Junk for Code

urban renewal in Adelaide: Riverside West

The Liberal Party of SA has unveiled a plan for the urban renewal of Riverside West. This area is between North Terrace and the River Torrens from west of the Morphett Street Bridge to the site of the Thebarton Police Barracks.

This precinct should be one of the jewels of Adelaide, but is currently blighted by waste land and ugly rail yards. It is one reason for the 'backwater tag' and is earmarked by the Rann Government for a new hospital. Presumably, the Liberal Riverside plan for the city's west precinct embodies a vision for a more vibrant city, attractive to residents and visitors and with more diverse employment opportunities:

The redevelopment of Riverside West is based around a new inner city stadium rather than a federation square. The Liberals say:

The State Liberals believe it’s time for a world-class stadium in the city centre. Our vision for Riverside West involves a cultural and entertainment precinct that would transform the city.This must include a world-class stadium either by renewing Adelaide Oval or, if this proves untenable, by creating a new purpose built facility. Both of these options will deliver a world class stadium beside a new and exciting city pulse. Every other mainland state has created such a place. Why can’t we? The State Liberals believe Riverside West is the best location for this new stadium. It is not the best location for a city hospital. That is why our plan is to rebuild the Royal Adelaide Hospital on its current site. We can have both a new hospital and a world class stadium. It just takes leadership and determination.

The money will come from the dumping the proposed extension of the trams to Semaphore, West Lakes and Port Adelaide that is expected to cost approximately $336 million, the sale of AAMI stadium and selling parcels of land in the northern suburbs

The plan is to relocate the Keswick railway terminal into the redevelopment, conference centre, hotels and tall buildings in the parklands. It is a concept or vision of redevelopment because the Liberals need a massive swing to win the election in early 2010, and this is not going to happen:

Will this entertainment precinct create the urban life that Adelaide needs to foster for the CBD to become a lively urban centre? Or will it be sterile and boring like the redevelopment at Port Adelaide? Why the towers in the parklands instead of in the CBD? Why a new casino?

Probably the best way to look at this proposal is that it places other options on the table than a new hospital and kick starts a discussion about urban renewal.

Flashback : Little Feat

Courtesy of Geoff Barker June 1977 Midnight Special Little Feat performing Dixie Chicken with Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris & Jesse Winchester.

The song is from the 1973 album of the same name, where Little Feat found its signature sound as a band, with its seductive, laid-back, Southern-fried funky sound. I never really dipped into their music after this record and I've never heard the latter-day band, which I understand became a live jamming band.

what role for art?

One session at the inaugural Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House in October was a forum Can the arts still produce dangerous ideas? John Carroll (sociologist and commentator), Catherine Deveny (writer) and Julian Morrow (writer & presenter, The Chaser) debate the claim that 'The Arts Don't Deserve a Place at This Festival'.

The discussion is whether the arts still have the ability to shock, or even to produce any genuinely new or dangerous ideas given the shift to entertainment and titillation in our culture.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, homeless, Adelaide Parklands, 2009

Carroll says that the role of (high) art is to tell stories which help people to make sense of their lives through death and tragedy eg., Homer's Iliad; Raphael's Madonna; a Bach Cantata. It makes us more than human in an everyday sense. Fair enough. What then of modernism? It repudiates this traditional role for one of shock of the new: breaking taboos and conventions.

Carroll says that modernism has given up being a custodian of culture for shock or political. So we should ignore modernism as it has nothing to say to us. It's good film and television (Sopranos, Madmen, Deadwood) that picks up the traditional story telling tradition.

Deveny defends the shock value of art (cunt poetry) and the importance of being shocked in challenging comfort. Though her performance was designed to shock the male audience this was not connected to contemporary art---art that is post modernism.

Julian Morrow asks whether art can be dangerous in a democratic society committed to freedom of speech. It is one of danger in the sense of shocking sensibilities (offensive) and this depends on the context of an elite or mass audience. It is not worthwhile for art just to shock conservative people?

Surprisingly, there was no mention of photography and truth by the panel or the audience, despite the example of photography and the Abu Ghraib prison. Nor was the relationship between visuals and news narratives explored given, even though these images of torture caused revulsion, and contradicted or disrupted the dominant discursive frame of our enlightened liberal culture. These photographs would have been seen by the panel and audience.

