Category Archives: Melbourne cool

Doing without doing

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You might remember me talking about a course I did last year with Landmark Education called the Self Expression and Leadership Program.  The course runs for four months, one night a week and one Saturday a month, and during the course participants create a project in a community or field of interest that really matters to them. The promise of the course is:

you will be living life powerfully and living a life you love.

I’m now doing the course again, this time as a coach, which means I have five participants to coach and support for the program.  I’d heard so many good things about coaching.  One of my friends, for example, has coached on six programs which is some kind of record because she loves it so much, and because, during the program, she says,

my life just works.

So far, everything I’ve heard about coaching is true, and much more.  It’s a bit of a cliché around Landmark to say this, but it really is a privilege to have five people “grant a listening” of me I’ve never previously experienced.  They invite me into their lives and hopes and struggles with a simplicity and trust that moves and inspires me.

This thing about listening, and “a listening,” is key.

One of the premises of the course is that we’re all listened to in various ways, and we’re listened to in different ways in different communities.  For example, you might be someone who is listened to as reliable and conscientious at work, as funny and laidback amongst your friends, and as charming and lazy at home.

There are all kinds of readymade listenings.  For example, there is a certain listening of teenagers, of senior executives, of retired people, of elderly people, of renters, of people on social security benefits, of celebrities, and so on.

The course is about having participants get the listening of themselves in their various communities – or, to be more precise, to get the listening they have of themselves being listened to by the community – and to get that the listening, any listening, can be transformed.

And transforming the listening of oneself in a community that matters brings undreamt-of power, freedom and self-expression.

This undreamt-of realm, a realm of unpredictable and exponential results (salut, Havi), is being discovered by my five wonderful participants at this very moment.  There is one story in particular I want to share (with his permission).

*****

One of my participants is a guy in his 20s.  Before the program, he was playing in a few gigs as a musician, and had had some difficult times in the last five years, including a serious car accident.

When he started the program he created the possibility (possibility is another Landmark distinction) of being a filmmaker.  He hadn’t been a filmmaker before, hadn’t even operated a camera.  Nevertheless, he created himself from the outset as a filmmaker.

He also created his community project in the same field: he would make a film documentary of the history and people of the Australian rock scene.

Now for the last six weeks he has been out and about, talking to all kinds of people in the rock scene and film industry about his project.  He’s so excited and lit up by his project he’s managed to get access to some big names in the rock scene, musicians who flourished before he was even born, musicians he reveres whom previously he would have thought light years away.  In just six weeks, he’s lined up several of these names to be interviewed for his documentary, he’s been given free use of a famous inner city venue for the screening of the first part of his doco, and he’s lined up two A-list bands to play for free at the screening.

Something else is happening too.  Last week he was offered his first paid gig as a filmmaker on a TV advert, and a couple of days later, another paid gig filming a rock industry event.  He did the first gig two days ago; yet until the day before — when someone lent him a top-of-the-range camera with which to practice — he’d never even held a camera.  As a result of the gig he was also given a media pass to a rock event held this weekend he’d been dreaming of attending as a lowly member of the public.  And next week, he begins his second paid gig as a filmmaker.

I’m so inspired by him.  He creates himself as a filmmaker and, voilà, he begins to be listened to as a filmmaker.  By himself and his community.

When we discuss what’s showing up for him, his eyes sparkle and he shakes his head in wonder.  “You know,” he said the other day, “it’s like what Chopper Read* said:

‘I’m a best-selling author, yet I can’t even spell.’

* A “celebrity” Australian criminal who’s written several books.

*****

Circus town

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Most cities of the world have one or two buildings which epitomise the city.  Paris has the Eiffel Tower, Barcelona has Gaudi, London has the Tower and Big Ben, Sydney has the Opera House.  By contrast, Melbourne doesn’t have an unmistakable landmark.  It has several charming buildings that residents revere, but no great statement monument.

