The secret of the success of any fool and criminal is that they are likeable. They don't succeed otherwise. Oh, they can have a hold of people or they can be immensely rich but, for the most part, the contradiction of the success of rotten people is that they are beguiling.

- David Marr

At the beginning of last year, I still believed in many things. I believed that all people were good; just weak. There is no way to underestimate this weakness, which I thought infinitely bigger than human capacity for good. Yet I believed that, as long as this weakness was cotton-woolled, sheltered from the elements, the good would have nothing standing in its way. I believed in some other things (trip-hop, good food), but they were marginal by comparison.

Now, on the 23rd of January 2009, I believe only that there is Hell. And I believe that, once you've ticked your boxes, you can meet Esmé every single day until you die, you will not be saved.

Snatched the best haircut in Carlton; near-religious as always. A good pair of hairdresser scissors costs a near $1,000. Steel from Japan, from Germany. Parallels between theatre and fashion photography. Long smile exchange with a man with a straw hat [od smijeha pravim saksofon; od sunca pravim put]. For a second there, contemplated saying hello, just-to-see. Insulation from the elements with conspicuous consumption: the long-sought Chatwin's In Patagonia and Rosenblatt's On Photography. Then bass. Sunshine. Footpath dancing. Fragori nella mente/ rumori dolori/ lampi tuoni e saette schianti di latte fragori e albori di guerre universali scontri letali/ SONICA/ SONICA. Perfect would be oldschool Marlene Kuntz for New Year. Which of course

Despite all my intentions to retire early, the dance season procrastinated, and it's only today that I am closing my year. It was an eventful one, and I am vaguely looking forward to a month of being a gentleman farmer: cooking, reading, watching films, and undertaking urban expeditions. Or something like that.

2008 was mostly a miserable year here, so beyond bearable that I refused to announce it, preferring to live in a never-ending 2007, until the clouds started dispersing - by which time the 2009 diaries were already on sale. This is one of the reasons why my theatre year is not entirely representative of Melbourne, Australia. Combined with a three-month return to Europe, I only got back to regularly attending local theatre events properly in September. Inevitably, I missed many unusually good-sounding productions, among which, in no particular order: Back to Back's Food Court, Schlusser's Life is a Dream, BalletLab's Axeman Lullaby, MTC(!)'s Blackbird and Simon Stone's direction of pool (no water) for Red Stitch. In Sydney, there were: Stoning Mary at Griffin Stablemates, Wharf2LOUD's Frankenstein, Hayloft Project's remount of their 2007 Melbourne show Spring Awakening at Belvoir Downstairs, The Rabble's Salome in Cogito Volume III and The Fondue Set's No Success Like Failure (which also had a short run in Melbourne).

Another reason is that the highlights of my year were uniformly European theatre products, and many of them on film. Purists will say aaaah!, but I have discovered that dance on film is the most beautiful thing in the world. Among my discoveries were the gorgeous films of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. I urge you to have a look at Rosas danst Rosas and Achterland, at least. The shows I loved were covered, laconically, for Real Time, and included: in Zagreb, The Wooster Group's Poor Theatre, Nature Theater of Oklahoma's NO DICE, and some mind-blowing student work. In Vienna, Mathilde Monnier and La Ribot's gustavia, Dalija Aćin's Handle with great care, and Hans Van den Broeck's Settlement. In London, Anthony Neilson's Relocated. In Venice, Random Dance/Wayne McGregor's Entity. While some of this was mainstage glitz, the amount of experimentation, passion, and sheer intelligence I found back home was a good reminder that, most of the time, unchallenged we just don't try hard enough.

Nonetheless, there was some exquisite local theatre, mostly clustered in the last few weeks (despite my dire need for rest). My personal, local Best Of would include: UHT's Attempts on Her Life; OpticNerve's YES; Elbow Room's There; Liminal's Oedipus - A Poetic Requiem; Black Lung's diptych of Avast I & II, and Phillip Adams's two shorts for VCA's Transmutations season. In Sydney, I saw the extraordinary Triptych, by De Quincey Co, and Hans Van den Broeck's Nomads, both at Performance Space. I also remember reacting very strongly to STC's The Season at Sarsaparilla and Hayloft's Chekhov Re-Cut: Platonov, but I wouldn't vouch for those reactions anymore. Things were unusual, back then. It was a strange year for MIAF too, in which the best productions were a poetry recital, a film and a piece of formally near-hermetic dance.

Of the things to look forward to in the next year, there will be a full season of Hayloft, the Malthouse program looks unusually strong, I may finally catch a Schlusser production, and I'll be keeping an eye on Black Lung and Phillip Adams, solo or with BalletLab.

Altogether, I have seen staggering 145 shows, a huge leap from 65 last year. Even discounting the occasional gallery visit from this number, I have spent almost half (three-sevenths, more precisely) of my nights this year in theatre. I have written on 31 of them, although some of my notes are still around, scattered in notebooks, diaries, on the margins of program notes, and should be revisited and pulled together.

