The monthly No Wave readings are a sort of heir to the long-running Lee Marvin readings which stopped a few years ago. Curated by Dom Symes, Banjo James and Olivia De Zilva, they usually feature four invited poets. Each poet reads for ten minutes with a break between the second and third readers. The Wheatsheaf is a great pub, serving a wide selection of their own and other micro-brewery beers, wines and spirits. Always a nice buzz at these readings. Get along if you can. $5 entry.
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Near Ridge Park, Adelaide is a traffic sign, which used to warn of elderly people crossing. For some weeks now, the sign has been upside down (see above). It’s on Glen Osmond Road, near the bottom of the south-east freeway. It would be one of the first things people driving from Victoria see on arriving in Adelaide. (For non-Australian readers, there is a fair bit of animosity between Victorians and Adelaideans). I often wonder what they might think of the sign, especially if they’ve looked at optical illusion pictures. On the other hand, they probably just see an upside down warning of elderly people ahead.
Caution – One-eyed rabbits smoking cigars
Caution – One-eyed rabbits line-dancing
Caution – Abusive two-finger gestures ahead
Caution – Abusive two-finger gestures combined with A-OK gestures ahead
Caution – Abusive one-balled rabbits ahead
Caution – Elderly people helping each other across the road whilst doing head-stands
Caution – Elderly Inverted Line Dancers Ahead
Caution – Fancy cocktails with two straws ahead
Caution – One eyed rabbits drinking fancy cocktails ahead
Caution – One eyed rabbits spitting out fur-balls ahead
Caution – Double Fuck off back to Victoria
Caution – Bad shadow puppetry ahead
Caution – Rabbits cleaning their ears with Q-Tips
Hey Victorians: Fuck off back to Melbourne and take your bloody one-eyed, one-balled, cigar-smoking, fur-ball-spitting, cocktail-drinking, line-dancing, hitch-hiking fucking rabbits with you.
Glen Osmond Road, Myrtle Bank
Copyright Mike Hopkins 2018
Meet My Mother by Louise Nicholas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Louise Nicholas is a much-loved and admired Adelaide based poet. This book, about her mother Dorothy, builds on the writing of her mother, and supplements it with Louise’s recollections of her relationship with her mother. There are poems by Louise about her mother, poetic letters which her mother wrote to her in Louise’s adult travelling years, and sections of prose providing a timeline through her mother’s life.
Louise describes her mother’s life, in a non-pejorative way, as ‘a little life’. Most of us indeed lead little lives, without achieving or experiencing anything world shattering, getting through life as best we can. This book shows that a little life can still be an incredibly rich life, where the day-to-day challenges of childhood, family and ageing are wrestled with. It is written with the gentle humour and accessibility which characterises Louise’s poetry. And in Dorothy’s poetic letters to Louise, one can detect the seeds of Louise’s poetic style – just one of the many gifts that her mother left her.
A lovely book.
Well, not quite free, but only $5 on the door. A reprise of the launch of the 2016 Garron chapbooks at The Artisan Cafe, 252 Main Road, Blackwood, South Australia.
Probably advisable to book a table in advance.
For bookings/info call Rebecca Edwards on 8278 2473
On Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1857556531173873/
I’m a finalist in the Spoken Word SA / Draw Your (s)Words Summer Slam, this Friday 10th February 2017, from about 7 p.m at Jive, in Hindley Street, Adelaide.
Thanks to Jules Leigh Koch for inviting me to be feature poet at the FSP reading at St. Peters Library on Saturday afternoon, 4th Feb 2017:
Along with a number of talented performers, I am guest poet at the SPIN gig in McLaren Vale on December 3rd 2016. I’ll be reading from my recent chapbook, “Selfish Bastards”, plus other work. Thanks to Julia Wakefield-Houghton for inviting me. She’s given me a 20 minute slot, which is long by poetry reading standards. Perhaps an opportunity to respond to world events of 2016!
(Assembled using Lightroom custom templates)
I’m doing a photography course at the Centre for Creative Photography in Adelaide, the second module I’ve studied there. This week, the subject was formalism, and the assignment for the week is to take some formalist photographs. I particularly liked some of the “typological” photographs which the lecturer presented. “Typology is the study of types, and a photographic typology is a suite of images or related forms, shot in a consistent, repetitive manner.”
I set out from my house to search for ideas and the first thing encountered out of my front gate is a large Stobie pole. “Stobies” are a particularly ugly South Australian invention. They are power line pole made of two steel joists held apart by a slab of concrete and were were ‘invented’ by Adelaide Electric Supply Company engineer James Cyril Stobie (1895–1953). In my view, they are a blight on the urban landscape. However, they make a surprisingly interesting subject for typology photographs.
Here is my first cut:
