Sun, Ocean and Art

Well, today I went with my flatmates and a friend of ours to Sculptures by the Sea. This is a free sculpture exhibition along the coastal walk between Bondi and Tamarama beaches in Sydney. The walk itself between the two beaches is beautiful. With the addition of sculptures it's pretty spectacular. The sculptures ranged between interesting, beautiful and just plain odd, just what you'd want from sculptures in my view. Some of the pieces, for example two eyes that were peering out of the cliff face, a bendy straw that stuck out of the water, looked as though they had definitely been intended created with the location in mind. While others looked as though they had been created regardless of the location and would really have been in just as at home in a gallery. Not that this is a criticism, by any means, I enjoy sculpture, i merely find it interesting.
Well, that was a very short post, I do apologise, however I am quite tired and I hear the call of my book. Perhaps I post about it next time.
Goodnight.

The Taming of the Shrew

Last night I went to see the Taming of the Shrew at the Sydney Opera House. I was fortunate enough to be invited to the opening night a couple of weeks ago, but my flatmate/best friend wanted me to see it with her. To be honest I actually enjoyed last night more than the opening night. Don't mistake me, I thought they were both great and enjoyed them both, but last nights performance seemed to have more energy and enthusiasm.
It's quite an interesting production, the cast is all female, which I believe is a first for a Shakespeare production. It's a good juxtaposition, given that in Shakespeare's time, of course, the cast were always men, playing female roles. It's quite a nice switch. Most of the time the production follows a fairly straight forward pattern, but there is a section where the characters are all female and quite feminine at that. It's an interesting plot device. I haven't quite decided upon the meaning of this yet, but I do like it. It did give an interesting feel to the performance. The play itself is actually quite sexist, what with Katerina being made to subjugate herself entirely to her husband, to the point where she is calling the sun the moon and the day the night. But in this performance, I got the feeling that she was doing it very tongue in cheek. It seemed almost as though there was a game going on between them, like he knew that she wasn't really totally cowed, just going with it. But I couldn't decide if that was the point, that it was ok is she was lying and he knew it, so long as it wasn't out in the open, so long as he looked like he tamed her.
But despite its inherent sexism, I still enjoyed it.

kane leaves

bellow is more random writing that i have been doing today. as is the case with this blog, i am not sure where it's going, we shall see. both random pieces of writing feel like they are going to end up in the same place, well that's how it feels right now.


Rhea closed her eyes and leant back on the pillows. The rain was a steady patter on the roof, the light of the oil lamp a hint from behind her eyelids, the wicks smoky scent a tang in her nostrils and on the back of her tongue. Rhea sat in the bed and let her mind wonder over the events of the day. Her brother’s sudden departure, her uncle’s anger, her father’s quiet disapproval. Rhea had tried to ask her mother what had happened, why had her brother left like that, barely stopping to sling a pack over his shoulder, his only farewell a wave as her raced across the courtyard and out the barely opened gate. But her mother wouldn’t tell her, saying only that after receiving a letter he’d argued with her uncle and father and had left. Rhea pressed, but her mother would say no more. Rhea was confused and hurt that her brother, Kane, her elder by merely three years, would leave without a word of goodbye. They were the closest of their parents five children, the eldest, Tan, was 15 years older than Rhea with children and a farm of his own. Her elder sisters, Mariah and Celsey, were also married and had moved to their husbands villages, Rhea barely saw them. But not so with Kane, they shared each other’s every confidence, or so Rhea had thought. What could be so important that he would argue with both her father and uncle, what would make him leave like that? Without a word to Rhea, not a syllable. It wasn’t like Kane.

Rhea sighed, and opened her eyes, she knew she would get no sleep tonight, not with worry and hurt warring in her mind. She snuffed out the oil lantern all the same and scrunched down the bed until she lay with her head on the pillow. She closed her eyes, in a pretense at sleep. Just before dawn’s first light touched the sky, she finally feel exhausted into sleep.

the Gathering

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I like to imagine myself as a bit of a writer, I have periods of creative writing where I bash out stories and random paragraphs here and there. I've taken creative writing classes at uni and as hobby classes with community colleges. There's been a bit of a writing drought lately. But I think that what part of the point to this blog, should perhaps be to actually get some writing out there, see if anyone other than my friends like it. Ha, that is assuming anyone other than my friends might in fact be reading this.

So with out much further ado, here's what I've been working on this evening...