The unintended benefit of all the above-mentioned misery is that I have become something rather unusual: a person that doesn't worry anymore. I've started working full-time in research, at Melbourne University, won a scholarship to fund the rest of my interrupted studies, next year, and have been writing at a pace unseen since I was a glorious multi-tasking teenager. I have discovered to possess, among other strange loves, a passion for dance in all forms, visual dramaturgy, and deconstructive theatre. I have remembered wanderlust. I have given myself time until the end of 2008 to decide about the rest of my life, and I'm now extending that period. It's a transitional time. Now that the dust has settled, all is peaceful and quiet for the first time... ever. I can't remember the last year I had where I didn't have any worrying to look forward to. Not the past five, at least, and I don't remember those immediately preceding as rosy either. It's good. Needed.

I have had the most wonderful three days in the dreaded City Up North, the highlight of which may have been the drunken strolls up and down the alleyways of Surry Hills with our own Arts Journo, gin in one hand and writerly discussions on the other. It is a stunning city, beautiful more for the overwhelming floral lush and the balmy warmness of its people than for the harbour views. Theatre, as usual, seemed to be the dialectic of lukewarm mainstage and the excellent Performance Space. Public transport was inconsistent, but gozleme were everywhere. Other people's boyfriends, and some gorgeous girls, treated me to extraordinary food. (The absence of people to demand meals from is one of the sad downsides to the otherwise glorious state of singledom. I would love to stand up for my own well-being, and demand spicy fish soup with Turkish bread. But who from? The normal state of affairs has me regularly feeding two flatmates and many more-or-less random men.) I was treated to books and conversation. I was treated to markets and bookstores. It was the calm and peace, gardens and smoking, walking and Christmas-shopping, that I rarely get at home, surrounded with half-finished projects, with dirty laundry and possibilities of housework. It was so beneficial to move away from the mountain of reads, from plays to graphic novels, sitting on my desk.

Sydney has grown on me for all sorts of unanticipated reasons, in all sorts of unanticipated ways.

I got home, chopped cauliflower, chilli, basil, olives, boiled water, heated the pan, drained pasta, grated cheese, poured water over chamomile flowers, sat down, held the fork in one hand, and smiled. When we were standing and applauding, it didn't have to finish when it did, it was good to just stand and applaud. And this weight, in my stomach, this everythingisgoodness, this sinking in of exaltation, never went away. So I smiled, to the wall, to the lamp, to the food.


Melbourne International Arts Festival. Patti Smith and Philip Glass: A Tribute to Allen Ginsberg. Playhouse Theatre, The Arts Centre, Sept 13.

The most brilliant thing in The Duchess is its near-failure. It is a film that redeems itself in the final five minutes, turning all the assumed flaws into a carefully orchestrated, systematic success.

(Of course, one always finds what one is looking for.)

For most of its run, The Duchess is a strangely flat film. It is not, despite advertising, a story of a strong woman who lives a life of her own. It is, rather, a surprisingly non-committal narrative of decisions adding up. There is no real dramatic bell curve to it, just a slow addition of events. One event not so much leads to another, as adds another detour to the meandering of Georgiana Spencer’s life. A marriage that turns more and more unhappy in imperceptibly small steps. An attempt at happiness through a short-lived affair, which she consciously gives up for her children. And then, imperceptibly, another child is taken away from her, in the only moment of absolute devastation this film allows itself to show. The charismatic main character, her cold husband, her pragmatic best friend, her ambitious lover, may dance around their established character, but never turn out to be too far from who they seemed at the first sight. Most of the time, one observes with light boredom, and a discrete lack of interest, since suspense is barely present, and the sense of thematic continuity vague at best.

Since The Duchess never makes a strong effort to distinguish itself from the middle ground of costume drama, its vague meandering appears to be a failure, a brick wall of lukewarm in a genre where palpitating and full-bloodied have always been rare. It is only in its ending, the lightest moment of formal intelligence, that one realises what has just happened. Having returned to a deeply humiliating, yet comfortingly proper ménage à trois, Georgiana in absolute silence accepts the news that the only man she has ever loved is engaged. And then, as if by magic, as she uncertainly wanders off into a party, heavily hit and collected at the same time, the subtlest little subtitle tells us that she lived on. That they all did. That she remained a loved and respected socialite. That he became a Prime Minister. That she continued seeing her child in secret. That her husband and his lover married after Georgiana’s death. And in this decisive, wise flatness, there is a fundamental truth about life.

One of the greatest sins of biopic, and certainly of historical drama, is this need to give moments of salience and depression, find points of departure and arrival, in one’s lives, give a narrative structure to the raw mass of human experience. Of course, you may say, it is something innate to humans. We all need to be able to tell ourselves the story of our life, of other people’s lives. But, as The Duchess ends, up in the air, we are already starting to push it into a bell curve, starting to look for overarching themes, causes and consequences. It eludes us, just like life does, but how beautifully. It is a film that not only refuses to place blame (Georgiana Spencer is neither stupid nor tragic, her husband both loving and incredibly damaging, the society punishing yet indifferent without internal conflict), it also refuses to organise a theme, a great thought on the nature of life. In the end, as we look back on the string of events in this woman’s life, not only is there no-one to blame, there is no tragedy to be blamed for.

