The classical

Something in Wellington to go to

Very cool

Check out Marie Osmond doing Hugo Ball's Karawane.

Mixing oil and water

I am very pleased with how these have turned out. The top one's from last weekend, and the other two from the previous weekend. My day job's a bit flat out at the moment (and looks like it will remain so for the next three months), so I've only been doing some preparatory drawings and mucking round in the evenings during the week.

They could do with a bit more work, but I don't really want to fiddle around. I'd much rather get stuck into the next thing. The photos are not exactly great, but they give the general idea.

This is And then my magic art powers failed me:

This is We can all be free:

This is the one I've abandoned (for the meanwhile at least). It could easily be rectified. If I do so, it will be Humanity won't be happy:


In other news, I've been finding my mood a bit funny. I had a pleasant evening last night, but by the time I went to bed I was in a foul mood. I'm not sure why. I'm extremely easily offended at the moment, resenting snubs (whether real or imagined). It's not very good. I think I may have to lay in some supplies and retreat to my cave for a while.

This and that

I am quite conscious of the fact that I am treating dadaism as a living idea, as if it still existed ... [T]here exists a kind of dadaist person, a dadaist fundamental way of life, which is not only characteristic of our time, but is congruent with many assertions of modern thought ... Decisive is the volcano and not the lava, the symbol-making power and not the rigid symbol, the ethical will and not the conventional morality, the individual in the mass and not the mass in the individual.

- Richard Huelsenbeck, 'Dada and Existentialism', 1957

I had a very productive weekend. Hopefully, I'll have pictures tomorrow. As well as painting, I finished reading Sartre's The wall, which is an excellent collection of short stories. I watched Kurosawa's The seven samurai again, and a couple of short Hans Richter films from the 20s.

Vormittagsspruk was brilliant. Four bowler hats get bored with their workaday routine and decide to bunk off for the ten minutes before noon. The other, Filmstudie, was a lot more formal but still lots of fun. I dug out an essay by Richter on his films, and ended up reading the essay by Huelsenbeck quoted above as well.

To top it all off, I'm pretty sure I experienced last night the event that a deja vu from a couple of weeks ago was the premonition of.

I'm off to Truffaut's Jules et Jim at the Film Society tonight. That too should be excellent.

Yesterday

I went to the south coast:



And ended up round at a friend's place, smoking, drinking, and eyeballing his dog:

For Jean

The source of the strange beeping

Andreas Reiter Raabe at Hamish McKay Gallery

I went to an opening at the Hamish McKay Gallery last night: paintings by Andreas Reiter Raabe and sculptures by Julia Gorman. One of the things that I like about this gallery is that he'll take a punt on things that you would not normally see in a commercial dealer gallery (such as the wall painting pictured above).

I had a very pleasant evening, and some very good conversations. It's always good talking with people who have a different outlook on things to you.

My favourite works were a group of small paintings on the left wall as you walk in. They may be small, but there's a lot going on. Well worth a look.

Something in Wanganui to go to

My will

I've just done my will. Some lucky person is down to get my boiled and tattooed skull.

Very weird

I am at my friend Paul Faris's. The first time I came to visit him here I had to recite 'Once in every in every life time...'. It's that kind of flat.

We were listening to the Fall when a strange electronic alarm like beeping sound started emanating from the kitchen. We investigated and determined it was coming from a shelf above the fridge. The weird thing was, though, that above the fridge was only only ancient jars and tins of stuff complete with cobwebs attached.

I got up and moved the most likely looking large tin, and the beeping stopped. However, the tin only contained tacky plastic cutlery. There had obviously been nothing even vaguely electronic there ever. Where did the beeping come from? Very, very weird.