A year in review: Clothes, part two

This memorial contains almost a month’s worth of parts – though not all of ‘em are about clothes! – and the post you’re reading is the second in the series. 

On 3 June I started wearing a different belt – a tan coloured one this time – to replace the black leather one in use for six weeks. The need for this testament to my weight loss, something that was evident on this day as it was raining and my trousers got wet, the cuffs dragging on the ground. By this time I was sitting at around 87kg, and the size-38 trousers I’d started wearing had become a bit loose for fashion, though they were still ok.

A few days later, on the night of 10 June, I put on pyjamas I hadn’t worn for a decade, the weather getting really cold and night-time temperatures in Sydney dropping perilously low. A couple of weeks earlier I’d started to wear a pullover or fleecy top on top of my button-down shirt. On top of this, while at home, I wore a zip-up jumper a friend had bought me and that, though I’d lost weight, I still used daily. Later, I’d exchange this for a cardigan.

I’d decided, before altering my trousers, to wait until I lost more weight to avoid spending money needlessly but on the day I went to the GP to have a corn burnt off (18 June) I also dropped by at the tailor’s shop and got him to tell me how much it’d cost to change them. (The corn had developed because I’d waited until the end of April I to throw out a pair of worn Sketchers shoes that’d become damaged in the inner sole.) I took all of the trousers with me in an Ikea bag (which the tailor asked me to leave with him when I quit the place that day) and for his information – he put in pins to mark where to cut – I tried on pairs of the Reserve brand (Myer) pants in 42 and in 40, there being multiples of each. In the batch were also other pants of different brands – these purchases going back a very long time indeed, in fact back longer than I had any memory of. 

For some he’d have to remove 18cm of waist to make the pants fit and all told I left ten pairs with him for each of which he charged me $40 as long as I paid in cash, so immediately I opened up my wallet and handed over $50 deposit telling him I’d bring the balance the following week. I’d thought that the GP wanted to see me on the next Thursday for the second dose of cold on the corn, but this appointment turned out to be, in fact, two weeks away. On the other hand I anyway had to be in Pyrmont to see the psychiatrist on the 24th, so was in the area on that day and when I picked up the five pairs of trousers that had been completed. I organised to get the rest later when I’d be visiting Dr Nanda, my GP, for my foot. 

The photo below was set up especially to enable me to show people what my renovated waist looks like – I normally never tuck my shirt in – as a Facebook friend in France (mais bien sur!) had asked to see my middle. “Pas mal,” she drily responded in a comment.

It means, for those of you who’re not conversant in French, “not bad”. Even at this new size, however, I’m still officially overweight, so my psychiatrist recommended that I lose a few more kilos to bring my body mass index below 25. As it is, when this photo was taken, I was just over. On the second Friday in July I fit in another visit to the psychiatrist due to panic attacks while driving and picked up the rest of the trousers on the same day, which was also when I got my second Covid jab. The tailor was still open when I dropped by at 4.15pm, though he told me I was lucky as, normally – he’d changed his routine on account of the state government’s new travel restrictions –, he shuts at 3pm. 

I was now a size 36 and when I took Ming and Omer back to their place on 7 August he let me try on a pair of his skinny jeans which’d gotten too small for him. I did as Ming asked me to do, the result being that I felt like an old man trying to look young, Ming gripped by the effect as she rolled on the floor laughing (literally) taking snapshots – which (below) show me as I normally look (left-hand photo) and me in Omer’s skinny jeans (right-hand photo). 

Ming’d just bought me the (size L) yellow sweater shown in both shots. My French friend (who I don’t know in real life) said, when commenting on the photos: “looking super good”. The mother of another friend said I’d lost too much weight. A third friend just told me to tuck in my shirt.

It was on the night of the 9 August that I thought to myself: “I need to stop wearing pyjamas to bed.” It was so warm (and out of a habit ingrained by fear due to a severe cold period in early June) that I’d been wearing pyjamas daily after showering. In June the tailor in Pyrmont had repaired a tear next to the bottom button on the pyjama top, and though the pants were much too big for me they’re made with a drawstring so size doesn’t matter and I can cinch them tight around my waist.

I retired my old batik wallet on 24 September (see below) as it’d become so worn that the cover was coming away from the body. I’d started using the thing in December 2019 at the time I was tidying up the library in my apartment in Pyrmont though mum had years earlier given to me a collection of colourful fabric wallets I’d kept in a shoebox full of bric-a-brac stored in the sideboard. I now took out of it a different batik wallet to replace the tired one.

On 12 October I wore a pair of shoes that’d last seen action before I moved to Queensland, an event that had happened in the relatively barren wastes of the year 2009 at a time when I had been employed in an IT department. I now felt the badly damaged heels worn down due to my customary scuffing especially pronounced because of a legacy of mental illness that oppressed me as I used to walk from West Pennant Hills to Hornsby to visit a bookstore on weekends. 

I vowed to take the shoes to Mister Minit when I went to see the GP on the following Wednesday and on that day I stopped at Broadway Shopping Centre at about 10.30am and headed to the kiosk in the arcade where a man took my shoes after remarking helpfully that the sole of one of them was cracked. He showed them to his colleague and came back to tell me that it’d cost $65 for new heels. At my quiet prompting he couldn’t say for certain if the cracked sole’d result in wet feet in the rain, “Unless you’re going to cross a stream.” After telling him that I’d be back in a couple of days’ time to pick up my footwear, I silently promised myself not to wade in a stream, headed back to the car, and went to Pyrmont to have my hair cut. Later, as planned, I saw my GP and was home in time to cook lunch. 

In the last week of October I took off my bedspread and put it away in the closet. I also stopped wearing a cardigan while inside the house, and on some days didn’t wear a jacket when going outside. This caused some problems with masks as I normally keep one in my in the breast pocket. To compensate for the new arrangement I started keeping a mask in the car so that I’d be able to go into shops or buildings without contravening regulations.

