Culturazi

I am writing this so I don”t forget. Last night I hada funny and frightening thing happen to me whilst I was at this party (you probably think I just go to parties, however so what) well it was when we were leaving actually. In the headlights of the car was this man who turned around and pulled down his pants and bent over and showed us his impression of the Bruce highway. Chiffon did not know what to think of this stupid and permanently imprinted on the head thing he do. It is not even very funny!

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Tags: Chiffon by loadedog
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Canberra is a very quiet place around Christmas and New Year, as people leave town to visit relatives and holiday at the coast. When I write “leave town”, I mean “flee like lemmings”. A place not renowned for it”s vibrant street-life rapidly takes on the aspect of a ghost town, but that”s good if you want to enjoy the peace and quiet of one of our beautifully landscaped public spaces. Or shoot a zombie movie.

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Tags: Gertrude by loadedog
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Erwin Wurm, an Austrian photographer, sculptor and artist of the absurd is one of two shows on at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney right now. Wandering around the show I was surprised to see a young student snapping photos, right in front of one of the gallery staff. I was then informed that photography was allowed, something I’ve never encountered in an art gallery before.

Wurm has a fine sense of humour and the works in this show, many of which ask for interaction from the viewer, are readily accessible to a broad audience, as funny and engaging to a small child as they are to an adult, though some arty intellectuals might disagree.

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Tags: Art by loadedog
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Summer in Canberra this year has produced its fair share of hot days and nights. Living without air conditioning, sensible people wear as little clothing as possible. When at home alone, or with just your partner present, one goes as naked as a vicar and it can then be reasonably comfortable, even in the long hot afternoons.

On the streets at night, groups of young women flit from pub to club, clad in less material fully dressed than would have constituted a set of underwear when I was a boy. The warmer weather must be quite a relief for them because they wear such clothing in the midst of Canberra’s frigid winters, their commitment to finding a mating partner overcoming any other instinct.

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Tags: People by loadedog
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Have you been watching Guns, Bombs and Steel on the ABC (Final episode was on Monday, I missed it). Episode one was, for me, fascinating and thought provoking.
The basic thesis of the series (of the book), which one could elucidate from not much more than the title, is that guns, germs and steel are responsible for the western world having a lot of stuff and the rest having not much.

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel.

That’s a little misleading though, because what I got from the first episode was that the presence of high protein grains and domesticatable beasts of burden in the biota of a fairly small geographical area (the fertile crescent in the Middle East) were initially responsible for humanity’s evolution from hunter-gathering
to more ‘advanced’ forms of civilisation.

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Tags: People, The Media by loadedog
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