Even if the Abu Ghraib photographs had minimal political or policy repercussions, they nevertheless dealt a fatal blow to the United States’ mission in Iraq. These photographs alienated much of the Arab world; but they created their own autonomous frame of reference in the sense that the heretofore banned sight of American soldiers in the role of sadistic dominators/occupiers has become an integral part of our understanding of the US war on terror.

The photographs of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison told a story ----but what was it? Doesn't answering that require an ordering the photographs, contextualizing the photographs, trying to understand what they are photographs of?

where's the water?

There was a brief exchange in the Senate over a report entitled Engineering a Crisis in a Ramsar Wetland: the Coorong, Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth, Australia from the Australian Wetlands and Rivers Centre at the UNSW. It part of a squabble about the water --- flows in rivers, water in dams and irrigation channels--in the Murray-Darling Basin.

The Engineering a Crisis report called for 700 gigalitres as the minimum requirement for an estuarine-freshwater ecosystem in the Lower Lakes to restore conditions favourable for waterbird populations in the Coorong.

Senator Wong's question was how do we conjure up this water when over the last three years we know we have been at one-fifth of the long-term average? Her answer was that we do not have enough water. Hanson-Young's response was to ask whether it was responsible to relax Adelaide’s water restrictions whilst returning no water to the lower lakes and the Coorong.

This raises the issue of sustainable limitsraised by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. This refers to enforceable limits on the quantities of surface water and groundwater that can be taken from the Basin water resources. What is environmentally sustainable is defined as the level at which water can be taken from a Basin water resource without compromising the key environmental assets, key ecosystem functions, productive base or key environmental outcomes of the water resource.

The context here is that the satellite data shows that the big loss of water happened beneath the surface in the Murray-Darling Basin: the groundwater, essentially, is drying out. So the situation in the Murray-Darling basin system is not one of a crisis for the river; it's a crisis for our groundwater system and also for the entire landscape as a whole.

It is a crisis for the landscape as a whole because the 13-year drought is not just a natural dry stretch but a shift related to climate change.

doing photography everyday?

In this interview at Bombsite, that I mentioned in this earlier post on junk for code Tod Papageorge says that in the early days of his photography career in New York during the 1960s he photographed everyday:

I had a rent-controlled apartment on 96th Street. I was married. My wife and I lived on something like $3,000 a year. And I had a darkroom in my apartment...It was the ideal life: I worked every day and never thought about the health insurance I didn’t have

Papageorge says that he would meet up with Garry Winogrand at 11am or so, they would then shoot for a few hours, and end up hanging out at the MoMA café.

I find that interesting, as shooting everyday is not something that I do. My photography is much more intermittent, even though I am working on different projects.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, shed+bike, Old Dadswell Town, Victoria, 2009

I kept on wondering about the everyday bit. Would shooting everyday be one way to define the difference between a professional photographer and an amateur one? How could you take photos during a heatwave? Or even during an Adelaide summer?

Photography is limited to early morning and early evening at these times because of the harshness of the light. The window of opportunity is very short. But shooting everyday is one way to define what being serious about photography is. You are actually working on it consistently.

Samson and Delilah: a bare life

I watched Warwick Thornton's Samson And Delilah, which is currently being reviewed in the Australian blogosphere. The world is small isolated community in the Central Australian desert near Alice Springs and the Todd river bed at Alice Springs. Boredom, poverty flies and stillness defines the remote settlement. Alice Springs signifies indigenous people being marginalised, degraded, excluded and voiceless.

The film about the relationship between two teenagers in the context of brutal Third World conditions of Aboriginal life conditions of dispossession and inequality constituted through colonial processes. These conditions are framed in an intensely personal context:

It is a bare life --a life reduced to survival and no longer protected by any legal and civil rights. The hope in the film --salvation from the shattering harshness of life, rescue, retreat to country to overcome addiction, and love--- is mythic and sentimental. The old ways of subsisting on sparse ex-pastoral land are best.

In contrast to Thornton's minimalist dialogue and effective use of natural sounds----eg., the crackle of a fire and the sounds of crickets --- the photographic style is social realist, rather than creating a new visual image. This is in spite of the importance of indigenous painting in the film as a pathway to a fulfilling life and a life beyond a bare life. Some of the images however, break away from the social realist 'window on a world' to being powerful images in their own right.

What is haunting is the insight that a bare live, as merely existent life for indigenous people, is a mode of life that is actively and continuously excluded or shut out from the polity and is a mode of life produced by the sovereign authority. This is no historical or political aberration. It is a life exposed to death, which comes from the suspension of the rule of law in the town camps near Alice Springs, and so they become a non-citizen and a non-human being. Race is the marker in the formation of the non-human in the town camp.

