[Dan's blog]

1. Kerbside Pickup/Sarah Logan + Parking Sun
2. Why Need I Feel Detrimental Emotions Such As Self Doubt and Jealousy/the Hauntingly Beautiful Mousemoon
3. To be a new pollutant, or some name like that I lost the track list/Hygene Atoms/ The New Pollutants
4. Major Tom/space lady
5. B2/The Great Rock and Roll Swindle/T Raumschmiere vs Rechenzentrum
6. Crazy As fuck/Brief History of Rhyme/Mc Hawking
7. Reich Remixed/The Desert Music/ freQ.Nasty + B.L.I.M.
8. Dtung geeng mayee/Dondtree jeen bra yook/Stylers
9. Nub/the Hauntingly Beautiful Mousemoon
10. Anyone Can Play /Anyone Can Play, anyone can sing/ Ben Frost + Lawrence English

a review for Art and Australia.

A review published in Realtime+OnScreen

• Electrofringe, Newcastle CBD and online, (curated by Sumugan Sivanesan, Ben Byrne and Cat Jones) September 28-October 2
• This Is Not Art, Newcastle CBD and online, September 28-October 2
• Gift/Back, by the unreasonable adults, TINA shopfront space, 513 Hunter st, September 25-October 1
• RAW, Colectivo Anatomic, Civic Arcade, Newcastle. September 29.
• Filastine
• DJ Scotch Egg

I am perched with my computer in front of the oven, thinking about what it will be to leave here. Perth, that is. I am in Perth. It's been well wicked strange to be here, 7 years since i was around last, really. Sorta. My mother's house is a weird decoupage of my chilhood, the tiny little weatherboard house crammed with the paraphenalia of 18 years of my growing up, pictures that I'd never looked at before because they were so ingrained in my eyes that they were part of the walls... portraits of the missing members from the dwindling crwod of my accident-prone relatives... all the detritus of my home from the era when my parents split up 10 years ago. In my homesick drowse i know the blurry visions that wil haunt my senile retreat to childhood when it comes.

From an email sent out by the Contextual villains:

Hello all,
This is a quick email to let you know The Contextual Villains have just launched a brand new website with plenty of new projects and Feast On Scraps III. You are receiving this email because you have somehow become entangled with The Contextual Villains, maybe a new project is up which contains some of your work... or maybe you have participated in a previous Feast On Scraps... or maybe you would like to participate in the current Feast? Anyhow, the urls are included... hope you are all well

cheers
the villains

A review for Realtime magazine.

Graffiti writers versus public artists. Funding legitimacy versus community legitimacy. The fractious arts community versus itself. Private Commonwealth Games security guards versus the customary streetlight. The environment makes it hard to ignore that the street art component of Nextwave is on disputed turf, and some of the best works in the program have harnessed contention to their advantage.

Taking no prisoners in the battle against saccharine public art is the arresting Clean, championing the city's homeless people and graffiti artists, both of whom have been made more unwelcome than usual in readiness for the Games. The stencil-art mainstay of Hosier Lane is infested with the ghosts of the multiply-evicted street dwellers, in the form of sensor-triggered audio recordings. The always cringe-inducing "You don't have any change, do you?" drops like an epitaph in this little space, as it starkly and suddenly illuminates the mass deportation of the city's poor. The surveillance state paranoia of officialdom is cheerfully inverted, as Big Issue vendors and drunken teens harangue you from above, in place of the silent police cameras. (Hosier lane in fact sports an blanket and bottle that some hapless sleeper has abandoned, i like to imagine, in their irritated flight from the self-fulfilling prophesies of the sound-art work made to mourn their passing. But anyway.) Under Clean's umbrella of official art approval, or perhaps just the usual surrender to the cult stencil status of the lane, graffiti here is largely unmolested by council cleanups, densely layered as always, and Clean's own small street decorations (parodic wallpaper with a repeating council wall-buffing motif) are already vanishing beneath a layer of fresh scrawls.

A dash of ice crystals in the mid atmosphere refract rays of sun and glimmer yellow against the dusty pink sunset, reminding people of custard and beaches and raw meat and lense flares and other sublunary commonplace items that the earthbond can harmlessly project onto heavenly phenomena; later the sun will set and reveal an infinite void sewn with saucepans and belts and scorpions. i am riding across the sydney harbour bridge on a borrowed bicycle, where i am hiding in my friends houses and living in a sorta half way house of half-house-wayfaring so i can pretend i am somewhere i am not committed to.