I finally bit the bullet and removed my overshirt on 16 December due to warm weather. On this day, for the first time since winter angled its teeth down, I went around dressed only in a long-sleeve shirt. It was the mooted “wear a Hawaiian shirt” day – a day of shame to celebrate Scott Morrison’s absconding to the island state at the time of the summer bushfires the previous year – and I decided not to participate. Looking round I saw that I was missing out on some “fun”. 

The 19th was the first day for me to wear a short-sleeved shirt and on the night of the 20th I removed two blankets from my bed which, the next morning, I put away in the cupboard. La Nina had meant an especially cool start to summer (at least, on the east coast of continental Australia) but it was time to come good with summer’s promise.

A year in review: Clothes, part one

This memorial contains almost a month’s worth of parts – though not all of ‘em are about clothes! – and the post you’re reading is the first in the series. I did the organisational work in the middle of December although I’d been writing the different sections all throughout the year. It’s a labour of love for the benefit of friends and family – and all those who take an interest in my wellbeing.

On 4 January, the day before moving in, I picked up a new belt from my new house, as the old one’d become too loose and my pants threatened, when I was walking along the street, to fall to my ankles. The belt I now selected has on it wear marks set at notches inserted by the manufacturer further up the tongue – I was slimmer than when I’d formerly used it, which must’ve been a decade earlier – and though I couldn’t remember how fat I’d been two years before evidence of progress was clear when, on 6 January, after my first night at the new house, I tried on a pair of 38s and they fit perfectly.

The photo was put on Facebook. Back at the beginning of my weight-loss journey, the previous year, I’d been wearing size 42s and even they’d been too tight.

In the end I dropped three sizes. Even in January it was a sort of vindication for my method (chronicled in my monthly “Shopping lists” and in the ‘Health and wellbeing’ part of this memorial) thanks to my GP, Dr Nanda, who’d suggested cutting carbs. I’d previously tried losing weight through exercise and had signally failed. When I’d lived in Maroochydore – I recalled as I watched myself getting slimmer and slimmer by the week – I’d gone to my local clinic and asked for advice but the GP I was using at the time told me simply that I should exercise more. As a result I bought a stationary bike but even with daily application my weight only went down moderately, and as soon as I stopped using it the kilos came back on. 

His wasn’t a real solution. Where aerobic exercise fails, restrictive diets, like my new regime, positively work. I laid out my clothes in the new dressing room with its racks and drawers and alcoves, and contemplated possibly – one day – putting on pants I’d not worn in 30 years, for example size-32 slacks I’d used when living in Japan in a former incarnation before the fall. A distant memory erupted in the present like a bird’s call or like the first bars of a symphony. How would the tune play out? I’d make a dapper conductor dressed in a suit and tie and with a new haircut (I’d got it done on 7 January). Mere appreciation of Wagner wouldn’t turn me into a music-school candidate but an artist need not dress up, he’s in company with his pencils and paper. I promised myself that I’d cut out forms from memory and place them on the surface of a table I’d not yet bought. I’d celebrate the unveiling of a stone. I’d carve my name at the base of the precipice of art and call it “chosen”. If I fell, it would be my own way down. A few days later, on 10 January, I sorted through my trousers and placed separate the 38s so that I could get to them easily and on a lower rack in the closet placed the 40s and the 42s (with some pairs of 44s). Four pairs of 38s would have to do for present use, I reflected as I contemplated earlier collections of clothes, including pants I thought to myself it might be possible – if I got skinny enough – to one day put on. A rack full of short-sleeved shirts – items I’d not put on since coming back to Sydney in 2015 – called out to me though the house was cool enough even on the top floor at midday in summer to do without air-conditioning. 

I’d no longer look like an ageing curiosity. I now wore short-sleeved shirts to signal awareness of summertime and since losing weight I could finally be seen. Slimming does good things for your self-esteem but because people are less likely to patronise you they turn to competition so there’s a trade-off in the exchange of signs and the processing of emotions and feelings and ideas that all the time completes itself within the socius as we daily go about carrying out tasks and meeting with people in the streets and in the suburbs. As I’d physically become more comfortable in my skin friends and family began to wear down my patience. The novelty began to make itself felt particularly strongly in autumn. 

On 6 March I brought upstairs from the storage room old, still-serviceable pairs of shoes, including sport shoes, sandals, and slip-on casual shoes from a decade ago. I find it diverting to wear such shoes, thereby indulging my vanity by demonstrating to what length my disregard of fashion's prepared to go, the conceit allowing me to feel superior to the many men who swan around in fashion-labelled clothes and expensive haircuts, or who – in all likelihood – belong to that selfish tribe of motorist that takes off slowly from traffic lights despite the press of cars behind them. 

Wearing old shoes is, for me, an ego boost. And three days after salvaging them I went to Prouds’ at Broadway Shopping Centre to ask about removing links from my watch band. They would only do it for timepieces bought from their stores, however, yet the woman behind the counter helpfully pointed me to Mister Minit in the arcade, where, for $14.95, I got done what I’d come to do. The man working there initially took out three links but I said that this made the band too tight, so made him put one back in. It looks a lot tidier now with links removed. The photo below shows me wearing an old shirt I’d had a new collar put in at the tailors in Pyrmont – I wrote about this one year – and on the same day I got the watchband tightened I was in that suburb only to see that my tailor’d moved premises to sit on Union Square. 