In a way, this is in keeping with a certain lovely modesty the city possesses, and a feel for genre, so to speak.  Yet I recently discovered a building, an institution, that if Melbourne were to stoop to easy knowability it would qualify as the emblem of the city par excellence.  It is the National Institute of Circus Arts, or NICA, a huge purpose-built structure of corporate blue glass hiding in a residential side street in the suburb of Prahran.

There is so much here that is characteristic of the city: unlikeliness, the quixotic, the dedication to the arts in all their forms, the blessing of old-moneyed philanthropy.  So when the planners in the Federal Government were thinking of building a National Institute dedicated to the circus – to the circus! – they must have realised there was only one place for it: the city known throughout the British Empire of the 1880s as the most wondrous in the realm — Marvellous Melbourne.

NICA offers a huge range of courses to both professional circus artists and curious members of the public, including children, teenagers and adults.  There are short courses throughout the year, and special holiday programs.  Secondary school students can combine circus training with their studies; older students can do full-blown Bachelor degrees in Circus Arts.  In fact, auditions for the Bachelor of Circus Arts begin this week across the country.  Auditions are at NICA tomorrow and Thursday, at Adelaide’s Cirkidz on Friday, in Brisbane on Monday, Sydney on Tuesday and Perth on Wednesday.

It also set me wondering what kind of person takes on a Bachelor degree in the circus.  The answers are fascinating.  There is, for example, the young Iranian-born man, Hossein Baghalan Aval, who formerly travelled the world as one half of an act called The Persian Brothers and who recently set a Guinness World Record for an act in which he

balances on top of [his partner] supported only by the tip of a dagger on a dagger below.

There is Adam Davis, a graduate of NICA who now performs for Cirque Du Soleil in Tokyo as a Chinese Poles artist.  Adam says of his unusual life,

Circus is alive. Accidents happen. Sometimes people sleep in and your six man act turns into a five man act… but of course one of the guys is still injured so you’ll be performing a four man act instead. For me this means that I’ll be doing … some of the other guys’ tricks as well as my own …my blood begins to tingle, it’s very exciting …

And then there’s Kyle Raftery, a “specialist in clown, unicycle and flying trapeze” who, since he graduated from NICA in 2005, has established himself as a “versatile multi-disciplinary artist, gifted at falling over for the amusement of others.”

Kyle’s story is one of those beauties in which a human being commits to an idea, an intuition, without the least thought of “how”.

I had very little circus experience or training, I grew up in rural NSW and always thought I’d become a musician.  Circus was … something I’d dreamed about doing so when I stumbled across the NICA website I decided to give it a go.  The night before the audition I was directing a school musical in a tiny town called Nundle.  I managed to get four hours sleep before driving six hours to Sydney to arrive at the audition with two minutes to spare.

Just the list of teaching disciplines that NICA offers is intriguing.  For example, there is:

  • Manipulation & Magic
  • Handstands & Tightwire
  • Verticals, Rope, Tissu, Swinging, Static, Dance and Double Trapeze
  • Russian Bar, Russian Swing, Adagio, Teeter Board
  • Cloudswing, Trapeze, Web & Death Wheel
  • Contortion, Foot Juggling & Acrobatics
  • and many more.

If you too are intrigued, NICA runs “Come and Try Days” several times a year, and there’s one this very Saturday, 2 October.  All sessions are 2 hours and cost $40.  Children’s (aged 7+) sessions are from 10am to 12, and teen and adult sessions from 12:30 to 2:30pm or 3:00 to 5:00pm.

For more information, contact NICA.

*****

Images: From the NICA performance, Veritas, March 2010, photographed by David Wyatt of Capturing Images (second from top);  Hossein Baghalan Aval by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images AsiaPac, courtesy of Zimbio (second from bottom).

The egg and I

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Reading of Posky’s brush with the eggmen, I fell to thinking of my own eggman incident …

About six years ago I went through a phase of attending life-drawing classes.  Life-drawing involves drawing a model who poses naked in front of the class.  Classes may be held in art schools, galleries or community halls.  Students set up their easels or their chairs around a dias on which the model sits or stands.  The classes are three to four hours in duration with a tea break in the middle, and the instructor will set various exercises throughout, usually starting with short 2-minute sketches and gradually increasing to more formal 40-minute drawings.