Nothing means much, by itself, in life. There are crossroads that follow one from another, there are devastating tragedies that one recovers from, there are decisions that backfire, and strange and uncontrollable acts of fate. In the end, little of it makes narrative sense, and the only redemption, closure or fulfillment one can find is entirely internal, completely removed from the trickle of events. Just like in life, terrible things happen for no apparent reason, people suffer, recover, and life continues.

The ending of the film, with resolute calm and formal precision, makes sure we understand. The last image of Georgiana, running around the pond with her husband’s lover and their children, when dramatic logic would demand at least a scar, is the most deeply life-affirming image one could possibly wish for. Not exactly role-model material, but how satisfying.

being my most spontaneous self, on Friday the 30th May I gave in to all those nasty feelings and bought my ticket out of here. As I literally jumped for the first available flight, on the midnight of Sunday the 8th I will be on my way to Hong Kong, and then.

Travelling spontaneously is not a light load. My passport, with my Australian visa, will expire during this trip. I've been making calls everywhere, from Canberra and Casselden Place to Zagreb, to avoid getting stranded. I had to buy the ticket in cash, due to the need to finalize the payment immediately, and walking the streets with thousands of dollars in bag is always fun.

Mum requested some perfume, which won't happen (new carry-on luggage rules).

It will be a short trip only, until mid-September, because I am afraid of growing roots. It will be a long trip too, almost four months, because I need a break that will be more than a blitz trip and some hugging on fast-forward. It will have to include festivals, theatre, the usual suspects, writing, and exploring the urbanistic scene in Europe. Because I'll be looking for jobs.

Announcing my spontaneous return prompted a large amount of mail in my direction, all welcome-backs and how-long-has-it-beens. It has made me realise how many people I know. Hundreds and hundreds. And how many are (or once have been) very good friends. Living alone in a big city, in between ties, it was easy to forget that I, too, am a social person. It has made me think that moving back to Europe would be a sensible thing.

This is not the right place to rant against Australian flimsiness in social relations, the way personal questions are never asked or answered, the way we shy away from going too far, too personal, too anything really. But when I realise that, no matter how hard I try to keep close to myself those people who ask hard questions, offer hard answers, who I can cry and laugh with and who won't settle for lukewarm dialogues on kitchen renovations, in Melbourne I will always have a dozen at best, compared to the entire populace of the European continent.

I have no intentions to stay in a place for sightseeing only, but I will travel any distance to see people. Emailing would be the best way to get that organised.

+++

For those of you in the know: life here has not exactly fallen apart. It has just changed. It will need to be a good thing, because I cannot afford many more bad things, but also because it feels, how to put it, pertinent. It feels like I need to go and I need to come back and these footsteps are already in front of me, just untraced.

I hope nobody is getting hurt, which is of course a sad nonsense, everyone has been hurt multiple times. But I hope we will all be better at the end of it.

all is over, all is finished. all can start again. it wasn't a case to make an announcement earlier than this: for a week i felt my self (the real me, the inner me, the one that's more than just a sum of other people's feelings about the me and the self) arriving, slowly, like on a train.

nothing more to discuss, here, but i can solemnly announce that, from now on, phones will be picked up and emails will be answered, explanations will be offered and invitations accepted. re-sending, re-asking, re-attempting contact may be a good thing though. i've collected a large dusty heap of unreturned attempts at communication. i keep them with the flowers on the bedside table.

i feel like i've seen the end of the world.

of course, i'm aware that worse things happen to lives: i could have been taken hostage, lost close people in unexplained circumstances, found out that my whole life was an orchestrated lie. but it's a quirky, selective list, isn't it?

and what now; nothing. as Tzara said, after the carnage we are left with the hope of purified humanity and that's what i feel like, purified humanity. said Baricco (his one moment of suspended pathos), saved is only he who has never been in danger. even if we ever found ourselves ashore somewhere again, we shall never again be saved.

i have learnt nothing except that human soul, bare, bleached of all routine and safety, is an empty beach. i've learnt to entertain, perhaps, many colourful thoughts on humanity. and humanity has, by now, for me, stopped being an abstract category. human life seems to be nothing if not a long attempt to shed that selfishness that we're conceived with, that clings on our skin as we're born into this world.

telling the story of how i've seen the end of the world seems to leave people mute, with no comments offered, and i am already starting to fear a life of a war victim, an eternal misemono, a freak show. but inside, it's just an empty beach.

you know that old understanding that, in order to write, one needs first to gather multiform, multicoloured experiences of life?

well how funny, you may say, because this person -who always saw some sort of writing happening in her future- has suddenly been granted deep insight into her own psyche. having been immersed into the kind of abundance of experience that would suffice for about three ordinary Australian lives, she discovers that she not only doesn't have any desire to write about it, she has no desire to talk or indeed think about it. in the grand scheme of things, she would be the war veteran who avoids answers to questions about the war because it's too deep, too dark, and has by now become an enormous gulf between her and the entire rest of the world.

in the grand scheme of things, she would be infinitely grateful were she allowed to develop a healthy alcohol problem. this is what they mean when injured soldiers mercifully faint. however, it is not possible to mercifully faint at the moment, and this person is alternating between figurative attempts at an alcohol problem and heartfelt self-damage. they are, at this point, reasonably differentiated.

