I meant to mention Peter Alwast after seeing his work a while ago. But you know what happens. I got caught up with other artists I saw there. Mari Velonaki came on my radio show a couple of weeks ago. We’ve got an interview with Eugene Carchesio in the next issue of Cyclic Defrost. I mentioned his work here too.

But I’m yet to say anything about Peter Alwast.

That’s a still from Alwast’s piece (via Gallery Barry Keldoulis). But he won the Queensland new media prize and a still is not new media, even if it is on a canvas. Oh and I hear it’s not ‘new media’ anymore by the way, it’s ‘media’, as in ‘media art’.

Greg Hooper described the prize winning piece, Everything, in Real Time:

The winning piece, Everything (see cover image), by Peter Alwast (it’s an acquisitive award so into the GOMA collection it goes) uses three large projections of what seem to be cut and spliced together clichés of digi-art animation. Shiny pipes, translucent shapes, clouds, mountains, CAD style building frames, lickable butterscotch cars, reflections into shiny domes to show off some projective geometry/linear algebra. Over the top runs a soundtrack that also seems to recycle the standards of collaged and cut-up sound, even down to the slightly manic sounding street preacher. (Subpsychotic street person rant = gritty urban equivalent of salt-of-the-earth charming peasant folk wisdom?) Overall, there’s an aura of slick and meaningless process, an empty consumption of surfaces that gets a bit creepy.

I just don’t agree at all.

It’s time-enabled painting. That’s three-dimensions – time plus the flat film on wall from three film projectors. A surreal mesh of images, in the three film frames, only heighten the sense of 3D. In the gallery notes, Alwast refers to shifting his gaze from PC monitor to window to phone to TV, and so on. And you get that in the film, the perspective seems to shift internally, so different subjects within the film move independently of one another.

It makes sense. We’re overloading on information. At the moment, for me, it’s Twitter, The Australian and the SMH, the New Yorker, Feedly, abstracts for a conference I’m heading to next week, a Christos Tsiolkas novel and the latest Quarterly Essay (on climate change and coal mining). There’s radio and TV, downloaded HBO series, DVDs, YouTube stars. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t go more than half an hour without checking my phone.

In a way, Alwast’s piece makes some sense of that mess of images. And while media artists are obsessed with technical challenges. Who can do this very macho bout of programming or gear tech or whatever, Alwast’s gone and observed something quite real and quite powerful. It’s a way of seeing the world. Art, I guess.

I was out doing an ‘observational exercise’ on Monday night as part of my uni class. Standing about in Chinatown, wandering down to Sussex and later Pitt streets, it made me realise how little time I spend just hanging out, soaking things in. Really enjoyed it.

Anyway, the aim was a couple of short profiles, potential introductions to a magazine feature. A place and a face. Here’s what I came up with.

Faces

There’s no entourage to speak of, but she’s the star.

He pulls his backpack around and crouches in front of the Oporto restaurant. Green-striped polo shirt – collar up – and baggy jeans, he takes a camera from the bag, pulling the Canon E.O.S. strap over his short brown hair and suede tennis visor. He checks something in the viewfinder, presses a button and adjusts the lens.

She’s about the same height, approx. 170cm, dressed in a fawn jumper, snug over red shirt and blue jeans. Brown discus-shaped handbag. He snaps a picture as she curves her head around to him like a model. Eyes sparkling, teeth glinting. Her eyebrows arch, but she holds them smooth. She giggles with the pose. It’s a funny smile, like a recreation of something she’s seen.

He snaps. She reaches to see the preview, then steps back into position. Carefully pats her shoulder length straight brown hair, parting the fringe across her face. He looks past her, at the backdrop of light rail cables stretching back to a horizon of George Street and the glitzy Guys And Dolls billboard at the Capitol Theatre behind. Needs to get the composition right. He’s done this before.

She flashes that smile. He snaps, laughs, picks up a red Esprit shopping bag, and they’re off to rejoin their friends.

Places

Around the corner from Chinatown, at Hay and Harbour streets, a squat McDonald’s restaurant squeezes out beneath the Entertainment Centre. The hulking venue’s like a Millenium Falcon: futuristic ’80s, washed out, unwashed. Street lights, a big red sign to “Darling Harbour”; decades of intersecting dreams for the city.

A girl steps past the monorail, scooping ice from a Gloria Jeans frappe. The empty train has a full-length hoarding for Pom-brand juice – “Health’s Angel” – moments later, the light rail trundles parallel to Paddy’s Market, also empty.