The indigenous couple try to forget about the pain by sniffing petrol as they try to live an everyday life on the edge of Alice.They slowly become destroyed from the petrol and more non human. Their only hope for survival is to leave.

Tod Papageorge: poetic documents

An interview with Tod Papageorge in foto8 that takes us back to American photography in the 1960-70s. As the head of Yale University's graduate photography department he is widely regarded as the bridge between Henri Cartier Bresson's school of the 'decisive moment' and the American school of photographic realism exemplified by Gary Winogrand and Robert Frank.

Tod Papageorge, Central Park, 1990, from Passing Through Eden,

However, his work---Passing through Eden and American Sports, 1970-----is not widely known and he has been absent from New York galleries for more than 20 years. The aesthetic in the 1960s was a street photography one----raw (Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand) as opposed to cooked (Ansel Adams or Paul Strand).Though raw the street photos were more akin to picture-poems in seeing a photograph not as a picture, but as the literal world held in their palm.

Tod Papageorge, Shea Stadium, New York 1970, from American Sports, 1970

Papageorge says that he started to photograph because poetry was impossible for me, not realizing that photography was at least as difficult, and also not anticipating how, as with poetry, that difficulty can, in itself, create an addiction in those people who see this kind of creative test as something monumentally attractive. He adds:

Photographing in the street with a Leica doesn’t have much to do with planning. You walk out the door and—bang!—like everyone else, you’re part of the great urban cavalcade. But unlike everyone else, you’re carrying an amazing little machine that, joined with a lot of effort, can pull poetry out of a walk downtown. All of the failed pictures you’ve ever made, all of the other photographs you’ve ever loved, even songs and lines from poems walk with you too, insinuating themselves into your decisions about what you’ll make your photographs of, and how you’ll shape them as pictures. The process, if anything, is intuitive rather than the product of planning—although the fact that very few people have been able to produce this kind of work at a high level also suggests how difficult it is. In other words, intuitive may not be an adequate word for describing the stew of wildness, dogged work and hard thought that goes into producing the best of this kind of photography.

He says that the easiest way to think of the difference between the European and American forms of “street photography,” is to consider how the pictures look—in other words, to consider their pictorial form.

Bresson’s pictures—especially those made after WW II--generally invoke the sweeping sculptural form of European painting....that they were always trying to be beautiful.Garry Winogrand’s photographs did not succeed through “significant form”—a phrase you can find in philosophy of aesthetics textbooks—but though “signifying form”; in other words, a pictorial form just robust enough to carry his pictures’s meanings. Beauty, or design, had nothing to do with what he was interested in. Winogrand said often that “there’s no way a photograph has to look.” In other words, he believed that it could look any way, with the understanding that the less it looked like the kinds of pictures artists make, the greater chance it might have to look like an interesting photograph.

Picture-poems is a along way from photojournalism's idea o photography as a credible witness.

Fotofreo: Carrie Levy

The 2010 exhibition programme for Fotofreo 2010 is now online. One of the core exhibitors is Carrie Levy whose book 51 Months documents the period that her father Glenn went to jail and was then released.

Carrie Levy, mom, from 51 Months

51 Months convey some of the emotions that a family will experience when the father is imprisoned and then returns. A blurb I came across describes the family situation:

On her 16th birthday, her father was sentenced to four years in prison. Levy soon grasped the consequences: people’s sidelong glances, and the whispers and stares at her school, which she left early in order to escape her own prison. Then she picked up her camera and started to photograph the empty spaces in her home, on the road, her garden, and outside the prison. The touching images in 51 Months are redolent of loss, of vacant lanscapes that for Levy were filled with painful meaning. Levy’s singular story ended when her father came home, four years later, and she tucked her container of 500 photographs under her bed where they remained a hidden visual narrative–until now..