Only two things of any significance have happened this week. One was an afternoon with Neira, spent in meaningful conversation. The other was seeing the entire Up series.

I only heard about it in Australia; it may not be as well-known to too many of you either; so I'll explain that it's a series of documentaries following cca 14 people. It started in 1964, when they were 7-year-olds, and followed on, every 7 years. The participation is voluntary (the first film was very much an experiment, and no contracts were signed), a work of love and dedication, it would seem, from both the observers and the observed. It started as an inquiry into the rigidity of the British class system, following the Jesuit saying show me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man; after 49 years, it has become something totally different.

I don't think one would grow up oblivious to the way life goes without this series of films. I have certainly understood my bit by now; through wise conversations with parents, yes, but even more so by listening to my parents talk with their friends, and through books (good long 19th-century novels). However, watching the entire series, one film after another, has had a profound effect on me. I've finished the last and felt a great sense of calm. About life, death, and everything. I don't necessarily understand why someone of the participants' age would be interested in watching this (provided they have friends), since growing and ageing you do understand how life happens, as it happens. But for a young person like me, this was a window into a darkly mysterious process.

Many thoughts. What struck me the most was the pace of life. From seven to twenty-one it was vertiginous, the characters going in all sorts of directions. At twenty-eight, they have stabilised. Somewhere between twenty-one and twenty-eight, it seems, one's life finds its anchor. What happens then, really, is that children and grandchildren come in a rapid sequence, and all of a sudden one is a grandparent, and a little bit confused. It reminded me of all those adults, throughout my life, marvelling at how much I have, my sister has, every child in the world has, grown, in how short a time. There it is, the mystery, explained to me. It flies past, life, once children are involved!

My sister, on that note, is a teenager now. The time that I'm wasting has never been more precious.

I was stopping the films every 30-40 minutes to discuss issues, share thoughts. Would a find it hard to start a relationship with a woman who already had another man's child, and why? Do their accents change? Why does Paul's seven-year-old self seem sadder and more lost each time we see it again? Why am I happy that John isn't a twat any longer?

I didn't find Neil very interesting, and I find it curious that people do. Is it the middle-class audience enjoying difference? Why? Neil's uncompromising philosophising complemented by a total lack of life skills is something one could find inside almost any male in Rijeka (not Croatia, I'll be precise, Rijeka). Just about any man I met in my hometown could donate spare parts to either Neil, or Peter (with his blissful, unthinking defeatism). There is nothing noble in that. I don't think so. There is an obstinance tinged with a sense of being lost, losing one's ties to the wider reality, that is acute in a place like Rijeka, where everyone sometimes seems somnambulant. Rijeka is a place where everyone seems from time to time lost in unreality, in dreams of what they could have been (had life treated them better, had the world been different, had God existed, had God not existed), what they should have been, what the world should be like. They all dabble in philosophy, and they all dabble in politics. There is no wisdom in it.

Wisdom is in small things. Raising children, keeping a marriage together, living a life as best as one can, understanding oneself. Madness is much too easy compared to understanding and correcting one's own flaws. This is why, had I stayed in Rijeka, I think I would have very likely accepted a gay lifestyle at some point. Women, who by sheer necessity run most of Rijeka, are infinitely more interesting in their nuanced understanding of life, death, conflict and conflict resolution. There is nothing deeper than buying everything one needs with less than enough money, doing everything one needs to do with less than enough time, staying healthy and happy when none of the two is realistically possible. (The reason I never respected philosophy very much was the fact that, historically, most philosophers have simply had it too easy, with inheritances and servants and eating out, to really understand the conundrum of quotidian struggle.)

The three East End girls end up as the most interesting characters for me. Why has only one had a decent career? What has she done differently? The inevitable solution is because she married later, had children later. Is marriage such a noxious presence in the life of a young woman? Even the career-focused wife eventually finds her life in shreds. Their lives are, to me, the least predictable. They remind me of my mum's friends. The wealthy characters find stability of circumstances very quickly, once their psychological stability is established. It's the blessing of assets. They all say, not too much money. Just to live comfortably. As if the quest for money was ever about anything other than living comfortably.

The kids are another interesting point. There is, truthfully speaking, not a whole lot of crossing of class barriers happening. Those who went to posh schools coerce their kids into university. East Enders let their kids roam free and easy, turning into car mechanics, hair-dressers, and such. In an isolated case of class ascension, a blue-collar daughter studies archaeology at university, but all the way in Australia (where university degree in itself does not privilege make). Nobody is hungry, nobody lives in a castle, but the logic is certainly still there. Things that frighten me - that nothing is guaranteed to you, not even staying where you are - are realised in multiple cases of loss of security. Some people, inevitably, stay on the conveyor belt of fate, enjoying the plush security they didn't have to work for, oblivious to the entire machine pushing them from behind.

Some, at the age of 49, complain about being lazy in their youth.

