Dear Dawn Tan

Your blog handmade love makes me feel happy, every day and one day, when I have twelve more pots of money, I will buy one of your little paintings and hang it on my wall.

The opposite of thorns on a rose

I want to watch somebody die, see that flat-pack end of them. I've seen the crash, click and climb of most things, spider-legged horses breathing out the last of their tree-strength, a new woman slide out of a torn vagina but not that bitter end. You can blame science if you like, both sides now, I want to discover just why we are supposed to operate as the exact opposite of thorns on a rose.

Dear Anastasia Freeman

Your exhibition* is sophisticated and beautiful, successful on many levels but none more than the personal. I was re-enchanted, or at least I was until I walked round the corner and found myself back on Oxford St in the rain but I can't really hold you responsible for that. Thank you for meeting me in a miniature wedding cake of a building that I misremembered as being slightly blue. You slid out all the possibilities hidden within each work of art, at the going down of the sun I will remember them.




* Thaumaturgy - Kudos Gallery - 6 Napier St Paddo - until 12th September

We have liftoff

Who would have thought it would be so difficult to explain exactly what I mean when I say I've invented a Little Richard crash helmet.

Interesting study

Curious admixture of a man, he has the correct ratio of shoulder width to visible chest hair but his nose leaves me with the impression of daintiness. He is altogether a different sort of man, one that might attend Oxford University between the wars.

To be continued...

Microwave is not the same as ultrasound but both will heat blue coloured goo to an acceptable temperature

He said he wanted to put things in my shoes. I was lying face down and he had a good hold of my left heel with his right hand, he massaged his fingers up my heel and across until they were as far underneath an ankle bone as fingers can be. I said "What kind of things? Roller skates, ponies, marmalade sandwiches, dynamite? It's dynamite isn't it? Dynamte!" He scoffed, "Dynamite! Why would anyone put dynamite in shoes?" then told me to lie still and cooperate. I thought about trying to leave because things had shifted from odd and uncomfortable into definitely very painful but he had smeared my left leg with several kinds of goo, first clear, then slightly yellow and finally blue and I thought I might slip over and skid into the doorframe or stain my red dress or something infinitely terrible but as yet unimagined. I tried to ask him what was with the different kinds of goo but every tiny deliberate movement of his freakishly strong arms and fingers sent a shiver of pain so pure and undiluted that I had to switch breathing from autopilot to manual. I endured for as long as I could before calling a halt to proceedings, he said he was just about to finish anyway then he held me down flat while he wiped away the goo with three towels, each one a different shade of blue.

I did not discover what he wants to put in my shoes or why he needs three separate kinds of goo but I am quite determined to find out. I am going to see him again on Thursday.

Little things big Monday night

I've been walking after midnight on my way home from drinking with a friend. I rose up unexpectedly from the comfort of my chair and walked out into the night. I met him at the cafe but we wound up high above King St playing records and sharing a longneck bought with the last loose change we had. He was ripping the filters off his cigarettes and showing me the evidence of something that should be an irrational continent-spanning love but he said it was only a couple of good songs and a photograph of a painting. I would have said write something new and post it south but he'll probably think of that on Thursday and stay up all night to catch the morning post. That will have, I hope, a transforming effect. I walked the back way home ducking under the railway line through Piss Alley. I don't think I've ever seen the streets so empty, nothing but one tourist at a bus stop in an electric-yellow dress and a small crowd mopping floors at Istanbul. I was photographing public garbage bins and private doorways.

It was somewhere between King and Wilson, on one of those big-tree streets that I stooped to snap a pelargonium stem. I carried it home and pushed it into the dirt with the other snapped and stolen plants struggling to grow roots where my arms and its arms have been. I will water the way to remember this night.

I have a small book that goes to New York without me then comes back again

Most cities hum. NY throbs. The Subway is the circulatory system for this place, the life force. Cars are here for show, most people walk, take the subway or bus, that's why the cars have to make so much noise, to be noticed.

Dear Robert Tuckwell I have decided that seeing as I do not know you it would be imprudent to fall in love or Extract from a letter to Robert Tuckwell

An art museum made out of pink, white and yellow paper run through with shadows cast by a miniature artificial sun. I walked the walls and ceilings until I understood the gravity of the imagined. If I mapped and reduced the trails I leave as I cross and cross this city their bleached and condensed shape might resemble the museum as seen from above. I have maps that will answer your questions. I am not known for my ability to imagine architects or the possibility of confining and redefining matter into space. You have forced mastery over things such as bricks, sand and sunlight. I understand this is something they teach in universities. My desk lies in artificial shadow, light blocked by a drawing and the direction to lay bricks, uproot trees and lock panes of glass in channels made of wood. I might once have thought the word homemaker was something of an insult or a self-remedy for failure. This has revealed more than it should.