The book, according to this review, feels like a personal document --akin to looking through someone else's photograph album that depict a difficult time in their personal life.

the world of new media

The arrival of the digital camera, computers and digital storage, cameras in mobile phones and access to broadband in the 1990s means that we are all photographers now and that we have a broad virtual audience.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, rain +rose, Solway, Encounter Bay, 2009

But we are in the process of becoming different kinds of photographers. Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis in 'A Life More Photographic' in Photographies say that:

The arrival of digital imaging did not revolutionize popular photography but caused gradual shifts in the habits of hobbyists and middle-class amateurs who bought computers, scanners and ink-jet printers but used them within the old paradigms of analogue photography. The photographic darkroom and the photo lab were replaced by Photoshop and a colour printer. The ability to make prints without the need for a home darkroom, and the ease with which old, faded prints could be improved or restored convinced many photographers to swap the photo lab for domestic digitalset-up.The ability to make prints without the need for a home darkroom, and the ease with which old, faded prints could be improved or restored convinced many photographers to swap the photo lab for domestic digital set-up.

The subsequent shift from print to screen based photography signifies a shift in photographic culture.

Some argue that:

amateurs have the ability to see through the dominant paradigms, are freer to recombine elements of paradigms thought long dead, and can apply everyday life experience to their deliberations. Most importantly, however, amateurs are not invested in institutionalized systems of knowledge production and policy construction, and hence do not have irresistible forces guiding the outcome of their process such as maintaining a place in the funding hierarchy, or maintaining prestige-capital.

However, the attempt to be “freer” from such forces by situating ourselves outside professions and institutions can lead to us being recuperated by them without being aware of it. Practice can often be quite conservative --eg., Flickr's bias towards sunsets, flowers and pets.

The creative industries often encourage artists to view themselves as cultural entrepreneurs managing their creative talents, personal lives and professional identities in ways that maximise their capacity to achieve financial gain, personal satisfaction and have fun.Consumers are rebranded as creative by the digital lifestyle and technology industry.

According to Rubinstein and Sluis what has facilitated this shift in photographic culture from print to screen is the rebranding of the computer as the centre of the digital lifestyle by Apple. photography is incorporated into the suite of friendly multimedia applications designed to appeal to every computer user and downplay the references to craftsmanship and specialist knowledge. The photograph that occupied the mind of Barthes --a printed snap shot-- is a different object to the photograph created today as image data, stored within a data base (Flickr) and incorporated into social networking and sharing experiences. Our attention shifts from the singular photographic image to image sequences: the ‘‘photostream’ in which the image is presented as a shifting sequence or flow of images.

Simon Harsent: icebergs

Simon Harsent, an English-born, New York-based photographer who lived in Australia for 11 years, has a show at the Australian Centre for Photography entitled Melt. Its about icebergs---it begins with images of massive icebergs as they enter Greenland's Disco Bay from the Ilulissat Icefjord and ends off the East coast of Newfoundland.

Simon Harsent, iceberg, from the Melt: Portrait of an Iceberg 2009.

This journey is known as Iceberg Alley, an area off the West coast of Greenland where icebergs break away from the ice-wall and travel from Baffin Bay to the East Coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, and then enter the shipping lanes. During this time the icebergs have travelled hundreds of miles, and have been so battered and broken down that they are little more than ghosts of what they once were.

Harsent, landscape,

The commissioned advertising work finances the personal work which is constructed rather than capturing as it is based on an idea with the style based on the emotional effect of the work.Harsent says about his work:

getting the camera off the tripod really meant so much to me. It opened so many different doors. As did moving into digital, I used to shoot primarily in black and white. With the invention of computers and everything, I came out of the dark room. I kind of do in Photoshop what I used to do in the dark room for black and white. I see it as a way of playing around....These days, one of the greatest things that has happened to me is digital, it’s just completely re-inventing my excitement. I can walk around now and I don’t have to carry shit loads of gear. I’ve got my Canon 1DS - Mark II- I have that, a couple of zoom lenses, and a tripod, and I can just walk around and shoot things how I see it. But landscapes, I’m very into isolation. That’s why I do a lot of singular portraits. If you notice in the landscapes, there is a lot of isolation, there is a lot of barrenness.

The barrenness refers to dusk, getting lost in the woods with the wolves, a dusk-night thing, that kind of very eerie, not really knowing quite what’s there.

Uta Barth: making pictures of and about other pictures

Uta Barth's work induces the viewer to become aware of his or her capacity to really look at something and refers back to the minimalist tradition, which proposes that a viewer relocates her or his self in relation to the object and its space.

