Major(ca)ly excited

T-minus six sleeps until LB and I flee London for a week of self-imposed dissertation exile. In the Mediterranean no less.

I was about to say that Saturday cannot come fast enough but having just glanced casually to my left and spying the fat pile of notes and scribbled essay plans I strategically placed yesterday for maximum guilt impact, well, Saturday can come when it's ready - I need this week to write another 5,200 words. Give or take.


It was always the plan to put the whole bloody thing in a drawer for a week once I had the bulk of it written - a bit of breathing space, some time out, some distance... Yes, I know how it sounds and yes, my dissertation and I are involved and yes, we're going through a rough patch... More than anything it's just a chance really to recharge physically and intellectually without the aid of stimulants and a daily contribution to the profit margins of the local corner store and their Diet Coke supplier.

Last week was designated for all things writing and general genius. It turned out to be a week of soggy, foot-dragging exhaustion and academic ennui. Thank god for dramatic death scenes and overwrought acting on Australian afternoon soap operas. To be fair, I did spend an awful lot of time thinking last week, and the week before, trying to find those elusive signposts for my elusive argument. Fortunately the concentrated brain frying wasn't entirely in vain as I did have a couple of significant eureka moments - elusive flashes of intellectual clarity - that struck, somewhat oxymoronically, while battling noisy, shoving, hectic public transport experiences. Honestly, if the Circle Line had wi-fi I'd sit there all day.


Anyway, I have a lot to do this week, including buying a beach towel, but I can't wait for Saturday because I know that irrespective of how much Redbull I need to drink over the next five days (read: A LOT) and how utterly crap I feel by the end of it (read: VERY), I know it will be done. Because my dissertation does not have a passport and is not allowed to travel.

(B)right on! A weekend away

It is still officially Monday and already the weekend feels like it was decades ago. I'm not sure if that's the sign of a terrible week to come or a fabulous weekend just gone. A little bit of both perhaps?


Brighton was just delightful and the perfect remedy for a long last week. LB and I had a great time, staying in this cute-as little B&B with sea views and not a hint of chintz (though some serious wafts of incense...) Arriving late on Friday we had dinner in the Lanes before waking up on Saturday to a beautiful, sunny, near-cloudless day - ideal conditions for a coastal walk and some sooking about a lack of hat.



Hopping the bus to Rottingdean, something of a Brighton ritual these days, we began our walk with some perilous hobbling over the pebbles for a token dip of the toes in the freezing water of the English Channel. After some considerable thawing we meandered back to Brighton for a further wander around the Lanes and a stroll through the Sussex Food and Wine Festival (with a well-timed arrival for a cocktail-making demonstration. Gin o'clock anyone?)

5,112

First drafts of introduction and chapter one? Tick.

It is an unbelievable relief to have this first big hurdle out of the way. The next big hurdle will be surviving the feedback from my tutor on Monday afternoon. But one thing at a time.

It's late here and I should probably head to bed - I've had a collective 8 or 9 hours sleep over the last few days trying to get this chapter written by today's deadline and I would be feeling elated that I got it done if I wasn't already busy feeling woolly headed and dopey.

Anyway - my capacity for clever has been drastically reduced, 5,112 words later so I am about to crawl into bed. Tomorrow is a new day and me, LB and my new "you finished your chapter, you look like shite, go on you deserve it" haircut are off to Brighton for the weekend and I am so excited a) to be getting out of London and b) to be leaving my computer behind. Am I done yet?

Prom date

I'm toying with the subtitle "This Dissertation has been brought to you courtesy of the good folks at Redbull and Diet Coke."