Two mid-30s men talk too loudly at each other. One leaves, the other asks people in the square for money. Actually, it’s more like a triangle. 500 metres on each side: McDonald’s and Oporto sentry to Paddy’s, 100 years old this year. The market itself bares the scars of several rounds of reno’s.

A man in a square, grey suit swings his arms robotically, striding towards a row of three phone booths. There are specks of rubbish everywhere: cigarette stubs, broken plastic spoons, discarded wrappers. Chicken burger wrappers and napkins wedged into the old train track sleepers, the randomly placed seats. Plenty of pigeons and sea gulls. Two bins. A skateboarder’s oasis, if it wasn’t for the uneven paving.

In a wonderful titled piece (The Only Thing We Have to Fear is the Fear of ‘Moral Hazard’), Owen Thomas wrote:

The worry is that bailouts will be bad for us in the long term. But in the long term, as one sage noted, we are all dead. We can ban government rescues in the long term, if they’re such a worry. In the short term, the biggest hazard is too much moralizing.

How much evidence is there that moral hazard has any meaningful effect on decision making, for example in choosing to safeguard your home against fire?

Tracking coverage of the bushfires in Victoria over the past week, one story’s niggled at my logic systems.

Insurers count the cost of fire devastation – SMH, February 13.

The insurance industry said Government intervention after such disasters did not help reduce the strain on the industry and contributed to a moral hazard where people were less likely to hold private insurance.

Paul Giles, from the Insurance Council of Australia, said: “Those people who do insure look at people who don’t insure and say, ‘Well, I’ve been paying my insurance premiums for a number of years, why do I bother if the Government steps in?”‘.

Mr Giles said the fire services levy and stamp duty accounted for up to 40 per cent of home and contents insurance premiums, and governments would be better off encouraging people to take out private insurance.

It’s a beguiling argument, and it works logically. People tend to be less cautious when they know they’ll be bailed out. But context is everything.

‘Moral hazard’ isn’t applied evenly. In the past year, as this article points out, large insurers and banks have gone to governments, hat in hand, for bailout money.

Months ago, when the president announced a paltry plan to help out a few of the millions of homeowners who got caught in the sub-prime loan mess, he reiterated the credo: “It’s not government’s job to bail out … those who made the decision to buy a home they knew they could not afford.” Days ago, when he endorsed the giant Fed bailout of Wall Street, the president signaled it was government’s job to bail out big bankers who had made decisions to buy and sell risky securities they knew (or should have known) they could not afford.

At the same time, Australia faces escalating climate risks – bushfires, floods, sea level rise and storm surge. How prepared are insurers for these things, are they adequately prepared for the payouts?

Beyond all that, evidence is increasing that we just don’t know how to assess risk.

Say, hypothetically speaking, you were asked to come up with some panel ideas for an upcoming festival.

On writing.

And you came up with a few half-baked ideas and they really went for them, but then you were forced to actually come up with the goods. What would you do?

So, seeing as you’re an occasional blogger, the first panel might be something about blogging.

The best who live in Sydney?

• Frockwriter
• Sydney Observatory
• City of Sound
• Nosey In Newtown
• Fresh and New

Who would you choose? What would you make them talk about? How do you avoid the dreaded love-in that usually happens at these things?

On another panel, you might want some proper writers. Like novelists and journalists. Being a festival, about writing. But because you’re obsessed with music, it has to have a music element.

Do you get silly?

• how music ruined me and saved me as a writer
• are lyrics good love advice?

Or serious?

• if music has gone through a billion changes and revolutions and genre-births – sampling, mash-ups, etc – how come writing hasn’t quite followed suit?” (Twittering and mobile phone novels aside.)

Or do you just throw that all away and put a bunch of writers and musicians on a stage together and stage and let them battle it out?

As you can see this is all just a ruse to get my blog posting up. There’s no way a festival would ever ask for panel ideas this half-baked.

Mark Oliver Everett writes like someone who’s used to having a great voice and timing to give his words nuance. Like a radio broadcaster… or a rock star, which he is. Everett’s the guy behind mid-90s group Eels (‘Novocaine For The Soul’).

(Pic from The Guardian)

His father was Hugh Everett III, who came up with the ‘many worlds’ theory of quantum physics.

Everett writes like you write a good pop song – simple and direct. It can seem a little plain, but like any songwriter worth his publishing contract, his book, Things The Grandchildren Should Know, has a story. His book – written before there are actually any grandchildren on the scene – is a warts and all memoir that dives deep into his childhood. And it’s messy.

He dealt with the death of every member of his immediate family by recording a series of increasingly popular records (despite constant battles with record labels), including Electro-Shock Blues and Blinking Lights and Other Revelations.