This is a much better location as it puts him right in the way of commuter traffic. I promised myself to take trousers there to have them taken in, once I reached a size 36. I still had four pairs size 38 pants to get on with, but it wouldn’t be long – once I reached, I mentally calculated, about 88kg (I’d be wrong) – before smaller size trousers’d be required. The 42s and 40s could be cut and resewed so that I’d have more clothes to wear and, while in Pyrmont on 15 March, I researched the project by asking the tailor what it’d cost to alter them. He said he’d have to see how much needed to be taken in, and where. I understood from talking with him that, if legs needed to be made narrower, the cost of alteration per pair’d be higher. He estimated it’d cost $30 a pair but promised me a discount for nine pairs. I reminded myself to take the trousers with me when I went to see my psychiatrist the following Thursday.

On the same day as I spoke with the tailor I started using the final hole of the blue-and-tan belt I’d been using for the past three months. The next morning I started wearing a cardigan for the first time in 2021. Within a few days I’d be using a black leather belt with a narrower profile and on 26 April – while traversing the heart of autumn – I went to Kmart and bought size-L briefs. I’d worn size “XXL” for the best part of a decade but my waist was now smaller. Using my mobile phone in the store I confirmed the size I should be wearing, the search term I used bringing up a set of results among which I saw one that showed that a size-36 trouser equalled a size-L waist. 

At the same time I bought socks and slippers, the latter being necessary because slippers my friends Ming and Omer had bought months earlier were too loose and I risked falling down the stairs. The new slippers have backs to them that grip the foot so they don’t fall off but eventually they’d also come loose and I’d have to resort to clipping them back on several times in my journeys up to the second floor. 

Take two: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower (2009)

 I bought this at Vinnies for $3, but when this small miracle happened is a mystery to me for my sins. The sticker is still on the spine, “Sold As Is” – though what that means I have no idea. I guess there’s no guarantee, with books from Vinnies, that every page will be in place so you can successfully and uninhibited get to the end.

I took this photo with some small watercolours by Zuza Zochowski in the background. The paintings hang in my living room behind the couch and I can see them when I come into the room from the kitchen, where I make pots of tea to drink in between reading or watching the news on TV. If you want to read a full review, see my Patreon. I really don’t know if the author of this book is still alive. He seems to have had one successful publication but apparently his Facebook account has been inactive since 2013. The mysteries multiply … 

Tweeting better stories, episode twelve: November 2021

Wanting to find a lighter-hearted way I offer readers this twelfth post in a series.

On 22 November at 4.43am I saw this strange post.

Hate

On 1 November at 6.02am I saw this pair of tweets in my feed.

The same day at 12.06pm I saw this tweet, with a drawing.

The next day at 5.51am I saw this drawing inspired by the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

On 5 November at 7.39am I saw this in Facebook.

On 25 November at 8.19am I saw this French poem.

Translation:

If I love you, hate me

So I lose you

And so you find me again!

This game between you and me

Has no rule

If it’s found …

If I love it, think about you,

In my dreams,

The faces are trouble

There is nothing but you

Who stops

On a doubt

Fame

On 20 November at 7.37am I saw this about a famous poet who wasn’t happy.

On 21 November at 5.52am I saw this tweet with an image drawn from a Netflix show.

Wheels

On 3 November at 8.13am I saw this in my native Twitter feed.

The next day at 5.16am I saw this poem.

Limbs

On 3 November at 6.45am I saw this drawing in my feed.

On 7 November at 8.10am I saw this tweet.

On 29 November at 6.57am I saw this post.

Water

On 14 November at 7.59 I saw this in my feed.

Distances

On 14 November at 8.24am I saw this nice twinned pair of tweets about distances.

On 17 November at 7.47am I saw this twinned pair of tweets about projectiles.

On 17 November at 8.09am I saw this twinned pair of tweets about distances.

Identity

On 17 November at 7.43am I saw this twinned pair of tweets about identity.

On 18 November at 9.17am I saw this tweet about love and marriage.

Plenty

On 19 November at 6.44am I saw this tweet.

On 25 November at 9.10am I saw this photo of a plant.

TV review: Build a New Life in the Country, season 1, Amazon (2005)

This is a relatively ancient show but I’d only just discovered it. It’s remarkably durable, the only thing giving away its age being a certain earnestness (plus the fashion – including the cars). I bookmarked it for some reason this year (I’d been looking for documentary) and finally got around to watching it when I was sitting with a friend on the couch and needed something to fill in time. He’s young and hasn’t bought his first house yet.

I thought he’d enjoy it. I did though normally I don’t watch ‘Grand Designs’. I’ve watched on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s main channel a show about making gardens, so when the opportunity arrived to use my OTT service for what, in the end, it’s designed – to compensate for a temporary lack of good commercial TV – I was immediately drawn into ‘Build a New Life in the Country’.

I found myself happy and surprised. George Clarke is an attractive personality in his own right and you can tell that he’s genuinely interested in what’s going on in the lives of the people chosen to feature. In one episode two middle aged homemakers renovate an old fortified and listed house in Northamptonshire. In another a young couple move from Surrey to Lincolnshire; this episode is notable on account of health problems the woman experiences. In the third episode a couple working in England buy an old place in Scotland and live separately while it’s being done up. 

This is comfort watching and for me signals a slowing down of time to a reassuring crawl. More dramatic points from time to time, for example the relationship split in ep 4 and the engagement announced in ep 5, were completed in ep 6 by the story of Dave and Rebecca, a young couple who had to borrow funds twice, luckily got council development approval for part of their land, then, when Rebecca got pregnant (they already had two small kids), ended up moving into the finished farmhouse – Dave heroically doing the vast majority of the work himself – just before she gave birth. 

I think the prize for creativity however has to go to David, whose wife Jenny is sceptical of his ability to renovate an old brick water tower out in the woods on a budget of 30,000 pounds. “This is a holiday, this is going to be finished,” says David when asked about his quest, but this is the only ep in which the build is not finished by the end. Clarke remarks at one stage that this is “one of the most poetic dreams I’ve come across”. It’s dreams that get you interested in these shows, and David is much like an artist. In home renovation and design shows you see the middle classes being creative, making things, and trying to achieve happiness. This is their charm.

