Thursday, August 25, 2005

nerdlingers


i went to the nerd shop yesterday and got a blue dust coat, i look like a high school woodwork teacher. It goes well with my glasses, unkempt hair and bits of periscope. It's really more of a stereoscope... see; nerdy. I have become such a geek that i played an online adventure game the other day. i blame the internet.

now, let me tell you about glue...

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

my personal triumph over adversity and what i learned from this

i have worked out the optics for the periscope in a pleasingly simple manner, and i asked my friendly acrylic dealer about glue and he said "use this stuff.", i said "cool."

thus i have more time to listen to that whistling sound that is the wind blowing over the arid existential planes of my empty life. Tumbleweeds of regret roll past mournfully and every now and then i stumble across the ruins of some folly from my younger days, the gothic ones are the worst; so grandiose, so 90's...

maybe my life has become dull and pleasant; all i have to talk about is glue and devices, and things that i have been making; I'm making cherry and plum blossom brooches for spring; little perspex branches with little perspex flowers. Soon life will be full of drama as I wrestle with the world of chutney and pickles, susan and i are supposed to play at shops tomorrow.

I've been having baroque dreams, plots so entangled they could keep a soap opera supplied for years. the last thing i remember is asking someone about the intense noise;
"that," they said, "is the howling of a thousand wolves"

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

technicalities

I'm trying to make a periscope for the experimenta exhibition at black box; struggling with lenses, degrees of magnification and focal lengths; i can make one that works, but it works a little too well; it magnifies everything too much. It has to be finished on thursday.

I've been having trouble with my glue on the perspex brooches; the 5min araldite sometimes comes out a little too brittle and the pins just fall off, which sucks and causes me much embarrassment, i've been researching adhesives but they tend to be very vague in their references to "some plastics"; which ones? Araldite in the UK make a glue that would be perfect, but it doesn't seem to be available in australia. I'm going to try the 24hr araldite.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

hong kong fever

The unfortunate malady that I picked up in china struck me down again yesterday. It wasn't entirely my fault- Susan sent me a text saying that my favourite HK clothing store had opened a Melbourne branch in melbourne central, and when I got there I noticed it was just next to the G-star shop, home of my favourite, but painfully expensive, jeans. Struggle as I might, the retail vortex was too powerful for me to resist; I was sucked in, idly browsing; apparently safe from harm, until I spied a denim motorbike jacket - very much like what I had been imagining myself wearing. Although in my imagination it was possibly made of leather, curiously enough there was a leather version- I tried looking at the price but it was too large for me to see all at once; i just got a vague impression of some monstrously looming thing. I tried it on but it still somehow had that creepy quality that has meant that I've never found a leather jacket i could wear; there are few garments that so easily make you look like a wanker. There are people [me] not meant to wear leather jackets.

I left somewhat poorer, but more denimy.

when i got home i decided to bask in a bit of retail afterglow before going to bed; I put on my new jacket, I sucked in my cheeks in my best blue steel look [not as convincing as rony's ], I looked at me from one side, I looked at me from the other side, I thought "one of my arms looks much smaller than the other"...
I checked again; one sleeve was slightly shorter and considerably tighter than the other, I wondered; "is it meant to be this way; a design feature, a bit of charming asymmetry that people with skinnier arms appreciate?"; the right sleeve was verging on uncomfortably narrow. I thought of Kaiser Wilhelm with his crippled arm; did his tailors make jackets like this? I pondered the lives of those crabs that scurry around with one foolishly oversized claw.

Today I returned to the shop and tried another of the same jacket; two normal arms. There was no problem exchanging, but now I have odd niggling doubts; is that bit really meant to be like that? How do know that it's not the piece for a jacket two sizes smaller? The quality controllers just check the seams, they would never notice....

by the way, this is for all you monkeys: http://monkeymagic.ytmnd.com/

the happy couple

troth plighting.

on saturday my friends Andrea and Cameron got married, there were a lot of good-looking people there, the bride and groom both being high on the list. people wore their fancy suits and combed their hair. The couple had me convinced that they want to spend the rest of their lives together, which is not really something i seem to come across with my friends, not that sort of conviction.

we ate food, drank drinks and danced and gave gifts, brooke, andrea and the best man cried [on separate occasions] I cunningly avoided the hangover I deserved for my profligate mixing of drinks, but the gods noticed my hubris and struck me down with gastro on sunday evening...bastards.

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

the spy who came in from the cold

blinking in the bright unfamilar light, out from the cocoon of threadbare plush and dim red lights. Into a world where people aren't twenty feet tall, with every word they speak laser-etched into the air in front of them.
I was getting a bit tired of running from cinema to cinema, and tired of the way that almost every story, even the real ones, needs a bit of death to push the story along, the boom resounding from those emotional depths.
It's time to be efficient and organised, do my laundry, cut my hair, make more chutney, make more badges,
or just lie around sleeping and then reading books when my body refuses to sleep any more, getting ready for a bit more sleeping.