Undergrowth Featured Blogs
Count Down to the End of Coal - Tome Fromme
Women and Microcredit
Sarawak Gone - Biomass & Wildlife Losses
the enterprise of destruction strikes again!
Dear Foxtel,
“See something. Feel something”. Such touching advice coming from an entourage of coma patients.
Who do you run for? Who’s the old man who changes you’re drip at night?
My advice, since you asked, Br’er Fox, Executive Director – T.V and Marketing: draw a big circle called despair and go stand in it.
Look in the mirror of every morning and repeat: I am defeated. See it. Feel it. In high definition!
Yours fearlessly,
x
The Enterprise of Destruction!
MIFF gets Garage Warrior
Many Hands at Webb Park
Guerrilla Gardening - Interview with Bronwyn
from a window, once (history images)
Every few months or so, I afford the development of another roll of film . There are about two dozen canisters lying about in my room. All in all, that amounts to about 600 images from my past life, from Europe and South America, which I have never seen. Images which mature like wine. In twenty years perhaps, they will be so potent and forgotten that just catching sight of one for the first time might cause my head to explode.
I remember a story Julian Burnside once told, about a middle aged and successful man who one afternoon found a collection of his own teenage poems stuffed between the pages of an old book in his sizable, though not ostentatious library. He gave himself the evening off, which he usually reserved for more serious reading and sat down to revisit his childish ambitions, feeling somewhat jovial, fully expecting as he was to laugh good naturedly at the foolish self he had once been. When his wife came into the study some hours later to say goodnight, she found him crumpled like a child in the corner of the room.
* * * *
"Hello there," said the frog from the ocean.
"Hello there, brother," said the frog from the well. "Welcome to my well. And where, may I ask, are you from?"
"From the Great Ocean," answered the ocean frog.
"I've never heard of that place," said the frog from the well. "But I'm sure you must be thrilled to see my magnificent home. Is your ocean even a quarter this big?"
"Oh, it's bigger than that," said the ocean frog.
"Half as big, then?" asked the well frog.
"No, bigger still."
The well frog could barely believe his ears. "Is it," he continued skeptically, "as big as my well?"
"Your well would not even be a drop in the Great Ocean," answered the visiting frog.
"That's impossible!" cried the frog from the well. "I'll just have to go back with you and see how big this ocean really is."
After a long journey, they finally arrived. And when the frog from the well saw the immensity of the ocean, he simply couldn't take it in. He was so shocked that his head exploded.
from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rimpoche
* * * *
In a vaguely related tangent, Z told me the other day about a love letter a man gave her years ago, written in Finnish. She doesn't speak Finnish, and she has never had it translated.
When I was in Bulgaria briefly, C and I found a series of black and white family photographs, which had been hurriedly ripped in half and thrown into a bin on the street corner.
The last image is a double exposure from Berlin, if I remember correctly. Whilst searching for something Sebald had written, by way of an explanation, I stumbled upon a passage of even less relation, which I now consider preferable. It has something to do with a life lead in such a way that "one might aquire the art of hearing 'wood rotting over long distances'".
baths of light ( leiko shiga )
An old lady found a collection of unusual water colour paintings lying in an attic. Not thinking much about it, she sold them to an antique dealer, for quite a bit more than she expected, who then sold them onto someone who knew that he was looking at a collection of original William Blake's. He made about ten million pounds, give or take a few million, by selling them to the auction house where I worked. One of the paintings, which I cannot find an image of, showed a prone body, above which another figure, a spirit of some sort hovered. It was one amongst a host of similarly themed images, which came before me while I was living in London. I can't remember the rest, but I was reminded of that work, and of Blake's work in general, looking at the work of the Japanese artist Leiko Shiga recently.
"The photographic paper becomes evidence. The printed image appears before me, smelling strongly as though it were some kind of raw food.
Confronting the inevitability of my own death and the passage of time, the act of creating frozen time resembles that of prayer.
The body is the empty vessel and the medium through which the images pass. What is memory? These people and situations have been sacrificed by the photograph. Look at what they have offered to that world. "
- words and installation by Leiko Shiga, at MOCA, Shanghai.

