Lux Veris

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Spring 2015 021

Morning on the Corso…this is Spring in Sydney

I love the light at this time of year, when bleached skies and metallic seas signal the onset of Summer. There is something uniquely Australian about the quality of that light: an intrinsic brightness with a shine and sheen that we recognise — instantly — as being the light of our homeland.

Pilots call it ‘severe clear’, a term used to describe conditions of unlimited visibility, but it’s a remarkably accurate expression. There is nothing subtle about the light in the Antipodes: here the sun blazes, the heat blinds.

In Sydney we appear to have skipped straight past Spring, with the temperatures in recent days soaring into the thirties. Around here, the beaches have been packed and the Manly Jazz Festival has been in full swing. It’s great weather for jazz, and for Jamiroquai too. While Winter might make us head for the mellow tunes of Milky Chance, Spring and Summer have us cranking up the car stereo, and reaching for Robin Schulz and Ministry of Sound Annuals. At this time of year my rear view mirror often provides glimpses of Marvel Girl busting out her best dance moves (quite a range, considering the confines of her car seat) while Miss Malaprop sings along — in her own words, as usual — thinking she can rap just as well as Nicki Minaj (she so can’t).

It’s been fantastic weather for footy, too, with last Sunday going down in the history books as a golden day in Australian sport: first the Wallabies won at Twickenham and sent the hapless Poms packing out of the Rugby World Cup, and then the North Queensland Cowboys took home their first NRL premiership in spectacular fashion with Johnathan Thurston kicking them to victory over the Brisbane Broncos with a field goal in extra time. It was a Grand Final for the ages, and one I won’t forget.

But then again, the October Long Weekend always has a touch of enchantment about it, because every year at 2:00am on the first Sunday of October, a magical thing occurs: Daylight Saving Time begins. Well, that is to say, it begins here in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory and Tasmania — for some obscure reason (still unknown to the rest of the states and territories along the Eastern Seaboard) Queensland doesn’t participate. To be fair, they always have done things a bit differently up there…though not even I am game to mention the Bjelke-Petersen years…

Still, for the rest of us, the beginning of Daylight Saving Time means longer days and lingering twilight. It means trips to the beach after school, it means barbecues and a few quiet beers at dusk. And for a lot of Australian kids, it means going to bed when it’s still light.

Strangely enough, some of my most vivid childhood memories are of lying beneath my window in my bed as the golden light of day slowly faded into the deep tropical green of evening. I can still hear the last raucous squawks of roosting lorrikeets, and the rhythmic thunk of the filter in the neighbours’ pool after someone popped in for one last swim. I can still see the inky silhouettes of trees on the horizon, and the first twinklings of the stars high above. Only when I had seen the Southern Cross wheel its way above my head would I close my eyes and sleep, secure in the knowledge that I was truly home.

Ahhh…that light, again. Severe clear by day, warm and inviting by night. And while Dorothea Mackellar may be justly famous for summing up what Australia is like in “My Country”, I think — oddly enough — that it was Wordsworth who understood just what I experienced as a child, even if he felt it a few miles above Tintern Abbey instead of in Sydney:

My local rockpool...photo credit Yury Prokopenko

My local rockpool…photo credit Yury Prokopenko

         …And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.


			

	

				
					



	


		
		
To Baryshnikov, with Love


				

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barishnokov_stting
Mikhail Baryshnikov…


Miss Malaprop has a case of the Baryshnikovs.


It happened quite accidentally, as these often things do: for some reason (still unknown even to myself) I was researching the great story-telller, Scheherazade, when I happened to click on a link to a YouTube clip of the Vienna Philharmonic playing Rimsky-Korsakov’s music of the same name.


Now, I’m not sure whether this phenomenon is unique to my children, but YouTube has a magnetic pull on my girls.  It’s uncanny — no matter what part of the house or garden they are playing in, the split second I start checking something out on YouTube they appear. Instantly. They then either try to squash themselves simultaneously onto my lap or lean heavily over my shoulders and usually end up obscuring my computer screen so that I can’t see a damn thing…


Anyway, this occasion was no different. Marvel Girl was at school, and Miss Malaprop had been happily drawing pictures of the Hulk and Thor (complete with swirling cape and hair so fine L’Oreal would definitely think he was worth it) when I began watching the Scheherazade clip. But there she was — yes, instantly — at my elbow.


“What are you watching?” she asked, her greeny-blue eyes already fixed on the screen.


“I’m not really watching, I’m actually listening — to the music,” I explained. “But if you want to, I can show you some music with dancing? Like when I go to the ballet?”


“Oooh…yes please, Mummy!”


And so it began. I was in one of my Russian moods (evidently, since I had begun with Rimsky-Korsakov), so first I showed Miss Malaprop the Dance of the Knights from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. And she loved it — the costumes, the dancing, the sets, the music; it was as though I had opened a world of wonder to her. But then she started asking questions about Romeo and Juliet and what happened to them, and…well, while I suspect the plot is best summed up in this e-card:


Romeo & Juliet
Seriously…they make several good points here…


…street fighting and teen suicide weren’t things I was ready to discuss with a preschooler.


So we moved on.


“Oh — here’s something you’ll like,” I said, clicking on another clip.


Those of you who follow this blog already know that Blue Jai’s First Rule of Parenting is simply “Distract” (trust me, it works almost every time). But on this occasion, it really worked: Miss Malaprop went from being simply fixated to utterly transfixed.


By Baryshnikov.


We watched him perform the pas de deux from Giselle, and then moved onto The Nutcracker, mostly because Miss Malaprop is familiar with Tchaikovsky’s score from her own ballet classes. Many of the clips are grainy, products of the long-gone days of videotape, but as my daughter watched Mikhail Baryshnikov dance she first grew very quiet, and then grew very still. And it wasn’t until later that evening that I realised just how deep an impression had been made.


You should see how high he leaps...
You should see how high he leaps…


At dinnertime, Miss Malaprop began explaining what she had seen, and did so with a reverence and wonder I have rarely heard from her.


“He’s the most angelic person…” she said, trying to express to her sister that what she had seen seemed super-human.


“Yeah, Baryshnikov.  He’s a man you know…but he’s the most amazing dancer. You should see how high he leaps! I just love him.”


And there it was.


Baryshnikov had acquired yet another fan.


Clearly, Mikhail Baryshnikov is not an angel, he is a man — and one who has been criticised (most notably by his former dance partner and sometime lover Gelsey Kirkland) for some of his personal and professional attitudes. That said, from a distance and, more specifically, from a preschooler’s perspective, I think there are worse people in this world Miss Malaprop could choose to look up to.


“Working is living to me.” Mikhail Baryshnikov


Dancing — as even Baryshnikov would tell you — is hard work. You’ve got to put in the hours, from an early age, and practice. And then practice some more. And then…yeah, you know what comes next…


But to be as good as Baryshnikov, you also need discipline: not just to do all that practice, but to develop good, or in his case, close to flawless technique. And the way Baryshnikov says he achieved that? By focusing on self-improvement: “I do not try to dance better than anyone else,” he says, “I only try to dance better than myself.”


It’s also, all too often, about making choices — some of them difficult. I cannot imagine that deciding to defect from the then Soviet Union in 1974 was an easy thing to do. But as Baryshnikov says, “To achieve some depth in your field requires a lot of sacrifices. Want to or not, you’re thinking about what you’re doing in life — in my case, dancing”.


And finally, there is one thing about succeeding as a dancer that, in my view, sets it apart: it exposes. On stage, there is nowhere to hide. You have to be prepared to perform, to reveal the extent of your abilities and the range of your expression, and to be comfortable with the result. And to do that effectively, and meaningfully, you need to know yourself.


When a dancer comes on stage, he is not just a blank slate the choreographer has written on. Behind him he has all the decisions he has made in his life…each time, he has chosen, and in what he is on stage you see the result of those choices. You are looking at the person he is, and the person, who at this point, he cannot help but be…Exceptional dancers, in my experience, are also exceptional people, people with an attitude toward life, a kind of quest, and an internal quality. They know who they are, and they show this to you willingly.


MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV




mikhail-baryshnikov
“When a body moves, it’s the most revealing thing. Dance for me a minute, and I’ll tell you who you are.” Mikhail Baryshnikov


My maternal intuition tells me that Miss Malaprop’s path in life is not that of a dancer: she is much more likely to use words (volubly and at varying volumes) than to express herself through movement. But if she chooses as role models people who literally embody what it means to work hard, practice harder, be disciplined and make difficult decisions, and if she makes the effort to get to know herself, I believe that she will succeed — in whatever it is she sets out to do.


This, perhaps, could be the moral of the story, though I suspect a cautionary corollary is also called for: if the YouTube phenomenon I described above extends beyond my house and into yours, be careful what you click on…it could change your child’s life.

			

	

				
					



	


		
		
Dear Aylan


				

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Dear Aylan,


You don’t know me, and now you never will, but there are things that I want to say to you even though you’ll never hear them.


The first thing I want to say is that I’m sorry. When I saw the picture of you, washed up on a stretch of Turkish beach, I wept — and the world wept with me. I am sorry that we failed you, that you did not find the refuge you so desperately needed.


I can only imagine what your life was like. In your three short years I wonder whether you ever knew the sort of peaceful coexistence my children enjoy every day, living in a society that has never experienced the harsh and harrowing realities of modern warfare on our home soil. I do know that you had a brother, Galib, and parents who loved you both so much that they made the inordinately difficult decision to leave their homeland and search for a better life. A life without bombing. Without war. Without privation. Without the incessant presence of danger — real, actual, life-threatening danger.