Uta Barth, Ground #38

In this interview with Sheryl Conkelton in the Journal of Contemporary Art Uta Barth says the following whilst talking about her work:

On the most obvious level, we all expect photographs to be pictures of something. We assume that the photographer observed a place, a person, an event in the world and wanted to record it, point at it. There is always something that motivated the taking of a photograph. The problem with my work is that these images are really not of anything in that sense, they register only that which is incidental and peripheral implied. Instead, there are some clues to indicate that what we are looking at is the surrounding information. (The images lack focus because the camera's attention is somewhere else. Many of the compositions, while clearly deliberate and carefully arranged in relation to the picture's edge, are awkward, off balance and formally suggest a missing element.) Slowly it becomes clear that what we are presented with is a sort of empty container and it is at that point that people begin to "project" into this space. It begins to read as an empty screen.

A second aspect is that many people relate to the pictures in terms of memory--what comes to mind is an entire inventory of other pictures seen.The specificity of time and place drop away and one starts to think about the picture, as much as what it is of. Barth is making pictures of and about other pictures.

obscurity in photography

In The Idiom in Photography As the Truth in Painting Rosemary Hawker says in reference to some of Gerhard Richter's paintings that:

blurring, smudging, and streaking the paintings, the photographic clarity and visual cohesion from which they originate is obliterated, and with it, their claim to offer up the subjects they represent is lost. Richter's obscuration marks the dirty window from which the view is taken, and this is at the same time the violent mark of rejection of the "spotless mirror " that photography has been so often compared with.

To question photography's adequacy for the task of representation is to threaten certain epistemological certainties that rely on the possibility of pictorial representation as such. An example is Uta Barth's field #9, from the Field series:

Hawker adds that obscured images are an easily discernible style of imagery in art history and that Richter knows this history. At a certain level, we need to know it so as to recognize that his research on the idiom of photography is about an already established topic in art history, that of obscurity.

Despite their diversity, Leonardo's sfumato, the disconcerting tenebrousness of Rembrandt, and Goya's bleak "black paintings" all share a visual ambiguity that is their strength. As Turner is famously said to have responded to the complaints of some clients, "Obscurity is my forte: '

Obscurity is also a persistent trope in photography itself ---most notably in photographic pictorialism, but also in contemporary photographic art practice, such as the work of photographers like Hiroshi Sugimoto and Uta Barth.

Uta Barth's photographic works for instance, question the traditional functions of pictures and our expectations of them and examines the conventions of photographic presentation. Her two series, Ground and Field (created from 1994 to 1997) consist of blurred images generated by focusing the camera on an unoccupied foreground. These unframed, empty images present only background information, implying the absence of subject and referring to the function of images as containers of information.

The untitled images of Ground show landscapes and interiors and make reference to the compositional conventions of still photography and painting. In the Field series, Barth shifts from the vocabulary of still photography to that of film, exploring cinematic effects and the images mimic cinematic framing conventions in a subtle query of the visual structures that imply movement or activity in the foreground.

Hawker adds that:

rather than obscure images being less informative, or less true to perception and visual experience, such images can be seen to more adequately parallel perception and its limits and analogously refer to the limits of representation more generally, to be more truthful in their explication of what is idiomatic to all language

What is idiomatic to photography is the truth effect, but this is paradoxically communicated through blur and lack of focus as much as through clarity.

'the truth in painting'

I've been trying to read Derrida's The Truth in Painting online during an Adelaide heat wave. I was curious about this text because we usually associate truth in art with photography and, despite the promise of a certain meaning within a fixed historical frame this is the terrain where meaning, communication, and historical context threaten to collide. This gestures towards a crisis in art history that is between truths and between fictions.

Despite a well established critical discourse existing around the issues of truth (the "spotless mirror " that photograph has been so often compared with) photography is still viewed as capable of functioning as an indexical record of a disparate range of events. The fact that photographic evidence is admissible in a court of law and that photography is used extensively by policing agencies is a simple example of this.

So I was wondered if there any of the linkages, commonalities and differences between painting and art be explored. Would the space the space between photography and painting be at once closed and reopened by Derrida? Would there be a dialogue between these media that allows the idiom in photography to reveal the truth in painting? And vica versa?

Gary Sauer-Thompson, rock face, Port Elliot, 2009

If I approached Derrida's text with certain questions I quickly gave up reading the circling text--it's an impossible task working through Derrida's reflection on the art work as pictorial artifact in a heatwave. I got lost in the layers of meanings deriving from Derrida's textual and visual attributions and appropriations and in the end I recoiled from the supremacy of postmodernist text over modernist image.