The rise of feminism is the biggest change that can be traced throughout the film. In 1964, two boys are living in an orphanage. In 1971 it turns out one was there because his parents were divorcing, the other for being an illegitimate child. In 1978 they feel scarred by their parents' divorces. In 1985 they need to be married to have a family, and stay-at-home mums proliferate. In 1991 they are single parents or mothers back in the workforce. In 1998 they are re-marrying, reconstituting families, and finally discussing dividing house duties. In 2005, they are supporting their children through child-rearing. Women, particularly the East End girls, have it much tougher than the men. Many male viewers seem to have noticed that little fact of life; it can only be a positive thing.

The resilience of marriage comes across in all its sincere strength. Marriage as something that one either invests in, or doesn't. Marriage like one's relationship with one's parents and friends, perhaps, complicated but necessary. Hardly a happy-ever-after sort of tale.

And, in the end, there is the poignancy of the fact that how happy one is doesn't seem to depend on anything other than how one wants to feel about life. The wealthy and the lucky are perhaps more content, but there is an incredible vitality in people living comparatively hard lives, such as Jackie, even Neil, a real refusal to get down and not enjoy this one-time gift that life is. After all is said and done, degrees earned, jobs had, families established and real estate improved, they all start looking increasingly the same, counting on the same sort of things to give their lives meaning.

I've found a lot of comfort in this series. I've found it all quite soothing.

With an eternity of time to spare, between now and the whatever of the future, going through mono 2005 and realising. That. My relationship with my parents has been truly dysfunctional for as long as I remember. And it's only looking back, reading it in fine detail (that I wrote then for some future analysis, with a cool head), that I realise just how much.

And the conclusions. No, they didn't do too many things right. Yes, they should have done them differently. I've carried with me, to the other end of the world, an enormous and completely senseless guilt that overwhelms, an automatic guilt for everything that goes wrong around me. Even in my accusatory accounts, in mono, I can read between the lines the swaying uncertainty of someone who never feels quite without blame for what happened. In retrospect, no. Apart from outright martyrdom, renunciation of self and dedicating my life to my parents' causes, there was nothing I could have done better. I have always been convinced that the nobility of intent means nothing without the effect of the actions, but, in retrospect, I was a child, for God's sake.

The one moment that comes to mind, that always comes to mind, without even existing in writing (it was before mono), is the lunch of the day I won the coveted high-school scholarship established by the city council to reward gifted kids. My father was furious. Furious. It would be dishonest to say I was confused and didn't understand, because I was perfectly able to comprehend his argument (the conspiracy between my mother and myself, the clause that links ongoing financial support to my high-school performance, his role as the one responsible bread-winner in the family and the risk he was facing of having to pay back money he had nothing to do with). My father yelled at me, a semi-argument flew over my head, I felt the existential despair of someone who could not, for anything in the world, do an uncontroversially good thing in her life.

But what do you do? What do I do with knowing this? Where do I go from now? How do I shake off this readiness to blame myself, this sense of inner failure a priori? What do I do with the empty thing in the centre of myself where, I can sense, other kids have a little fuzzy ball of feeling cared for and special? Technical question. What do you do?

I can also follow 2005 unravelling in the only way possible, the move to Melbourne and the last instances of our relationship in the long-distance mode, suddenly seen a little bit better, a little bit clearer. I struggled for years to make sense of it backwards. Growing more tired in enormous leaps, until the only things I wanted were, with no exaggeration, a bed, a roof over it, and a kitchen corner I could use to cook for myself. I could not in any way provide these simple things for myself then&there. The way I arrived to Melbourne, tired, tired, tired. The last summer in Rijeka, with G, and how I fantasized of being able to cook for us, being able to sit down and read a book, being able to do nothing. I was, then&there, hungry for that nothing, for that void of activity. I was tired of every act overflowing with meaning. When I arrived, for the first weeks all I wanted to do was sleep, eat, curl up in bed.

That then didn't happen. But now, at the end of the two-year cycle, it's repeating. And it has just so happened that I am able to do - having given up the need to study, or pursue any sort of plan (for that matter) - exactly what I wanted then. Sit around. Read. Sleep. Eat (although not much). It's by no means a serene existence, this time around. But it's what I needed then. And it's what I have now. The only thing I have now.

+++

Don't get me wrong. I'm going through a crisis alright. But reading through 2005 made me wonder, quite honestly, how it's possible that I'm still a sort of person that can be considered bubbly etcetera, and not some locked-up nutcase. It made me realise that I've had it worse, that I still own a share in the roof over my bed, that I don't have to withstand anyone's nervous breakdowns to gain my right to their kitchen, all such things. Perhaps, in order to get anywhere from here, it's important to appreciate where I've come from, and how I've come to this. It's certainly been thought-provoking to give it a second read.

Sometimes I read my old journal and really enjoy myself. It renders it all quite well. And I speak as a person who detests a nice turn of phrase, but does like being amused.


