verb's blog

A few photos from the VISIONS of MU exhibition launched at the Otto Mainzheim Gallery on the 27th of October in Hacchoubori. Despite a typhoon closing down many trainlines around Tokyo for the night, a lovely crowd braved the storms and gail force winds to make the opening. A live music and VJ performance by NabeOne and myself (Verb) kicked off the later night party with the tunes of DJ Moja and various random dj drop-ins and some live painting on the walls of the gallery until dawn.

Hanging out in the beautiful old town of Lijiang in the Yunnan Province of China with my friends Jun and Simon, we became friends with the owner of an Irish/Naxi Bar called 'The Sexy Tractor'. After a few games of darts in which I drew a piece on the chalkboard I managed to convince him to let us paint his walls in exchange for free drinks and rent in the upstairs loft where I am now staying.

Last night I heard consciousness whisper crude jukebox sonnets to an already subdued and lovesick dream, while in between the body slept with ancient purpose. Absurd in absent motion. Groping sculpted bedsheets with the thirst for intimacy. Primal as the moment of touch. Homesick for reality, warm and sweaty nights of tantric communism. Dreamlike but true. Never forever but long enough to seem, another dimension away.

Today I ate lunch in an inner city park of Brisbane's CBD. Sundried tomatoes and fetta cheese from the deli, avocado and organic grapes are my kind of decadence. Around me office workers are on their lunch break, eating out of plastic containers with plastic forks. I watch an ibis pick through the scraps of a plastic bag. The bird looks as if it could have flown straight from some ancient egyptian temple as I watched it glide here through the high rise valley, straight to modern day corporate Australia... It's noble profile doesn't deserve this kind of beggar pose, but the city makes scavenger's of all wild animals doesn't it?

This past week I've been staying with my old friend Daniel who I grew up with in Darwin, and is now a successful corporate lawyer. Dan's parents started Solar Village in the rural outskirts of Humpty Doo and built their own house out of rammed earth back in the seventies. I remember visiting their beautiful bushland property as kid and being spelllbound by the kangaroos that would hop up to the verandah to eat food offerings and learning about the real potential of domestic solar arrays for the first time. Nowadays in a classic role reversal that often happens to kids raised on alternative ideals, Daniel is working on the 38th floor of a high rise in Brisbanes CBD - about as different a landscape as possible from the one in which he was raised. I called him up a few days ago after making a shotgun decision that I needed to catch a flight out of Darwin that night so as to avoid the thousand dollar pricetag of a weekend ticket. Without hesitation he said I could stay in his apartment in Fortitude Valley. Legend.