Museum of Contemporary Art (Part II)

Here are some impressions from another recent trip to the wonderful MCA.



 



Rosalie Gascoigne: Tiger Tiger, 1987

This is made from road signs that are carved up and reassembled. Some critics refer to Gascoigne's work as visual poetry. It caught my eye because it is inspired by a poem I love, The Tyger, by William Blake:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Tim Johnson: Dewachin, 1987

This is inspired by Aboriginal dot paintings and is beautiful and shimmering in the original.

 

Nick Mangan: eXoecoaXis, 2005

The kids were impressed by the hand-made crystals poking out of the Persian rug, and I like the catchy title...

Robert Owen: Sunrise #3, 2005

Imagine this in your living room - minus the bucket! Love the combination of vibrant colours.

Angus Stone at the Enmore, 1 November 2012

 

 

It's like stepping into a fairytale: cut-out trees, a fake campfire in the corner, glittering light bulbs for stars. It fits the atmosphere this evening. People are sitting cross-legged, chatting quietly and waiting patiently for Angus Stone to appear. When he finally does, the crowd goes wild though; and when he calmly utters the profound words: "Hi, I'd like to introduce myself, my name is Angus", there is no stopping at least the female part of the audience. There is a lot of chanting his name and fervently shouted declarations of love. The man himself takes all this in his stride. He strokes his beard thoughtfully and answers carefully that, yeah, he loves us too, which sends the girls into another screaming frenzy.

 

But all that aside, there's the music. It's mostly stripped back, acoustic and folksy like River Love, the first song of the evening that has more than a hint of Bob Dylan to it, but there are also slightly edgier and darker pieces like It Was Blue and End of the World, which suit Stone's voice surprisingly well. This voice really is something: It's raw and emotional, and like his big sister he has that uncanny ability to give you the impression of sitting right next to you and singing gently into your ear.

 

For the encore Stone plays a song that he has written on the same day, something gloomy and acoustic about a beautiful French girl who makes him sad for some reason. If feels authentic, and I'm thinking that this is what people crave: that sense of a simple truth; a guy with shaggy hair and a guitar who sings softly about his feelings, his loneliness and his dreams. It certainly isn't new, but it is honest and beautiful - and it still gets the girls...



Autumn Laing by Alex Miller

A while ago I wrote about the satisfaction of putting things into order, of quantifying and labelling them. Well, here I will attempt something that I have meant to do for a very long time: I will choose one book every month that I loved reading and will try to explain why I did love it. And thus I will hopefully save it from disappearing in that big pile of all the other books and movies and newspaper articles and websites that I really wanted to remember; the ones that moved and inspired me and that somehow fell between the cracks in the mysterious landscape of my mind...

This is a book about being old. It is a book about being young and immortal. It is a book about art, about jealousy and passion, about women and about Australia. Autumn Laing tells her story, beginning, 'They are all dead, and I am old and skeleton-gaunt. This is where it began fifty-three years ago.' Doesn't this alone make you want to sit back and read on? Oh, the power of words, drawing you in and creating a world just for you to discover!

Autumn Laing is young and beautiful. It is the late 1930s in Melbourne, and she is married to kind and gentle Arthur. Theirs is a quiet and comfortable marriage. They have a circle of artistic, bohemien friends who come to their house to eat, drink copious amounts of red wine and discuss art and poetry. They are trying to invent an Australian version of the European modernism and argue about aesthetics, philosophy and ethics. Their lifes change when Autumn meets and subsequently seduces Pat Donlon, a promising and hot-headed young artist. He is married to lovely and innocent Edith, who is pregnant with their first child. The book shifts between the unfolding story and the present, where Autumn is dying, bad-tempered and armed with a sharp tongue. She is looking back with regret and longing and eventually is able to find some kind of peace and closure.