March 19, 2005 (while in Venice, Italy):

i sent an email, in an act of despair, pedantically stating what i know, what i don't know, and what i'd like to know (making it sure not even one extra question is needed). the response i got (surprising fact, considering their working hours and the general strike that happened meanwhile) consisted of asking for my name and phone number,so that we can discus my case in greater detail via phone. i felt like crying again. (...)

i'm very relaxed here, by simple lack of bonds. and that's ok.

and i'm not necessarily fickle. i'm just trying to relax and not do anything significant, anything full of meaning, anything revolutionary.i take little iron capsules every morning, with water or coke. i learn geography during the week and japanese on weekends. i managed to do my washing yesterday (finally caught an idle washing machine just about midnight), but i haven't managed to put it out to dry before this morning.

i also shoplift more than you'd believe, for adrenaline and because i'm poor. so i'm not entirely without controversies.

2006 was the year of the mega-entry; of the power-entry, if the wink to the 80s pop music is of any relevance to you. It was the year of sociological deconstruction, and one of frustration. While indexing the blog posts, new categories have cropped up: urbanism; theatre; and in-depth conversations with books (an even spread of fiction and non-fiction). 2006 was angry, still angry.

2006 and 2007, in couplet, have been a prolonged psychological experiment on the writer here present. I will not consider 2008 to have started until my own political status in Australia is resolved, and with it concluded my battle with my university. Too many aspects of my life currently depend on that decision: work, study, extracurricular activities, place of residence. Self-betterment will need to wait until I am an independent agent of change in my life again.

All this should be taken as a matter of fact, not some deranged existential lament. I have grown beyond deranged; deranged was very 2006. Recently the question of maturity came up, and with it two opposite answers: for one, maturity entailed recognising the singularity of each existence, recognising the secondary characters in one's life as the protagonists of their own; for another, maturity was precisely the recognition of oneself as the principal actor in one's own play, not merely a side-kick to those around. The conclusion, perhaps, is that we need to take care of ourselves and each other equally. The other big phrase that kept nudging for attention has been that of family: after years of cultivating an extended family of bloggers, lovers and fellow globe-trotters I've ended 2007 acutely alone. Not feeling lonely, but sitting, nice and sober, at the end of the world, in a pool of deep, dark, inescapable solitude. If anything, 2008 will need to be the year of rebuilding relationships: with my strangely reinvented parents, with my dearest friends on the other side of the world (on all the other sides, to be exact), with the people in this city. That is my forgotten New Year resolution, together with a self-betterment project (cultivate beautiful fingernails!) and an attempt at self-preservation (write more and better).

At this point the text was interrupted by an international phone call to comrade Pjotr (because the beginning of a new year is the time when old friends are checked on), and happy life in 2008 now appears a bit more possible, in between films, books, theatre and promises of globe-trotting in good company at the other end of it. I am left thinking, if my old friends, my new friends, and my new self can all be contained in a room (a boat, a car or a park bench) at the end of 2008, it will mean the end of this prolonged confusion.

The most important thing for me, since 2006, was coming to the sober realisation that I am unlikely to be psychologically deviant. That I may be over-stressed, cruel and unnecessarily verbose, but I am not on the path to insanity, despite what may be said in heated arguments. I wonder if it is a common thing to doubt one's own sanity. I am, in any case, relieved. 2008 will be a year of taking responsibility for my own emotions and the decisions they underline. I may as well start believing all that empty flattery.

Marcie Freestyle should write more and in English and in public: meanwhile, her little stories of Italian deli owners in London will be a rare treat for us who know.

David, one of my most interesting Australians, who introduced me, among other things, to the great Howard Taylor, has recently got back in touch, after a semester of me too scattered to reply to emails. David's photography is marvellous, and so are his words.

My new blog-find is Nicht Das Papierkrieg, found through the web of linkage, with the fascinating post: spatial theory, election and everything else seen through the philosophical prism of What Would Tintin Do?

On the weekend, I quite accidentally had lunch with one Austin from Calgary, and it ended up being one of those days you remember for no other reason than wanting all your days, forever, to feel exactly like that. Not only is Austin an incredible photographer, he also strikes me as one of the highest-quality human beings I've had the privilege to meet, recently or otherwise.

And finally.

It was a rainy day, of the warm, happy kind (because down here, after years of drought, nobody dislikes rain any longer), pouring left and right but with patches of sun, stop-starting. Warm, windless (exotic and tropical, were I geographically illiterate), and Dave was walking towards me, under a glorious pink umbrella, umbrella for women&children, looking like happiness. He did a little dance when he saw me, we didn't speak much, but he was smiling that Dave smile and the rest of the day was really quite beautiful.

Everything that I said I would do, but somehow never seemed to, ladies and gentlement, will happen in the next few weeks. I have, in one word, finished with essays, exams, applications forms to Uni of M that the U of M wouldn't accept, abusive phone calls from Centrelink, documents for La Migra, and even the question of whether my mother has re-married or not has been successfully resolved with the mutual agreement that we would keep in touch a lil bit more.

I contemplated taking photos of my work-station, to share the amusing sight of five open books sitting one on top of another on each side of my laptop; a message board for myself overflowing with letters of alert and alarm from various public and private bodies; et similia. That I'm not doing it has more to do with wanting to clean up as soon as possible and get the hell out of this period of my life than common decency. However, ladies and gentlemen, I may have finished my semester mere 5 days before the results are released, but I am still in high spirits, and I announce, ceremoniously but grinning like a goon,

that summer begins tonight!

