A quick snap of the back-end of the Queen Elizabeth 2 at Circular Quay today (8 March 2012)… they say it’s the largest ship ever to have docked at that terminal and about 10 meters too tall to make it under the Harbour Bridge.

The cafe used to be at 175 Campbell Street in Surry Hills, Sydney, Australia. It’s been knocked down now. A shame, it was a great old building and the Cafe had a good feel about it.

It was setup by Herman who had an architecture business up stairs and the cafe below. All things must pass, as Mr Harrison said. It was great while it lasted…

In the ’80s, before The Palace Hotel was renovated, you could get a $1.50 beef and mustard roll to have with your beer. This was lunch for many City Art students walking between buildings. It used to be a routine after finishing painting sessions at the Flinders Street campus to walk back to the Paddington campus through the Palace Hotel, grab a beef and mustard roll from the hole-in-the-wall type kitchen. That and a quick beer set us up for an afternoon of art Myth, Archetype and The Sublime.

Invitation to the opening of the
DADO art exhibition held at L’otel

Kite Oil painting exhibited at DADO

L’otel used to be a small French provincial style hotel, bar and dining room in Darlinghurst, Sydney, Australia. Years ago it was run by Yvonne and Eli’ and a friend and I held the first art exhibition they had there.

It was a good space back then and I had a few other exhibitions there over the years.

The place changed hands and style a few times after Yvonne and Eli’ left and now and the wall space doesn’t work for exhibitions.

The Bagel House was a great Sydney cafe, near Taylor square, I played some jazz there in the ’80s with some friends. I wonder what became of the Portelli family? Lovely people, think we played at their house for a birthday some time too.

Baby Enzo - Cafe - Bar - Dining Room - it was in Oxford Street, Paddington, Sydney.

Years earlier it was just called Enzo, it had strong art exhibitions in the ’80s and was one of the early gay bars in Sydney.

It lapsed for some while before Kiran Moraryie set up Baby Enzo. We held he first art exhibition Baby Enzo had and called it Naked.

After the exhibition I took a room upstairs as an art studio for a while. It was a great space with French doors looking out over the back of Paddington.

Baby Enzo shut down after a while and Kiran headed off overseas on a mission. The building is now back to being a hair salon.

I caught this by chance the other day heading over the Sydney Harbour Bridge into the city. It’s the cover image of Queen of Dreams by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni aligned with a train passenger. It has a dream like quality fitting for the book with the umbrella adding another Magritte-type layer.

She came to stay for a weekend-break from the pet shop…

They had lovingly pumped her full of so much food, she spent the next twenty-four hours pissing and shitting everywhere. She was the shape of a small hippo’ at first but looked more like a staffy-shaped puppy on the last day.

Tears of course upon having to return the beast to the shop.

She stayed elsewhere on another occasion and caught ring-worm. It knocked her about a bit. Eventually she went to live with someone who sounded like they would take good care of her.

Note the puppy spit in the image, she did a bit of that.

Salivary Glands… okay, so I know you need to know, a dog (or cat) has four salivary glands, Mandibular, Parotid, Sublingual and Zygomatic. Got that?

• Mandibular - the mandible, the jaw.
• Parotid - in front of and below the ears.
• Sublingual - under the toung.
• Zygomatic - of the zygomatic bones, the cheek bones, Malars or Jugals.

An undated - clipping from a New Zealand newspaper, some time in the early ’80s reads… 

Rock band really did

Brussells [sic]

New Wave?

I saved this image years ago from a New Zealand news paper - a great set of characters. The text reads:

Mrs Iris Strickland - one of the few voices supporting the MP for Hastings, Mr David Butcher. Mrs Strickland said the National Government had hit superannuitants harder and she was now "living better than I ever have."

Clippping - The Hawkes Bay Herald Tribune - 1984

It has - there's not a bloody original thought left in the world. Just try and come up with a catchy name for a web-site. Someone has always been there first. Pricks!

When I was a kid I used to look out the car window on long, boring, family holiday trips and watch the lolly-pop men at each end of the inevitable New Zealand roadworks - back then the concept of roadworks was to rip up the road, dump a whole heap of rocks all over the place and let the traffic pack it all down for a few weeks.

Anyway, on one of these trips, I thought up this idea (this is in the '70s) of portable traffic lights on a trailer at each end of the roadworks to control the traffic. Wireless technology didn't occur to me but I thought it would need long cables on poles so the wires didn't get crushed. I didn't realise what I was on to.

There's a whole history to this alphabet and various different versions of it.

It's all out there on the web if you are interested in that. I've just put this up here 'cause I keep needing to remember it in the middle of a phone call and wish I had it with me... so here it is.

• A lpha
• B ravo
• C harlie
• D elta
• E cho
• F oxtrot
• G olf
• H otel
• I ndi
• J uliet
• K ilo
• L ima
• M ike
• N ovember
• O sca
• P apa
• Q uebec
• R omeo
• S iera
• T ango
• U niform
• V ictor
• W hisky
• X -ray
• Y anky
• Z ulu

Without the readability gap, the words are:

Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Osca, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Siera, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whisky, X-ray, Yanky, Zulu.

The Bob Dylan Revue are playing again this week in Sydney. Being a Dylan fan from his late teens, Douglass is a great choice to play the roll of Bob Dylan.

There is an uncanny resemblance to the man himself. Douglass has a natural feel for the Guitar, Blues harp and that distinctive vocal style… even Dylan himself would be a little puzzled at first… but he’ll come around.

I was flicking through Mr Grubber’s fine RSS feed this morning (as you do) and found my way to the new song by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers -

I Should Have Known It.

I agree with the DF, it’s a great tune. It’s slick, pop-rock and I like it. It could be a shocker in less competent hands but Tom has such cred’ in his delivery that it works for me. There are some contrived edits of the band interacting with each other but that’s just a bit of fun.

Art aside, something in the background of one shot caught my eye. There’s a poster on the wall that has been obscured about two thirds of the way through the video. Something legal didn’t like I guess. Perhaps someone wanted payment.

I wonder what it is?

Saint George, later in life, meets another dragon and things don’t go as well as they did last time.

George has had a good life but when he gets older and a bit wiser he begins to question things he would have taken for granted previously.

Where is my beautiful lance? What is my beautiful lance? Why is that dragon looking at me that way?

The lance, a symbol of sexual and spiritual virility is broken, it’s more of a snapped blind-persons cane. It’s a symbol of beliefs, of a faith that’s broken.

These Lance paintings are about my father, poor bugger, he wasted a large part of his life fooling around with a seriously fucked-up religion, only to find later in life that he didn’t have the resources to get past what he saw as a loss of faith.

I said “What does it matter? So there’s no God, move on to something else, open a bookshop or something”.

more…

Global nuclear disarmament would be nice, I'd be happy about that, but what can you do?

Regan and Gorby in Iceland, 1986

Various people have had a crack at it over the years but they all seem to loose traction after time.

In 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan came close to taking an unprecedented step. During the Reykjavik Summit in Iceland, they almost agreed to get rid of all their nuclear weapons - but that fizzled out.

Closer to home, in 1995, then Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating established The Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. It had an opening statement declaring it was...

...persuaded that immediate and determined efforts need to be made to rid the world of nuclear weapons and the threat they pose to it.

Later on in 1989, in reference to the Canberra Commission, Keating said, "I wanted to put the authority of a sovereign government behind the push to rid the world of nuclear weapons" - I like that.

The current Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd seems to have re-branded Keating's idea, and in collaboration with the Japanese government, has launched the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND). It's a mouthful of a title but a worthy move, with the aim of reducing the number of nuclear weapons over time. It has a long term goal of eliminating them beyond 2025 - too long for my liking.

I much prefer Keating's "Elimination" to Rudd's "Non-Proliferation" but perhaps stopping the growth is a pragmatic place to start, what with the May 2010 deadline approaching for the review of The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

Of course the United Nations were on the case from day one. The first resolution ever passed by the UN General Assembly, on 24 January 1946, was for the "Establishment of a Commission to Deal With the Problem Raised by the Discovery of Atomic Energy." They were to "...proceed with the utmost dispatch" to make proposals "for the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction" - nice try UN.

There is one crowd who have actually had some success. The Nunn-Lugar project claims to have helped in the decommissioning of over 7000 nuclear weapons. Seven thousand! They also claim to be chronically underfunded, or in fact criminally underfunded. Just imagine what they could get done if we threw just a fraction of the Bush-Blair-Howard-Iraq-invasion-cash at them. Nunn-Lugar state a goal...

...to lessen the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction, to deactivate and to destroy these weapons, and to help the scientists formerly engaged in production of such weapons start working for peace.

UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe 
Barack Obama Chairs the UN Security
Council Summit on 24 September 2009

That's the practical stuff that needs to be happening. Nunn is also involved with the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) who seem to be doing some good work. 

Revisiting Reykjavik would be a more dramatic place to start but perhaps a less idealistic proposal is to sink a few lazy billion into projects like Nunn-Lugar and NTI.

I know I'm probably being overly optimistic but there do seem to be a few glimmers of a positive new momentum for nuclear disarmament growing again. Obama is heading in the right direction by chairing a UN Security Council summit on nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament. It's the first time a US President has done that. 

Earlier in 2009, in his first address to the UN, Obama promised three important things...

America intends to keep our end of the bargain. We will pursue a new agreement with Russia to substantially reduce our strategic warheads and launchers. We will move forward with ratification of the test ban treaty and work with others to bring the treaty into force so that nuclear testing is permanently prohibited.

We will complete a Nuclear Posture Review that opens the door to deeper cuts and reduces the role of nuclear weapons. And we will call upon countries to begin negotiations in January [2010] on a treaty to end the production of fissile material for weapons.

I will also host a summit next April [2010] that reaffirms each nation's responsibility to secure nuclear material on its territory and to help those who can't, because we must never allow a single nuclear device to fall into the hands of a violent extremist. And we will work to strengthen the institutions and initiatives that combat nuclear smuggling and theft.

If he just gets those three things happening he will have earned that Nobel Peace Prize several times over. Let's see what happens with those promises in 2010.

While Obama may be at the beginning of something new, some of our other institutions just continue to reinforce the same old thinking. Take the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for example, perhaps instead of the paradoxical statute of "...accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace...", we could lobby for someone who has been to the brink, like Mikhail Gorbachev, to be the head of a new United Nations body for Nuclear Abolition (UNNA). Screw peaceful use! Let's burry this crap for good. 

It will take a someone to make a move that is uncharacteristic of most of the conservative clowns mis-managing this stuff today. I suspect politicians are the wrong people to be running this disarmament show, their self-serving, small-minded, nationalism will continue to reinforce their little-dick militarism and get us nowhere. Take Chirac for example, who decided in 1995 it would be fun to screw the Pacific some more with another eight underground nuclear tests - mutha-fucker! We don't need clowns like that in charge ever again.

We need a new paradigm of thinking to manage nuclear material. A structure that sits above nationalism and restates the purpose of the UN agencies. It should have two parallel streams of work, one to rid the world of nuclear weapons and the enriched material to make them and a second stream, to begin undoing the damage the nuclear power industry is inexorably storing up for future generations with waste from power generation that none of us can work out what to do with. We need a base-load of new thinking.

Get the power stations managed by a central global body, no one can own them any more, make nuclear power the possession of the globe. It will be a while before we can completely replace those things with clean energy options, but we have to start heading that way now rather than building more of them. If you want a nuclear power plant in the interim, it has to be managed by the one international body, the land it's on is excised from the national boundaries - no chance to get in there and start bomb making classes again.

Further to this we should link the possession or suspected possession of nuclear weapons or the material to make them to trade in a similar way to a carbon tax. Every gram of nuclear material you are suspected of possessing will increased a hefty tariff on your exports. This way there is an incentive for transparency, and for all nations, including the US, UK, France and the others holding on to this shit, to be seen to be giving it up. Now I know this is crazy talk, I have no idea how you would administer a tariff like that - but it's an idea.

Here ends my potted history of nuclear disarmament. Sweet dreams and throw down your guns.

She lived in the beautiful area of Porangahau in the North Island of New Zealand.

Martin Luther was a bit of a prick really, I never did like having him over to stay.

This puzzle was hours of fun as a kid. A box of wooden blocks with pictures stuck on each side. There was a bus, car, plane, ship, a steam train and a second newer train. 

Okay, finally I think apple have caught up with themselves with their new iPhone. I may have to officially retire the Newton. Although I'll be fully convinced when I can use a WiMAX iPhone on the Unwired network in Sydney. Let's see how long that takes.

By the way the image on the screen of the Newton is a drawing I did at the Singapore airport of a weary traveller with his head in hand.

Drawing detail...

Here's another one from a while ago. 1989, The Triffids at the Enmore theatre in Newtown, Sydney, Australia. Standing room only, poor sound but I guess that's the deal with the real thing.

Here's an oldie. The last time I saw Bob Dylan in concert was in 1986 in Sydney Australia. Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers were support. It was great, but hell that's a while ago now. Back to the EntCent to see him again Aug 15 2007 - let's see what 21 years of touring does to a singer. And how about that price 26 bucks!

I just mixed up another batch of the medium I use for oil painting. I seem to always loose or forget the recipe so I decided to store it here for safe keeping. This is a simple recipe with damar resin, stand oil and gum turps. I don't bother with dryers or other ingredients, too lazy.

You can of course buy a ready-made medium but they generally don't tell you what's in them and also I find something meditative about preparing my own. It's a method of procrastination that feels as if you are doing something art related - anything but actually face the risky business of painting.

The recipe for the medium I use is in the proportions 1:2:5. That is, one part damar varnish, two parts stand oil and five parts refined turpentine. This gives me the base mix and I pour some off and add a little more turps for the lean underpainting as required.

See the full recipe here... and feel free to let me know if you have a variation on the theme.

Here's a triptych of charcoal drawings on paper from 1987. I liked these, they had an Aussie summer feel about them to me. They hung around on the wall for so long the poor quality paper fell apart somewhere along the line. 

I've got the dance floor from Strictly Ballroom up on eBay for sale. The floor used to be installed in my studio years ago but it's been in storage for years and I think it's about time someone else had a go. Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom is listed on imdb and the floor can be seen in the trailers hosted on that site.