da Scriffles

Rain for the new year:

Left Brisbane four days before Christmas. 

Thank God the rainfall map's not in the purple!

In the early morning the rose is in shade while the lawn is in sun.

By mid-morn the rose is in sun while the lawn is in shade.

By noon the rose and the lawn are equally lit.

And the red rose sucks up the fading light of evening. 

One rose. Four perspectives.

I thought it was interesting anyway.

With clouds above, 

the rain falls.

Above the clouds,

the sun rises.

People scurry past torn hoarding,

so not glimpsing earth, grass and sky.

Silent, padlocked, empty city block,

forgotten like the first colonial sentinels,

standing small by the expressway, 

dwarfed by the 21st century,

standing small on rock solid foundations that built this city.

The first paper bag had a V-bottom.  Ah mass production of packaging! How far we've come.

Imagine how special that little V-bottomed paper bag must have been to people who had no other choice but to wrap goods in paper and tie it with string. 

Perhaps the most adorable thing about honest little paper bags today is the fact that you can put anything in a plain little bag and almost anything it contains will be more valuable than the bag.

Packaging costs so much more than the contents of most things we buy today - the price is so inflated by all the advertising, marketing, packaging, branding and differentiation.

Appearances are always important - even back in 1852 - but the difference between reality and the "appearances" today is quite sinister.

The parade of human imperfections turns into a horror show if you sit on a bus comparing it to the flashing images of pert young things pouting on the backs, sides of buses, in bus shelters, billboards, free newspapers, shop windows ... All the real people running to work are all odd shapes, wearing daggy, unco-ordinated fashions, too tall, too dumpy, too broad, too bumpy (including moi, I'm afraid to say.)

Yes, it's shallow. But we all do it, without thinking mostly, don't we? 

The most grotesque thing about it is that we believe that the appearance of substance seems to be a higher calling than achieving substance.

"It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit" - Noel Coward, Blithe Spirit. (1941).

Hope I get to see them spin a cocoon. 

I went to see Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life 1990-2005 last week at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art.

I see it's been extended into April. 

Surprising to me that this collection captures the struggle of life and death in today's youth and beauty and fame and wealth obsessed world.

Though once upon a time it was not unknown to take a funeral assembly photograph with the open casket, I wonder if any of these famous people would let her photograph their corpse - or would any magazine publish a photograph of the corpse of a famous "it"/"in" thing.

But here in this collection Leibovitz includes death, alongside youth and beauty, and fame and wealth. She photographs indiscriminately and unashamedly.

She shows photos of her dead lover, Susan Sontag, and photos of her parents in bed just days before her father died - extraordinary family documents in this day and age.

It wasn't the big portraits hung in crowded halls that impressed me most. I only became fascinated when I entered the little corridor of snapshots perhaps used to plan this exhibition.

They are all pinned to a board in horizontal lines across two walls. I think it's effect is stronger than the actual exhibition because all the images are here together in a confined space.

The strongest photograph for me was an abandoned bike on a sidewalk smeared with blood in Sarajevo - a sniper had just murdered a teenage boy.

The plaque beside a beautiful photograph of her mother tells how she cried behind the camera as she took the photograph despite her mother's concerns that she would look old - that's what her daughter wanted to capture and her mother knew it but allowed her to take it anyway.

It is a picture of honesty, a communication between mother and daughter. But that don't pay the bills. I bought a copy of Vanity Fair at the airport for $10 - the cost of entry to the collection is $15. 

Correction: Well, almost today ... at least just three days ago