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Showing posts with the label is it art?

There is no wall left to this village.

Angry sticker #1. Paternoster Row, North Hobart. July 2013. Another one from Ezra! Lament of the Frontier Guard , Ezra Pound By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand, Lonely from the beginning of time until now! Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn. I climb the towers and towers to watch out the barbarous land: Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert. There is no wall left to this village. Bones white with a thousand frosts, High heaps, covered with trees and grass; Who brought this to pass? Who has brought the flaming imperial anger? Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums? Barbarous kings. A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn, A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom, Three hundred and sixty thousand, And sorrow, sorrow like rain. Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning, Desolate, desolate fields, And no children of warfare upon them, No longer the men for offence and defence. Ah,...

The best mannered people make the most absurd lovers.

Art #1. Bathurst Street Car Park, Hobart. February 2013. As you know, the Internet is a wonderful place filled with the rich and varied treasures of the world holds (and RSS feeds.) The following are some things that I've had a look at in the last week. I call this: a Compendium of Click-throughs for Monday Morning... This one explores the history of neurasthenia or “invalidism”, a curious mid-nineteenth-century chapter in the story of the emancipation of women . This one is a bitter-sweet collection of photographs of Afghanistan in the 1960s . Our local museum is now offering a collection of 100 objects that help us understand and explain Tasmania . The point of universities? "James' Giant Peach Transport Across the Atlantic" , a in the Journal of Physics Special Topics . "In the US since 1998, for every time a woman used a handgun to kill in self-defence, 101 women were murdered with a handgun." Women, Handguns, and Self-Defence: A Deadly ...

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

Art? Lindisfarne Bay, Lindisfarne. September 2012. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster: Repressed Edwardian culture. Sharp sketch of the stupidity of the upper classes and the effects of shifting mores. Good stuff. B+

Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.

High art. Geilston Bay, August 2011. the Russian Civil War Henry (given name) the Randolph Bourne Institute Artaxerxes I Smithton , Tasmania What is today's Sunday Top Five ?

If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.

A touch of blue. Gregory Street, Sandy Bay. September 2011. "Chiggety check yourself befo' yo' wreck yo'self"? What's that mean, exactly?

I worship your fleece which is the perfect triangle

10 Murray: going the way of the Tasmanian Tiger? Corner of Murray and Davey Streets, September 2011. It's about time that I had a sexy poem... The Ninth Secret Poem , Guillaume Apollinaire I worship your fleece which is the perfect triangle Of the Goddess I am the lumberjack of the only virgin forest O my Eldorado I am the only fish in your voluptuous ocean You my lovely Siren I am the climber on your snowy mountains O my whitest Alp I am the heavenly archer at your beautiful mouth O my darling quiver I am the hauler of your midnight hair O lovely ship on the canal of my kisses And the lilies of your arms are beckoning me O my summer garden The fruits of your breast are ripening their honey for me O my sweet-smelling orchard And I am raising you O Madeleine O my beauty above the earth Like the torch of all light

A man's conscience and his judgement is the same thing; and as the judgement, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.

What's going on? Criterion Street, Hobart. August 2011. Sunday Top Five day and I think today I'll recap My Top Five Poems That I Have Featured On This Here Blog! i like my body when it is with your , e.e. cummings After Making Love We Hear Footsteps , Galway Kinnell Not Waving but Drowning , Stevie Smith Small Frogs Killed On The Highway , James Wright PLEA FOR A HISTORY OF WORKING-CLASS LEEDS , by Barry Tebb

The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.

The question at hand. Russell Street, Sandy Bay. July 2011. Can a heart still break once its [ sic ] stopped beatin... Now, I'm no cardiac surgeon, but if a heart has stopped beating there is a mighty good chance that it already is broken! This reminds me of one of my favourite heartbreak songs that I thought I'd share with you, the Mountain Goats' paean to the dissolution of a marriage, No Children . What I really like most about this one is the almost joyful intensity of the vocal in the celebration of bitterness. As a sucker for a decent lyric, I reckon that this one is a beauty. I mean really I am drowning There is no sign of land You are coming down with me Hand in unlovable hand And I hope you die I hope we both die That's truth and beauty there.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

It’s parked there all say, every day, yet it never gets a ticket. Out back of the Withdrawal Unit, St Johns Park, New Town. January 2011. “Fancy girls push me in the bottom”? Desire? Complaint? Fantasy? “ Fancy girls push me in the bottom ”? A cry for help? “Fancy girls push me in the bottom”? Which girls? Where? “Fancy girls push me in the bottom”? Who? Why? “Fancy girls push me in the bottom”? It’s like that a five-tone musical phrase that’s repeated in Close Encounters of the Third Kind . “ Fancy girls push me in the bottom ”? Over and over and over again. I’m expecting a visit any day soon…

An overflow of good converts to bad.

It's art Jim, but not as we know it. Rosny LINC, Rosny, October 2010. The LINC stands for Learning and Information Centre , and is part of the broader CKN ( Community Knowledge Network ) which links together Adult Education, the State Library of Tasmania, Online Access Centres and the Archives Office under one banner. To cut a long story short, it's my local library . Which leads me into today's Sunday Top Five! Five Wonderful Feelings For Today! Irascible Frustrated Tired Aching Morose This may or may not have something to do with having the entire weekend written off by rain.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

I sense a pattern. The nouveau riche area of Wapping, Hobart, October 2010. I have already railed before about the gentrification of the areas of what were formally slums here in Hobart. Primarily, these areas were those that previously housed the various destitutes, waifs, beggars, prostitutes and cocktail waitresses that seem to surround working docks . When the work at the docks dry up, all that are left are the slums. Eventually – after a period of mass forgetting – those with the bread to spare force out the toothless grannies left, bulldoze the filth and shift in their high-rise apartments, underground parking and diamond-studded collar wearing Pekinese. What I want to know is, as I suspect, this a universal phenomenon? Dear readers, have your cities experienced similar ‘urban regeneration’? How has is worked out?

Sooner or later, one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

Odd things painted on walls in New Town, #1. New Town Road. July 2010. Who said that holding hands is powerless Huh? I’m not sure that that is a sentence. Traditionally (and far too simplistically), a sentence is traditionally defined as a group of words that expresses a complete idea and that includes a subject and a verb . Convention also dictates that it ends with a full stop, question mark, or exclamation point. Who said that holding hands is powerless It looks like a question, but we don’t have a question mark. We have a subject, verb and even an adjective, but I am not convinced that we have a complete idea . Who said that holding hands is powerless I do wish that these hip young urban artists would try out their sloganeering prior to getting out into the streets to create their intertextual self-reflexive hyperstylistic post-structural syntaxtically illiterate counter-cultural mash-ups. I mean really . Every day I wait that that bus stop and every day I wonder what on Earth it...