Aylan, I wish you had made it to safety. I wish that it did not take seeing the photograph of your lifeless body to galvanise support around the world for the thousands of human beings who are fleeing five years of relentless, ruthless warfare and are seeking a safe haven. Somewhere. Anywhere.


But I am grateful that even though you didn’t get to see it, people around the world have stood up for you. They wiped away their tears and showed each other what humanity is, nowhere more so than in Germany where, as Geoffrey Robertson so eloquently put it, “the grandchildren of the Gestapo became the angels of mercy”. And the world wept again, but this time they were tears of hope.


These people showed the world what leadership looks like, Aylan. It looks like the people who greeted the displaced thousands flooding into their country with applause, with toys and sweets, with open arms. It looks like the people who waited on roadsides handing out care packages of much needed food and water. It looks like the people who drove their cars across the Hungarian border to pick up the asylum seekers who were still walking to safety. It looks like Angela Merkel.


I am sorry — no, I am ashamed — that such leadership has been sorely lacking at the highest levels of government in my own country, and that our prime minister — in whose electorate I reside — seems to have lost himself in a mire of bureaucratic bullshit, crapping on about quotas and proportions, and crowing about stopping the boats.


A humanitarian crisis should never be turned into a political issue, but in Australia, our prime minister’s lack of compassion and basic concern for his fellow human beings is doing that faster than any parliamentary debate ever could.  It seems that he has not only forgotten Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that “everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution“, but that he has also failed to recall Article 1:




All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.




Aylan, even though you will never speak again, I promise that I will keep speaking up for you and for the thousands of people seeking refuge, just as you did. I will stand up and say, over and over again, that refugees should be made welcome in this country. I will honour that spirit of brotherhood, of humanity.


I will remember you, Aylan.


May you rest in peace.


 Refugees welcome

			

	

				
					



	


		
		
The Wellspring


				

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My First Principles: words, music, food.
Know your First Principles…


This month marks the first anniversary of the day I sat down, summoned my courage and started blogging. From the outset, I have said that this is where I come to make sense of it all, and after twelve months of showing up on the page I firmly believe that doing so has benefited me, and probably my family, too.


I believe it’s important to thank all the people who have joined me since I set sail on this voyage, and to make special mention of the mums who sought me in the school playground to chat about everything from Holiday Bonus Points to the meaning of saudade, or to jokingly re-introduce themselves after I blogged about The Name Game. I want to thank the friends who provided early encouragement (and who, to my eternal gratitude and partial disbelief, continue to do so), as well as the hundreds of complete strangers who stumbled across my little site and stayed to read a post or two. Discovering that my words have been read by people all over the world, from Argentina to Germany, Turkey to Taiwan, as well as here in Australia has been an astonishing and humbling experience.


Find your wellspring...
Find your wellspring…


I believe there is a wellspring in each of us, the source of our creativity and our connection with humanity and the planet we are so lucky to live on.  Writing this blog has enabled me to dive into that wellspring and to clarify what is important to me, what I am passionate about, and also what I am challenged by. It has provided me with a platform to speak my truth, whether I was struggling to make sense of the Sydney Siege, or speaking out against the death penalty, or fangirling over my two favourite Toms (Wlaschiha and Hiddleston), or reveling in the beauty of street art.  And writing about all these things has enabled me to connect with people in ways I never have before.


I believe that I am truer to my First Principles – my Holy Trinity of words, music and food – when I visit my wellspring regularly.   When I align myself to these three things, my most important sources of nourishment, I live a better and far more authentic life. I may not always progress smoothly; life simply isn’t like that. But honouring the things that make me who I am and finding the time and space to share them with others certainly makes it easier to deal with the inevitable ups and downs that characterise every person’s existence.  Blogging reminds me that we are all riding this rollercoaster together, and that it can be terrifying and thrilling and every other kind of emotion I can name (and probably a few I don’t know yet know precisely the right word for) along the way.  It also prompts me to remember that the same is true for each of us, the world over.


Connect...
Connect to your own greatness…


I believe I am blessed in my life to be supported by my family, the crazy trio you may laughed with – or perhaps just laughed at – and cried with over the past year.  You’ve shared our adventures and misadventures, and witnessed some of the tests and trials my husband and I have encountered while parenting two strong-willed and independently-minded girls. The Bloke, Marvel Girl and Miss Malaprop all inspire me, challenge me, delight me, frustrate me, and fill me with more joy than I ever thought possible. They also willingly put up with a wife and mother who is happiest when tapping away at the keyboard, and who considers herself incredibly fortunate to be able to do so on a personal and a professional basis – even if it means my life is regulated by the alarms I set to remind me to pick the kids up from school.


I believe, looking back, that it probably wasn’t a coincidence that I began blogging in spring, the season of rebirth and renewal.  Spring is a great time to start new things, and to watch them grow. One of the themes I have returned to again and again over the past twelve months has been seasonal change, as I’ve connected with the world as it transforms itself around me and noticed details I may not have otherwise. In the process, I have become far more aware of how I respond to the seasons and the unique ways they express themselves in this Great Southern Land. (As a side note, I would also argue that spring is probably a much better time to set resolutions than those first remorse-filled weeks of January when we lament our Christmas and New Year’s excesses and wish for the umpteenth year in a row that the festive season and the bikini season did not coincide.)


But having said that, I also believe that it doesn’t matter when you start something new: the important thing is to begin. To have a go. Or to have another go. Or even to resume doing something you love, because you know it serves you and brings you closer to who you truly are. For me, it’s writing, reading, listening to and playing music, cooking well and eating better.  It’s also exercising: running, weight training, and practicing yoga.


...and Begin.
…and Begin.


Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to attend a yoga workshop welcoming the coming of spring.  It was a chance to find stillness within, to connect with my breath, to meditate on new beginnings and to draw strength and inspiration from the wellspring within.  Emerging into the twilight two hours later, I was greeted by the sight of the moon, luminous and full, lighting up the evening sky.  Seeing that shining orb reminded me that I, too, have come full circle, and I remembered what I wrote in my very first blog post: that what I write here may never be great, or even particularly good, but it will be mine. The most important thing was that I began.


So rise up.  Follow your breath.  Find the wellspring within.  Connect.  And begin.

			

	

				
					



	


		
		
Dinner with Nigella


				

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Cookbooks...the joyous combination of words and food.
Cookbooks…the joy of combining words and food.


Those of you who follow this blog with any regularity will know of my Holy Trinity of First Principles: words, music and food.


These are my three main sources of nourishment, and without their sustaining, inspiring and stabilising presence in my life I would probably end up in jail or in what used to be called (in the good old days of political incorrectness) a lunatic asylum.


But those of you who know me personally will know that there’s another thing that I am slightly obsessed by — planning.  Yes, I’ll admit it, I’m one of those people who loves lists. Particularly of the old-fashioned hand-written variety, the kind that can be crossed off with flourish and flair.


I am also, I’ll confess, a bandit for spreadsheets, tables, and — more recently — menu plans. And when the menu planning mood strikes me, I find there is nothing more pleasurable than sitting down with a couple of old friends and working out what my family and I will eat for dinner for the next month.


Nigella...the original domestic goddess.
Nigella…the original domestic goddess.


Technically speaking, they’re not ‘friends’ at all, they’re cookbooks: the tried and trusted tomes I turn to when when my soul’s kitchen needs re-stocking.  But when I’m happily ensconced at the dining room table with a pile of cookbooks beside me, it begins to feel like Nigella and Jamie are my friends (obviously…after all, we’re on a first name basis here).  Similarly, the likes of Stephanie Alexander and Maggie Beer feel like neighbours who pop their heads over the back fence to chat about what’s growing in their veggie patches, while Yotam Ottolenghi — whose latest volume I have only recently acquired — feels like an exciting new acquaintance who I want to get to know a whole lot better.


Seriously — what’s not to love about cookbooks?  They’re where words and food collide, with delectable results.


Cookbooks are also packed with beautiful photographs, enticing recipes and, more frequently in this age of the celebrity chef, introductory pieces that allow the author’s passion for creating delicious food with locally sourced, seasonal produce to shine through. I suspect I find Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver particularly accessible because their cookbooks read like the television scripts they no doubt once were, and I can hear their voices in my head as I read the (sometimes pithy, occasionally rambling) comments that preface each of the recipes in their books. They don’t just make me feel hungry, they make me want to cook.


Jamie: what's not to love about this guy?
Jamie: what’s not to love about this guy?


I am equally inspired by food memoirs, especially Ruth Reichl’s widely-acclaimed trilogy of her lifelong journey with food. In my opinion, Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table, and Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise are all well worth a read. Novels that include recipes for dishes cooked by the characters also fill me with joy — but I suspect that may be the topic of another blogpost altogether.


To be honest, I think I’m a better cook when I’ve sat down with my culinary ‘friends’, or even when I’ve simply been side-tracked by a recipe when I’m looking for something else entirely.  I know I’m definitely more willing to try new things in the kitchen afterwards, despite the fact that I have been known to tune out the kids clamouring for their evening meal over the top of the television blaring the Octonauts theme just because my attention has been entirely captured by a new way of cooking with chorizos…or artichokes…or tangellos…or any number of other ingredients.


It's pretty simple, really...
It’s pretty simple, really…


And, notwithstanding such lapses of maternal attention, my kids are developing a great relationship with food, not doubt partly because I am interested in what I am cooking for them and because I willingly express my love for fresh, local produce. They are eager to try new dishes and to have a crack at cooking too, and are particular fans of purple carrots, pomegranates and many other fruits and vegetables I had never heard of when I was a child.


Needless to say, I’m running out of space in my kitchen for all my cookbooks, much to my chagrin. Even so, I find it hard resist the siren song of a new volume culinary inspiration, despite my lack of cupboard space and my husband’s (probably well-founded) dismay.


But I do know this: sticking to my First Principles is good for my health — mentally, physically, and spiritually — and, by extension, it is good for my family’s health too. So my argument (and believe me, I’m sticking to it) is this: if I splurge ever now and then on a cookbook, everybody benefits.


And besides, if my habit of making friends with cookbooks continues, I’m sure we could renovate the kitchen…

			

	

				
					



	


		
		
Who’s Afraid of the Wizard of Oz?


				

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Miss Malaprop came home from preschool the other day and informed me that one of her little mates had brought in a DVD of The Wizard of Oz. Now, given that both my children are in equal parts blessed and afflicted by active imaginations, The Wizard of Oz is one movie we’ve, shall we say, kept in reserve for the time being.


Not because we’re cruel, unfeeling parents — no, no, no.


We simply value uninterrupted sleep. Possibly to the point of obsession.


“Did you watch it?” I inquired, as casually as I could, trying not to hold my breath or to further elevate my already rapidly rising blood pressure.


“Well, not all of it,” came the initial response, at which I might have winced: my sleep deprivation sensor had, even at this early stage, been well and truly triggered.


“Did you like it?” I asked, unable to keep the slight tremor of trepidation from my voice.


“Well…”


Cue klaxons, sirens, alarm bells of varying intensity…


Yes, true to form, instead of merrily singing, “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” and “Follow the Yellow Brick Road”, my poor Miss Malaprop proceeded to inform me that there was a wicked witch with a horrible green face and finished up with a plaintive, “Oh Mummy, I just can’t get it out of my head.”


And so the fun began…


Oz Plot
Lee Winfrey tells it like it is…


We dealt with the green faced witch first, given that this was Miss Malaprop’s main object of preoccupation. Marvel Girl raced to her room and returned with a Guardians of the Galaxy poster she had pulled from her wall, pointing out that Gamora not only has a green face but that she is also roughly twenty-seven kinds of amazing.


Gamora: it's OK to be green.
Gamora: it’s OK to be green.


Now I should point out, as I have before, that our kids are not old enough to watch any of the Marvel movies yet, though we do explain various plot lines to them and leave out the parts that are…most graphic and violent? That said, it didn’t seem like a good time to tell either of my girls that before she became a Guardian of the Galaxy, Gamora did a whole bunch of dirty work for Ronan, the Kree fanatic, or that she probably listed her occupation as “assassin” on any official intergalactic paperwork.


It did seem like a good time, however, for me to draw Miss Malaprop’s attention to various outrageous acts of artistic licence that MGM took when they made The Wizard of Oz way back in 1939, including the fact that in the book the Wicked Witch doesn’t have a green face at all. No, L Frank Baum did say the Wicked Witch was hideous, but he certainly did not say she was green.


Then, quickly applying the First Rule of Parenting — which is, of course, Distraction — I went on to express my umbrage at Dorothy’s shoes being glittery red in the movie (no doubt sparking an untold multitude of shoe fetishes around the globe), when in the book the shoes are specifically described as being silver.


Our discussion then moved on to how the movie actually finishes, and the standout role performed by Dorothy’s shoes (regardless of their colour) in returning her safely to Kansas with Toto — whose name, naturally, means “everything”. I may have proceeded to wax lyrical about how it wasn’t the Wizard of Oz who was powerful, it was Dorothy, and finally brought matters to a head when I explained that once you are no longer afraid of something, it has no power over you.


David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King.  If you want to see the spandex pants in all their glory, you'll have to look elsewhere.
David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King. If you want to see the spandex pants in all their glory, you’ll have to look elsewhere.


Fortunately, Marvel Girl and Miss Malaprop were both fascinated by this idea, and it appeared that the image of the green faced witch was finally be fading from my younger daughter’s highly impressionable mind. Seeing the opportunity to apply the Second Rule of Parenting — which is, of course, When in Doubt Change the Subject — I sneakily steered the conversation in the direction of another movie entirely, Labyrinth, and regaled my eager listeners with tales of Sarah triumphing over the Goblin King.


Again, my imaginative kids are not likely to be watching Labyrinth without adult supervision any time soon — not least because the sight of David Bowie clad in spandex could be detrimental to their otherwise normal development — but I did manage to successfully skirt the issue of Jareth the Goblin King snatching a child in Sarah’s care and skipped straight to the moment of Sarah’s victory. “My will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great,” I intoned solemnly, “You have no power over me!”


The kids cheered, and the rest of the evening unwound as it usually would, excepting the fact that I may have shoved a bottle of wine in the fridge — which I wouldn’t generally do on a Wednesday.


And I won’t lie.  I gave Miss Malaprop the most carbo-loaded evening meal she has had in very a long time, and sent her off to bed hoping against hope that digesting said dinner would act as some kind of nightmare-preventative and she would slumber blissfully until morning.


To her credit — and my eternal relief —  she did.


Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead.

			

	

				
					



	


		
		
The Writing on the Wall


				

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Graffiti Sirens
“Sirens” by Hush


Unsanctioned.


Unauthorised.


Unendorsed.


Why do all these words sound less offensive than illegal?


See here’s the thing: I love street art.


I’m not referring to the mindless repetition of a single tag across a public space — that’s about as impressive as a dog pissing to mark its territory.


I mean consciously created visual artworks.


On walls.


Walls that belong to other people.


Graffiti, from written words to wall paintings, has been around for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians did it, so did the Greeks. Any visitor to Pompeii would know that the Romans were bandits for it. From Ephesus in Turkey, to Tikal in Guatemala, to Sigiriya in Sri Lanka, people across antiquity have left their marks on walls, painted for posterity, or more likely scratched — which is, of course, the meaning of the Italian word graffiato, from which graffiti got its name.


Blue Bird by the elusive Banksy
“Girl with Bluebird” by the elusive Banksy


In modern times — particularly since the advent of the aerosol can — graffiti has been taken to a whole new level, raising it from vandalism to art. Part of street art’s appeal is that it is subversive: its very presence is usually illicit but, by virtue of its accessibility, it is able to elicit a response from the broader population. Street art is often political. Provocative. Daring. It’s bold and it’s brave and, despite its illegality, it can also be downright beautiful.


Street art is also intriguing because some of its greatest practitioners are shrouded in secrecy. From 1932 to 1967, Sydneysiders would awake to see the work of Arthur Stace wherever he chalked the word “Eternity” in elegant, Copperplate script on pavements throughout the city. During the course of his life Stace is estimated to have produced the word around 500,000 times, writing his way into popular culture as he did. His identity was eventually made public in 1956, but his work was immortalised when the word Eternity was illuminated on the Sydney Harbour Bridge at the 2000 New Year’s Eve celebrations.  The image was used again during the Opening Ceremony of the Sydney Olympics later the same year.


Blek le Rat's "Ballerina"
Blek le Rat’s “Ballerina”


More recently, Blek le Rat — one of the originators of stencil graffiti — produced his work anonymously in Paris for a decade before he was identified (and arrested) by French police in 1991 as he stencilled a replica of Caravaggio’s Madonna and Child on a wall. His style is distinctively Parisian, frequently depicting dancers and musicians, as well as style icons like Diana, Princess of Wales. Since 2006 Blek le Rat has held exhibitions of his work in galleries around the world, but has expressed his preference for working in the streets where it can be seen by a much wider audience than in a gallery.


The identity of influential Britsh street artist Banksy remains a closely guarded secret, despite numerous claims by various newspapers that they have discovered who he is. Banksy’s stencil art is often satirical, politically charged, and wickedly funny. In the words of Shepard Fairey, “Banksy paints over the line between aesthetics and language, then stealthily repaints it in the unlikeliest of places. His works, whether he stencils them on the streets, sells them in exhibitions or hangs them in museums on the sly, are filled with wit and metaphors that transcend language barriers.” Like Blek le Rat, however, Banksy also prefers to use the street as his canvas, stating that “when you go to an art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires”.


My dining room wall.
A metal print of Birgit Kinder’s “Test the Rest” on my dining room wall…complete with extra graffiti. The original has been repainted multiple times since it was first produced in 1990.


One of my favourite pieces of street art now hangs on our dining room wall — a metal print of a Trabant 601 breaking through the Berlin Wall from the famous East Side Gallery, a 1.3km-long section of the wall on Mühlenstraße in Freidrichshain-Kreuzberg that has been described as a memorial to freedom. Another metal print hangs in our hall, a montage of graffiti from various sections of the Berlin Wall before it came down on 9 November 1989.


And that’s where I think the lines of street art begin to blur: when it begins appearing on walls in suburban houses, or when its production has been given public approval.


Sanctioned.


Authorised.


Endorsed.


Damn graffiti kids...
Damn those graffiti kids…


I remain torn between wanting to take my kids to see the gigantic Kosmonaut mural Victor Ash painted in Kreuzberg in 2007, which has — unsurprisingly — become a Berlin landmark, and wishing they could simply explore the city and discover the incredible urban art that has been created without approval.


Because that’s the thing about street art. You can hang it on your wall, you can stick it on a Pinterest board, but the best kind will always be the piece of graffiti you stumble across on the street — the one that the artist has put there to communicate directly with you and whoever else sees it.


On walls that belong to other people.


Out in the open.


Free.

			

	

				
					



	


		
		
In Praise of Pluto


				

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Eris.  Ever heard of it?


Didn’t think so.


Eris is the reason Pluto — poor old Pluto — is no longer deemed worthy of being called a planet.


Horsehead nebulaIn the good old days (otherwise known as the Eighties), we learned about the solar system in school. Back in 1986, the reappearance of Halley’s Comet was not treated as a harbinger of doom, but as an unmissable opportunity to foist random space facts onto unsuspecting school aged children that was too good to miss. In educational parlance, it heralded the arrival of a “teachable moment” in gloriously action-packed colour, and our lessons were filled with tales of the Milky Way, black holes, quasars, nebulae (the Horsehead Nebula was a particular favourite), red dwarfs, Magellanic clouds and — of course — the planets. All nine of them.


Nine planets — just like the Nine Nazgul in Tolkein’s trilogy, or the nine circles of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy. We even had a mnemonic to remember them, in order of their proximity to the Sun: My Very Elegant Mother Just Sits Under New Potatoes. (Admittedly, like many mnemonics it doesn’t make much sense, but the critical factor here is the presence of Potatoes…er, I mean Pluto…at the end, way out in the darker reaches of the galaxy).


But then in the early Nineties, Pluto’s planetary status started to wobble. Astronomers discovered the Kuiper belt, a ring of objects way out past Neptune. Big objects. Dark mutterings began to be heard in astronomical circles, that Pluto — named for the God of the Underworld, no less — was only a dwarf planet.


And then, in January 2005, a new body was discovered. And this object, as it turned out, was bigger than Pluto.


Yep, you guessed it: Eris.


In one fell swoop, Eris — appropriately named after the Goddess of Strife and Discord — sent Pluto packing from the planet list, relegating it to the ranks of TNO’s (Trans-Neptunian Objects) and forcing the International Astronomical Union to come up with a formal definition of “planet” at a conference in the Czech Republic in 2006. And while the cynic in me suspects that all those stargazing scientific types really wanted was a good excuse to visit Prague, the upshot of their Eastern European sojourn was that Pluto was down-graded. Reclassified. Failed to pass the planet test.


To say the decision to strip Pluto of planetary status was controversial would be an understatement — even in astronomical circles.  Apparently less than 5% of astronomers voted to support the new definition, which could hardly be construed as a representative sample in any dictatorship democracy. I, for one, would agree with Alan Stern, who asserted that “the definition stinks, for technical reasons” (and if you’re similarly inclined, you can read about why here).


eris_pluto
This image comes from a Northern Arizona University article discussing their involvement in investigating the surface of…you guessed it…Eris.


Apparently, Pluto does not meet Criterion 3 of the IAU’s definition of planet: that the object “must have cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit”.


I mean, seriously people — is that it? If clearing the neighbourhood is all they needed Pluto to do, surely we could have sent someone out there to sort it out? The US Marines, perhaps? The French Foreign Legion? Hell, I think even the New South Wales Police Force would be happy to take on the task of clearing a neighbourhood.


To be fair, I do understand that the IAU had something more along the lines of gravitational dominance and of there not being other bodies of comparable size other than its own satellites in the vicinity — and let’s face it, Pluto is light years ahead of Earth on the satellite front, with five moons to our one. But even when the scientific definition is considered, the celestial finger is still pointing in one direction, and one direction alone: towards Eris. Because Eris is the body of comparable size to Pluto that stops it from clearing the neighbourhood.


My Very Elegant Mother Just Sits Under New…


Sigh.


But now, finally, true believers around the galaxy are being rewarded for our continued faith in Pluto: our favourite former planet is making headlines once again.


More than nine years after its launch (yes, nine…there’s that number again), NASA’s New Horizons mission, tasked with understanding the formation of the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt is rapidly approaching its destination. At the time of writing this, there are less than four hours before the New Horizons spacecraft flies closest to Pluto, when it will be only 12,500km from the Plutonian surface. The images the spacecraft will send back to Earth will be the first we have ever seen — which is arguably the most exciting thing to have occurred on July 14 since the storming of the Bastille in 1789.


I can’t wait to see those pictures!


Though I would imagine that Alan Stern, the aforementioned Defender-of-All-Things-Plutonic, is pretty keen on seeing them too. After all, he is the principal investigator on the New Horizons mission.

			

	

				
					



	


		
		
A Winter’s Tale


				

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Southern CrossThe Winter Solstice has just slipped past down here in the Southlands, and with it the shortest day.  It’s about as cold as it ever gets in Sydneytown, when the sun dips down before dinnertime and the stars swing overhead in the early darkness, pricking tiny silver holes in frosty skies.  The Southern Cross shines brightest in the winter sky.


Winter.


Some say we don’t know much about winter, down here in the Antipodes. It’s not like we need to don down jackets just to pop out to the shops, and any child sporting a pair of earmuffs is probably impersonating Anna from Frozen rather than protecting their extremities from the cold. But having spent two years living in Canada, in a city on a more northerly latitude than Moscow where winter lasted the better part of eight or nine months, I can honestly say I have felt colder in Sydney than I ever did in Edmonton.


Sydney cold seeps.


