40 day challenge - The beginning

Tomorrow is my first day of a 40 day challenge. Sounds exciting, doesn't it! For six weeks I will practice yoga six days a week in my local studio (www.powerliving.com.au) with one day of rest. I will meditate twice daily, say good-bye to coffee and alcohol and just generally take a long, hard look at what my body really needs and what it doesn't.

Why do I do it? I guess the main reason is that I'm just curious how it will affect me. The program is called 40 day challenge for a reason. Will I cope or buckle under the physical and mental pressure? I also believe that it will kick-start this year and somehow help me manifest the perfect job and the perfect balance of making my family and myself happy. A teensy bit far-fetched? Ridiculous? Maybe, but there you have it. Well, and then there is obviously the sheer vain pleasure in getting fit and looking great. I dare anyone participating in the challenge to contradict me in this point.

So for the next 40 days (or 960 hours or 57,600 minutes...) allow me the weekly self-indulgence of only talking about myself: my mind, my body, my fears and failings and ultimately (hopefully!) my triumphant success. Stay tuned.

Morrissey at the Enmore, 21 December 2013

I have waited for this concert for 25 years. When I listened to the Smiths for the first time, I knew that someone finally got it - the loneliness, the longing, the joy and pain and sometimes the shear boredem of being young. Be it "Mother, I can feel/ the soil falling over my head" or "When you walk without ease/on these streets where you were raised", Morrissey captured all these feelings poetically pitch-perfect.

So as I am standing in the Enmore Theatre, I feel like pinching myself: I can hardly believe that it is the man himself on stage, opening the concert with Shoplifters of the World Unite. It feels utterly surreal seeing him perform live the soundtrack of my teenage years. Although I haven't listened to some songs for a long time, I find myself singing along word for word.

Morrissey is all theatrical gestures and snappy one-liners. He throws in the odd dispariging comment about the royal family or dictatorships around the globe. His vegetarian anthem Meat is Murder is really too long and a bit tedious, but still chilling accompanied by footage of cattle being led to be slaughtered in the background. For Let Me Kiss You he throws his shirt into the audience and reveals a pretty trim body for his 53 years. People hand him books and flowers, something I haven't seen in a long time at a concert. He even invites a few fans on stage. Their reactions go from enthusiastic hugging to reverently kneeling before Moz.

Satisfyingly the playlist leans heavily on early Smiths material and ignores the worst of his self-indulgent smooth solo numbers. And when he sings the first tunes of Please Please Please, Let Me Get What I Want, I feel like crying: This is flawless and beautiful and just perfect.

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?