I’m no climatologist, but it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen storms with as much force as we’ve now experienced in Brisbane and South East Queensland three times in four days, most recently about an hour ago, and with another one also accompanied by severe hail and dangerous winds apparently on the way yet again later on tonight.
Here are some images licenced under Creative Commons from flickr. Two aren’t actually of the most recent storms, but for those who aren’t used to a classic Brisbane storm, they might provide a bit of a lightning flash of illumination. Over at Circulating Library, there are also some contemporary photos to look at. Taking photos might be a tad risky, actually, as one of the two deaths from the storms has been a young man who unwisely tried to photograph a stormwater drain at Chermside on Sunday night. Via Stilgherrian, you can also have a squizzy at archived radar images of last night’s storms here. When I checked at around 5pm it was impossible to get on to the BOM site to check tonight’s storms on their way, and the site also couldn’t cope with the traffic just after the ABC weather at the end of the news.
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
I spent Friday night on an art gallery opening crawl - at two of the three galleries that were featuring works in the Brisbane Artist Run Initiatives Festival - Kiln in Paddington (which has the most steampunky art website in the world, I would venture to wager) and Jugglers in the Valley. Danielle O’Brien’s prints and paintings started an octopus theme, which continued on at Jugglers. Later on, I enjoyed the Five Spice Tofu and a Shanghai Beer at the fabulous Super Bowl in Wickham Street - so a really pleasant evening.
I didn’t have my camera with, but here are some photos of Kiln from an opening last year. It’s a transformed former tram substation, so a wonderful example of post-industrial architecture, and you can see why it sits nicely with a steampunk theme.
I’m not sure if it’s in the BBC’s charter, but the venerable public broadcaster is allegedly trying to reach out to people with disabilities, and to increase social awareness of disability issues. Through such charming initiatives as their online Paris Hilton like trash celeb persona - “Disability Bitch”:
“Hi, I’m Disability Bitch. I’m disabled and I love it. Everyone should be disabled. Everyone should be like me.
“I own an extensive collection of colour-coordinated wigs and an even more extensive collection of colour-coordinated mobility aids, all of which complement my natural beauty…
Whatevs, darl. But there’s more. She’s not an all purpose disability bitch, but part of a reality tv franchise. In pursuit of its social inclusion agenda, the BBC is running a reality tv show - “Britain’s Missing Top Model” - the premise of which is that chicks missing limbs or in chairs can also be teh hotness and get to be in glossy fashion mags. It’s “Stylish, sassy, chic … disabled?”… The idea, I guess, is supposed to be that disability is no barrier to objectification. Continue reading ‘Disability and body image and reality tv’
I was interested to read of the loud condemnations by Morris Iemma and Kevin Rudd of the cover of the latest issue of Art Monthly Australia. The cover features detail from a print of Polixeni Papapetrou’s Olympia as Lewis Carroll’s Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs. In this artwork, the artist’s then six year old daughter, Olympia Nelson, is portrayed naked. My first thought was to wonder whether either Iemma or Rudd had actually seen the magazine in question, and that’s still unclear to me. My second thought was to wonder whether one of the media themes of the day - embodied in this piece by Nicholas Pickard in Crikey - had any merit. Pickard argued that the magazine’s editor, Maurice O’Riordan, was a “total fool” who was playing into “Hetty Johnson’s hands”. The two subtexts appear to be that the Bill Henson controversy had faded away, leaving artists to go about their business as normal (or something), and that O’Riordan was courting more controversy in order to increase sales of his mag, heedless of the dangers of raking up the cinders of the fire the Bill Henson controversy started.
But, unlike a lot of people who might have an opinion about this new controversy/furore/”debate”, I thought I might go and buy a copy of the magazine in order to form my own view. So I did.
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
I’m still going with, ahem, a certain project - couldn’t keep up the 6000 words a night pace, but that’s ok. Hopefully it’ll be finalised this week and I’ll be able to have a life again. I did go for an afternoon walk the other day, and here are some New Farm and Brisbane River photos for you!
Writing in the Australian Review of Public Affairs, Kylie Valentine proves that it is possible to say something new about the Bill Henson controversy. It struck me that one huge absence in all the debate that swirled around Henson’s images of adolescents was any contribution from the subjects themselves. Lots of adults jumped into the breach to fill this void, speculating about how the models would feel about being the subjects of this sort of art, or how they might feel at a later date. It was an entirely defensible position, of course, for the photographer’s subjects to maintain silence on grounds of privacy, and it’s worth noting that a number of Henson’s former models did speak out, though their voices seemed to be almost entirely ignored in the “debate” that took place.
With the winter solstice almost upon us, and very short days, and because I’ve lacked the time to work on my own photography lately, I wanted to highlight these two rather spiffy photos of the Brisbane sunset taken by Cabaran:
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
As for me, I’m over-writing “Lazy Sunday” as it’s anything but for me. I expect to be up to the early am hours tomorrow getting the first draft of my thesis into a shape I’m happy to submit to my supervisor. So while everyone else is more than welcome to post on their weekend doings, I thought I’d share some photographic insights for the benefit of any other research students out there - Mark’s tips on how to finish a PhD dissertation!
#1: Use the tried and true yellow post-it note method for the citations and references you need.
#2: The dietetics of thesis completion are as important as the dialectics. Stock up on a nutritionally varied range of stimulants.
#3: While prayer and/or meditation may be important aids to writing, ensure that candles are not lit next to piles of books but remain symbols only.
Those who’ve been following the Bill Henson controversy might recall that the June/July 2008 issue of Art World was pulped because it featured some of the images at the centre of the media storm on its cover and inside its pages. It’s now out - with a different cover - and it includes an interview conducted by Edmund Capon, Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, with Henson. Because I think a lot of what he says about the process of creating the photographs touches on many of the points discussed here regarding the whole brouhaha, I’ve reproduced some excerpts of the interview which seemed pertinent to me over the fold.
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I’m not sure if it’s in the BBC’s charter, but the venerable public broadcaster is allegedly trying to reach out to people with disabilities, and to increase social awareness of disability issues. Through such charming initiatives as their online Paris Hilton like trash celeb persona - 
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