This Is Not Art
Long weekends mean you can get up early on a Saturday, have breakfast with your great mate Kate, go to work, then go to Newcastle to an art festival for 24 hours and be back on the Monday to recover from it all.
Sporting an encompassing name, This Is Not Art is held annually in Newcastle and actually comprises several events - Sound Summit, Electrofringe, National Young Writers' Festival and Crack Theatre Festival. We camped in a tent city at a sporting field and were very comfy despite the rain.
Panel discussion on DIY venues
This focussed on Marrickville in Sydney, where there is a history of illegal gigs being staged in empty buildings. The amount of warehouses and completely non-residential streets in the area has made viable some licit venues like Red Rattler, whose owners pitched in to take out a mortgage to buy the property they are in. They described difficulties with getting environmental impact statements through the (Greens-heavy but apparently staffed with some non-simpatico types) council and the responsibilities of ensuring that people don't hang around outside the venue with drinks, for safety and noise reasons. I commend these venue proprietors for dealing with liquor licensing and security issues in concocting an antidote to awful venues like the Coogee Bay Hotel, which to me epitomise the profitous business of getting people boozed up and offering little in return.
Literary smackdown: fact vs fiction
Spicks and Specks-style game format. Marieke Hardy, Phillip Gwynne and Margo Lanegan for fiction, Anna Krien, Michaela McGuire and Guy Blackman for non-fiction. I've read and liked Anna Krien in the Big Issue but wasn't prepared for her acerbic, almost scary, but heartening onslaught on the host's inept scoring and the fiction panel's incomplete arguments. The heckles throughout made me wish I'd done an arts degree so I could join in with wit.
Vivian Girls gig
Three girls from New Jersey playing punk songs to dance to with sweet vocal harmonies reminding me of Kim Deal in The Breeders and The Amps. They all swapped instruments at the end and finished with feedback. It will be interesting to hear what they sing about as they get older, because for some reason they seemed to me to have the capacity to put forward some really serious stuff in with lighter songs, perhaps like Sonic Youth.
Panel on meteorology, UFOs and telepathy
These talks were academic and conceptually a bit beyond my knowledge but I went along because how often do you get to hear a talk on these subjects together? A PhD student described her work on storms in literature (King Lear) and getting an invitation to speak at a meteorological society meeting retracted after she described her planned speaking topic. A visual artist showed pictures of her ("life-size", though admitting not knowing how big this might be) UFO installation-in-progress made out of ties arranged in a spiral according to colour. Finally there was a paper by Astrid Lorange which described among other things the EEG recordings of thoughts about Earth's and human history sent to space by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan in the Voyager.
Workshop on the tech of making bleepy music
This was for Dennis - three musicmakers showed how they work in Ableton and one had a nifty box (wish I could remember what it was called; all I know is a chap in America called Barry invented it), with all these squares that you press to manipulate samples via a computer interface. This session was even more beyond my ken than the metaphysics stuff before, but it was super nerdy, produced some good sounds and Dennis enjoyed it.
Spelling bee
I was so keen to be a contestant but my slip of paper didn't get pulled out of the jar. This was a super fun event, not least because of Lawrence's hosting! We sat on couches and watched 15 audience contestants narrow to 6 finalists and one winner. I don't think the words got hard enough, but the grammar sure did! What the hell is an anacluthon? I did manage to finally learn what a split infinitive is though ;) And there was a side competition called Cheese or Font, an analogy of the true/false hands on heads/bums pub trivia game, in which I was one of four finalists but bombed out on the decoy of Black Forest (a font).
And, among all this, Newcastle seems like a pretty cool city with decent pubs and cafes and signs of a not-moribund artistic community. Will have to return on a regular weekend and see more.
Sporting an encompassing name, This Is Not Art is held annually in Newcastle and actually comprises several events - Sound Summit, Electrofringe, National Young Writers' Festival and Crack Theatre Festival. We camped in a tent city at a sporting field and were very comfy despite the rain.
Panel discussion on DIY venues
This focussed on Marrickville in Sydney, where there is a history of illegal gigs being staged in empty buildings. The amount of warehouses and completely non-residential streets in the area has made viable some licit venues like Red Rattler, whose owners pitched in to take out a mortgage to buy the property they are in. They described difficulties with getting environmental impact statements through the (Greens-heavy but apparently staffed with some non-simpatico types) council and the responsibilities of ensuring that people don't hang around outside the venue with drinks, for safety and noise reasons. I commend these venue proprietors for dealing with liquor licensing and security issues in concocting an antidote to awful venues like the Coogee Bay Hotel, which to me epitomise the profitous business of getting people boozed up and offering little in return.
Literary smackdown: fact vs fiction
Spicks and Specks-style game format. Marieke Hardy, Phillip Gwynne and Margo Lanegan for fiction, Anna Krien, Michaela McGuire and Guy Blackman for non-fiction. I've read and liked Anna Krien in the Big Issue but wasn't prepared for her acerbic, almost scary, but heartening onslaught on the host's inept scoring and the fiction panel's incomplete arguments. The heckles throughout made me wish I'd done an arts degree so I could join in with wit.
Vivian Girls gig
Three girls from New Jersey playing punk songs to dance to with sweet vocal harmonies reminding me of Kim Deal in The Breeders and The Amps. They all swapped instruments at the end and finished with feedback. It will be interesting to hear what they sing about as they get older, because for some reason they seemed to me to have the capacity to put forward some really serious stuff in with lighter songs, perhaps like Sonic Youth.
Panel on meteorology, UFOs and telepathy
These talks were academic and conceptually a bit beyond my knowledge but I went along because how often do you get to hear a talk on these subjects together? A PhD student described her work on storms in literature (King Lear) and getting an invitation to speak at a meteorological society meeting retracted after she described her planned speaking topic. A visual artist showed pictures of her ("life-size", though admitting not knowing how big this might be) UFO installation-in-progress made out of ties arranged in a spiral according to colour. Finally there was a paper by Astrid Lorange which described among other things the EEG recordings of thoughts about Earth's and human history sent to space by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan in the Voyager.
Workshop on the tech of making bleepy music
This was for Dennis - three musicmakers showed how they work in Ableton and one had a nifty box (wish I could remember what it was called; all I know is a chap in America called Barry invented it), with all these squares that you press to manipulate samples via a computer interface. This session was even more beyond my ken than the metaphysics stuff before, but it was super nerdy, produced some good sounds and Dennis enjoyed it.
Spelling bee
I was so keen to be a contestant but my slip of paper didn't get pulled out of the jar. This was a super fun event, not least because of Lawrence's hosting! We sat on couches and watched 15 audience contestants narrow to 6 finalists and one winner. I don't think the words got hard enough, but the grammar sure did! What the hell is an anacluthon? I did manage to finally learn what a split infinitive is though ;) And there was a side competition called Cheese or Font, an analogy of the true/false hands on heads/bums pub trivia game, in which I was one of four finalists but bombed out on the decoy of Black Forest (a font).
And, among all this, Newcastle seems like a pretty cool city with decent pubs and cafes and signs of a not-moribund artistic community. Will have to return on a regular weekend and see more.