Sydney stormIt gets into your bones. It is dank and it is damp. It rides in on southerlies, straight off Bass Strait, and settles into every exposed crevice. It saps and it leaches. It is persistent.


Winter weather in Sydney is a petulant child: sunny one moment and sulky the next, or threatening to storm before suddenly showing off, throwing ridiculously perfect rainbows and breathtaking beautiful sunsets skyward as twilight descends. It makes us stamp our feet and rub our hands, yet takes great delight at seeing our breath emerge in great clouds of white when we speak into the chill.


In wintertime, we seize the days of sunny splendour that remind us that summer does return to our city, we grasp them and will them to last.  We retaliate against unexpected rainstorms by buying yet another umbrella when the weather catches us out. Again.


But when the wind blows and the temperature drops, we often retreat.


As Edith Sitwell once said, “Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”


In WinterIn winter, we wrap our fingers around warm cups of tea. We roast and we slow cook. We bake. We pull portable heaters out of their hiding places. We wear ugg boots anywhere we think we can get away with it, and even in some places where we can’t. We curl up with books under blankets. We indulge in marathon Netflix sessions. We curse the fact that Season Three of Crossing Lines is still in post-production because we’re running out of episodes of Tom Wlaschiha…er, sorry, of Season Two…


And, somewhere in the midst of all our burrowing under covers, swapping recipes for soup, and muttering the motto of House Stark, there comes a point when Sydneysiders start to smile. It’s a strange and subtle tipping point, that begins with a slight upturning of the corners of the mouth, and usually ends up resembling a smug grin.


Because the secret to surviving a Sydney winter is very simple: all you need do is remember that around here, winter doesn’t last all that long.


And, besides, as Anton Chekov said: “People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy”.

			

	

				
					



	


		
		
Star Wars: A New Hope


				

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Episode 4


There are certain things I have longed to share with my children since they began their lives on this strange little planet of ours — experiences I hold so dear that I want to hit fast forward so they’re old enough to enjoy them now. You know, right now.


I can’t wait to take them to Disneyland, for example, or to snorkel the Great Barrier Reef, and I frequently bemoan the fact that they’re still not quite old enough to begin reading The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.


But when I caught Marvel Girl and Miss Malaprop in the hallway before school last week using their hairbrushes as lightsabers (one Skywalker Blue, one Vader Red), I felt my breath catch and I dared to wonder — could it be? Was it time? Were they finally ready to watch Star Wars?


Ever so casually, I dropped a description of the morning’s Jedi-inspired skirmish into conversation with The Bloke when he got home from work, and saw a thoughtful gleam appear in his eye. After all, this was the man for whom I had purchased a Darth Vader helmet (complete with voice changer) for his thirtieth birthday, just to see that split second upon opening it when he looked like a five year old — and maybe even felt like it too. But that was before we’d even thought of having kids…


Yoda Keep CalmWas it really possible that our progeny were ready to become Padawans? To learn of the ways of the Force, to speak of Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobe, of Darth Vader and the Death Star?


It felt like the dawning of a new age. A new hope.


A New Hope! Because that, of course, is where any true believer would begin their journey into embracing the intergalactic. (We don’t take too kindly to that Jar Jar Binks nonsense around here.) No, The Bloke and I were in firm agreement that Episode IV was the place to start.


And so, yesterday, we did. After spending part of the day piecing together part of a huge puzzle of the (actual) Solar System, talking about stars and planets and space travel and the International Space Station, we finished the day by watching the first half of Star Wars: A New Hope.


Marvel Girl, excited and already entranced, read out the famous opening lines to her sister as they scrolled up the star-filled screen. Miss Malaprop, never one to be outdone by her more literate sister, proudly wore her glow-in-the-dark Millennium Falcon T-shirt to mark the occasion.


Leia We Can Do ItOh — they had so many questions!


Why does Tatooine have more than one moon? What exactly are the Jawa people?


Why does Darth Vader sound like that? Why did he have to blow up Alderaan?


Are there men inside all the Storm Trooper suits? And how come Jabba the Hutt looks like a giant slug?


Mum, did you really have a Princess Leia toothbrush when you were little?


Can we go to a Spaceport like Mos Eisley one day?


But why not? Are you sure it’s not real?


We can’t wait to watch the second half with them this afternoon. There are sure to be many more questions, but there will no doubt be moments of pure joy for everyone crammed onto our couch. Our little Padawans haven’t even heard of Ewoks yet, or seen anyone ride a Tauntaun, and they don’t know who Luke Skywalker will met on the swamp planet of Dagobah or that he has a sister.


But seeing my girls enter a new world — no, make that new universe — has been a privilege I am now glad I waited for: they were ready.  Marvel Girl got up this morning and drew detailed pictures of R2-D2, Obi-Wan Kenobi and all the characters she has encountered so far while Miss Malaprop and I finished off the Solar System puzzle.


It’s been a great reminder that life in our own galaxy is pretty unreal.


May to Force be with you.


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