The next three months will be sun, sea, walking barefoot, slow food, slightly aged white wine, books, writing, different languages, and not only replied emails, but real hand-written letters to you-know-who-you-are, taking photos, some more web-design, urbanism in theory and practice, and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots

of serious engagement with cinema, theatre, poetry, graphic novels and mature music genres like jazz and yé-yé. This summer, if nothing goes wrong, will be all


The Shop of Wild Dreams;
Live painting by Danijel Zezelj with live music improvisation byJessica Lurie (sax) Andrew Drury (drums) Danilo Gallo (bass) AlfonsoSantimone (piano). Gallery D406, Modena, Italy, Oct. 2006.

Hello world.

I wish I could tell you I'm doing many an exciting thing with my time, ladies and gentlemen. However, since finishing Nomads! Nomads! Nomads!, I've been compiling what is now a near-finished, good 3cm-tall pile of documentation to Let Jana Stay in Australia. There is no end to this work, as no list from La Migra is ever exhaustive; there is no certainty, as every list requires at least one non-applicable type of document. There is just the vagueness of proving one's own indispensability. And nobody is indispensable.

I am at every moment fully aware of how futile this is, how little is gained by me having to spend a week writing declarations, photocopying bank statements, putting together a selection of photos. How little I would lose if I didn't have to do this. The potential for personal development in this process is zero: the only thing I will gain in the end, apart from endless patience and infinite humility, is the privilege to stay exactly where I am, as I am, with nothing but one single right added (a right to debt). Yet it has to be done: if I ever want to be able to go forward, do something other than stay in place, I need to be able to stay in place. The sense of humility this process installs in you is mesmerising: as a person who was always particularly given to self-importance, and studying in a milieu where self-importance must have been spoon-fed ever since the first solid foods, I find it quite striking, the sheer amount of humility this process inspires. How does one prove one's own indispensability, when there is no such thing?

My itemised list of supporting documentation for my new State of Residence in the Commonwealth of Australia counts 53 individual documents. All of which needed to be requested, collected, photocopied, certified. I could be doing factory work, and it would be equally nourishing for the soul.

I may be able to deliver my pile of paper to my Case Officer tomorrow, in which case the real work may begin: co-ordinating, phoning university and La Migra, arguing for stretching deadlines, for closing one eye, trying to arrange the impossible, the barely possible, and the we-shall-see. That I also have exams, essays, and that I would like to sit down and reflect on some theatre seen recently doesn't even figure in the picture. On the other hand, I may not be able to deliver the pile of paper, in which case I'll be doing the absolute impossible until you hear back from me.

And when all is done, I will be exactly where I am, as I am, only with the right to low-interest debt. Talk about career, opportunities taken, what looks good on a CV. Talk about the overwhelming sense of futility. Talk about, hey, a crisis of the sense of direction.

I am married to G. Until tonight, my parents didn't know.

There is a point in this conversation where I remember sabyne and volcaos lamenting the fact that, in the UK, most people are normal. In Portugal, they say (and rightfully), most people are eccentric in some way. I feel the same way. There is an oppressive sameness to Australia that makes people react very strange when I talk about my family, even though my family is firmly within the confines of what's expected in Croatia.

EDIT: Maybe not quite firmly within. But certainly within the wider confines, within the acceptable deviations.

We decided to get married and live in Australia at the same time when my parents decided to get divorced. I told them both that I was planning to move to Melbourne to live with G, with no further details. Their reactions were identical: Oh, now you think love is all that matters... but love is but an illusion... what if he gets tired of you and kicks you out in a couple of months?, and you don't know anyone there?... , et cetera. In order to avoid ugly situations (e.g., they decide I'm out of my mind and forbid me to realise my crazy plan; I have to escape my parents to get to the airport), I didn't mention our marriage plans. G could not get over it. G probably thought of me as a wildly deviant person, and of my family as completely dysfunctional. He asked me to consider how they will feel when I eventually tell them! I told them they'll probably find it really funny.

I told my mum tonight, and she laughed her head off. She has a boyfriend now, and the humour of the inverted mother-daughter situation escaped nobody.

So there.

+++

The weekend has been really nice. Beautiful lunch at St Kilda and walk on the beach on Saturday, while two fantastic things happened on Sunday.

I went to the market. That's not very special, I go to the market all the time, but now that it's spring it's suddenly getting exciting. All the vegetables look dashing and full of vigour, not struggling to green like they did in winter. And all the seasonals are coming out. So I got the first broad beans. I love pulses of all kinds, but broad beans are my favourite - because they're so rare. Fresh beans and peas are something of a fringe vegetable group in Australia, and very expensive, probably because there's no demand. (Most people I know here wouldn't know how to shell a pea, it seems.) And, as with all fringe vegetables, they're out in the open only when in season; when their production doesn't require effort. So, now one can buy broad beans in their thick pods, artichokes and baby artichokes, first Adelaide tomatoes, sweet peas. I had the best lunch one can possibly have: some rapidly boiled broad beans smothered in butter, and a chunk of bread. The preparation requires 6 pieces of kitchenware altogether, and this includes the board and the knife to slice the bread. I indulged. Broad beans are the best.