The world of the life class is an odd little cul-de-sac.  Everything is ancient and rustic – easels don’t work, chairs wobble, students use charcoal to draw lines and rolled-up bread to erase them.  And the bounteously-built woman rules.  For within minutes of starting, the rank beginner divines that drawing a big curvy woman is a thousand times more gratifying than drawing a thin woman, or any kind of man.  Women have more inherent interest to their bodies, and the more woman, the more interest.  The interest lies in the contrast of planes and the promise of movement, a certain dynamism, in each part.  A man’s body, by comparison, is more fixed and the torso generally must move as one or not at all.

Our favourite model at the Victorian College of the Arts was a woman called Nicola.  She was in her late 20s probably, neither pretty nor plain, with an effortlessly monumental quality to every gesture.  Over 6 foot tall, she had medium-sized breasts, a tiny high waist and a huge outswelling of hip and bottom, and it was impossible to make a bad drawing of her.  Her powerful, eloquent body would, as it were, do the drawing for you.  With just a hand, a flick of the ponytail, she made us all into Degas.

*****

As well as the rusticity and inversion of female desirability, there is at times, it must be said, in the world of the life class, an air of imminent orgy.  Oh yes, everyone is on their best behaviour, very studiously acting as if staring at someone’s private parts for 10 minutes is something they do everyday.  But despite the unspoken truce people make at the door, sometimes the unnaturalness will out.

The funniest occasion was an evening class at Fitzroy.  The model was a woman in her 50s called Doris.  A grandmother, she was big and bountiful, especially around the middle, with a square-shaped head and auburn hair in two square wings.  Doris looked as if she’d just shucked off a load of care, and she posed in glorious equanimity on the stage for an hour or two.  At every mini-break a small man in a flat cap, a fellow student, circled the room trying to chat up every female student.  He came to my easel, introduced himself and gave me his card.  Now given the best behaviour code, this was unusual but innocuous.  So we were unprepared for the announcement of the proprietor after the main break.

Eyes dancing, lips smacking at foible and anticipation of tableau, the proprietor cleared his throat:

Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve had a request.  One of our students it seems is a professional model and he has offered his services as an impromptu model for this evening.  Does anyone have an objection to him joining Doris on the stage?

Rather belatedly, he asked Doris if she minded, to which she shrugged.  What else could she do?  And the rest of us goggled or looked at our shoes.  Taking our silence as assent next thing there was a rustling behind the easel and our fellow student, shorn of his clothes and flat cap, emerged eager into the light a small skinny man with a shiny pink egg of a head.  And with a flash of his rosy orb he leapt on to the stage, and after much fussing and sighing (on Doris’s part), took up a pose at her knee like an imperfectly restrained pet.  Poor Doris assumed her care again forthwith, and for the rest of the night, and to this day, I have in my mind’s eye a vision of the two of them posing: a grandmother and her unwelcome eggman.

Update

Here’s Doris, whose name is actually Gladys I now see,  solo.

And here she is with eggman who doesn’t look very eggy.

And some more sketches of Nicola.

*****

 

People of the sock

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Last year I started a community project called A Walk in the Park. The project was about having pedestrian crossings installed at six locations in my local neighbourhood to encourage people to give up some of their car trips and start walking.  The project was a great success: we got our local Council to sit up and take notice, we created a community of people committed to the neighbourhood, we contributed to the just-launched Pedestrian Strategy for Victoria and built all kinds of links between organisations, government and residents. Even today, 18 months after the key rally, I still get enquiries and encouragement from people interested in the project.

Now it’s time to start another community project and I’ve got a beauty in mind. It’s going to be called People of the Sock and it’s about bringing together sock knitters and people who are homeless (I dislike the term “homeless people”; people aren’t their housing situation). The project is to hold a sock knitting workshop and create 100 pairs of socks which are then distributed to the people who sleep near the Princes Bridge at Southbank.

The project is dedicated to my lady of the toadstool who gave me the clue, and to my father.

