It is 2009 in Brisbane. This is me in the future wishing all y’all still in the past a happy new year. The International Date Line is magic!
Right now, our best friend Evan is somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He’ll be here this afternoon. Poor dude doesn’t get a NYE. I know he’s a little pissed that he’s stuck on an airplane instead of stuck in some hipster Portland bar kissing a cute girl, but I think he’ll be less pissed once he sees the stripper we hired to meet him at the terminal. Because we are classy best friends like that.
Australia, being a commonwealth country, celebrates Boxing Day. You know, that event marked on the calendar with “Canada” following in parentheses. For those of you that don’t have a Canadian handy to explain, Boxing Day is historically a time when the wealthy would give gifts to their household servants. Hence, I imagine, the paid day off from work I had today. In contemporary Australia, most folks take advantage of the holiday to shop the post-Christmas sales or watch the Boxing Day Test with some mates and a slab of tinnies.
Not being big fans of shopping in crowded malls, and not having a TV, Kim and I were happy that the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art was also open today. What’s more, admission is free, or more accurately it’s paid for in numerous small instalments through the ubiquitous goods and services tax.
What turned out to be my favourite piece, fully sick as they say here, was a video instalment of 16 Michael Jackson fans in Berlin simultaneously singing along to Thriller. This requires a bit of work on your part to end up in the right place, so please stick with me. Navigate to WORK -> VIDEO -> KING, make sure that your pop-up blocker didn’t block any of the content from this site, and turn the sound on (there isn’t any sound for the first few moments). Now you can enjoy a small taste of what we experienced.
Imagine this on 16 side-by-side flat panel screens in near-real-life proportion. I was entranced, and ended up watching the whole 42 minute performance of the Thriller album. At the end I felt like I had taken an anthropology course.
Justin and I were planning to go bush this Christmas. We may need to work on our planning skillz, because we are still in the city. All the walking tracks and walking camps are closed on Fraser Island. The 4WD tracks are still open, though. Maybe Santa will bring us one of these:
Justin’s been good this year. Really, really good. Also, he recycles.
It’s probably too late to write Santa a regular letter; does anyone know if Santa twitters (or is it tweets)? And will Santa accept bourbon in place of milk? It’s all we have on hand.
Speaking of bourbon, Justin’s been in many of the bottle shops in Brisbane looking for Knob Creek. He finally had to settle for Woodford Reserve. Apparently, it will not feel like Christmas until three requirements are met: bourbon, woodstove, and snow. We’ve been a little green-eyed looking at all the photos of snowy Portland.
Our friend Tess arrived in Brisbane the other day, bearing gifts for me and Justin. One of those gifts was a book we’d forgotten in Portland, a guide to cycle touring in Vietnam. I’ve really gotten into reading guidebooks recently, because I find it so useful to actually know information before I need it. (Fact: I used to travel with guidebooks but never looked at them until the trip was over.)
So I opened the guidebook and started reading it somewhere in the middle (Another fact: I usually begin books, all books, in the middle, flip to the end, and then wind my way back to the beginning if I’m really interested.) The middle in this case was a list of useful phrases, in English and Vietnamese.
I was sounding out and laughing over some of the suggested Vietnamese translations until I got to the phrase, “Do you sell condoms?”
Now, I believe this is a genuinely useful phrase to know. The problem is I can’t guess at how to pronounce “condom” correctly in Vietnamese because I have never heard it said out loud. I know that the Vietnamese is written right there for me to read with all the diacritical marks and everything, but my ability to read in Vietnamese is at about the “Duck, Rabbit, and Kitten are friends” reading level, and Duck, Rabbit, and Kitten don’t usually know squat about prophylactics.
A few months ago, I had the privilege of being included in a group photography show. I spent a long month before the show reviewing my catalog of images, categorizing, considering, re-categorizing, and re-considering. I wanted each photograph I exhibited to have a voice, and I wanted the voices to tell a story. This was important to me, because I was trying really hard to be completely honest. Taking photographs is a very personal experience for me. Or, put another way, I wanted each photograph to have its own Power Ring and when their powers combined, Captain Planet would appear and save the earth.
The show went great. A lot of people said nice things to me. Thank you.
After the show, I stopped taking photographs. I tried, because I was encouraged to, but I didn’t like very much of what I was taking.
I took the above photograph last Friday. It’s detail of a pipe behind an abandoned building; the pipe is splitting vertically. I’m posting it here because I find it confusing and hard to look at.
RSS - Posts
