cuttsblog

WELL DONE AUSSIE SMOKERS!

I was having a chat to someone who had been having a chat to someone. That last someone was a smoker who was bemoaning the fact that the general public think they (smokers) are costing the taxpayer.  ‘But they are, aren’t they?’ said my chattee. ‘I think not’, I said, ‘ because the big tax on the fags go someways towards offsetting those medical bills... but let’s do some research’ Google and more google and came across this. No idea how correct but the fact that they added cost for bushfires into the mix gives it a bit more legitimacy. Now tax fortnite and yappy dogs!

Here’s a link to the article: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/an-australian-senator-has-just-thanked-smokers-for-their-8-billion-staggering-generosity-to-the-economy-2014-10

READ THIS AND WEEP... or start making a stand! 

Anyone who is a staunch advocate of Laissez faire economics will not read this... but if you want to argue against it then do your homework and read this

WHY AREN’T I RICHER?

Preface this post with an image that sums it all up... Rodriguez the seemingly internationally renowned musician that ended up as a bricklayer!

Mmmmmmmm??!!! I am struggling economically. Probably not really struggling in comparison to some but definitely struggling if I compare my wealth or earnings or defined annual income to what I have known before. Yes, I am a part time single Mum and I live in a rural setting and that certainly hinders sensible defined hourly rates. However, I have done so many things to try and get above but they keep tipping over.

WHEN I WIN THE LOTTERY#1

This is going to be an ongoing series. I came across the artwork of George Leslie Hunter (Thanks to Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery) and so started looking at his paintings on Google images.

SCIENTOLOGY, SOUTHPARK, PORN AND MIDGETS

This is definitely a weekend post - but also a grand traverse through law suits, comedy, religion and bad music that proves how ludicrous our society can be.

If you have some monotonous chores to complete, then do yourselves a favour and complete this one hour journey... you will then mow or clean or hang out the washing while singing along to every moment and quietly giggling. Click on the links to take the tour.

It begins with South Park and scientology and then leads onto R.Kelly and what he terms a "hip hopera", saying, "It's now too long to be called a song..."I don't know how to explain how I wrote it. It just keeps rhyming and rhyming." 

First of all you need to watch the South park episode called ‘In the Closet.’ I am sure you can download it from all sorts of places but here is an official link where you pay and thus the makers get paid...tv.com  The next thing you need to watch are the first few episodes from the R. Kelly ‘hip opera’ so as to understand the reality of his place in this episode. He is not taking the piss... he has even created a dvd where you can watch all 33 episodes. The first 3 are enough to give you an idea of the madness but it is worth watching episode 11 as that is where there is a midget with a big cock that farts in a room full of black men with guns! Episode 1 then runs into 2 and 3... and here is a link to Episode 11

Ok, so now you know what I mean when I say you can sing your way through the monotony of any chore.

OP SHOP ART

How do self managed super funds (SMSF), The Voice and Agatha Christie lead us to the collecting of Op shop art. Let me explain..... I run my own company and rather than paying myself super, I decided to invest in well researched pieces of art as part of my SMSF. In 2011, the government made changes to art and SMSP that saw a massive blow to art sales and art value. There are a host of summaries on this bad decision but NAVA and the SMH best explain it... in short; you can buy art but it has to be stored far far away, never to appear in the home and be insured to ridiculous levels. Needless to say, mine remains on the walls and I have no super.

I haven’t bought art of any worth for a while but I do still spend money on art that I love.  Hard to justify if it is for no reason but to enjoy. This is where Agatha Christie comes in... I am reading the new (yes new) Hercule Poirot mystery - The Monogram murders - and there is a great discussion between Hercule and a suspected villain who is a well know artist...

On being asked if all the paintings in the house belonged to the artist she answered “Oh, no… very few of these are mine. I buy as many as I sell. Which is as it should be, I think. Art is my passion… Looking at nothing but one’s own pictures would be very lonely. I always think when I hang a painting by another artist that it’s like having a good friend on my wall.”

This explains the joy of art on the walls.

Now that we have discussed SMSF and Agatha Christie, how does The Voice come into this? Creativity doesn’t often pay the bills and so the creators of The Voice and X Factor can use the fact that an amazing singer or a brilliant dancer has never yet been seen because they have a family and bills to pay - thus they are simple folk... teachers, doctors, electricians and railway workers. The same goes for great artists and that is why op shops are full of magnificent art thrown out from deceased estates; moved on because there isn’t enough room in the caravan.

