Bonjour!
This is the one of images for the invitation to a party I'm helping organise that I didn't think would be too suitable but for some reason puts me in a party spirit. Like your in Slovakia or something and your madly trying to find where the disco is and your friend has just passed out in the field (or maybe that's me) and you're really losing it in your great coat.. Yeah!
Lately I've become a professional party planner (amongst my many other professions)...or perhaps I'm just a dilettante, as this seems to be what many of the fine dilettantes I know spend a lot of time doing.
Anyway hello! its been a while.... Brrring brrring
I wanted to call this post Hemispheres but it sounds like some ponderous "literary" title..(errr maybe it is?!) But I still want it to be about this topic...in that kinda double life, upside down way. North and south, east and west, day for night, moons that wax and wane in different directions, water that get sucked down the drain in the opposite way, autumn,spring. Simultaneous time...lives. Twins.
Nan Goldin, 1979.
"French Chris at Drive-in, New Jersey" Nan Goldin, 1979
These are some pictures of the all round amazing woman, party girl and maybe dilettante Cookie Mueller. Apart from starring in lots of John Waters films and No Wave cinema and an assortment of NYC downtown plays and being a muse for Nan Goldin, she was also a pretty interesting writer. My favourite story so far is about her and Divine driving in the Provincetown countryside to an op shop in a VW bus and having an accident where it rolls upside down and they scramble out and Divine lifts the whole thing and places back it back the right way. Cookie writes "From that day on I always felt really safe when I was with Divine"
I am using that story because it's, well, adorable and I really like Divine and it also illustrates this post's "themes" in an obscure, roundabout sorta way. I also remembered a poem that I'd read that Cookie Mueller and Richard Hell wrote which also related to this
transcontinental. discombobulated, alien, double life feeling that I'm trying to get at. Its called "Life Among the Alert in Europe" and I'm not going to use the whole thing as its kind of strange. The "illustrations" today are mostly just random images from my phone and give a vague explanation of what I've been doing lately.....but my doppelgänger will be sending her images at a later date (sun baking on the Amalfi coast and enjoying the spring whilst rehearsing for her opera recital)
From Monty's Last Greatest Show on Earth Party...Tres magnifique!
"Do Shine" from Foreverland exhibition with Michael Needham
An Except form Life Among the Alert in Europe.....by Cookie Mueller and Richard Hell
Detail from "Map of an Englishman", Grayson Perry, 2004
"After NY, the life in Italy, France and unknown
ancient landscapes provide the party who will stay
up late
"Map of an Englishman" Grayson Perry,2004
open
wide oceans
of avenues leading to drifts of being awake
"Niagara Smoking Topless" Cary Loren,1974 and Drawing by Niagara from "Return of the Repressed" Destroy All Monsters exhibition, Prism Gallery, 2011.
and someone you have never met before (in the mirror)
Or perhaps have seen so well (as through a window pane)
Why is it that people look so much better in Europe?
Is it the landscape that sweeps out behind their heads,
Is it the older buildings they stand up against..."
I did warn you it was a bit strange....Anyway back amongst the Alert in Carlton I am admiring the autumn colours again...except its just gone very wintry and blown nearly every lovely yellowey and orangey leaf off every single Europeaney tree in town. Everything is bare and raw, pink and scrawly.
Oh yeah but we were talking about doubles
How many double doubles can we can come up with? Umm lets do the obvious and worst first..double trouble, double jeopardy, double indemnity (wow these are all sounding like bad Hollywood film titles) double jointed, double life (yeah i know I already said this) double entendre (ooh) double cross, double bed, double agent, double bass, double chin, double take, double barrelled, double feature...
From Michael Needham and my "Foreverland" project. This is a a golden rainbow light installation we put on top of 30 storey Park Towers housing estate in South Melbourne.
Double rainbow....yeah well that's a nice one... and not quite as diabolical as the rest
What does one do when stuck in the role of the less fortunate doppelgänger whose braving the inevitable cold of winter in antipodean shores??...find mushrooms i guess..Oh my, look at this beauty!
From "The Surround" Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano, 2009
I ate it and found myself with her
"Midnight Sun in Norway" Aurora Aspen, 2012
and she was still, perfect, absolutely vivid.
