What I did on my weekend…

Just the sort of week­end I’d hoped for. After a great day Friday at the X|Media|Lab con­fer­ence, went for a drink with Amanda Wise, an old acquaint­ance from the a early days of my career (those who were around at the time: she worked at Radi­ant with John of the banana yoghurt throw­ing at Wood­ford), then had scrummy blood orange and rock­melon gelato and went back to mum’s. Was going to go out again, but ended up watch­ing a quite good film called Cher­ish with Mum instead. 

Sat­urday saw me at the Art Gal­lery of NSW for the Cara­vag­gio exhib­i­tion, which was a little dis­ap­point­ing. Although sub­titled “Dark and Light”, it didn’t thrill me with intens­it­ies. There were a few amaz­ing pieces, but out of 60+ works, only 10 would have been by Cara­vag­gio, the rest by his fol­low­ers and imitators.

The rest of the gal­lery was good though. Haven’t been for a while, and enjoyed the Braque, which I didn’t know was there, a bunch of other early 20th cen­tury works, and a sur­pris­ingly high qual­ity Art Express, which is all the stu­dent works from last year’s Year 12.

Then went off to Glebe Mar­kets, which I love and met up with Mum again for more gelato: this time a taste of sour cherry, a taste of coffee and almond and then a cone with mocha and zabagli­one. Yay for Badde Manors.

Ducked over to Naom­i’s, then off to coffee with pred­ator. Dis­cus­sions as usual with him range all over the place, from our mutual his­tor­ies with wif_of_bath to DNA to life plans, his PhD on chem­ical sys­tems as inform­a­tion sys­tems and the new one, his life expect­ancy post-op. It’s not look­ing good (with sec­ond­ary cancer in the lymph system, he’s got about five years, max). He’s in good spir­its though, and sug­gests a wander through New­town cemetery. We dis­cover the wreck of the Dunbar caused havoc in the region in the mid 1850s and come up with a great epi­taph for Pred’s tomb­stone: So that’s what’s under here! We finish with a relaxed con­ver­sa­tion about sex and intim­acy in the park and then I’m off to dinner with turtlesnake and her part­ner (am I cor­rect in assum­ing he is mde­sacre­bois?). Great to see them, and this time it’s books and Buffy, iPods and other stuff and even better, singing along to Buffy the Musical.

Sunday I meet Stu Ridley and baby Trin­ity at the MCA Café for break­fast before head­ing in to see the Leigh Bowery exhib­i­tion. It was com­pre­hens­ive, with cos­tumes them­selves, large photos of Bowery posing in the cos­tumes, video of per­form­ances and other mater­ial such as let­ters between Bowery and The Face magazine, copies of the Face, Bowery’s London trans­port ID. I thought the video of the ‘birth’ pro­jects was fas­cin­at­ing – Bowery had an enorm­ous dress that con­cealed the har­ness he wore con­tain­ing a naked woman covered in red and blue paint. After per­form­ing a song, he would lie back on a table and per­form a birth, as she crawled out of the har­ness between his legs. Then he would ‘feed’ her by regur­git­at­ing into her mouth and piss­ing into a glass. It’s a pity the ‘songs’ were so abom­in­able. I’m not really into the whole post-punk thing and the sound qual­ity on the videos were atro­cious. The woman behind me who looked at Bowery and friends naked except for their full face masks and their mer­kins and com­men­ted that ‘it makes me feel so much better about my cel­lulite’ and ‘I have one word for them: liposuc­tion” clearly has no idea it is her brand of ‘fem­in­in­ity’ that Bowery is cri­tiquing so viciously in many of his pieces.

I also found Lucian Freud’s paint­ings of Bowery naked to be arrest­ing: he appears vul­ner­able yet strong without his props.

The after­noon was Dance of Death, the Strind­berg play with Ian McK­el­len (I tend to agree with others than McK­el­len and the set are the stars of this pro­duc­tion), more gelato (this time man­dar­ine) and then drinks for the start of X|Media|Lab proper. Home to Naom­i’s and a great game of ana­gram with fejoa-infused vodka. 

Life is very, very good.