The Dubious Monk

Saturday morning I went out to have a cultural day. A free cultural day. Up at the Sydney Opera House (perhaps you’ve heard of it?) there was an indigenous film festival going on with free screenings. The movie I saw was called Here I Am, and’ll be touring Oz over the next while.

The movie was shown in the Playhouse part of the theatre, so not the gigantic part. Actually, I don’t know if there is a gigantic part. All the different shells are separated for than I’d always assumed. It’s not just one big shell that’d have you looking up at the concave version of the icon from the inside.

After the movie I went for a walk through the botanical gardens to find the Art Gallery of NSW. I knew it was in that vicinity but it’s much deeper behind the park than I’d assumed the last time I went looking for it. On Saturday I found it and wandered around. It’s a free gallery which is appreciated (so I could go now without worrying about wasting it before Holly arrives).

The collection was kind of awesome. They’ve got European masters (I looked at one Monet and recognized very few other artist names in that area since I don’t really know that much about Art) and aboriginal stuff and 20th century Australian art. One painting, “The Telephone Box” by John Brack, was from 1954 but could have been 21st century street art; I checked the date a couple of times.

There was also an exhibit by this Japanese photographer who takes pictures of pictures projected onto posing nigh-naked people painted white. It was pretty neat.

But the coolest exhibit was Unguided Tours, which was a bunch of cool video things. Part of one piece used Google Maps to mark out the discarded condoms in a neighbourhood. Another artist created these awesome video pieces out of these gigantic mounds of junk. One basically made a video of outside a jet window flying above a cloudless ocean. But what made it cool is how the video is constructed out of broken chairs and hairbrushes and a vacuum cleaner hose and an unshaded desk-lamp. Very very neat.

It almost made up for still having no internet at the apartment. Our landlord is apologizing and says there was a mixup last Thursday about the address so they can’t get here till this week.

So far the living with a shared kitchen isn’t going too badly. There’s not an Australian in the building though. We’ve got three Chileans, a Colombian, a New Zealander, and Holly and I will represent North America. When I type it out like that it seems like a lot of people. But it doesn’t feel that full.

I got a library card the other day. And went to the little Chinese grocery store where they carry almost all my favourite Chinese brands of juice and snacks (no Shaolin cookies though). And I’m working on a story to submit for the second Machine of Death anthology. And writing letters. Things aren’t too bad.