I am tired and a bit teary and generally feeling not like some epic mountaineer but like the epic mountaineer's sherpa. Dissertation writing is lonely, heavy business and I am s-l-o-w-l-y going insane. My days run something like this:

8.30am: alarm goes off
8:40am: snooze button
8:50am: snooze button
9:00am/9:10am/9:20am: snooze button
9:30-10:30am: shower, breakfast, faffing, 1st visit of the day to the Costcutter for Redbull and Diet Coke
11:00am: Sit down at computer
11:02am: Get up and find something else to eat, struck by pangs of procrastination masquerading themselves as peckishness
11:05am-2:15pm: write, struggle, smack head against wall, (optional 2nd visit to Costcutter), write some more
2:15-2:45pm: Half Hour of Shame (read: Home and Away)
2:45-3:00pm: miscellaneous faffing
3:00-7:00pm: write, struggle, write some more, smack head, (optional bout of tears), (optional 3rd visit to Costcutter)
7:00-11:00pm: all or any combination of the above, plus occasional guest starring events such as movie dates, dinner dates or, as happened this week, a Prom date.


One of the myriad adventures LB and I added to our list several weeks ago was a date to the BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall and so on Tuesday we headed off to Kensington for some high brow culture. And by high I mean Up in The Gods high, back row, count the bald heads below high. It was so fabulous. A bit of Mendelssohn, a bit of Sibelius, a bit of schizophrenic pretentious contemporary and we had ourselves a ticked box. The whole point of the Proms is that for not very much money (our tickets cost 11 pounds) anyone and everyone can come and experience classical music at the Royal Albert. While the whole experience is designed to be unpretentious and relaxed I'm still not sure how I feel about seeing someone in their tracksuit pants sipping a glass of rose at the interval. I think I feel, well, "just no."

If you can't say anything nice....

...Don't say anything about the Midlands. In fact, don't go to the Midlands. It is, as the name suggests, the Middle of England. It's also, as fittingly described by most other English folk, a Shithole - quote, unquote.

This bank holiday long weekend has been an adventure wholly lacking in one. LB and I took to the train on Saturday morning to meet his sister and her husband halfway on their trek to Newcastle, their temporary home for the next three weeks before emigrating back to Sydney (via some seriously exotic travels in Europe and Asia of course). Anyway, we were optimistic about a fun weekend away - cute country pubs, walks in the countryside, cute country pubs. Hmm. Not so much.


Uppingham, the little village we were all staying in didn't even have Sky TV - the horror! - I think that nailed it for LB and his brother-in-law when it came to trying to find somewhere to watch the football. For the rest of us, it was a general lack of things to do. There was one great restaurant, that we did manage to dine at, once, a big fuck-off lake, Rutland Waters, that we made a token effort to walk past and then, driving aimlessly from village to nearby village, we got desperate enough to drive as far as Melton Mowbray, home of the famous ye olde porke pie. Only to find Ye Olde Porke Pie Shoppe closed. Ahh the Midlands.

Dissertation Karaoke

I woke this morning with soggy eyes and an elevated sense of already elevated stress about my dissertation. And all because I had a dream. A dream where, instead of writing 15,000 words on some aspect of contemporary art practice, addressing all relevant cultural and political theories, I had to write an album. Not only that, I had to then present each of the 12 self-penned songs on my album, explaining the structure, content and intent of each verse, sing one of them and then design an appropriate cover which had to feature an image of yours truly. And please justify that too. I have felt sick and anxious and nervy and consequently exhausted all day. Ahh Panic. Hello my friend.

Busy is over-rated.

It's a terrible thing to wish a week away but staring down two full days of nannying, an all day group tutorial, a new job and two nights at the bar and realising diddly squat was going to be accomplished on the research front, well I really had no other option. Because I'm still resisting my former ways of chocolate as a coping mechanism.

Some ish and some art

I've started August in earnest... Ish.

Tidied my room? Ish.

Started the arduous process that is researching my dissertation? Ish. With a dash of tick.

Returned fervently to my exercise regime of twice-weekly swims? Cough. Next?

Vowed to be a better writer, better ponderer, better Bondi girl when it comes to being 12,000 miles from home? Too early to say but I'm feeling optimistic.

