mountain masala

battles and bruce

have been crook for the last 3 days with no voice and a cold. apparently its going around.

for a change i have resisted working while sick - and found it really difficult to do!

apart from sleep i've finally started watching the 'new' Battlestar Galactica series one - just fabulous. found out the www.emusic.com has bruce cockburn albums and so i've now got digital copies of my cassettes and LPs and filled the gaps in my collection. found a brilliant iPhoto camera app called Hipstamatic - great aged/cheap photo look. stunning.

that's about it really... yawn...

free sound design library

thanks to the age for this article about stephan schutze's huge free sound design library.

art galleries must embrace cyberspace

continuing the quotes about museums and galleries as stimulation for thinking about church, sacred space, mission, worship, etc.... but also with a digital edge.

"Art museums are fundamentally about space: the space a painting takes up on a wall; the space occupied by a sculpture; the space between exhibit and viewer. Increasingly, as museums embrace the digital age, that space also means cyberspace."

art galleries must embrace cyberspace

not unexpectedly, the whole conversation reflects what has, is or will take place in the church.

church as curated space

i'm getting back into reading about installation art, museums, exhibitions and all that as part of working on my research into 'alt worship'. so you can expect lots of quotes and stuff. Here's the start of a very interesting study and theorising around why people come to musuems and galleries and why their experiences differ so much.

“I would assert that the museum visitor experience is neither about visitors nor about museums and exhibitions, but rather it is situated within that unique and ephemeral moment when both of these realities become one and the same - visitors are the museum and the museum is the visitor. This new way of thinking suggests that we stop thinking about museum exhibitions and content as fixed and stable entities designed to achieve singular outcomes and instead, think of them as intellectual resources capable of being experienced and used in different ways for multiple, and equally valid purposes. It requires us to stop thinking about visitors as definable by some permanent quality or attribute such as age or race/ethnicity. Instead, we need to appreciate that every visitor is a unique individual, and each is capable of having a wide range of very different kinds of visitor experiences… Finally, it demands that we come to accept that the long-term meanings created by visitors from their time in the museum are largely shaped by short-term personal, identity-related needs and interests rather than by the goals and intentions of the museum’s staff.”

Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience by John Falk, Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek California, 2009.

awaken the spirit

thanks to jonathan for this post about a developing project to make the scriptures available to spiritual seekers using art and exploratory language.

awaken the spirit - sample here.

it's a really interesting project and i have multiple reactions. it's not the way i'd do it, but i warm to the project itself.

i really like the 'imaging the word' series that i've had for some years, so if it was me i'd be blending poems, prose and texts from a range of sources along with more varied media. but all that costs money and takes time too!

what gift will you give?

the church of england bookshop in the uk knows just what a newly ordained person needs....

if you're attending an ordination....

what will you give?

Life Online

Norton/Symantec have released a study called Norton Online Family Report: a multi-nation survey of how families set house rules around internet use. Download the report here. The report found that Australian parents are more controlling of family computer use than the global average. Read an online news report by the Age here (including response from Andrew Fuller).

Nielsen have released new stats that indicate that on average, 22% on online time is spent using social media. 72% of Australians use social networks online. Read the Age report on this here.

new music

clearing the decks today and downloading new music from emusic

- "phylactery factory" by white hinterland (aka Casey Dienel)emusic says: "Dienel is obsessed with exploring the ways beautiful things go bad; that she wraps these considerations inside whirligig piano-pop is a kind of further Statement Of Theme — big doom wrapped in glimmering packages. Phylactery Factory is the loveliest funeral you've ever attended."

- "take it from the man" by the brian jonestown massacre - a step outside the comfort zone to listen to what is apparently a brilliant take on 60's & 70's music;.  emusic says "simply amazing, evoking rock's golden age without ever disintegrating into slavish devotion"

- "watch the fireworks" by emma pollock - former lead singer of the Delgados from Scotland. emusic says "enough sugary indie pop confections to launch a hundred late summer road trips"

- "tangerine" by david mead - emusic says: "Blending rich harmonies with clattering, off-kilter instrumentation, Tangerine is a singer-songwriter record for people who don't like singer-songwriter records. With its endless hooks and indelible choruses, Tangerine is never saccharine, but always sweet."

- a couple of tracks from "inside the shadow" from burning star core - "droning violin, strings, brass, guitar, computer glitches and sundry percussion..." Mojo magazine

- some of doc watson's guitar pickin' - mighty fine, mighty fine! to go with the guitar tab book that bruce mullan once gave me. if i can ever play even one of these songs well i'll be the centre of every, err.... bluegrass gathering that i go to.... hmm.... so many flannelette shirts, so few hoedowns!

- a few tracks by the necks from the aussie soundtrack to "the boys" - broody jazz

have also been helping my daughter discover patti smith as part of her "elvis to u2" music class at adelaide uni - covering the history of popular music. apparently they didnt even get to u2!! (what a life!!). the question is whether, as jazz students, they got to trip hop... have the lecturers heard of massive attack, and if not, are they the reason that their adelaide concert was undersold????

never let it be said that my tastes aren't eclectic (now where's my "machine head" CD?).

queenstown to lake tekapo to home

we got back from our two week trip last night. there was snow overnight on Friday night, so the skylift above queenstown was all white. we changed plans and decided to drive to the snowfields at coronet peak after all. heaps of traffic going up the hill, so we stopped 2/3 of the way up so that maddy could throw snowballs at us... clear sky, little wind. fabulous weather.

we stopped at the bottom of the mountain for maddy and i to ride the shotovoer jet - a 6 km jetboat ride up and down the shotover river above queenstown. this was not cheap, but was seriously the best ride of my life - like the star wars' canyon race but on water! absolutely freezing.

wanaka to queenstown

cold night, sleep in again, left at 10 am. apparently the weather was going to be rainy and showery. instead we have blue sky and some clouds and no wind at all. spent 1/2 hour down by the lake, taking photos to the north, apparently the backdrop for Gandalf's flight to Rohan with Gwaihir after his rescue from Orthanc (thats what the book says... I'll have to watch the movie or read the book again - aside, I wrote my year 12 book review on 'the lord of the rings' - had no real appreciation of it, let alone an appetite for cultural tourism!). anyway, HUGE salmon and eels swimming below the jetty.