The second was my long-awaited afternoon in NGV International. I thought I would have to go alone, but Sam and I managed to organised going together, and I've had some of the nicest hours I've ever had in Melbourne there and then. We walked through 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th century Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts, then skipped the romantics and the modernists and went straight for photography (with a peak into the Heroic Fashion of the 1980s, where Sam danced). We had a beautiful conversation - on Christianity, the materialism of Christianity, the economics of art through history, and - this is when I went on a bit of a rant, perhaps - the connections between artistic representation and the modelling of the universe.

Medieval art (and Renaissance) as perfectly symmetrical, infinitely self-referential, like a ball bouncing off in the closed world of the flipper machine. The Mannerism, high-strung, deranged and upset by the uncertainty of living on an Earth that rotates around the Sun. Then the history of gardens: gardens feature endlessly in medieval art, gardens with the Madonna and the entire holy entourage, gardens of love, gardens of Gethsemane. Gardens were, from their earliest history, models of an idealised world: representing the heavens, the earth, the inbetween, the people. Or, the order of things. Zoological gardens and botanical gardens both follow straight this tradition, zoos in particular (because entirely concealed, but incredibly announced once one is aware): different sections for different species, the order of the species, the walk through the zoo as a story of the evolution, etc.

Later Sam told me he'll be too busy to see me for some time to come, and although it made me feel bad for intruding into his precious free time, it also made me sad that it seems so hard, here, to spend time with friends.

But we found our favourite painting:


Bernardo Cavallino
The Virgin Annunciate, circa 1640.

We loved her red nose. There is a beautiful humaneness in this Madonna that's completely absent from most religious art (and, let's face it, most European art of the time is religious). Something about this painting is really moving.

This time, I didn't get to look at my other favourite painting from NGV:


Balthus
Nude with cat, 1949.

It has the warmth of children's books' illustrations, and the light of a summer in a hot, dusty city, it reminds me of home, it sings of my home, and aaaaah!

And, re: unreal van Gogh, it was very interesting to note that many, many of the artworks in the NGV have disputed authorship. It's obvious many would have been bought as old masters, only to later be confirmed as copies, or works of the anonymous, or lesser artists. As of NGV's purchasing strategy, which Matt suggested to diss, I'm afraid I don't know enough. I think of the NGV as a gift to me from Melbourne. Never before have I lived in a city with a free gallery to wander through. Venice might have had better collections of this or that kind, but in Venice there was always the tedium of getting bang for buck, of having epiphanies and life-changing experiences on the spot.

But art, like film, I don't watch as art. I find them interesting on a million different levels, but least of all as life-changing sublime things. In that sense, I thought to myself later, the only thing I observe as itself is urban design. And architecture. (And then I started thinking how my objection to architecture is that it doesn't think of buildings as buildings, but as everything else.)

+++

EDIT:

Avant-garde and kitsch

The word [kitsch] became very popularized in the 1930s by the theorists Theodor Adorno, Hermann Broch, and Clement Greenberg, who each sought to define avant-garde and kitsch as being opposites. To the art world of the time, the immense popularity of kitsch was perceived as a threat to culture. The arguments of all three theorists relied on an implicit definition of kitsch as a type of false consciousness, a Marxist term meaning a mindset present within the structures of capitalism that is misguided as to its own desires and wants. Marxists suppose there to be a disjunction between the real state of affairs and the way that they phenomenally appear.

Adorno perceived this in terms of what he called the “culture industry,” where the art is controlled and formulated by the needs of the market and given to a passive population which accepts it—what is marketed is art that is non-challenging and formally incoherent, but which serves its purpose of giving the audience leisure and something to watch. It helps serve the oppression of the population by capitalism by distracting them from their alienation. Contrarily, art for Adorno is supposed to be subjective, challenging, and oriented against the oppressiveness of the power structure. He claimed that kitsch is parody of catharsis, and a parody of aesthetic experience. (...)

Other theorists over time have also linked kitsch to totalitarianism. The Czech writer Milan Kundera, in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), defined it as “the absolute denial of shit.” He wrote that kitsch functions by excluding from view everything that humans find difficult to come to terms with, offering instead a sanitised view of the world in which “all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.”

In its desire to paper over the complexities and contradictions of real life, kitsch, Kundera suggested, is intimately linked with totalitarianism. In a healthy democracy, diverse interest groups compete and negotiate with one another to produce a generally acceptable consensus; by contrast, “everything that infringes on kitsch,” including individualism, doubt, and irony, “must be banished for life” in order for kitsch to survive. Therefore, Kundera wrote, “Whenever a single political movement corners power we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.”

For Kundera, “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

(Take that, well-made play!)

Rene's visit made up for the entire year and a half of non-photography (and a year and a half of lots of other things). These are my beautiful, colour-enhanced memories of these beautiful two weeks.


underneath CityLink [abstract art]


underneath CityLink [abstract art with soc-realist elements]

( I mercifully allow you to CHOOSE! the remaining twenty. )