My lady of the toadstool told me she knits socks for Father Chris Riley in Sydney who distributes them to people who are homeless. They are particularly valued because socks (and scarves) are both warm and easily portable.  As my lady explained, when not wearing the socks, a person who is homeless can easily stuff them in their pocket for the day, unlike the gift of a blanket which the person has to carry around for the day or hide somewhere.

*****

I have no idea how the project is going to happen, but it could look like the following …

The workshop is late November in a place like a public garden with a big video screen.  Hey, Federation Square just popped into my mind!  Perfect.

We invite everyone who wants to learn to knit socks, including people who are homeless.  They know about the event because we’ve had a story published in The Big Issue and The Age and we’ve been on radio talking about it.  We have 20 to 25 experienced sock knitters working the crowd of wannabe knitters, casting on for people, teaching them how to hold the 4 needles, easing them over those painful first few rows.  On the screen we have the most famous sock knitter in the world, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, aka the Yarn Harlot, beamed in from her home in Canada.  She’s cracking jokes, talking about beer and sharing secrets.  From time to time, she shares the screen with the sock pattern beamed in from the depths of my knitting bag, and a supremely competent and entertaining compere ties the whole lot together.

All the sock yarn has been donated by Opal in Germany or Heirloom in Italy, and Knit Picks has donated all the double-pointed needles, size 2.75mm.

Now here’s the tricky bit which I can’t even envisage. Knitting socks takes time and it takes navigation of the heel.  We can teach people to start a sock and knit it for an hour or so, but at that point they won’t be up to the heel.  So how do we teach them to start a sock, knit a sock and turn a heel — a sequence that would take a day or two of normal, interrupted knitting — in one session?

Anyway, someone else will work that out.

A few weeks after the knitting workshop — say, mid December — we gather together again and distribute the socks to the people by the river. Just in time for Christmas.

The possibility of the project is spreading the joy of making.

What do you think, dear uncrazy readers?  Could it work?

PS. My toes don’t really look like that. They’re usually beautifully pedicured.  Yarn is Heirloom’s Jigsaw which knits up tight and smooth after a splitty start. 

*****

The photograph not taken

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It was a Sartorialist moment: in Blue Bag last Friday, time on my hands, iphone at the ready and a woman he’d be happy to include in his next book.

She was with a large family; on holiday I fancied, for no reason, from Spain.  A daughter, son-in-law, some sons and a granddaughter.  While the rest fussed about what to order, she and the little girl sat down to watch the day.

She was in her 50s, petite, hair just thinking of turning grey. She was wearing a woollen scarf like the Noro one made popular by Brooklyn Tweed …

… in green and orange like Noro’s Kureyon #185 …

… with red earrings like these I own …


… and, pièce de résistance, she carried a patchwork leather bag beamed in from the 70s, country cousin of these Josef Seibel clogs I’m coveting.

In a family of cheap black, she’d got the style gene of the entire group. The colours – against her hair, the neutral clothes, the fag end of the week – redeemed the street.

And what did I do?

Why, I let the opportunity go begging.  It was too perfect.  Not wanting to do what I knew I could do easily, I sat there and didn’t take her photograph.  And now all I have to show is these approximations.

*****

Image: Noro scarf by Beatriz of Busy Bea Knits on Flickr (top)

Coming out + more ugo

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Someone on the weekend asked me why I don’t have my name on this blog, and I realised it was time to do it. When I started this blog almost two years I wanted to write as unselfconsciously as possible so I wrote using only a blog title.  As time’s passed I’ve got more comfortable about owning what I write and think, and though it still freaks me out a bit to contemplate current and potential business clients reading my deepest thoughts and feelings, I reckon I can handle it.

My name is Narelle Hanratty.

*****

My super-talented friend Patrick was recently in New York and he found the sister of the art work, “Our magic hour” that I wrote about here.  Both are by the New York-based artist, Ugo Rondinone.

Top image shows “Our magic hour” in Melbourne, Australia; bottom image shows “Hell, yes!” at the New Museum, New York.

