Chirpy Cheep Cheep

I remember this song being played at a backyard barbie in the early 1970s.

Check it out on YouTube

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=iT1y8xwl2HA&feature=related

Spirograph commercial

See this 1973 commercial for the Spriograph on YouTube

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=LbvmKzf_wr4

The female unicorn - the beginning

Well, I've ordered a tube of lilac Hobbytex paint and some of that non-woven fabric that looks like the stiffening stuff Mum used to sew into collars and cuffs. Yes, there's still a Hobbytex factory in Sydney (www.hobbytex.com.au). I've been quietly slaving over Photoshop, creating an image I'm going to title The Female Unicorn. It stars Denise (who is making a Manwich in the previous blog) on a rearing unicorn waving a feminist flag. Yes, Denise has gone through a huge process of self-examination and self-realisation since that day with the Manwich. After this, things have to move off the computer and into physical reality as I trace the design and work out a sort of paint-by-numbers colour scheme. Can't wait until the tube of lilac turns up!

The Race Weekend

It's the race weekend in Bathurst. With the sound of the races in the distance, we sat around Karen's gorgeous little laminex kitchen table and worked out some stuff. The soundscape would be different in each room and you'd be able to hear all three simultaneously as you wandered through the space. Karen has created a series of Manwich posters and furry things with bands of plastic, very 70s, very now. I'm starting to book in my interviews. The first is on Tuesday, the last is on Wednesday, November 21. I want to interview up to 12 people in that time.

macramé

Macrame Lives

Reverberation as afterlife

I just heard this phrase on Radio National in a discussion about an exhibition on surveillance. A man talking about walking into a cathedral, hearing a choir, and even after the choir stopped, the overhang that still filled the space, suggestive of afterlife. It's that silence - impure silence, overhang - that follows the moment. The quality of the air when the voices stop. The voice is lost, but this exhibition gathers together the lost notes, the notes floating on the air three decades later, after the Hobbytex tin was closed for the last time. There had to be a last time the tin was used, rediscovered decades later, rusted on. The tiny noise of the last metal-on-metal sound of the sprung metal hoop closing over the top of the tin.

Craft books out of the library

I used to love going to the local library with Mum and getting out craft books. This was in the 1970s when small works with felt were all the rage. I made a gorgeous little figure called Humpus Dumpus - I still think about him from time to time. Mum might even have him packed away somewhere.