To temporarily occupy my otherwise wavering attention I want something like ‘Build a New Life in the Country’, which takes a relaxed approach to thinking about what it means to be happy, a home being an essential part of life, something – like clean water or access to free healthcare – you shouldn’t have to worry about too much. Watching a show like this you can examine your own feelings about the world and because you relate to the feelings of the people shown on-screen (a cost overrun, a progress delay, the completion, moving in – points of tension underlayed by Clarke’s calm demeanour) – it’s engaging and fresh despite the fact that what’s happening took place thousands of miles away in a different country. 

The other day my normal Monday night viewing (‘Poirot’) was inaccessible because I’d had to drive a friend home and I missed the start, so I tuned into ‘Build a New Life in the Country’ in order to get myself to bedtime. Normally after the news I watch something entertaining and unproblematic on a secondary digital channel (9 Gem or 7 Two) or else catch what’s on the ABC if it’s half tolerable. I understand many people don’t even use free-to-air TV at all – in fact in late November I spent a couple of hours with a guy who actually said this to me – but I’m not as demanding as most, I’ll happily watch ads on account of the art used to make ‘em. 

It seems to me there’s as much intelligence and panache involved in making a commercial about insurance or jewellery as there is in a Netflix drama. We’re spoiled for choice and that’s why it gives me so much pleasure to get something positive out of an old show like ‘Build a New Life in the Country’, which ran for many seasons. It’s astonishing that I’d never heard of it but that’s probably because it never screened in Australia on free-to-air television. What accounts for this omission lies out past understanding because there’s something attractive and quaint about the English countryside featuring in the show. In Australia the distances are so large and the environment so harsh that it’s enlightening to be confronted by the problems that beset a couple like Terry and Marilyn when they decide to “go bush” (the expression obviously doesn’t apply to the UK) in the comfortable because relatively populated confines of rural England. Recommended watching.

Take two: The Dating Game: One Man’s Search for the Age of the Earth, Cherry Lewis

I bought this book from the Co-Op Bookshop in 2008 or thereabouts for 90 cents. What a cracking price! Less than a measly dollar for a woman’s study of the life of the man who worked out how old our Earth is. 

I chose for the background in this photo a satellite photo of Sydney I got out of a Sydney Morning Herald in 2002. What think you? Does it make sense to use a satellite photo for a background? This book is a biography (see my Patreon for full review) but the subject is geology. For those out there who are, like me, interested in science, it might make sense to use this photograph for decoration of this post. I like surprises, and this book contains a good number of ‘em. 

TV review: Bordertown, season 1, Netflix (2016)

Kari Sorjonen (Ville Virtanen), his wife Pauliina (Matleena Kuusniemi) and daughter Janina (Olivia Ainali) move from Helsinki to a small town near the border with Russia. Kari is slightly strange and while his erratic behaviour puts some people off – like Johanna Metso (Niina Nurminen) of the Serious Crimes Unit in Lappeenranta – he gets results with his insight like a savant.

In other crime dramas, like ‘Death in Paradise’, the detective has sudden eclaircissements near the end of each episode, during which he finds the answer to the puzzle all in a rush, like a lightning bolt falling from the sky and illuminating the mystery. In that show, the detective rounds up all the suspects, as in a traditional Agatha Christie, and unveils his knowledge before the assembled cast so that you can see their reactions – it’s the nub of the story, we want to understand not just who but also why. In ‘Bordertown’ these little moments of revelation happen throughout each episode, on the scene of the crime, in the office, or in the forensic lab in front of the slowly decomposing cadaver of the latest victim.

I’d already saved ‘Bordertown’ in the Netflix app when, a couple of weeks ago, Mikey from Lincolnshire brought the show to my attention again in a tweet. When I responded to say I’d already bookmarked it he added, “but don't watch the new full movie on Netflix to end season 3 of Bordertown, before you've watched all of them... top tip.” In fact I’d responded to his tweet about ‘Karppi’, another Scandi noir about which he said, “Really hope there's more seasons. One of the best things on #Netflix.” I bookmarked that show as well.

Season 1 of ‘Bordertown’ is made up of several multi-ep stories but some characters bleed over in several of ‘em, for example Lena Jaakola (Anu Sinisalo), a Russian secret service agent whose daughter Katia (Lenita Susi) gets caught up in a pedophile ring with links to Mikael Ahola (Mikko Leppilampi), who works for the city administration where Pauliina’s trying to get a job. 

It’s a small town.

The fact of its being close to the border with Russia is central to the plots of each of the stories, for example ‘Dragonflies’, where party drugs are brought across the line of demarcation for sale in Finland. The method of importation is in dogs’ bodies, a feature that is suitably grisly (these sorts of crims dramas are characterised often on Netflix as “gritty”) but we do know – at least we should, by now – that people love a bit of blood to go with their Doordash delivery. 

Episodes 8 and 9, which made up the second-last intrigue Kari and his team had to solve, ended up being a bit tight and I didn’t quite work out the reason behind these murders, but the stunning complexity made up for a bit of inconvenience. 

This show is heavy on visuals and I recommend it if you like police procedurals. Virtanen is talented and speaks English, so it’s possible we’ll find him acting in a show made in the US. Here’s wishing!

Hang five: Childhood drawings of Ada da Silva

This is the sixth in a series of posts looking at my art collection. I’m taking questions from an old school friend and answering them. Roger lives in the north of the state and I live in Sydney but we’re both passionate about art. He asks five questions, each of which I answer below.

It would seem that such strong frames may overcome the more modest pictures they house, yet I agree the heavy black frames really compliment Adelaide’s drawings. Was this serendipity or did you purposely match the two? And the coloured mount boards are such a bright and fun way to present the pictures and echo their colours. Again, pre-planning or spur-of-the-moment? Your idea of using the designs for tea towels seems workable. Really the possibilities are endless with strong source material – what about table mats or curtains for a rumpus room?  

I usually go to the framers out at Richmond and just decide on the spur of the moment how to house each work of art I want to get finished. Even before going out that far from home I’d already considered using nothing too ornate. Something simple because there are five in the set and to make sure the works themselves were privileged. 

You’re right that the heavy, dark frames work even though they’re quite different in tone from the drawings, and perhaps that’s the key. The contrast between the busy artworks and the stark borders made of wood stained to a deep brown give a dramatic counterpoise. The mounting boards were also chosen while I was in the framer’s studio, and Amanda Edds, who runs the business, keeps a wide range of samples (with different colours and textures) nearby on little racks, so I just picked out colours to go with each work. The green is more muted than the other colours, and while I could’ve chosen a more insistent green I decided to use a gentle olive shade.

Since Ada is a commercial artist it’s possible to make something out of these designs. I will ask her what she thinks about the idea next time we talk about the drawings. She’s planning to come to stay in Australia sometime soon, so I’m sure there’ll be an opportunity for me to raise the subject.

These pictures are enchanting and show the natural understanding of design and sense of colour that children have. The flowers, trees and animals are free of intellectual analysis and exist only in the moment, a zen creation. We often lose such joy, and arguably fall prey to the endless digressions of over-thinking our creative work, under the mantle of adulthood. But some, such as the Naïve art of Paul Klee, Captain Beefheart, and our own Ken Done (!) retain the sense of childlike wonder in their mature work. Do you think we all have a reserve of, often latent, creative energy that is waiting to be rediscovered in a personal ‘Indian summer'…or does the true light only shine on the young? 

The emotional cost of making a mistake is lower for a young person than it is for someone older. Stress accumulates over time, so people who are older naturally have a more delicate emotional balance that they have to keep stable – or static – during the course of an average day. 

Young people are naturally more impulsive. Once you reach our age you’re very conservative due to all the shocks you’re weathered over the years, so a child has the ability to make sallies that would make an older person hesitate. When you’re young you think nothing of making a picture with an orangutan sitting next to a pink rabbit, and while Ken Done might also think nothing of doing such an unlikely thing, he’s a particularly driven individual. I love his work and admire what he’s achieved over the course of a long life. I wish I’d had the support necessary to enable me to do what he’s done. Unfortunately it’s not water under the bridge and I’m still coming to terms with the way my father altered the shape of my existence due to the pursuit of his own demons. In the meantime I seek solace by looking at pictures that other people have made, and by making wonderful objects framed with quality materials that I can travel past as I go about my business every day I’m alive. It’s a privilege to be still kicking at 59 years old!

There are some similarities in the design of these paintings, are these deliberately grouped as a set or were these the only ones you had in your possession when the time came to getting them framed?

Three of the drawings have a sky, and in each of these there’s an orange sun (I think Ada likes warm colours). These resemble landscapes, and because there’s a horizontal they invite the viewer to enter the frame. 

The two drawings with no sky are different in how they draw the viewer’s attention, and appear to be more like studies made in a studio or some sort of controlled space like that, perhaps a zoo enclosure. They’re more like dioramas you might see in a museum. I loved the tiny, compact underwater displays at the Australian Museum when I visited as a child. You can see similar displays at the aquarium in the CBD where fish and eels are housed in small tanks full of water that people walk past as they learn. 

These five drawings I somehow still had loose hanging around on a table after moving house but I don’t remember when they came into my possession. I moved back to Sydney from Japan in 2001 (just before the Twin Towers) and I think the drawings came to me via my mother, who might’ve received them in the mail from Japan in 1998 or thereabouts. Once back in Sydney I went back to work in 2003 and six years later moved north to live on the Sunshine Coast then came back to Sydney in 2015.

In Pyrmont these drawings were in the library – a third bedroom that I used to contain books and the remnants of mum’s house after she went into residential care – which was a place that I eventually cleaned up in November 2019, shredding stacks of paper and putting valuables aside to have framed or repaired. There was an old Bible that belonged I think to Ada’s great-great-great-grandmother which I took to International Conservation Services in Chatswood because it’d got damaged in the 2011 flood in southeast Queensland and needed attention.

So much has been lost over the years that it was a relief to frame these children’s drawings. The process allowed me to permanently fix things representing a time of flux, of great instability.

The dreaded cliché, often heard, is “my child could have painted that” and in this case it is a truth. But your daughter Adelaide has grown up to be a commercial artist. Is her current style much more sophisticated in approach to her early output? Are there any Japanese, or other cultural influences readily seen in her mature style?

Ada’s drawings, which she now makes on an iPad with a digital stylus, are very competent in the use of colour. While her line is often flexible and quite impressionistic, intuitive and free – she’s able to render any type of object or scene – I think her use of colour is particularly attractive. Obviously her palette is more diverse now than it was when she was limited to a set of children’s crayons.

I know you are currently considering tertiary study in the art field. Have you ever considered running a picture framing business, or perhaps a gallery, to take advantage of your artistic flair? Does the future hold such possibilities?

Framing is a very skilled occupation and I don’t know that I have the inclination to do something so physical although I’m detail oriented and the meditative aspect of the craft would probably appeal to me. There aren’t many conservation framers in Sydney. Amanda took over the business from a guy named Jochen Letsch who used to operate in Annandale (Jochen now works for ICS). Conservation framing is quite expensive and it’s not a popular option for many people even though artworks are better looked after if you get the work done properly. In the long term it’s cost effective because it protects the artwork from damage that cheaper options permit but most people would baulk at paying $450 to finish off a child’s crayon sketch. The way I think of it, these drawings should be available for my great-great-grandchildren to enjoy.