The text starts from Cézanne's statement "I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you" in a letter to Émile Bernard. Sadly, Cézanne died a few weeks later, before his promise to Bernard could be fulfilled. Derrida asks: 'What does it mean for Cézanne, for any painter, to write this, to say this'? I could follow that Derrida was interested in the idiom of painting --in the sense of a combination of words that has a meaning that is different from the meanings of the individual words themselves.

Consequently, Cezanne's statement can have a literal meaning in one situation and a different idiomatic meaning in another situation. Derrida joins idiom, truth , and painting, whilst making clear the folly of attempting to fasten on the idiomatic, much less to reproduce it.e wrote four times around The Truth in Painting).

The titles of the four discourses in this book are Paregon (frame) which is concerned with Kant's Critique of the faculty of judgement; Tarergon which is concerned with Varerio Adam's exposition titled (The voyage of sketch, (1975); Cartouches (Cartridges), is concerned with Gerard Titus-Carmel's exposition titled he Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin (1978); Restitutions is concened with concerns Heidegger's The Origin of Works of Art and is a dialogue over the mimesis representation of the painting of shoes by van Gogh over which Heidegger and Meyer Schapiro are debating.

At that point I gave up apart from wondering about around the various conceptions of truth: the ---correspondence theory of truth regards a proposition as true if it corresponds to what is the case; the coherence theory of truth regards a proposition as true if it is a necessary constituent of a systematically coherent whole. I wasn't sure of the pragmatic theory of truth was discussed.

Derrida's text was kinda like hitting a sponge really.Or a tangle. Or a labyrinth whose shape is determined more by its borders than by what it contains.

Leunig--boat people

I do not have much comment to make on this hullaboo and the inhospitality towards strangers who are recognized to have a right as a guest to ask for refugee.

It's an existential panic manufactured by Australian politicians. They--the conservative politicians --- are demonising the Tamil asylum seekers and exploiting Australian's historical anxiety over invasion for their own self-serving interests.

Little is said about the brutality and violence towards the persecuted Tamil population in the detention camps in Sri Lanka by the Sri Lankan state. I'm just stunned by the silence. It distresses me, deeply. That's all i want to say here.

heatwave in Adelaide

There is a heatwave in Adelaide --a week or more of temperatures in the high 30's and low 40's---and I've gone down to Victor Harbor for cooler temperatures so that I can work on health policy. It's not much cooler here.There is no sea breeze, it is very still, and the days are hot. At least it cools down at night.

Tonight I am relaxing with a glass of Savingnon Blanc from Nelson, New Zealand, and I'm watching a DVD of a feel good Grateful Dead concert--- Downhill from Here --- courtesy of Winamp on my computer.

'Downhill From Here' was recorded live at Alpine Valley Music Theater in East Troy, Wisconsin in 1989 and the above track ---"China Cat Sunflower"-- starts off the second set as part of the "China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider" coupling. Since the motionless Dead were never a visually compelling live act it comes down to the music and the quality of the filming and sound.

The raw energy of the Grateful Dead’s late-’60s performances and the adventurous freewheeling jams of the its early to late '70s excursions remained a thing of the past. They'd transformed into tight-knit, rock ’n‘ roll outfit that effortlessly could tap into its history as a means of creating some good music that ventures into the experimental in the strange Jam and Drums and Space section of the second set.

This show in 1989 represents a revival of sorts for the Dead and it is basically the peak of the last era of the Dead - the band really did begin to go downhill from there. Below is the "I Know You Rider" part of the opening "China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider" coupling:

The band's improvisory skills are still sharp and became apparent during the playing of the "Playing in the Band" and "Uncle John's Band" sequence This version of "Playin" was stretched out a good 13 minutes- with "Uncle John's Band" intertwined afterwards. It is an almost complete live Dead performance and it gives some experience of a concert's communal experience. However, it is quite average in terms of the Dead musically.

What I would like to see is The Grateful Dead Movie. This was filmed October 16-20, 1974, right before they took a year off to make Blues For Allah & work on solo projects. By all accounts it encapsulated the Grateful Dead’s 1974 "farewell" concerts at Winterland Arena in San Francisco. It also blended the music of the Dead with the feeling of what it was like to attend a '70s Dead show.

I wonder how good it is as a work of film?

a political hullaboo

There is so much political hullaboo in Australia at the moment over Tamil asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat by Sri Lanka. The event has given expression to one of Australia’s defining fears: the arrival of boat people from Asia.