Alex Miller is an amazingly skilled writer. His style seems effortless, but is so confident and elegant in providing first only glimpses of the story and the characters that inhabit it and subsequently weaving all the threads together into a rich and colourful tapestry. Miller lets Autumn talk and gives her a truly unique voice. I tried to slow down my reading towards the end, and I really missed her after finishing the story. In fact, I'm still thinking of her as someone I knew and who has recently died. The power of words...

Julia Stone at the Metro Theatre, 15 September 2012

I have been vomited upon by my two sick children for the last two weeks and have only recently re-surfaced from under a mountain of dirty bed linen, stacks of salted crackers and seas of chamomile tea...

So just before heading to Fiji for a long anticipated and, I think, well deserved holiday, a quick recount of my last little adventure into the Australian music scene. The venue is the Metro Theatre again and the occasion the concert of the lovely Julia Stone.

Support act is The Trouble with Templeton from Brisbane. The band's young singer and songwriter Tom Calder is definitely someone to watch. He's got charisma, a wonderful voice and he writes songs that are catchy and packed with raw emotions.

Julia Stone herself, when she finally enters the stage, is delightful: Her unpretentious and relaxed banter gives the concert a very personal and intimate feel. She tells little stories about how the songs for her solo album By the Horns came about and what inspired them. She is sweet without drifting into the kind of sugary and infantile cuteness that strangely seems to be the default setting for a lot of girls these days (Wow, I sound like a grumpy old woman, and I'm breaking my own rule of not being bitchy in this blog, so enough of this).

 

Julia Stone does a few trumpet solos, but for most songs she plays the guitar (one bearded guy seems solely assigned to hand her a different model after each song). Stone seems mature and confident and is clearly a seasoned performer. But her most obvious asset is her sheer talent: Her voice is beautiful and fragile, and it matches the songs with their stripped back, acoustic compositions that sound deceivingly simple, but are delicate and well crafted arrangements.

 

After playing together with her brother Angus for six years, they both have taken this year to pursue their respective solo projects. I'm very much looking forward to seeing Angus Stone perform at the Enmore Theatre this November, where he will play songs from his new album Broken Brights. They have promised to get back together after this little excursion. Whatever they decide to do in the future, these extraordinary siblings have proven that they continue to deserve a central place in Australia's musical landscape.

 



David Helfgott at the City Recital Hall, 10 August 2012

As David Helfgott jogs onto stage and gives a thumbs up into the audience with both hands, grinning like an excited child, you can't help but be enchanted. This is not your average start of a classical concert, and Helfgott certainly isn't your average classical performer. After having inspired the Oscar-winning movie Shine in 1996 with Geoffrey Rush portraying him as an adult, he is in fact probably one of the best known pianists of our time. The movie shows Helfgott's childhood in Melbourne, born to Polish-Jewish parents. He displays early signs of being a prodigious piano player, but increasingly struggles with a schizoaffective disorder. The movie was subsequently strongly criticised by his sister who disagrees mainly with the depiction of their father as an authoritarian tyrant.

Today David Helfgott performs Sergei Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No 3 in D minor, the very piece that brought about his mental breakdown and admittance to a psychiatric hospital as a young man. It is known to be one of the most technically challenging pieces to play. "Rach Three" is a wonderful composition - full of longing and nostalgia and a passion that sometimes simmers under the surface and sometimes bursts open in glorious, brilliant rainbows. The extraordinary thing about Helfgott's performance is how he seems to literally live and breathe the music he is playing. Every now and then he mutters and grunts, bowing deep over the piano and frowning in concentration. At other times he beams gleefully into the audience, nodding vigourosly when playing a particularly triumphant part. He plays without sheet music and is utterly immersed in the piece. His enthusiasm is contagious and highly entertaining. There is nothing grave and somber about Helfgott's playing; it is pure, unadulterated joy.