People sometimes refer to my house as a gallery – so I’m almost in the business already! I’d never thought of running a commercial gallery. I wonder how much it would cost? You’d have rent, electricity, insurance, telephone, broadband, domain name registration, website hosting – a range of expenses associated with the operation regardless of whether you actually sold anything or not. It’s an interesting notion to think about, and perhaps I’ll give it more thought next year. 

Take two: Best New Singaporean Short Stories, Volume 3, ed Cyril Wong (2017)

I bought this curious book at the 2MBS FM book bazaar but before that it’d earlier been bought at Kinokuniya’s in the Sydney CBD several years ago. The sticker on the back o0f the book tells me it was bought there sometime in or after January 2018. I haven’t been to Kinokuniya for a good long time, probably at least a year now, but normally they carry unusual things like this. 

As any good independent bookseller does. Not all of the stories in this collection are equally good but for a full book review, see my Patreon. 

I’ve taken a photo of the book’s cover in front of Dick Watkins’ ‘Untitled Drawing 07’, a favourite red-and-blue painting of mine that I chose on this occasion to feature on account of the colours. The book’s cover is a nice shade of blue. The mounting board used for framing the painting was something I chose. 

Take two: Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood (1996)

Heaven knows when this was bought but it was bought well after I returned from Japan (which happened in 2001) and it was bought second-hand. There’s a notation “$8.50” inside on the first page, which gives you some idea of when the purchase took place. This is a recent valuation for a used book of no particular value, and in fact you can get novels for much less – $3 at Vinnie’s or $4 at the 2MBS FM book & record bazaar – if you go out of your way to look for ‘em. Most people don’t buy second-hand and it’s even hard to get rid of used books.

I bought used copies of Atwood’s books because I was curious about her. In recent years as a result of TV shows she’s hit a resurgence and is, in fact, a dominant figure in the publishing world, but when this book was published she was still building her reputation. The remarks by notable authors used on the back cover to spruik the book show, however, that many people appreciated her skill and imagination in 1996 when this book appeared in print. This Virago edition was published in 1997 (5 times), in 1998 (5 times), in 1999 (twice) and in 2000. For a full review see my Patreon. 

Review: The Saving I Need, Poetry Chapel Vol. 1 – Jessica Mussro

Six weeks ago I wrote about this book. While my review was complimentary I felt encouraged to have another stab at reviewing it because of the efforts of its creators to find an audience. I wanted to continue the conversation.

The thing I took away from these poems the first time reading was the author’s sense of awe, and I realise upon rereading that part of that appreciation is linked to the talent evident in them. Mussro is alive to the magic of the passing moment but she also has in her the ability to capture those fleeting perceptions, those stray ideas that gravitate to the periphery of consciousness as time expands and as we come closer to the limit of mortality. Here you are present at the birth of a lamb, you watch swallows flicker across the field of your vision, you open a jar to smell the herbs inside, you share in the moment.

As soon as you’ve finished reading a line and have understood its meaning – as soon as you’ve made this fragile truce so that you’re subtly changed – another verse appears to distract you. Here’s the boon of literature. A line as simple as “Spring in the hills can go to your head” transports the reader to a place perhaps seen from the driving seat of a car on a trip taken long before on the South Coast even though if you read the introduction you’ll know that you’re actually an ocean away on a different continent. But then you read, “Dense green shoots fill the animals’ mouths” – and so you realise you’re on a farm, perhaps in a barn or outside on a slope. 

“Raw heat floods the days with queer energy”: here, now, you’re under the sun on a slope with the scent of grass surrounding you with its calm miasma and for a moment you find yourself inside someone else’s skin. But Mussro challenges you with her blinking notions of the poetic. What constitutes the energy she names in this way? What particular sense of “queer” is she using here? Is it in terms that people on social media might understand? Is it a politicised meaning she’s reaching for as she asks us to accompany her along the hillside? We’re on a farm, remember, not on a protest march in a city street (where the use of this word might take us in the imagination). The layers pile up and are swept away by the brooms of Mussro’s words – cleaning out the barn. 

Fragments come together and are separated by novelty as the author parts the curtains on the page which, like a stage, presents a scene with actors (“queer energy”, “new lambs”, “fearsome songs”, “a frail, perfect hand”) and we ask: what is being shown to me here? Is this something that has happened to me, or is it a play of words revealing something new? The imagery sticks and falls away as the signification slides across the front of your mind, one word bringing with it sensations of thought to crash against others that enter from stage left, speaking their own lines. One image strung like a pearl on the narrative cord beside another one that (sort of) matches, but also that turns away to point out in a different direction, signalling – what? 

In ‘Mary of Bethany’ we visit a house. “My mother, grandmother, aunts / saved for years / bargained and harassed a dozen merchants / for this fragrance” – we have a solid image, a smell (something that, in ‘He is in the Field’, was “a new-lamb scent”) – but certainty fractures with the vagaries of thought. As it does in real life; we range like livestock over the foothills of understanding, smelling the grass that sustains us but always distant from the enlightenment that daylight suggests should eventually come, given enough time. In the poem the domestic arrangement encompasses romance, love, marriage, all of the classical tropes of contentment. Surely the reader can understand what Mussro is talking about.

But here memories find their own level and the field of understanding is barely common ground. The beauty of these verses is in their ability to draw the reader to a point where it appears that everything will be uncovered – the identity of “him” in ‘Mary of Bethany’, the identity of “he” in ‘He is in the field’ – but then, with the flick of a swift’s tail as it careens across the field of wiew, fast as the blink of an eye, you’re confronted with a puzzle.

In ‘The Swifts’, a short poem of just 42 words, you’re apparently on more stable ground. Fewer questions to answer here, you’d think. Here you can see the birds flying, perhaps hear the call of a crow in a tree, but the imagery is complex and satisfying, the author digging up secondary ideas (“a cyclone”, “like children they return”) to tempt the reader and draw in different vectors of meaning on which to carry the weight of the world. I think the crux of this poem is in the words “hunger and glee” that appear in the middle, like a hinge upon which the entire construct opens, insisting on a shared sense of destiny. What have such seasonal birds got to do with me? 