WHEN WORDS MAKE A THOUSAND PICTURES

Gerard Manley Hopkins 1844 -1889

This post is about one poem that defies the standard prose that says a picture paints a thousand words (or something similar.) This poem paints a thousand pictures and the thoughts beneath the view.

A very basic review is this... Gerard was watching a kestrel as it hovered in the morning light... it swung out and then dived for whatever it wanted to eat... and in that dive, it’s speed threw it asunder and there was beauty in that mess. A comparison is then made to things that seem dull, until they do their bidding... such as the blade of a tractor (scillion) that glows gold as it ploughs but only because it ploughs - the blades are made to glisten as they are sanded by the dirt; or a simple grey ember that shows the beauty of the flame as it splits open. Beauty is in the everyday. Read it and wallow in the alliteration and the onomatopoeia (makes modern rap seem naff). PS.. all grammatical anomalies are from the poet... hyphens included.

THE WINDHOVER

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion. 

There are a links to references that take you through the poem and so read them all... it’s a great little journey into the strength and imagery that can be created by the written word - as well as a definitive explanation into what each thing means; important as the nouns and verbs used here are from another era and not easily understood. A more literary discussion is found on Spark Notes and then there is a basic, user friendly version on Shmoop.

DESIGN NEEDS A KICK UP THE ASS

This is a very long post but worth the read... I can say that as I haven’t written it but merely compiled some very good thinking in the one spot (and created a naff photoshop to set the scene!)

I was recently part of a Museum of Brisbane event where a group of us were asked to comment on the photographic works of Alfred Elliot (1890 to 1921). I was asked to talk about the photo that is shown in this post... we called it the ‘Easton and Pearson’ shoot. I was trying to find some support to help explain the reality that sees us in a stagnant era of fashion and design.

I came across this fantastic essay called ‘You Say You Want a Devolution?’ (Kurtz anderson 2012.Vanity Fair) Read the whole thing but here is the crux of it... “The past is a foreign country. Only 20 years ago the World Wide Web was an obscure academic thingamajig. All personal computers were fancy stand-alone typewriters and calculators that showed only text, played no video or music, offered no products to buy. E-mail (a new coinage) and cell phones were still novelties. Personal music players required cassettes or CDs... Look through a current fashion or architecture magazine or listen to 10 random new pop songs; if you didn’t already know they were all things from the 2010s, I guarantee you couldn’t tell me with certainty they weren’t from the 2000s or1990s or 1980s or even earlier. I feel as if the whole culture is stoned, listening to an LP that’s been skipping for decades, playing the same groove over and over. Nobody has the wit or gumption to stand up and lift the stylus. Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think, it’s an unconscious collective reaction to the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out. So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture. We seem to have trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle—economic progress and innovation stagnated, except in information technology; which leads us to embrace the past and turn the present into a pleasantly eclectic for-profit museum; which deprives the cultures of innovation or the fuel they need to conjure genuinely new ideas and forms... maybe America and the rich world are on the verge of a cascade of the wildly new and insanely great. Or maybe, I worry some days, this is the way that Western civilization declines, not with a bang but with a long, nostalgic whimper."

But worry not, Bobby Solomon, the founder and Editor-In-Chief of The Fox Is Black has the answer... “Here’s what I think we need... I think we need to fuck shit up. We need to make things that are uncomfortable to look at. We need to piss people off. We need to do things that seem fucked up and weird, that make no sense, that will never be perfect and were never meant to be so. We need not explain ourselves or ask for forgiveness. We need to change this fucked up status quo of borrowing from the past and start thinking about our future. How can we be proud of our work when it’s already been created? I know our generation can create radical change, we just have to hurt and bleed and fight and scream to make it happen."

And finally, I have proof of the doleful pudding that we are a part of. Locked out of Heaven is a song by Bruno Mars. If you are over 35 and you haven’t listened to it then please click on the link and groan with me. It sounds exactly like The Police... does Bruno care? No! He is happy to admit that he has taken all of its form and structure because he wants to imbue that past into our future.. ...’critics have been quick to point out its similarities to previous hits by the Police, most notably “Message in a Bottle”or “Roxanne.” And despite what you might think, Mars has no problem whatsoever with those comparisons.