We don’t think that much about the emotional lives of snarling, pouting, grinting rock stars. OK so that’s not entirely true – the likes of Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin or Britney Spears do clog up plenty of column inches.

It’s pretty rare to get a frank insight into one of their lives – unless it comes with a truckload of self-pity, self-aggrandisement or at the very least self-consciousness. Most say, the songs speak for themselves.

But in this case, I’ve rarely had time for Eels’s records, and it was only the unrelenting thrust of his story that inspired me to listen back to records. They still didn’t do that much for me, but I love that Everett’s story was engrossing enough to make me want to hear his music.

It’s weird blogging while all hell breaks loose in Victoria, but I’m totally caught up in the response to the horrific fires at work, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who needs to escape.

Over a month after 2009 expired, I’m checking my diary and of the list of records I need to spend a bit of time with, these are left.

Uncle Tupelo
Phillippe Grancher
Focus Group and the Ghost Box catalogue
Arthur Russell
United States of America

I mean I’ve heard one or more songs by all these people/groups – but I haven’t spent enough time, don’t have their albums. Need to.

I have a show on Sydney radio station FBI 94.5 and every week they ask a presenter to come up with a short list of things to check. This week, it’s me.

LISTENING to D.N.E.

I love Eugene Carchesio’s take on this world. In Someone’s Universe, his show at the Brisbane gallery of modern art Queensland Art Gallery, Carchesio filled a room with matchbox sculptures that catch the light just so, and wonderful miniature paintings and sketches. Someone’s world indeed, I was sad to leave. But if the likes of Young Marble Giants or Vincent Over The Sink get you excited, you should try Carchesio through his reissued classic (as D.N.E.), 47 Songs Humans Shouldn’t Sing.

EATING Gelato

Summer days are all about the cold treats. But if Mr Whippy soft serve doesn’t cut it, don’t fret. The Italian version is what you’re after. Gelato Messina (241 Victoria Street, Darlinghurst) constantly experiments with flavours: I recommend Sicilian trifle, choc-mint or pistachio. Don’t sleep on this one, get it while it’s hot.

READING Won Magazine #4

Won Magazine stands out from the milling crowd of do-it-yourself publishers. The tabloid style quarterly art mag might get ink on your fingers. But big pages and ace layout give breathing room to the beautiful images and long Q & A interviews with painters and photographers and writers and disco icons and fashion designers – people who’ve got things to say. Not always easy to find on the street, but worth the effort.

TALKING ABOUT Leonard Cohen

Can a 75-year-old Canadian with a line in mystical religion, poetry and pop really rock the stage as much as everyone’s been saying? More sax solos than Kenny G. Spontaneous standing ovation before he even started. It was cheesy and hilarious as hell, poignant too. All the hits – ‘Chelsea Hotel,’ ‘Hallelujah,’ ‘Everybody Knows’ – quite unlike any other show, and as great as I could have hoped.

Open a newspaper.

Any one, really. Among the usual stuff, at least one journalist will be covering the global media meltdown – the wave of newspaper closures triggered by classifieds/advertising shifting to the web. Fairfax dispatched a crowd of journos last year, and Glenn Dyer at Crikey says News is about to get rid of a bunch more. Global crises are always good copy. And journos love to cover their own patch.

But come December/January, something funny happens. Just when readers are ready to really sink their teeth into a quality paper, the big papers shut shop. Send the journos on hols, batten down the hatches, send out a thinned down paper packed with syndicated content and fluffy features.

Television used to do this. Fill out the summer (non-ratings) months with repeats and low quality programs. But if you lose your audience, the ratings mean nothing. Filesharing new shows (delayed by the local networks) has given audiences an alternative, and in many cases they’re not going back.

It’s much easier to find the alternative to print online.

For the moment, there are still plenty of benefits to reading the broadsheet. Discovering articles of interest, rather than searching for specific topics, is still better in print (despite the best efforts of Delicious et al). But with print fighting an ultimately losing battle to keep readers in the habit of buying their papers, you’d think they’d change tack.

Old news, I guess, given the papers are back to normal. But this year’s shaping up to be a pivotal one.

I don’t think I ever expected to see Leonard Cohen on a stage. So I can understand when the crowd spontaneously stands, cheering, as the 75 year old leaps onto the stage at Sydney’s Entertainment Centre.

Cohen was the first musician I obsessed over. I bought most of his records at the second hand shop between my high school cafe job at The Three Sisters and Katoomba train station. I borrowed his novels and books of poetry from a friend (still have them).