In ‘Hearing an Interview with Matthew Sanford’ a possible answer is suggested: “the body responds with strategies / for new beginnings, / reaching toward what is alive” – a simple response to a question the reader might want to put to Mussro. What is it that I’m reading? Is this something you’ve thought, or is it me speaking? And I was reminded of these poems while watching a video a friend who is a photographer made to describe her art. 

I watched the video just after writing about the poems. It is about colour and at one point Basia Sokolowska talks about Anselm Adams and his black-and-white photographs using different tones to create meaning and to communicate with the viewer. Colour is like the imagery in Mussro’s poetry, it might be bright or it might be subtle but, like the words she uses, it carries a burden of meaning independent of the artwork being experienced. This is the realm in which the reader – or the viewer – finds him- or herself before the artwork, in a place of understanding and of revelation. For Sokolowska it might be a mild mid-blue or a sharp, saturated red, for Mussro it might be a word (“new”, “alive”).

Take two: Women, Authorship and Literary Culture, 1690 – 1740, Sarah Prescott (2003)

The photo in the background below is one of my mother when she was young. In this shot she’s about sixteen. Above her in another photograph is my grandmother – the woman who’d become her mother in law – and her husband. Mum was the one who was supposed to write, but in the end it was dad who spent years writing a memoir.

This is a scholastic imprint (Palgrave) and the book was bought for $24.95 (full retail price) sometime in the middle of 2008 when I happened to be for a few days in Melbourne. It’s a book from the bookshop Readings. I went to Melbourne in that year to attend a Jane Austen conference at which Germain Greer spoke. 

In those days I travelled between the capital cities in my big sedan. I’d bought the car the previous year and it took me on many intra-city trips including once from Melbourne to Brisbane along the Newell Highway. I also remember getting up from my seat in the crowded auditorium to ask Greer a question about the forgotten poets who were Jane Austen’s influences and whether it was productive to read their work (“Yes, definitely.”). This diminutive but impressive book is of the same ilk: smart and informative. For a full review, see my Patreon (you know you want to). 

Hang five: Poul Friis Nybo, painting of a farmhouse with a large tree

This is the fifth in a series of posts looking at my art collection. I’m taking questions from an old school friend and answering them. Roger lives in the north of the state and I live in Sydney but we’re both passionate about art. He asks five questions, each of which I answer below.

You have grouped these pictures together for similar subject matter – both are pretty pastoral scenes [showing the countryside]; Bodalla NSW and a sylvan vista from the Dane Nybo. My first response is that, from a distance, they both look to be perhaps the same artist's work and both appear to be watercolours. The photo close-up reveals the second one to be acrylic or oils on board but the impressionistic style has the same softness of touch of the watercolour. The play of light is captured beautifully. Did you deliberately link the stylistic similarities, as well as obvious links in subject matter, when grouping these two?

Yes, you’re right that they both capture the scenery beautifully, but the stylistic similarities were quite serendipitous. I think that this kind of domestic landscape – a view of human habitation mixed with a natural vista – is what made me choose to group the two artworks together in the first place. It’s remarkable that the Danish oil that is the subject of our conversation is so fantastically light in appearance, however, as though Nybo had been attempting to emulate a watercolourist when he made the painting 90 years ago in distant Denmark.

My friend Grant whose grandfather was Danish and who’s been to Denmark says that this painting was probably made on the peninsula. This deduction depends on a cursory analysis of the soil visible in the painting, which appears to be sandy. Most Danes live on the islands, and Grant says that the Germans took most of the good bits of the peninsula for their own use. 

On a more tangential tack, you may have experienced watercolours to be an unforgiving medium where one can’t retrace steps to fix a mistake in execution. Acrylics are more forgiving, though not as much as slow-drying oil paints are. Wiki research tells me that Impressionism coalesced in the 1860s with the emerging plein air paintings where new, pre-mixed and quick drying paints allowed easier outdoors painting and freed up painting techniques. This makes me wonder how much the innovations in the painting medium itself determined the new art movements (a current bugbear of mine is the 'Pandora’s box' of machine art that computers have enabled). Form determining content … your thoughts?

Definitely there will be innovation around the edges as new techniques are made available, it’s in the nature of the species to venture into new zones for occupation – we’re made of stars after all. But just as it was hard for Nybo to completely give up figuration it’s difficult for artists experimenting with a new medium to discover, immediately, exactly what is possible to do with it. The word “experiment” suggests that you have to move away from the edges, but doing so takes courage and therefore time and so it won’t be every, single practitioner who alights upon the perfect way to express him- or herself in the medium of digital art. 

The AI-determined artworks that I’ve seen however demonstrate that the artistic landscape will change in decisive ways at some point in the future. Meanwhile, stalwarts will continue to make more conventional works of art as they try to earn a living and to express themselves. This is how Nybo’s Modern Impressionist works got made; he was using brushstrokes in ways the Impressionists had pioneered 50 years earlier in France, but his aim was still intensely figurative. You can see the way the work was made – Nybo wasn’t covering his tracks and is, in fact, making a feature of the work’s painterly underpinnings – but the demands of figuration were uppermost in his mind. Rather than trying to show the atmospherics – as the Impressionists had done – Nybo is trying to paint a thatched house and a large tree.

