Big theme in my life. Experimental 3D / Documentary. We interviewed a broad cross section of the community in response to the cover of a men’s magazine that was displayed in the streets of Sydney, Aug 1999.
To this day, i still don’t understand why they have women on the covers of women’s magazines. Perhaps we’re all lesbians.
The most painful laughs I have ever experienced in my life occured during the making of this short film, which is only just a small slither of just how crazy my husband & Sam Hughes got that night. Mitch is the one in the back who goes stir-crazy with the alluminium foil and Sam’s the one who knows how to do great things with a vacuum cleaner.
Experimental animation from 1998, one of my professional practise units @ uni. My own work in design has followed a very similar ethos ~ where i’ve had to be very selective about the kinds of devils i choose to sell my soul to.
When i did art, they told me ~ “that’s not art, it’s more like design”.
When i did design, they told me ~ “this is not design (not commercial enough), how do you expect to get a job producing work like that?! your target audience, it doesn’t even exist!”
I still continue to enjoy how Newtown Mums became the ultimate up-yours, to the latter.
Received a very patronising letter attempting to inform me about the provisions of the Education Act 1990 by a robot the other day, so this is my tongue-in-cheek reply ~ to that robot:
My typography teacher @ uni tried to fail me in the subject after these infamous words were submitted in a very naughty piece that broke all the rules and totally shitted all over the design brief. Rewarded with high distinction by another lecturer who happened to agree with it’s sentiment in this music video. For now ~ I am content with allowing this post to remain as it was originally intended to be.
A poem from 1997, which i’m now using in response to another stupid robot from 2008.
You Are A Robot
In negative philosophy,
time passes.
A lingering bad smell,
is stained upon the university walls.
Vacant stares,
evaporate into silence….
Tuberculosis,
on a hot
neon sign,
yearning for a good wank
in opulent water.
Sorrow burns tenaciously,
in an everlasting bubble of rushes.
I hate this so-called “God”.
Syphilis on him!
An absolute waste of copious time.
Of all that money has to offer,
I’m presented with this,
pathetic lecturer!
émigré?!
So what!
You are a robot.
Simon Says…
Doubt Yourself.
A seductive tool,
to remind us of time
and how distorted it becomes.
Away…. Away!
..at how the nadir darkens onto a
burnt-out pool of vomit.
Idiot!
Outrageously uncreative,
stupid,
little,
so and so.
Yearning to bring back to life,
dead old ways.
I close my ears,
to drown out your insipid notions.
FUCK YOU!
…I quietly scream.
Tolerating what I can…
You are a Robot.
Simon Says…
Confuse Yourself.
To you,
it’s all nothing!
Your idealism,
lacerates
every drop of inspiration.
A rancid reflection,
of eclectic lost causes.
How invigorating,
to see Neolithic half-witted dorks,
show their intolerance!
How do we fucking escape these contradictions?
Riot?!!
Stuff their mouths with
Kellogs Cornflakes?
~ Why not?!!
You are a robot.
Simon Says…
“Hate Yourself”
I know what lies ahead,
you have to find,
The Brain.
Only YOU,
can kill the brain!
Yes,
some of us just may disagree with your arguments.
Keen to attack it,
with our own opinion.
Then I think…
What good ~
…would that do?
Our own opinions,
are underrated,
and rejected ~
because having to listen to,
New Ideas,
don’t correspond to your own fucking idea of,
“evergreen design” ~
I fucking hate you!
Go on and forcefully insert your
foul iconoclast contradictions,
up into the air,
and hear us laugh at two baboons.
You people,
are the tyrannical rats,
of evolving dismemberment.
A long wait it becomes,
to complete the instructed tasks.
Buzz off,
Angel from Below.
I curse and will,
enjoy to see your stupidness
become further outmoded,
and DIE!
~
See how busy we’ve been? Look at the state of the lawn in our backyard. Hubby has been so caught up with manufacturing his whistles that I ended up challenging my refusal to learn how to start up a lawn mower. I’m the one always cleaning the toilets in this house, because my husband doesn’t know how to use a toilet brush. The embarassment of owning weeds and scottish thistles gowing up to 1.5m high in the front lawn of this house, in a “Garden Village” for crying out loud, finally got the better of me.
The flies have been so psycho up this way, that i had to invent my new Woztraylian Bushwoman’s (Reverse Swagman’s) Hat for protection. The psycho flies were attacking my ears so badly, that i created some protective ear flaps out of sticky fly-catching paper. Instead of shooing flys away with a regular swaggie hat, i designed this one to attract and kill them.
The front lawn before i started to learn how to start the mower. Take note of how the quality of light in the sky begins to change with the next photo! It’s the early beginnings of a new afternoon storm approaching.
The front lawn after i learned that there’s no point in pulling the string thingie if you haven’t pushed the accelerator throttle down thingie first. The down side of finishing all the mowing, was that the sound of the motor was no longer drowning out the sound of the dying flies stuck around my ear flaps screaming “help me, help me, help me, help me!” in stereo! 555
It took me about 60 minutes to mow our lawn. This new hat of mine reduced the entire psycho fly population of Leura by close to 150 flies. That’s approximtely the equivalent of one psycho fly attacking your ears every 24 seconds. Can you see why i had to invent this hat now? I was hoping that i could send them a very strong message of “fuck off” - that maybe they could tell their friends to,
“Stay away from this woman’s ears! She’s dangerous!”
…but they seemed to be somewhat aloof to this.
It is no longer a myth for me that the sign of sticky psycho flies attacking your ears in Leura, now means that there is going to be a fierce storm that will be brewing in the afternoon. The more psycho & sticky the flies are, the more volatile the storm usually becomes.
Some shots of the orange hazed clouds post-storm. This is about the 4th time that i’ve seen this phenomena across the last 2 years. You can see more orange-sky phenomena photos from My First Storm Chase in Feb 2006.
It’s been the coldest summer i’ve ever experienced in my life. I had to wear my winter coat a number of times during December(our summer here), and we’ve had to put the heaters on for some nights as well.
The dought has broken in many parts of oz with the La Nina weather pattern returning. Very high levels of rainfall have been having a significant impact on my plants.
Napoleon has never flowered for 2 years, just as my dwarf palm hasn’t given birth to a new stem either.
I’ve had this breed of succulent for close to 6 years. The first time i ever saw it flower was last year, where it had no more than 5 or 6 flowers. This time around - it’s a a full blown explosion!
This other succlent, has never looked so pregnant in my entire life of getting to know it over the years. The intensity of it’s colour has never been this saturated or explosive in it’s display. Old plants once deemed as potential dead - have been rising from the dead in my front lawn as well.
What has been the most striking across this summer, is the weather pattern of hot mornings with clear blue skies, that are consistently followed by the formation of electrically charged storms in the afternoon.
I’ve found it fascinating how the storms always form between 3-4pm on average so consistently. As for why i’ve been able to register such a time frame? It’s because these cloud formations start to occur when it’s time for me to pick my son up from school.
We had another hail storm the other day. My son never enjoys the thunderstorms because the electricity blackouts upset him a lot. It scares him. He thinks it’s going to be the end of the world (without electricity) and he’s also seeing the news reports of the climate getting worse, with many floodings and all sorts of other natural disasters revolving around the weather on TV.
I decided to try and divert his negative regard towards the weather into something positive. Here is part 1 of measuring the Leura “Floods” at the front of our house:
After the storm subsides, my son does a more accurate reading of the water level with his red K’nex stick.
For now - i must return back to life & work/work/work ~ and learn how to take more time to relax. It’s been good to be able to pull out my camera… but *sighs* ~ i have to get back to my work. Life’s great - but there’s a lot of amazing things in my life that i have to get back to achieving.
Interesting adventures in website design with work atm. I’ve been forced to confront code. *gah*
I’ve endured a very steep learning curve with PHP the last year, very thrilled with my progress. My brain is gaining a good grasp with some of the Mysql stuff. My brother’s been a great support - gave me a good tutorial last week and my mother’s pitched in with the effort by purchasing a reference manual to cover all this apache/Mysql/PHP stuffings.
At this end right now - i am somewhat disgraced by the lack of grace i see in the programming end of this work. It’s messy, lacks clean hierarchy and has such a pathetic sense of “chippy choppy” ad-hoc-hack-isms. It doesn’t function with the Firefox browser either (oh, what a headache!) *lol*. It’s like the ability to program generates a form of obfuscation - where the end-users, the lay people who only see the end-result - can’t see how ugly, messy and lazy the programming stuff actually looks like in the underbelly. I know that good programmers can see this sort of messy & sloppy code stuff though.
I’m still on the “outside” looking in but it feels good that I’ve had a number of achievements today.
Lucky to have such a great brother who’s a first-class programmer. He’s provided so much fantastic support and i’ve also been moved by how mum has pitched in like this too.
Although many C64 games were fairly “unisex” for me - I still faced many which featured males as the primary protagonist all the time. Come to think of it - Hollywood films are comparitively, not too different!
This wasn’t too much of a big deal for me, but i did experience something magical as a young girl when my life finally encountered a game known as Yie Ar Kung Fu, especially when the female opponents, Fan & Star appeared - dressed in RED! (no! never in pink, it must always be a pomegranite red, for me!)
Like - wow, finally - a female fighter! About bloody time. Fan was my favourite. I loved her dress, that she appeared to be brunette and i also liked the fans that she chucked. You can see these ladies in fighting action here:
This gameplay makes me laugh so much as i used very similar moves to win. Primitive compared to the complex martial arts moves you can muster on a PS2 with a game like Tekken in this era.
When Fan entered into my life, i felt so much peace and hapiness being the way that i am, or perhaps it was a reflection of where it was that i needed to go…
For crazy thinking mums who have a bloody sense of humour!