JOHN KEATS 1795 - 1821. DEAD AT 24

John Keats is declared as one of the great romantic poets, set alongside Byron and Shelley. However, none of them lived past their 30′s and Keats only became a hero long after his death. Keats only published fifty-four poems, which goes to show that any of us can become a posthumous hero if we stick at what we do - if only for a short while. It also goes to mention though, that he was committed... he published "Endymion," a mammoth four-thousand line poem based on the Greek myth of the same name... committing himself to at least 40 lines a day. 

The Strange Case of Mr. Keats's Tuberculosis has been discussed in many a science journal but his medication probably didn’t help his cause... “His doctor in Rome placed Keats on a strict diet that consisted of a single anchovy and a piece of bread per day in order to limit the flow of blood to the stomach. He also induced heavy bleeding, resulting in Keats suffering from both a lack of oxygen and a lack of food.”

Anyway... this all leads to a brilliant poem, especially given the context of Keats’ short life, that should remind us all to get on with it.

WHEN I HAVE FEARS THAT I MAY CEASE TO BE

When I have fears that I may cease to be

  Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,

Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,

  Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,

  Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

  Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

  That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

  Of unreflecting love—then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

VINYL...WHY?

I have a dodgy record player and buy albums from opshops. Then something changed... not only could I show my kids something that they had never seen, introduce them to jazz and my favourite 80′s music, but it created a system of calm and action at the same time. There are so many debates as to how much better vinyl sounds (even scientific) but that is not the issue here. Modern society is used to the MP3... you ask SIRI to play the MOPED song and it starts playing. There is nothing wrong with that process but it is yet another layer of simplicity that may make us all part of a thin crust of society, shallow observers who know ‘what’ and ‘why’ but not the ‘how’. The bigger picture is about connection... By selecting a record, pulling it from its sleeve, placing it on the turntable, lowering the needle, listening to the second of nothingness and then hearing the music will obviously fire more neurons than asking SIRI. Add to that the human ability to concentrate... 45 minutes for adults and about half for kids. That is why listening to vinyl is great.... school day. Ask them to grab a record and play it. You have about 25 minutes to get them eating. Side 1 finishes. Turn it over, time to get dressed and pack lunches. The vinyl becomes a magnificent alarm clock.

Choice magazine rated record players, cheap and expensive, and the outright winner was the Audio Technica 120

DIY MAGAZINE RACK

I read (trawl through) a lot of magazines and wanted to find a magazine rack that I could hang near the kitchen table.  I googled every which way but couldn’t find anything simple... everything was thick and chunky and took up too much room. Apartment Therapy is a great place to visit as it has a post on just about anything that you think you need, how to make it or where to buy it.

POLAROID FILM IS AVAILABLE

I bought a Polaroid SX-70 - a beautiful polaroid camera in a leather case….because it looked good…but how to use it?! Polaroids take a snapshot in time and manage to do all the things that a photoshop filter can only aspire to. Polaroid film is no longer manufactured. YES it is!

All hail the The Impossible project A quick take from their website....“Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid and the inventor of the world’s first instant camera and film, once said: “Don’t undertake a project unless it’s manifestly important and nearly impossible.” The founders of Impossible took him at his word when, in 2008, they purchased the last factory in the world manufacturing Polaroid instant film, creating 'The Impossible Project'. Their aim was simple: to save 200 million Polaroid instant cameras from becoming utterly useless.

OUR ECONOMY IS A JOKE

I was driving and listening to the ABC and Conversations with Richard Fidler came on.

Satyajit Das and the question of debt

What an amazingly clear description of our screwed up economic existence. It goes for 50 minutes but do yourselves a favour and listen.

THINK ABOUT YOUR BRAND

IT IS NEVER THAT BAD

POEM - E.E.CUMMINGS

Poem of the day, week, month or year... depending on how regular I become with posting them. This is my favourite poem of all time.

because you take life in your stride…. e.e. cummings

because you take life in your stride(instead of scheming how to beat the noblest game a man can proudly lose,or playing dead and hoping death himself will do the same)

because you aren’t afraid to kiss the dirt (and consequently dare to climb the sky) because a mind no other mind should try to fool has always failed to fool your heart

but most(without the smallest doubt) because no best is quite so good you don’t conceive a better; and because no evil is so worse than worst you fall in hate with love