Originally, the impressionist movement of the 1800s was a radical portent of the abstract painting that followed. History tells us abstract art didn’t peak until the middle of the following century. When Nybo painted your picture, 90 years ago, such relatively new art perspectives were challenging to the bourgeoisie – it may be that they still are, with many viewers having never progressed beyond strict realism. Do you think an awareness of the timeline for the various art movements, and how they influenced each other, is necessary to appreciate art’s evolution? Or in these post-modernist times, should the differing styles all collapse into the ’now’ for anonymous consumption by a generally uninformed public? Can education help ‘the great unwashed’ or is this the idle musing of an unrepentant flaneur …

It’s good that you are able to stroll in the forest of artistic endeavour with your eyes open. As you point out, many people haven’t progressed very far beyond Impressionism, though if you found an Impressionist work for sale on Facebook Marketplace it’d probably command a high price because most people recognise an Impressionist artwork for what it is. I recently watched an Australian Broadcasting Corporation program where ordinary people were filmed giving their opinions about pictures in the National Gallery of Victoria. One guy said he much preferred a figurative 19th century painting to a cubist Picasso. 

Evidently he’s one of your “unwashed”, and I agree with you that more education is needed; but most people would rather spend time at a football game than going to the gallery. I’m also an unrepentant flaneur and get up to do the dishes when the sport comes on during the evening news. Like you I appreciate the fact that it’s possible, nowadays, to use any number of influences to make new art. It’s possible in 2021 to quote a large selection of styles – most, as you point out, pioneered in the 20th century – in an effort to express something about yourself, or about the world you live in. Or even about your relationship with that world. The sky’s the limit!

The Nybo painting has strong links, as a family heirloom, with your own personal history and its provenance lends your curatorial role an aspect of being also a historian. Monetary value can be such a motivating force in the so-mercenary commercial art market but you clearly value other factors. Certainly some artists make financial concerns their raison d’être; Damian Hirst comes to mind (reportedly the UK’s richest artist/collector). But such considerations may be a secondary priority to the genuine collector and art lover. How important is a) a picture’s provenance, b) its inherent beauty, c) market value, to your personal appreciation of it? Is any of your collection primarily kept for investment purposes and the sometimes exorbitant inflations of the ‘art game’? Do you see any conflict of interests between these various motivations? 

I’m attached to all of the artworks in my collection, and our talks are part of the storytelling that provenance implies. The works I’ve bought on Facebook Marketplace for a few dollars are just as valuable to me as the ones I’ve bought for a lot more at commercial galleries. Obviously if a painting accrues value I’m going to be happier than if it does not but I can’t understand why a collector would buy a painting purely as a repository for value, or purely as an investment. It seems to me perverse to hang something in your living room – where you spend a good deal of your time alone – that you don’t enjoy for its inherent qualities as an object. For me, everything that I buy is beautiful regardless of whether it cost tens, hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Who was Elmer Johansen and why did he collect Danish oil paintings?

Elmer was married to my grandfather’s sister. Madge Dean married Elmer on a Pacific island in the 1950s or 60s. She’d been working in Japan with the occupation forces and then travelled to Europe to work before settling on an island (I forget which one) where she met a Danish stevedore. They eventually settled in New Zealand where Elmer became a tugboat captain in Auckland Harbour. Madge was a keen photographer and I have hundreds of slides with her works. Perhaps I’ll get some of them printed and framed one day – they’ve very beautiful – and we can talk about them. 

Madge and Elmer had a collection of curios in their house and with the paintings they went to Uncle Geoff before my cousin Douglas, when his father died, gave them all to me. Madge died of cancer in the 90s and at that time Elmer came over to Vaucluse to spend some time living with my family but he used to go down to Watsons Bay Pub and get drunk. Dad kicked him out because Elmer would cry in his room (my brother’s room; my brother had left to live in the US by this time). Dad was teetotal and had little sympathy for this relative in his extremity, but this sort of callousness was typical of the man.

I had the paintings professionally cleaned – Elmer was a pipe smoker so they were discoloured by nicotine – and reframed in 2013. I’m not sure about the frames and think that perhaps I should’ve taken more time to choose frames but unfortunately in that year mum was diagnosed with dementia so I had a lot on my plate at the time so the pictures weren’t the most important consideration in that year. At some point in the future I might get the paintings reframed, but not right now.

Take two: Judith Wright, Collected Poems (1994)

I took this photo in front of a picture by a friend of mine she made in southeast Queensland not far from where Wright and her husband had a holiday home. The island off the coast in the drawing is Mujimba. I know this because I visited mum and dad on the Coast and even lived there for a number of years. Mujimba lies within sight of Mount Coolum, which is shaped like a woman’s breast.

This book came into my collection at some point and I paid $8 for it second-hand. I know this because the amount is written in pencil inside the front on the first page where there’s a publisher’s blurb. I guess that I bought the book after my return from Japan, which happened in 2001, so not so very long after the book first appeared.

In my review I go into detail about what Wright’s poems made me think about while reading. Her poetry strikes me as being good overall, but that’s all I’ll say for the moment. If you want to read a full review please make the effort and subscribe to my Patreon (it’s very good value, I promise). 

Take two: The Way of the Knife: The CIA, A Secret Army, and A War at the Ends of the Earth, Mark Mazzetti (2013)

This was bought new – probably at Books of Buderim – and cost $27.95. The picture it’s taken with is a painting in oils of African violets by Zuza Zochowski. Back in 2013, when the book was purchased, I wasn’t really interested in America’s seemingly endless wars and this probably accounts for the fact that the book was only first read to about page 95. The second time I’ve persisted. 

A full review is on my Patreon. I know I keep plugging away with these links, but you’ll have to bear with me because I love literature but I’d gotten sick of doing all of this work with no reward. Even now I get no financial reward because the subscriptions collected so far only go toward servicing the publishing platform, and nothing gets sent through to my PayPal account. Keep in mind that even if a dollar a month gets through to PayPal it’ll probably be sucked up by service charges on that end anyway. So even though I’ve been asking for money for reviews since February I’ve actually seen not a cent of the money people have so far pledged. The choice is yours.