My parents rock. Thank you so much for the pressies, guys! Item number one: I’m going to Melbourne Film Fest with a gold pass thanks to cashola. Item number two: Heeb the new Jew review, cultural item extraordinaire, from the States. It’s Vice magazine for left-wing Jewish strays. What can I say? “Torah for pyros” is a sample headline.
Let’s see: 2004, the art exhibition. So far, I’ve only been to the bit in the ACMI Screen Gallery. Some of it was ordinary. There were a couple of really interesting pieces, a remote drawing arm being driven by a rat cortex somewhere in the US, Philip Brophy’s hysterically rude animation driven by a penetrative interface (you stick your finger into this squishy pink thing to change the animation), a great drag king video triptych about the urban mall (bizarrely enough set at the Macquarie Centre shopping mall in Sydney, where I grew up, so it became a nostalgic space for me, the ice rink, the car park, the walkways and lifts, my teenhood revisited in kitsch 80s fashion and an Angels soundtrack) and a couple of okay pieces. It’s nowhere near as good as Transfigure was, I have to say. I’m yet to see the still art part of it, which is likely to be this weekend, but my initial impression is that if this is the cutting edge of Australian screen culture, we’re in trouble. It may be the Australian definition of ‘art’ that’s a problem or that my standards have been raised enormously by the Venice Biennale, but having seen art by James Guerts, who’s Australian, I feel like there are other artists I would have included.
Maus and the Jewish Museum: Amazing. We arrived at midday and I expected to wander around for a few hours. Five hours later… the Maus exhibition itself was well done, lots of original art and sketches alongside printed work; the original three-page strip that became Maus the book and other original strips I hadn’t seen before: a really striking one called Master Race about an encounter between a holocaust survivor and Carl Reissman, who ran one of the camps, on a subway train in New York. There was also stunning work about the September 11 attack and the US response: scathing humour, eliciting uncomfortable laughs. I think my favourite of that was the three-panel sequence questioning the role of patriotism and how the flag got involved in all this, going from yellow alert (high likelihood of terrorist attack) to red alert (very high likelihood of terrorist attack) to red, white and blue alert (virtual certainty of terrorist attack). In the panels, a man runs to hide under an American flag as the alert increases. With his head under the flag, the speech bubble reads “I know I’m supposed to feel safer under here but I can’t see a thing”.
After that, mireille21 and drjon went home and I decided to stick around with steampunk and Curtis to look at the rest of the museum. Wow. Easily world-class in terms of presentation. I loved the orange-yellow washed walls with hand drawn sigils and diagrams, quotes from the bible, the Talmud and Jewish thinkers and writers, Hebrew lettering, the tree of life with the kabbalist layout of the 22 letters. In the floor, stone strips with key dates in Jewish history (although I felt a little resentful that post-World War II the only dates related to Israel, rather than the Jewish world… Interactive videos, tracing the diasporic trajectories and more. And that’s before you even get through to the section on Jewish Australia, where there are cases and artefacts and letters to read through and lives to pore through. I’ve always been a huge fan of drawers that you have to open in museums, drawing you in to the research process.
Because steampunk hadn’t been in a synagogue before, we went on the tour. That was also odd, because the woman opened the ark while we were all sitting down and I felt very uncomfortable and just had to stand (it’s traditional). My mum will laugh reading this: she went through my hyper-religious phase as a young teen when I went to synagogue every Friday and criticised anyone who got the candle blessing slightly wrong. Sartre cured me, thankfully, but I still have an addiction to ritual and the Right Way to Do Things. The woman said there was no need to stand as it wasn’t a religious ceremony, but I don’t buy that. The guys still have to wear yarmulkahs as a sign of respect in the synagogue even when it’s not religious and I think standing when the ark is open is similar.
Lastly, on Monday night, I had a few hours to kill before meeting the gorgeous Thea for drinks at E55 to celebrate the thesis, so I dropped in to ACMI to see the Philip Brophy project, Descore, which was a series of short film collaborations between directors and composers. A colleague from Melbourne Uni, Isobel Knowles (from Architecture in Helsinki) had scored one of the pieces, a clever meditation on how people make themselves beautiful in front of mirrors complete with fifties guitars and sugar sweet pop. I didn’t particularly like the film Brophy scored, but the one he directed (“Voices in my head, words in my mouth”) was superb.
Saw Spiderman 2. Lots of fun. (For the benefit of fizit, I went with the guy who was wearing the Gwen at XDream). In other news, my Sunday-night movie buddy Dean (some of you will know who I mean) is coming to stay for a few days and while I was trawling Movie Reel for DVDs for us to watch, I discovered that Things Behind the Sun has been released. This is an excellent film and I really am going to have to get a bunch of people round for a screening sometime soon.
Phew. That’ll teach me to leave time between updates! Guess I’ve been busy.