When he finishes, the audience erupts in cheers and gives a long standing ovation. Critics have found fault with Helfgott's technical abilities in the past; they have condemned an audience, not used to classical concerts, for clapping between movements. They were bothered by Helgott's grunting while playing. Looking around me, I see smiling faces everywhere, people laughing out loud at Helfgott's repeated hugging and kissing of his fellow musicians on stage, others copying his two-handed thumbs up. This man brings joy and wonder into people's lives, he makes classical music approachable and is truly inspiring in his playfulness. Why so serious?

Jack White at the Hordern Pavilion, 26 July 2012

 

I've go a confession to make: I used to be a rockabilly. This was when I was about 17 years old, right after a brief gothic stint and just before donning Doc Martens and jumping around to Ska and Punk music. It took me a year or so to figure out that my rockabilly friends not only adopted the music from the 1950s, but also the macho culture and latent racism of this period. But for a while my girlfriend and I were part of this cool gang, clad in leather jackets adorned with the Confederate flag, sticky hair and all; feeling very rebellious and different indeed. Until I understood that subcultures are in a way much more conservative than the mainstream, with their stringent rules about the right clothes, the right hair and the right music. Rebellion? Sure. Individuality? No way.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I'm at a concert again - one that I had been looking forward to for months. The support act is the infectiously cheerful Lanie Lane with her mix of rock'n' roll, blues and rockabilly. And that music takes me right back to these exciting times of carving out an identity, deciding where I want to belong and gradually realising what's important (and it isn't what brand of hairspray you're using).

After this stroll down memory lane allow me to be briefly reduced to a gushing teenager in reliving the amazing two hours that are the Jack White concert. Oh. My. God. What a musician! What a guy! I was never so right in anticipating an event; this is without a doubt the best concert I saw this year, if not one of the best I've ever been to. Jack White is a true rock star. Mysterious, a bit bonkers, it seems, but oh so sexy, and with the most amazing voice and guitar skills.

With his terrific all-male band (alternating nightly between this and an all-female band), he plays songs from his time with the White Stripes and the Raconteurs, and from his debut solo album Blunderbuss, about which I wrote in an earlier blog entry. He starts thunderously with Black Math from his Elephant album with the White Stripes. To imagine the power: With just one gesture you indicate you want the audience to clap, and several thounsand people obediently raise their hands. The contrast between his earlier, explosive pieces like The Hardest Button To Button and his new material as a solo artist is sometimes stark, but White pulls it off as he tackles each song with intense concentration. It is only halfway through the concert that he allows himself a half-smile. He ends the concert with an electric rendition of Seven Nation Army, and the crowd goes wild, shouting the lyrics and roaring the bassline. I'm squeezed in, I am drenched in sweat and my lukewarm beer is sloshing out of my plastic cup as I jump up and down - in short, it is exactly how a great concert is supposed to be.



You might have noticed the slight improvement in the quality of the concert photos (I know, the photos of my rockabilly years are pretty dodgy. They are scanned, but I couldn't figure out how to change the frame. Where is your personal technical advisor when you need him...).
I could claim that I took a proper camera this time and was really, really close to the stage. But I'm just going to admit that I got them from Jack White's official website (jackwhiteiii.com), because we weren't allowed to take photos. I'm sure you're glad.

Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats

I feel like sharing a poem again; one that I love passionately and irrationally in equal measures, as it is - in my view - intensely beautiful, but quite long and not easily accessible, although it is very well known. It is a wonderful example of what I wrote about poetry earlier; that it is sometimes best just to let it wash over you and trust that the poem will carry you safely ashore.

John Keats had the extraordinary power to move his contemporaries as well as readers today. Surely part of his appeal is due to the tragic circumstances of his short life and his death of tuberculosis at the young age of only twenty-five years. He fell in love with his Hampstead neighbour Fanny Brawne, a romance that was beautifully captured in the movie "Bright Star". Keats wrote almost all of his major poetry in the short period between 1818 and his death in 1821.

I
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, –
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

II
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

III
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

IV
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

V
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

VI
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain –
To thy high requiem become a sod.

VII
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

VIII
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep?