anyone?

One delightful pasttime was wandering through the glamorous cemeteries. In Pere-Lachaise, Adrian purchased a map of the famous tombs, and we paused near the entrance to mark out the ones we wanted to see - Maria Callas, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Stephane Grappelli, someone called 'SexToy'... We found that all of these graves were on the opposite side of the cemetery from where we were, so Adrian said, in all innocence, 'Well, should we head over that way then? It's a bit dead over here.'

Now, Itlay! Florence was like the savoury, and Venice is dessert. In Florence the buildings have egg-yolky, spicey tones. I stayed with Simone and Gavin in an apartment they rented (they're travelling Italy, celebrating the anniversary of their wedding - six years ago in Florence. For those Melburnians who aren't familiar with my familial situation, Simone was married to my dad and hence has the odd title of 'ex-step-mother', but we alternately refer to me as her daughter or niece. What does this make Gav? Who knows. We all dismissed biology as a grounds for family long ago.) Simone and Gavin's apartment was right next to the Uffizi, which I spent a couple of hours wandering through, as usual getting a little teary over Giotto. I even bought a book about him as I left. Very rare. As much as I idolise favourite artists etc, I seldom commit to them financially. Of course the ultimate fourteenth-century art high was in Padua, when I waited for 15 minutes in an air-stabilising room to spend 15 minutes admiring the wondrous Scrovegni Chapel. To say I've been looking forward to this experience since high school is only a slight exaggeration. How amazing to see it all up close! (After this, I sat in a sweet Padova park and finished reading 'American Psycho.')

I sort of pass by a lot of the later stuff. Caravaggio is wicked, and it's good to see works like the Doni Tondo and the Madonna of the Rocks in the flesh, but it's not the same. I realised that the reason I love Giotto and entourage is that they represent the beginning of humanism. They're like Hamlet, or the printing press, or penicillin - they represent a totally new way of relating to the world. But at the same time you can still see the remnants of the past, the Byzantine stuff - the gold, the holiness, the fact of the artworks' being religious. I like that they sit on the cusp. I lose interest as we move towards the perfection of Michelangelo (I'm sure I remember reading that a contemporary said Michelangelo's people looked like they were full of rocks). I like all the weirdness and imperfections that preceded the naturalism we know. People emote and are painted in proportion - but buildings are shrunk to fit into the frame of the picture, and the scenes still exist in these strange celestial vacuums. I loves eet. I eats eet all up.

Venice is a gigantic pasticceria. All the plastered walls are cake-coloured and the Moorishness of the architecture makes all the white window frames look as if they've been squeezed from an icing tube. I passed from coffee shop to church to gelati shop with Simone and Gav. We stumbled across some architectural Biennale exhibits. In San Stae, a beautiful old church (yes, very rare in Europe) there was a house made of cardboard boxes, each with a little individual artwork inside and holes punched in the walls so you could peer in. Some of the sculptures inside were simple - a stack of egg trays - and some more complex - a bunch of silver springs, mechanised and rotating in different directions, like a plant. This reminded me of an exhibition I went to at ACCA a few years ago, where one of the works was a maze constructed of cardboard, very dimly lit and claustrophobic. I automatically love both these pieces, just because they are both made of tough brown cardboard, and this reminds me of a house Dad once made for me and Alex when we were tiny - one huge box which once held a refrigerator, and a smaller one, maybe dishwasher-sized - both boxes attached to each other and cut up and drawn all over, to resemble a house. Cardboard is fun! Cardboard art is fun! Also, I think there's something really awesome about being able to walk inside a work of art.

Another Biennale exhibit we stumbled across was one about Jørn Utzon, the Danish architect who designed the Sydney Opera House. I have to confess I've never really been very knowledgeable or excited about architecture, except for the obvious - Brunelleschi, the Skytower - but this exhibition was very interesting, with lots of little snippets about how much Utzon is inspired by shapes within nature and by ancient forms of architecture like the use of platforms in Chinese designs, and by visual effects specific to a particular place, like the hazy lighting peeping in through the roof of a bazaar in Iran. (Kidding about the Skytower bit, clearly.)

And one more odd artistic experience: one afternoon we were walking through one segment of the Venice labyrinth when we passed a small contemporary gallery emanating New Orleans guitar. We poked our heads in and found that one of the two guitarists was the painter of the oil impressions of Venice that decorated the walls, and that he was a visiting artist from New Orleans. Simone got into an Italian conversation with him which culminated in the two guitarists urging Simone and Gav, who teach Ceroc in Auckland, to demonstrate their moves. So as the two guitarists strummed away, Simone and Gav danced around the tiny gallery and Venetians and tourists stopped to watch and applaud from the street.

Disastrously hungover, I now get on the train to Bologna, where I will obviously try the pasta, and enjoy a slightly slower pace before heading to Rome on Tuesday. Ouch, my head.

Berlin makes me a lazy blogger,

but while we wait for the next entry, I've posted the links to my photos for general consumption. (See left.)

have pity on the working man

Nick and I found the perfect bar in Bergen last night - a little place called Legal with the sort of kitsch interior and fuzzy lighting and chillaxed crowd we Meyers Place devotees feel at home with. The best part though was when they played 'Mr. President' by... Mr. Newman. Heart.

Also, the weather is magnificent.

up north; circus

Touristy things I saw in Amsterdam: the Van Gogh museum, Anne Frank House, the floating cat boat, the flower markets. Things I did in Amsterdam which are illegal back home included purchasing and ingesting spacecakes and mushrooms, and riding my bike without a helmet. Culture shock.

A few words on the cat boat. This is a refuge set up in a converted house boat on the canal Singel, where volunteers take in and look after Amsterdam's stray cats. There seemed to be quite a few of them, maybe thirty at first glance, and a bunch in quarantine in a different room. Belyndy and I were patting a grey and white one in a little basket, when a Singaporean man who had been watching us and chuckling said, 'Careful of that one. She's schizophrenic.' Really? 'Yes. One minute nice. Next minute, ssch!' It turned out that this man was a retiree living temporarily in Amsterdam to help out on the boat. We chatted for a while and exchanged email addresses for photo-swapping, and when Belyndy mentioned that she works with costumes, the man hurried into the reception area to fetch a magazine for her to look at. This turned out to be an issue of Vice with an article in it about a woman who creates costumes for cats. He showed us pictures of cats dressed as musketeers, bees, alligators... Looking at the photos on my own camera I realise I've taken lots of pictures of animals. This makes me feel sentimental and silly, but it's good to know that there are people out there who are far more obsessed than I am.

After my Amsterdam sojourn I caught the night train to Copenhagen: the first leg of my long journey to Oslo. For such a short stay, I feel like I have a lot of impressions of Copenhagen. I quickly became fond of a particular cafe on Istedgade, called Bang and Jensen's, where I frittered away both my Danish mornings over coffees that came with tiny chocolate bars. The cafe is candlelit, even at 9 in the morning, and they play an eclectic songlist which kept distracting me from my notebook - the first morning it was something heart-wrenching that reminded me of my first and only experience of fados, and the second morning they played Nancy and Lee. Nothing like a bit of country with your coffee.

I grew obsessed with the oxidised copper detailing on everything, to the point where I'd stop my chunky hired bicycle in the middle of a busy bridge to take a photo of a pale green monument or statue or roof. From the top of the Rundetårn I could document the spires of the entire city.

Christiania provided a haven from the grey roads and grandiose architecture which I'm unfortunately beginning to associate with sweatshop brands and overpriced sandwiches. It was a relief to spend a couple of hours wandering through the Freetown. What a thoroughly hippy place. Every last detail was wrought by artists, from the carved and painted park benches to the spectacularly graffiti-ed walls of the newer buildings and the carefully mosaiced facades of the older ones. Houses were bright. Gardens were mad. Materials were recyclable. I entered a gallery - one small room - decorated with pictures of Tibetan scenes, and put 10 kroner in a tin for Tibet, and for a badge which reads 'Chrisitiania, du har mit'. 'You have my heart,' apparently. Which it did, for an afternoon.

On my last night I saw the Australian company Acrobat performing Smaller Poorer Cheaper. This was interesting in light of my recent experience with the Jim Rose Circus. Acrobat used nudity as a drawcard, but in an entirely different way. For example, one of the three performed a simple disappearing handkerchief trick. He performed it several times, each time discovering the handkerchief in a different item of clothing, and then removing that item - shirt, pants, underpants. Finally, he performed the trick naked, and ended by pulling the handkerchief from his arsehole. How amazing to see this trick performed twice in a matter of weeks! Compare it to the same trick in the Jim Rose Circus: one of Jim's silent showgirls is naked but for a pair of high heels. He instructs her to put some clothes on. Finding a stagehand has removed the black leather number she initially shed, nameless minion sashays to the centre of the stage, turns her back to the audience, dances, then pulls something fuschia from her arsehole. She pulls this rag over her head and it turns out to be a transparent boob tube. Facing the audience, she then pulls a second piece of fuschia material from her vagina, and this tubey skirty thing forms the lower part of her ensemble. The audience of vocal young men goes absolutely ballistic. The cherry on top is Jim Rose roaring into the microphone, 'The only thing she doesn't pull out of her pussy and ass is my cock!'

(For the first time since starting this blog, I'm close to just finishing up this entry with an 'LOL'.)

I'm glad Acrobat came along to provide me with a naked circus alternative. They've reaffirmed my belief that if performers want to strip off and pull props and costumes from various orifices, that has the potential to be wildly entertaining. I've been considering this. Acrobat use the image as a punchline at the end of a standard sort of a routine. In Jim Rose, the trick is meant as another shocking freakshow display, which is dull in itself. But the worst thing is that the woman has no agency, no voice. She doesn't own the trick at all. She does what she is intructed to do, in a show which is filled with naked, silent women doing as they're instructed.

And blood! In one amazing sequence, one of the Acrobat crew dons white pants and does a series of climbing and tumbling moves using a vertically suspended red rope. (If anyone knows proper circus terminology for all this stuff, please correct me!) Soon the red from the rope is staining his white pants, and we realise that the rope is soaking wet, and as the act progresses the man's body becomes covered in red, and the floor beneath him is splattered. He finishes with a flailing tumble and comically lands, thud, on the floor, still entwined in the rope, red everywhere. Now, I'd already left by the time one of the Jim Rose women sprayed red paint from her arse, but perhaps someone who saw it (like Amy) could comment?

Finally, I arrived in Norway on a sleek Scandanavian train late on Wednesday night. Oslo has turned on the nicest weather I've seen since Greece. Tonight we leave for Bergen, where we venture through the fjords all weekend. Of course everything in Norway is incredibly expensive. Everything. I keep hopefully looking at pricetags, looking for the one thing, just one small thing, which you can get really, really cheaply. Even if it's something completely useless like grenadine, or a paperweight, or carob. But watching the crowds of new parents on leave, out in the sun on a workday, you soon realise that the only thing you can do relatively cheaply in Oslo is breed.


Next week, Berlin.

still my hero after all these years

and accompanying me through the lush and misty countryside of Norway...


(Just a wee note in acknowledgement of those albums you never get tired of hearing.)