*****

Images: by Patrick McCormick

John Monash: bridge builder, humble genius

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The masthead shows Morell Bridge in Melbourne.  I cross the bridge several times a week, and each time I get a thrill at its prettiness and elegance and the fact it was built by the man dubbed “the best general on the western front”:  John Monash.

The bridge was built in 1899, and apart from its grace and its famous builder, is notable for being made of reinforced concrete, one of the first such structures in Australia.  At the time Monash worked as a civil engineer, though he had also already begun his spectacular military career by joining the university militia in 1884.

Fifteen years after the bridge was built, when World War I broke out, Monash became a full-time Army officer.  Four years, and many battles later – including Gallipoli, Passchendaele, Amiens and the Battle of the Hindenburg Line – Monash returned to Australia having acquired

an outstanding reputation for intellect, personal magnetism, management and ingenuity.

His troops from the Battle of Hamel recalled the most extraordinary aspect of the battle was

not the use of armoured cars, nor simply the tremendous success of the operation, but the fact that in the midst of battle Monash had arranged delivery of hot meals up to the front line.

John Monash’s face is featured on Australia’s $100 note, our highest value currency, and he is commemorated in many buildings and structures, including the university I attended, Monash.  But I like to think of him when crossing the Morell Bridge.

*****

Some interesting facts about John Monash:

  • He was born in Melbourne to German-Jewish parents; when he first set out for the war, there seems to have been little comment on his origins, “despite the anti-German hysteria of the time.”
  • By 1918, however, after his great successes had begun accumulating, Charles Bean, the official Australian war historian, was plotting with Keith Murdoch (yes, Rupert’s father) “to undermine Monash, and have him removed from the command of the Australian Corps.”  The antipathy seems to have been partly based on “a general prejudice against Monash’s Prussian-Jewish background”, and partly because he didn’t “fit Bean’s concept of the quintessential Australian character.”  In any event, the plot failed.
  • On 12 August 1918 Monash was knighted on the battlefield by King George V, “the first time a British monarch had honoured a commander in such a way in 200 years.”
  • When Monash died in Melbourne in October 1931, “an estimated 250,000 mourners … came to pay their respects.”
  • Before his death, and “despite his achievements, honours and titles,” Monash had instructed that his tombstone “simply bear the words ‘John Monash’”.

*****

Images: Morell Bridge (photographs taken by me); John Monash presenting a medal after the Battle of Hamel (unknown photographer) (bottom)

All references from Wikipedia.

Ocean without a shore: Jargon-free art for May

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There’s a church in Rome, just near Colosseo, called San Clemente.  It’s not one of the showstopper churches, at least not from the outside. However, venture inside and descend into the depths and it becomes an eerie and remarkable experience.

The church one enters from street level was built in the 12th century.  It features golden mosaic walls, a homely courtyard.  It also features, over in a corner, a makeshift set of stairs leading to the structures that have been excavated below the present-day church.  The first structure is the remains of an earlier basilica built in the 4th century, a set of faded murals showing the halos and faces of long ago saints.

The journey does not stop there.  There are more stairs, this time descending deep below the road surface to the remains of an apartment building built in the 1st century AD.

At this level, one stands in the dank Roman earth and looks through a grille to the remaining chamber of the building, a chamber made into a mithræum, a temple for the worship of the pagan god, Mithras.  In this small cave there are two stone benches, and between them an altar showing a relief of Mithras slaying a bull.  And as one is standing there, staring at the pagan figure, one suddenly becomes aware of something else.  It is the sound of rushing water, the sound of the Cloaca Maxima, the ancient sewer used to take water to and from the nearby Colosseo.  Built over 2,000 years ago, and here it is, still working, still rushing.

Another subterranean roar

I was reminded of the Cloaca Maxima on hearing another subterranean roar of water, this time in US artist Bill Viola’s mighty video work, Ocean Without a Shore. As the sound of water announces the irruption of the past into the present under San Clemente, so it does in Viola’s work too.

There’s no evidence Viola was thinking of the Cloaca Maxima – the title of the work, for example, is taken from the 12th century Sufi mystic, Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) – but it is poetic to consider it was first displayed in an ancient Venetian church as part of the Biennale in 2007, just 400 kilometres north of San Clemente.

Since 2008, Ocean Without a Shore has been installed in the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and now all Melburnians can have the pleasure, a discombobulating one to be sure, of meeting the large cast of Viola’s ghosts swimming up from the depths in their new dark home.

The work features three life-sized video screens, one on each wall, with a bench for viewers making up the fourth side.  What the viewer sees on entering will differ each time, depending on which point of the video sequence has been reached.

On one screen perhaps there’ll be a figure emerging from the gloom, walking towards the screen.  On another, a different figure retreating back into the depths.  On the third screen, maybe, a grey swirling mist, the hint of a figure newly swallowed by the gloom, or not yet emerged.

The climatic moment

Or perhaps the viewer has entered at the climactic moment, the moment in which a figure is completing their solemn journey out of the depths by breaching a sheet of water that appears to lie just behind the screen’s surface.

As each figure approaches the sheet of water, still invisible to the viewer, the dull subterranean roar increases in volume and the first shards of illuminated water begin to strike off the parts of the body going in advance: breasts, noses, mostly hands.  Then, suddenly, the figure is in the midst of it.  Lighted water gushes from the body, clothes stream.  The sound takes off like a jet engine.  And then a moment later they are through, sodden, and the torrent rattles away.

The figure now stands fully lit just behind the screen surface.  As each emerges from their watery trial, plastered with cloth and hair, they are revealed in all the outward particulars of their individuality.  A middle-aged man in shirt and tie, a grandmother, a glamorous woman, a youngish man in a tracksuit jacket, and many others.  At first, despite the outward differences, they appear indistinguishable in tone: flat, unemotional, blank.

It’s not until one watches a few of these emergences that the variations start to show up.  Some of the figures don’t have a smooth passage.  A man in his 40s, limber, bracelets on his wrists, takes two attempts to get through.  A young girl of 9 or 10 merely pokes the sheet of water with a finger and decides not to proceed.  Most moving is an older man in a pink shirt who breaks through hands raised, shoulders hunched as if waiting for a blow, an attitude that scarcely relaxes when he’s through.

After they emerge, each figure stands silent for a few minutes.   Some push the wet hair from their foreheads.  Then, after a time in which nothing much happens, there is the same tiny adjustment as they shift their weight to one foot and slowly begin the journey back.  A few look longingly over their shoulder as they turn; most are unmoved.  They go back through the sheet of water again, and recede slowly into the depths whence they came.

“The presence of the dead in our lives”

The NGV describes Ocean Without a Shore as being

emblematic of Viola’s considered attention to human beings undergoing various states of transformation and renewal.

Certainly, the passage through the water suggests baptism and also, the breaking of the waters at birth.

But Viola himself has something narrower in mind.  For him, the figures swimming out of the subterranean gloom are meant literally as ghosts.  The work, he says, is about “the presence of the dead in our lives,” and is based on a poem by a Senegalese poet, Birago Diop, which includes the following lines:

The dead are never gone:
they are in the shadows.
The dead are not in earth:
they’re in the rustling tree,
the groaning wood,
water that runs,
water that sleeps …

For this viewer, listening to the Cloaca Maxima still, Viola’s video is about the continuing presence of the past, or the permeability of time.  It speaks to me of what the novelist William Faulkner once observed:

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

*****

Images: San Clemente and National Gallery of Victoria, courtesy Wikipedia (top); still from Ocean Without a Shore (middle), Bill Viola, courtesy The Age; portrait of Bill Viola (bottom), courtesy Bill Viola website.

Exorbitant privilege of the eye

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The Grand Perfume Tour to Paris and the South of France via Oman and London is postponed due to client commitments.  Feeling wistful though resigned, took myself in compensation on mini tour to olfaction via Fitzroy and Elena Vosnaki’s blog.

