You have to admit, the psychedelic-mushroom munching-hillbilly-slightly creepy and scary but hilarious vid for this song goes really well with the events of the week just gone.



And I love this quote from an old interview:

“When my relatives ask, ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’, and I tell them I’ve been playing in a country band, a grimace comes over their faces,” he says, “and they pretend to be supportive.”

Hauschka – Morgenrot from Jeff Desom on Vimeo.

Morgenrot is an animation made from old photos of New York from the Library of Congress. That haunting music is from Hauschka (Volker Bertlemann), a modern composer from Dusseldorf.

More about it here.

I love decaying, secret urban and industrial sites. Love. them. When Barista put up a post on the Japanese ghost island Gunkanjima, I was happily googling it for days on end. Same with the motorcycle rider of Chernobyl and the wonderful secret tunnels under the city of London. I’m too chicken to go where the Cave Clan used to go in Melbourne, but if they ever decided to do guided tours, well.

We saw Collapse last weekend – a site-specific installation/play, which uses the heavily patina’d wharf area between the boat clubs and the shipbuilding factories at Williamstown.

In November 2008, Melbourne based company Red Cabbage will be installing a large-scale site-specific performance which will transform a secret historical location in Williamstown.
The Melbourne premiere of Collapse is a tale of human survival within a society in crisis. Audiences will embark on a journey by boat to discover a post-apocalyptic community seeking grace in the midst of adversity.

We had to assemble at Spotswood Scienceworks jetty (Scienceworks is another collection of cool old industrial archaeology, and that whole precinct is a great hangout for the industrial landscape lover, although it’s not what it used to be.) A boat took us to the wharf where the Red Cabbage collective used the old buildings (the same ones used for the Tall Ships project, I think) where I got to enjoy some vintage decay plus interesting weirdness. We weren’t really expecting a plot and suspected it might be quite installation-y, so we weren’t disappointed.

They also take you into the old morgue, which is a bluestone building smaller than the average school portable, with hefty shelves all around the perimeter. Not many ghostly vibrations there, though, with so many people crowding in.

We finished up at the Pirate’s Tavern, which is the hidden hideout of the game fishing club. It’s got a great scruffy personality. They hire the place out for parties– it’s worth a look, the fact that it’s all so hidden is the best part of the fun.

My completely fictional Ms Playwright is a professional writer, but still finds it hard to balance the work with her domestic life while her children are young, as we all do. She finds that the realities of her adult life do not jive with her youthful ideals. She’s discovered that the post-70s life is no “dream”. (Gosh!) For this, she blames second wave feminism. She writes articles for broadsheet dailies which claim that combining a career and children are, for women, simply impossible, and feminism has all been a big con and we’re all miserable but don’t want to admit it because we’re just full of the feminist kool-aid. At the same time, in the great tradition of anti-feminist Special Snowflakes everywhere, she is herself building a career that most of us can only dream about.

Also in the great tradition of the anti-feminist pundit, she’s standing on the shoulders of giants in order to piss on them (while tossing off remarks about how much she really respects them, honest), because her success has in no small measure been made possible by the efforts of the women who came before her and fought for womens’ talents to be taken seriously.

Needing to bump up the income to put the sprogs through Grammar school, Ms P thinks up a sure-fire marketing ploy. She’ll write a play which is a thinly disguised account of a traumatic event that happened to a prominent second-wave feminist (SWF). SWF is often in the news and is commonly used by the press as a handy hate-magnet to get the more bigoted sections of the readership going. Therefore, she’ll be easily recognisable and the speculation will make the play an instant hit. Unfortunately for SWF, the public won’t have the information they need to separate fact from fiction, and will tend to take the whole thing as based on fact. Ms P will disingenuously refuse to admit that the play has anything to do with SWF (oh, please) and will primly assert that “there are many fallibilities (sic) among the women of SWF’s generation.” It wasn’t us who ruined the world, Miss! A bad woman did it and ran away.

Naturally, SWF is pretty pissed off by this. Annoyed? Anyone would be! So she makes a couple of acerbic comments, as the media so loves her to do, and is then portrayed as a rampant! Termagant! Madwoman! who “foams”, and has no sense of humour, as well as being a “shrew”,as they’ve done a thousand times before. This leads to another round of hateful putdowns for SWF from random self-anointed experts and huge free publicity for Ms P’s play. Result!

I reckon it should be interesting. And I’ve got this great marketing strategy I’d like to tell you about…