A line of grey appeared on the horizon and began the slow creep across the sky as the first arrived. Tunic dark in the predawn, shapeless, face hidden inside the cowl, it was impossible to tell whether male or female. The form trekked slowly up the slope, moving carefully in the barely there light. As though unsure of the terrain, the hood, moved from side to side, as though searching for something. As it reached the top, another cowled figure appeared at the base of the slope and began it’s own slow way upwards. The light on the horizon had become almost white, a crescent of light cutting the black earth from the grey of the sky. More figures appeared near the hill, all the same dark cloaks, all heading to the top of the hill. As the white light began to spread following the grey, in the inexorable march towards dawn, the figures formed a circle on the crown of the hill. Without a word, without any outward sign, they all threw their hoods back and faced each other across the grass. There were eight figures in all, four men, four women, the men all wore their hair long and tied back, the women’s hair long also, but hung un encumbered to their waists. Their faces were pale in the dawn light. The woman, for it could be seen clearly now, who had arrived first lifted her face towards the light of the dawn, her eyes blazed, on her brow was a single stone, milky white, like a tear drop, it hung from a simple silver circlet, set high in her dark hair. Opening her mouth she began a quiet keening, which grew in pitch and strength as the others joined. The wordless song reached an almost soundless pitch as the first rays of sunlight broke across the hill. Swiftly now, the sun rose, bathing the hilltop in a yellow glow, the people on the hill stood out suddenly in sharp relief, their shadows long behind and before them. Her moon drop stone shone as the woman pulled a small chalice from deep within her robe. The man to her right, his hair curling beneath the cord that bound it back, reached also into his robe and poured a dark liquid into the chalice as she held it before him. She raised the chalice to her lips as the others began a deep chanting. Taking one long draught, she passed the chalice to the man on her right, as she looked back into the rising sun, her lips were stained the deep red of blood.

what have you been reading lately?

I just finished reading the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest. I think these are fantastic novels, incredibly well written and seemingly well researched. Stieg Larsson, who has passed away after finishing the writing the series, but before they were published was a Swedish journalist who was a prominent anti racist journalist in Sweden. So far as I am aware his novels were not based on any one article or case that he worked on, but I would certainly imagine that the ideas for these novels were drawn from his work as a journalist.
The original Swedish name of the first book, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, was Men Who Hate Women. This title ought to give an indication as to what this book may be about. I don't want to give too much away, assuming of course that there is anyone reading this blog, I wouldn't want to ruin it for those of you who may now be interested in reading the books. A basic synopsis of the first novel is that it is a detective story about a journalist who is hired to discover the whereabouts of a long lost family member of an old patriarch. The journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, hires a young woman as a research assistance and together they discover some fairly traumatic family secrets in the hunt for the missing girl. The other two novels focus more specifically on the research assistance and her own skeletons in the closet.
Personally I thought these novels were fantastic, but I would warn you that I don't believe them to be for the faint hearted. Normally when i like a book I recommend them to one and all, but in this instance I have found myself being somewhat hesitant to recommend them to one and all.

And so it begins...

Not really sure, to be honest, what this blog will be about. It may just be a stream of consciousness blog containing my innermost thoughts and feelings, or a description of daily activity, maybe it's just a glorified dairy.
So where do begin?
Well because of the mood that I am in today, I think I will start off with a stream of conscience style post.
So the other night I was reading about the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, according to their website, the aim is To smash protons moving at 99.999999% of the speed of light into each other and so recreate conditions a fraction of a second after the big bang. The LHC experiments try and work out what happened. (http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/)
Well, naturally this got me thinking, if they were able to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang, what if they managed to actually recreate a big bang, here on earth, or more particularly, in earth, since the machine is actually underground. What would that mean? Supposing they recreate the Big Bang, would it therefore follow the same evolutionary path as the universe we occupy? What if they recreated a mini universe inside our earth, what if there was a mini Milky Way with a mini solar system just like our own. Would there be a mini Earth? Imagine they inadvertently created a little tiny planet that followed the same evolution as the Earth, people from apes, neanderthals, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the Crusades, the Industrial Revolution, Capitalism.
I wonder too, would they have any knowledge that they were inside another world in another universe? Which really begs the question, what does that make us? Maybe Douglas Adams was right, maybe we're just the result of an experiment, the machine used to find the ultimate question of the Universe.
Well that gets us off to a nice start.