now there is a page in my diary titled "HOMECOMING", which must mean something significant.
According to that digital flight status display, we have just passed onto the edge of the green-brown splodge of continent-in-satelite-view. Outside, all i can see is stars, and 10 thousand metres of void. But under it, i'm sure, are the warmly glowing pixels of the continenet that birthed me. prissy, expensive, agoraphobic, insular, paranoid Australia. Hello.
this is not a triumphal homecoming; it's an undignified retreat. between my shonky financial skills and a couple of soured deals regarding my work prospects, i find that my cash is gone. So my options have evapourated, and i'm here. keywords: misplaced, uneasy. the british airways plane that has been pressed into my service is buggy, flakey, crumbling. with ungenerous thoughts in my head such as "britain=decayed empire" and "they conquered the world and learnt nothing about how to cook", i step onto my native soil in the predawn light. and then spend sunrise clearing customs.

dorms. the public bus of sleep.
buses. the roadtrip of the friendless.
Alternatively: wealth buys us the right to loneliness.
*sigh* i just farewelled ros in the jakarta airpoert today after 12 days of rambling around various bits of indonesia. now i am in one of those ignominious retreat phases, where i realise that i fucked up in my budgetary planning phases, and my travel optios are largely: keep a low profile and perfect my soul, stay on friends floors or dorms and eat packet noodles.
a contrast to the last 4 weeks of living large on the tourist strip. we've both had probably the most heavy-duty touristic encounter with any country that either of us has ever imagined. staged traditional performances, hotel rooms with rubbish service and toilet paper. tablecloths in the restaurants. and the result , in past-bali-bombing, post-suharto, post 9-11, post-tsunami indonesia has been mostly surreal. the expat joints are still packed out, because disaster only attracts expats, but the tourist joints are... not. we have spent the days in a succession of eerily empty venues... empty apart from the performers, and us. traditional ramayana dances, wayang kulit shadow plays, gamelan performances... have all been a bunch of sarong'd performers that outnumber the audience by 20-to-1, (40-to-1 when one of us goes to the toilet)... the urge i have to know if any of these shows would go ahead if we didn't fortuitously turn up 5 minutes before is somewhat like the urge i used to have to know if the fridge light goes off when you close the door. or do people just go back to their houses, smeared in hanuman-the-monkey-god makeup, with their tail over one arm, make a quiet cup of tea and watch foreign sitcoms on telly? Even the local Dangdut nightclub has been utterly empty of patrons apart from this 26 year old boy and his 50-something year old mother. The sexy girls in sequined miniskirts and knee-high boots carolled and jiggled before us alone. every now and again, one fo the girls would step out of the spotlight to entice us onto the dancefloor with her, and then would retreat into the comfortably blinding brightness in surprise when she saw a very different couple than she expected sitting there in the front-row booth seat... ill-kempt age-disparate whitefolks in a nest of empty beerbottles... In staggering reversal of free-market dogma, the price of tourist services has not fallen for us due to steep competition, but skyrocketed, as the becak drivers close ranks in price-gouging solidarity, sucking every last drop from the gormless foreigners. (Mental note: send this anecdote this to the World Bank. reverse 50 years of economic policy. have a cup of tea in front of a sitcom. globalisaion quashed so easily.) Anyway, travelling as the only audience to multituidinous performers is strangely like travelling alone. it's been touching. and we've had bonding time and all that. and i am now startled to find how much i miss ros as i farwell her at the jakarta airport. and it's not just that i have no-one to shout me dinner tonight. i remembered that it's been 7 years since i knew where home was, and about the same length of time for her too. What land did i come from? Where do i live? it's one thing to become accustomed to your own rootlessness, and another to find that the most stable person in your life is just as rootless. I want my mum.

2am, jakarta airport terminal, i find ros, my mother, lying on a bench in the quiescent jakarta inernational aiport terminal, reading a book. here we go, 10 months since i saw her last, as she packed my suitcase full of a 5 years backlog of tax returns for me to do on the plane as i headed out fo the country, in the way that only a mother can. so, uh, we agreed to meet again in indoesia for her holiday. two weeks of traversing java on a quest to climb mount bromo. because it's thered and now, so are we.
So now we're in yogyakarta, most javanese city in java (i like places like that) trying to find 1) places from a vague memory of school trip i took here 10 years ago and 2) all the friends that i mean to meet here but missed by virtue of being about 3 months late. Doing badly on both counts, but there's no time, we've got mountains to climb, and zines to write together. travelling with the person who wiped your bottom is an odd thing. (for a start, as i write this she is commenting that i took an abnormally long time before starting to wipe my own, you dson't get THAT kind of tale from my lips normally). interpreting between the worlds of my memories of where i came from and the place that i am now... exposes the secret fence sitter in my soul. perpetual transit boy. free radical. I wonder where my community is.