We make a bit of an effort to get him on the radio show. But apparently he’s not giving interviews this time – Radio National plays an interview from his last tour in ’83 or ’84. I’m glad we didn’t get him, to be honest, I can imagine sitting across in the studio, starstruck.

Anyway, at the Ent Cent. The band isn’t too far from Brian Wilson’s Weekend At Bernie’s/Late Show troupe of session musicians, and includes long time collaborator Sharon Robertson and back up vocals from the Webb Sisters. Cohen, dressed in pin-stripe suit, collared shirt, cowboy string tie and bull-tie clip, couldn’t be more different from Wilson though, he alludes to drugs but isn’t damaged, he’s sharp, articulate. He’s 75!

Still you can’t miss the age, as Cohen introduces the band, twice, right down to the wording: “prince of precision” (the drummer), “architect of arpeggio” (keys), etc – still, as someone else says, if I’m awake for 3 hours straight (and leaping about on stage) when I’m his age I’ll consider it an accomplishment.

He jaunts through hotel lobby band versions of ‘Ain’t No Cure For Love,’ ‘The Future,’ and ‘Everybody Knows.’ ‘Chelsea Hotel No.2′ kicks off unaccompanied:

I remember you well, in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed

There is a gasp of recognition as the audience picks up the line. Then laughs as it sinks in. There are so many punchlines in Cohen’s songs. I know them so well.

I find myself wishing there was less sax, less keys and less electric guitar. No solos. Love the flamenco guitar though. Having said that, most of his records (’70s onward) have kitsch accompaniments. But especially on the early songs, at the Ent Cent it really swamps the simple lyrics.

Five per cent of the audience sport fedora hats. I feel like one of the youngest in the audience. The guy next to me keeps yelling out “Bravo.” Cohen doesn’t talk much between songs, and when he does it’s lines I’ve read about him saying at other shows:

Last time I was on a stage, I was 15 years younger. Just a crazy kid with a dream.

Boom, boom.

I’ve never seen a show quite like this. The sax solos, the band, the soft pastel lights – the Ent Cent for god’s sake – it feels like 1987. Every time someone solos the crowd jumps up. The spontaneous ovations are driving me crazy, especially on a truly awful ‘Bird On The Wire.’

‘Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye’ was great.

The crowd evacuates at interval for ice creams and coffee. They return, and there’s another ovation as Cohen skips onto the stage like a spritely leprechaun.

He plays a rinky dink melody on his Technics keyboard. Another spontaneous cheer. He laughs self consciously, lifts his hand and says: “One hand.” It’s actually one of the highlights, a great version of ‘Tower of Song.’

Recent songs ‘Where Is My Gypsy Wife,’ ‘My Secret Life,’ and especially ‘Boogie Street’ are diabolically bad. Terrible. We tune out. Another solo. Another cheer.

‘A Partisan’ is actually a relief. The band’s pared back to a driving drum beat. It’s strident, terrific. ‘Hallelujah’ is nothing like John Cale’s version, it’s just like the original. It’s obviously why most of the audience is in the Entertainment Centre, and starting without fanfare it takes a verse for the audience to work out what’s happening. Still, another ovation.

He plays a sultry ‘I’m Your Man,’ leaving us wondering how he’ll encore. “If you want to take me for a ride, you know you can… I’m your man.” The tone’s resigned rather than defiant. It’s almost three hours into the show.

’1000 Kisses Deep’ starts off suddenly. It’s a poem, but most of the audience cheers after a couple of lines, I guess assuming it’s an aside. Another cheer at the end of the verse, but after that most people realise it’s a poem.

Back for an encore, ‘So Long Marianne’ is seriously disappointing. Kinda wish he didn’t play that. ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ gets a run too. The Webb Sisters do ‘If It Be Your Will,’ which brings back memories of Antony’s swirling maelstrom of a version at the Cohen tribute Come So Far For Beauty at the Sydney Opera House several years ago. The show finishes with ‘Democracy,’ which gets a cheer with its line about “democracy coming, to the USA.”

Overcooked, these songs aren’t. Whether it’s Choir of Hard Knocks or John Cale doing ‘Hallelujah’ (both amazing) or Nick Cave doing ‘Tower of Song,’ Cohen’s songs have been perfect cover material for a long time. Perhaps most because (at least since the ’70s) his records are so kitsch. Live, he’s witty and self-deprecating, touching, a bit sleazy at times and at others a funny old man. There’s a fervour to his songs, a transcendent quality. Most of all, it’s funny.

A show quite unlike any other.