Most of the voices are saying that the Rudd Government needs to toughen up--ie., get some backbone--- when it comes to asylum-seekers. These voices mostly come from the conservative side of politics and they mean 'turn the boats back'. We don't want the boats landing on our shores. Their emphasis is toughness on border protection (Fortress Australia) and, by implication, the harsh treatment of refugees in Australia.

Rudd's Indonesian solution---palming off boats to other countries to prevent them from coming to Christmas Island ---has done nothing to solve Australia's refugee problem, as it encourages people to bypass Indonesia and sail directly for Australia.

Why not increase the resources for processed by staff from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) or the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) to reduce the years of waiting to be processed to months?

a retro style

One recent development in camera technology is the rise of relatively compact cameras with large sensors that addresses the consumer desire for a carry-around camera with large sensor, compact body, and a single fixed lens with really good optics. Can Leica deliver on this desire with its ethos of operational minimalism and a camera that feels and looks like a camera before the digital revolution?

Gary Sauer-Thompson, firehose, Adelaide, 2008

I still shoot with an old film rangefinder Lecia M series (an M4-P) that requires me to use a hand held lightmeter. I'm one of those waiting for a genuine digital rangefinder --one that brings the "M camera experience" into the digital age.

The Digital Photographic Review says that Leica is the:

sole survivor of the once-mighty German camera industry is one of the very few genuine 'heritage' brands left. The company's long-running reputation for sheer engineering quality and optically-superb lenses is legendary - many a budding snapper has aspired to own a 'real' Leica, eventually. Unfortunately though, this quality is (inevitably) accompanied by heart-stopping prices, meaning such aspirations are often left unfulfilled for many years.

Leica has finally nailed the digital M rangefinder series. The just released M9 can be regarded as a true digital inheritor of the M series' legacy. So a rangefinder digital photography---working with a basic camera and not a computer with a lens attached--is now possible.

How about the "point and shoot" category? There are some sample images of the Leica X1 --the new point and shoot 'baby' Leica. The quality of the images recorded throughout a wide range of ISO settings look good, though the noise and lack of detail appear at the higher ISO values (from 1250 upwards). It's quality and control in a smaller package.

It does appear that Leica has made a serious "point and shoot" camera rather than a snobbish accessory--- something pocketable for travelling and spontaneous opportunities. The X1 has clearly been designed as an instrument for taking photographs, pure and simple, and features a pared-down, traditionalist design in service of that goal. The more analog control approach taken by Leica with the X1 (and the M9) is a distinctly different approach to digital cameras than that taken by the Asian camera manufacturers. But it does have its limitations.

We will have to wait if this is the desired carry-around camera with large sensor, compact body, single fixed lens with really good optics. The price, as always with Leica is always a big turn off. That is not stopping a lot of people from buying the M9 though. Whether I can afford an X1 (or an M9) is another matter.

Bangarra Dance Company Fire: A Retrospective

The Bangarra Dance Company is Australia’s most successful Indigenous dance company. It merges the old with the new-- fusing the cultural integrity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tradition with contemporary expressions of dance and music to create unique theatrical experiences.

Fire - A retrospective features the most memorable and compelling elements of the company’s repertoire during its extraordinary 20-year journey. The work traces Bangarra from its modest beginnings to its current status as an enormously respected and lauded dance company around the world.

Nadav Kander: Yangtze, From East to West

There is a portfolio of Nadav Kander's work from his Yangtze Long River project at the Pekin Fine Arts in Beijing. The London-based Kander photographed along the Yangtze River from its mouth to its source.

Nadav Kander, Shanghai1, C-Print, 2006, from 'Yangtze, From East to West'

It does seem that everybody is going to China to photograph the dramatic transformations taking place from industrialization. The work of Ferit Kuyas has been mentioned here on junk for code.

Kandar's artist statement gives the flavour of this body of work:

The Yangtze River, which forms the premise to this body of work, is the main artery that flows 4100miles across china, travelling from its furthest westerly point in Qinghai Province to Shanghai in the east. The river is embedded in the consciousness of the Chinese, even those who live thousands of miles from the river. It plays a pivotal role in both the spiritual and physical life of the people. More people live along its banks than live in the USA – one in every eighteen people on the planet.

The Yangtze is being dammed to provide hydro energy to help drive China's industrial machine that keeps Australia going through its ever increasing demand for iron ore.

