[ hold :: this space ]

so many things i’ve been meaning to write about…

it’s finished now, but Ecstatic City at the ngv was simply superb. Due to the water crisis in melbourne the fountains in the moat at the front of the gallery have been switched off, so Chris Doyle made a fountain by projecting images of melbourne people jumping onto the front of the gallery. It was beautiful.

21:100:100 is still on… it’s a sound installation in at Gertrude art gallery, 100 works by 100 sound artists… everything ambient, electronica, drone. i was a little underwhelmed when i walked in - i wanted images, or darkness, some way of getting lost in it - but after a while i felt like a kid in a candy store. It’s an overwhelming collection of works, best consumed in medium sized doses over repeat visits. we were there for a couple of hours the other day. i’d really like to do more with sound in the stuff we do. it’s always the thing we think of last, the accompanying soundtrack rather than the central piece…

i kept meaning to blog about man on wire when i first saw it, but couldn’t ever find the words. It’s an extraordinary film, one i still think about. a couple of friends have said they won’t see it because they’re terrified of heights. i’m not good with heights [i'm not scared i'll fall, i'm scared i'll jump], and it didn’t bother me at all when i was seeing the film. oddly though, later that night i was lying in bed, and i felt almost paralysed with fear as i thought about what Philippe Petit had done. he was walking - dancing - on a tight rope, a quarter of a mile above the earth. it’s a film about passion and courage and the pursuit of dreams, but more than that, it’s about wonder and awe and defying the hypothetical and real laws of gravity that would keep us pinned to earth. i loved it.

tonight we’re having a between the spaces dinner to plan a christmas ‘moment’… and then i’m off and away for a week. see you when i’m back.

Andrew Denton interviewed Philippe Petit on Enough Rope tonight, in anticipation of Man on Wire opening in Australia this week.

Denton: Of all the amazing things in this act, the thing that most astonishes me is when you lie down on the wire, you lie flat, and then you stand up again. That strikes me as breaking several laws of gravity.

Petit: [bemused, as though the idea of laws of gravity is entirely new to him] You know, I never thought of the high wire as a technical world,  although i am practicing still today three hours a day on the wire. I always thought of the wire as theatre, as something really very special and inspiring, where the physical act should not have the most importance… and when you say that laying down the wire and standing up is physically demanding and physically difficult, i’m not interested in that. I’m interested in the idea… of a man or a woman walking on thin air or a little wire, that at some point will be so well in their world that they can fall asleep…

Is that not our task?  Finding the way of being so well in the world that we are bemused by the idea that some law of gravity might get in our way…

i think this has a thousand possibilities…

i just wanted to archive these…

David Foster Wallace:

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan motherr-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

and
Steven Weinberg:

When I was an undergraduate I knew a rabbi, Will Herberg, who worried about my lack of religious faith. He warned me that we must worship God, because otherwise we would start worshiping each other. He was right about the danger, but I would suggest a different cure: we should get out of the habit of worshiping anything.

Someone told me the other day that they’ve not heard me quote Christians, only articles / books against Christianity. I’m not sure whether that’s true, but if i think about it, the writing that really makes me think - as compared to that which simply confirms what I believe - is written by those who are asking the unanswerable questions… and they mostly aren’t Christians, and often they are asking them of Christianity. And after being confronted by that sort of writing I dread reading most christian books, purely because the rehearsed responses of christianity are so often anaemic and self-serving…

in the meantime, the other idea we had for a winter solstice sacred space involved lots of knitting and mulled wine… i think this could be part of it… knitting our prayers for the world. i think it would work…

see you next week.

‘The dichotomy between beauty and necessity has always been a false tension. Yet as a distraction, it has been extremely effective at crippling our power to bring full-bodied, earth-rending change. And those of us who are most intent on justice, those of us who are activists, and those of us who stand in the barrage of steady societal critique perhaps need to drink in more art than anyone else. In our line of work, the task of stoking our vision and constantly imagining possibilities is absolutely essential.

We can be so harsh and ascetic as we fling ourselves against the needs of the world. Art is accused of being bourgeois because much of the creation of art takes time and solitude and staring out the window. And how can we give ourselves permission to do that when people are starving and there is work to be done?

I think of Judas bemoaning the fragrant ointment that could have been sold to feed hundreds of hungry people but instead is poured in that single lavish, revolutionary gesture onto the head of Jesus. He views the profligate gesture as sin, and feeding the poor as the only good.

I know that voice. it comes from my own lips. But if we always see only those who are starving, we will continually wander the desert of the frantically working and overwhelmed. What we need - desperately - is to not be overwhelmed. And the single thing that keeps us from being overwhelmed is imagination…’

- taken from ‘How one justice-seeker was redeemed by beauty’, Dee Dee Risher, in Geez Magazine Spring ‘08 edition.

i’ve heard the rumour twice now… that i applied to be a candidate for ordination and was knocked back. just wanted to say that i haven’t applied [and won't be], but the church would indeed have been right to knock me back if i had.

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i’m ordering these for christmas presents [no-one i buy them for reads this so i'm safe to put this here]…. i think i just had the beginnings of an idea, something to do with pictures of jesus on the cross, chocolate and easter worship… i might need to add to the order…

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loving this also :

There are hundreds more on the website, with the following explanation:

Rotterdam-based photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek have worked together since October 1994. Inspired by a shared interest in the striking dress codes of various social groups, they have systematically documented numerous identities over the last 13 years. Rotterdam’s heterogeneous, multicultural street scene remains a major source of inspiration for Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek, although since 1998 they have also worked in cities abroad.

They call their series Exactitudes: a contraction of exact and attitude. By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. The apparent contradiction between individuality and uniformity is, however, taken to such extremes in their arresting objective-looking photographic viewpoint and stylistic analysis that the artistic aspect clearly dominates the purely documentary element.

roddy hamilton writes the loveliest liturgies, and the community at abbotsford were home away from home for me, for all those months i was in scotland. i love what they’re doing with the CAOS arts project: 700 people involved in art and music in the local shopping centre on saturday… wordy…

the nosh is over, and jonny’s on his way back to london. i had another phone call from someone today telling me how inspired they have been by jonny’s input at a workshop last week. his stuff seemed to tap into a new energy that’s kind of bubbling up all of it’s own accord in different places around the church. his visit was the perfect thing at just the right time.

my head is full of things to think about in response to the last few weeks - the labelling of worship, worship and mission, risk and safety in worship, more on wild spaces, cultivating imagination, the power of imagined opposition, resistance and dignity… and there are a few things about to begin that i’ll post about soon. i just need a couple of days to get some headspace back before writing things up.

i put together these wine labels for worship i did at the nosh, but ended up not using them … i’m not sure if i like them or not… maybe i’m not sure i quite understand them.

and finally, a few random inspirations from the last few days:

what the news will be like when the world is fixed

the residents of regents park

newspaper blackout poems

Everything Nina Katchadourian does makes me think differently about the world. I’ve linked to sorted books before. I loved this today.

Missing her already: Pamela Bone, columnist for the Age, died last Saturday. She was the person I most want to be like when I grow up - courageous, passionate, honest, prophetic, and a beautiful writer. They’ve reprinted one of her columns in today’s paper.

… and a late addition that may not yet make sense: I love this line from Rothko’s entry on Wikipedia, “I am not an abstract painter. I am not interested in the relationship between form and color. The only thing I care about is the expression of man’s basic emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, destiny.” I wonder if that’s why so much of our worship seems like a vapid watercolour when it’s laid against the reality of life. we forget we’re working with the paint of tragedy, ecstasy and destiny…