Pure, fake sensation

First stop: Klein’s perfumery in Brunswick Street to play with the Demeter Fragrance Library.  What once looked like a fun, short-lived gimmick — the rows of small, square bottles filled with the simulacra of Dirt, Rain, Thunderstorm, Wet Garden and my personal favourite, Funeral Home — has lasted beyond all prediction. These naïve and simple anti-perfumes have continued to find a market ever since they were launched in New York in 1993.

Their endurance cannot be due solely to the magic of the gimmick.  Some of their customers must have bought them over and over again.  And some, like me, must have come on them after a bout of longueurs with the Chanel crowd, or fresh from an avant-garde disillusion, and felt, finally, here was the answer!  Fragrance as nothing more, nothing less, than pure, fake sensation.

So it was that I found myself buying the purest, fakest sensation scent of all — Baby powder — and winging my way back to puberty in our holiday house at Pearl Beach, discovering boys for the first time and covering myself in Johnsons & Johnsons after a day in the sun.

I suspect too that Demeters is what you get when you realise you’d rather read about perfume than wear it.  And that, alas, is now the state of affairs with me. I’d much rather read a fragrance demolition or a list of 10 best fragrances than get up in the morning and commit to a perfume’s actual physical presence.  Maybe it’s not so surprising then that as the practice of perfume connoisseurship becomes abstracted, the only “perfume” one can stomach is the abstraction par excellence: a cheap, synthetic mimesis of natural phenomena.

In fact, it can’t be too long before the sense of smell, amongst others, starts to atrophy in the face of what Derrida called “the exorbitant privilege of the eye.”  That this “privilege” grows daily as we gain more and more of our information — even our sense information — from the internet gives me pause.

Grasse-hoppers

Second stop on my mini tour was a vicarious trip to Grasse courtesy of Elena Vosnaki’s wonderful blog, Perfume Shrine. Elena writes lyrically, sensually, of the Route de Mimosa (The Mimosa Road), a 130km trip through 8 towns of the region — Le Rayol-Canadel, Sainte Maxime, Saint Raphaël, Mandelieu la Napoule, Tanneron, Pégomas, Grasse, Cannes — in which …

… literally millions of downy flowers fragrance the hills and valleys of this region, rendering it a golden feast for both eyes and nose; the sugar-spun scent of mimosa (an acacia species), persistent and entrancing, mixed with the tannic aroma of cork oaks and dry Provençal herbs.

And of the small resorts of Anthéor, Agay and Boulouris, where …

The bigraradiers [?], full of orange blossoms that are shedding petals like a carnival parade throwing confetti at the gentlest gust of the wind, aromatize the air as we pass, the refreshing, joyous smell a welcoming salutation for weary wanderers.

To read Elena’s full post, click here: Perfume Shrine: Perfumed Pilgrimage: Grasse-hopers part1

*****

Image: courtesy Perfume Shrine: Black & White Le Nu Provençal, Gordes (1949) by Willy Ronis

Little parks

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Melbourne has been hosting this week the international Healthy Parks, Healthy People congress, and Alan Saunders on Radio National spoke to two of the keynote speakers this morning.

Having people enjoy public parks, and the effect it has on neighbourhood vitality and personal wellbeing, is a cause close to my heart.  Last year I established a community project called A Walk in the Park to get people out of their cars and get them walking.  One of the goals was to increase usage of our beautiful local park, Como Park.

Melbourne is, of course, famous for its parks.  It’s one of the things that entranced me about the city when I moved here from Sydney 10 years ago.  I was amazed that in suburb after suburb, block after block, someone had set aside some land for nothing other than enjoyment and reflection.  And each was so lovingly tended.

The little pocket parks are my favourite.  Look at this little beauty I spotted today: The Dame Nellie Melba Memorial Park in Coppin Street, Richmond.  Note all the little details including the treble clef and other musical notation wrought in iron to celebrate the famous soprano.  How wonderful to live in a city where someone would go to such trouble for a small park in a side street of a suburb still shaking off its slum past.

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To listen to Alan Saunders’s program, click here:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bydesign/stories/2010/2867745.htm