Nadav Kander, Metal Palm, Nanjing, Jiangsu, C-Print, 2006, from 'Yangtze, From East to West'

The river has been transformed over the last twenty years as result of the controversial Three Gorges Dam, which has created a 600 kilometre reservoir, forcing relocation of up to four million residents as it turns nearby towns into modern cities. Kander continues:

Using the river as a metaphor for constant change, I have photographed the landscape and people along its banks from mouth to source. Importantly for me I worked intuitively, trying not to be influenced by what I already knew about the country. After several trips to different parts of the river, it became clear that what I was personally responding to, and how I felt whilst being in china, was permeating my pictures; a formalness and unease, a country that feels both at the beginning of a new era and at odds with itself. China is a nation that appears to be severing its roots by destroying its past by moving forward at such an astounding and unnatural pace. I felt a complete outsider and explained this pictorially by ‘stepping back’ and showing humans as small in their surroundings. Common man has little say in China’s progression, and this smallness of the individual is alluded to in the work.

It is is similar to the industrialization of capitalism that took place in the 19th century in Europe (England, France and Germany) that Marx wrote about in Capital, but on a much greater scale. China (and India) are only in the early stages of catching up with the living standards of the developed world, and this process has a very long way to run.

Nadav Kander, Chongqing X1, C-Print, 2006, from 'Yangtze, From East to West'

In its race to develop, the country's history is being lost. Kander continues:

I feel that there are strong parallels in China with the 20th Century immigrants who poured off the boats onto American soil, a new beginning without roots. Millions of domestic migrant workers are travelling from rural areas to the cities. This condition manifests itself throughout China’s social fabric and echoed my own feelings of dislocation. Further layers have been added to certain images by compositing single figures into a scene, twice removed from their natural habitat. Rather than looking to the future with hope, the photographic migrants appear in limbo, unable to observe their past at a time of uncertain future.

One world is going, another world is in formation. Modernity has arrived in China and the Yangtze is being devastated by industrial and agricultural pollution.

Nadav Kander, construction site, Chongqing C-Print, 2006, from 'Yangtze, From East to West'

Kander says that though it was never his intention to make documentary pictures, the sociological context of this project is very important and ever present.

The displacement of 3 million people in a 600km stretch of the River and the effect on humans when a country moves towards the future at pace are themes that will inevitably be present within the work.A Chinese friend I made whilst working on the project reiterated what many Chinese people feel: ‘Why do we have to destroy to develop?’ He explained that in Britain, many of us can revisit where we were brought up and it will be much the same, it will remind us of our families and upbringing. In China that is virtually impossible. The scale of development has left most places unrecognisable; “Nothing is the same. We can’t revisit where we came from because it no longer exists.”

Kander concludes that China is progressing rapidly, and the landscape – both economically and physically – is changing daily. These are photographs that can never be taken again.

Star of Greece

On Saturday we had a birthday lunch at the increasingly funky Star of Greece-- a culinary beach shack perched atop Port Willunga’s cliffs in Fleurieu Peninsula, South Australia. We ignored the fish and chips for a less than critical audience and went for the vibrant, fresh experimental dishes in the Modern Australian style.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, plastic flowers + umbrella, 2009

Abu Dhabi: architecture

I saw some images of contemporary architecture in Abu Dhabi the capital of the United Arab Emirates on television tonight. They were impressive and an indication of the immense wealth in the Emirates that has been generated from oil. It was such a long way from the architectural design in Adelaide and Australia:

RMJM, Capital Gate tower hotel, Dubai

What intrigued me was that, though Abu Dhabi one of the richest cities in the world, the architectural emphasis is not on being the biggest or the tallest as in Australia. It was more about technical ingenuity, innovative design and aesthetic significance. It is about the aesthetics of architecture.

An example: is Zaha Hadid's amoeba-like structure covered with a netlike window structure, organic lines, multiple perspective points and fragmented geometry that is in such contrast to the political and architectural culture that had emerged in the 1990s in Australia:

Zaha Hadid Performing Arts Centre, Abu Dhabib

This deconstructs both the classically formal, rule bound modernism of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier and the old rules of space — walls, ceilings, front and back, right angles. She reassembles them in “a new fluid, kind of spatiality”.

Zaha Hadid’s design for the Signature Towers, Dubai

This is proposed for Dubai's commercial district Business Bay. It is a mixed use development, including offices, hotel, residential, and retail areas and incorporates two link bridges, waterfront park, and promenade.

I'm unaware of any deconstructive architecture in Australia--- an architecture of "discomfort and the unbalancing of expectations". The deconstructure movement in architecture is usually associated with Coop Himmelblau, Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Daniel Libeskind.