The last time I wrote the parentals had just left and I was about to depart for Barcelona for The Meal of My Life at The Number One Restaurant In The Whole Wide World. That is a tale that very much needs to be told - a gastronomical, emotional, artistic(al) journey through 35 courses and some bloody fabulous wine. See previous point about being a better writer. To be honest, I don't yet have the words. But they're coming. Ish.


So to August for now and all things school and art and heavy intellectualisms. It's Dissertation Day Two and god bless Diet Coke - the ultimate fix all for hangovers, headaches and a curious affliction called Brain Fry. I popped my British Library cherry today and despite the curious fuzzy-headedness that resulted from six and a half hours churning through books on politics, monuments and the problematics of collective memory in artistic representation, I left feeling rather virtuous and too tired for tears.

As part of my Earnest August month - and because, you know, I'm doing a Masters degree in Contemporary Art - I have resolved to make more of an effort to see more art. It sounds silly I know, but in all my years as an art journalist, the more I wrote the less I actually had time to see. I am turning over a new leaf.

In truth it started last month, dubiously enough, with a visit to the Wapping Project in east London. A fabulous old building, the former Wapping Hydraulic Power Station in fact, it's been converted into a killer art space for exhibitions and performances but that also includes a chi chi restaurant and a cute-as little book store in the garden - inside a greenhouse.

What a total shame the exhibition we saw was utter shite. I hate feeling like art is taking the piss out of me, because I'm normally such a staunch defender of all things weird and ugly and challenging and silly. But this was, well, it was crap. An exhibition about the cultural history of eels, yes, eels, in Japan and the UK. There were some lovely sound installations, recordings of the daily kerfuffle at the Billingsgate Fish Markets, but otherwise, it was a room full of vitrines holding paraphernalia about eels - everything from fishing baskets to those naff patches your brother sewed on his football jumper. Yes. The Parramatta Eels got a mention...


So thank god for a wheatfield in the middle of Dalston.


Part of the Barbican's Radical Nature exhibition, the architectural collective EXYZT turned an abandoned railway line in east London into a functioning mill, with its own power-generating windmill. You could go and bake bread or simply lounge in a deck chair by the wheatfield and revel in the sheer delight of this little pocket of oddness.


As part of the off-site project, American land artist Agnes Denes was invited to re-create her famous 1982 work Wheatfield - A Confrontation. Twenty-seven years ago Denes planted two acres of wheat in Battery Park landfill in New York. Interrogating ideas about food, energy, economics and waste, it remains an iconic work:


Falling a little shy of two acres (by about 1.9 acres...) Denes' Dalston wheatfield is nevertheless a thought-provoking and in this instance, quite charming, interruption in an otherwise pretty drab industrial site. I liked it. No ish about it.

And then TODAY (earnest, earnest) I finally managed to get to Trafalgar Square to see Antony Gormley's take on the Fourth Plinth Project. Now I'm not sure what I think of Antony Gormley (shades of Artist-as-God complex perhaps?....) but his work for the Fourth Plinth was interesting, loath though I am to use that word because it says everything and nothing at the same time. The intellectual equivalent of a Milky Way bar.


But well, it was. The Fourth Plinth is, as the name suggests, the fourth plinth in iconic Trafalgar Square. The other three bear historically significant monuments dedicated to well, I'm not entirely sure who, but I'm sure they're important. Anyway - the fourth plinth, in the north west corner, was built in 1841 and intended for an equestrian statue that never eventuated. It was empty until 1998 when the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce commissioned a series of temporary contemporary art works to sit on the plinth. Rachel Whiteread, Thomas Schutte and Mark Wallinger are just some of the big names to have plonked a big piece of sculpture on it.

And now it's Gormley's turn. For his 100 day work, One and Other, the artist invited members of the British public to sign up for a roster, an hour at a time, to sit on the plinth. Well, to sit, paint, sleep, dance, mime, protest - whatever the hell they wanted really. I'm not even sure it has to be legal. 2400 people - 24 hours a day for 100 days - are living the dream, immortalised as living, moving pieces of sculpture in one of the coolest locations in town. I imagine the view's not bad either.

I wasn't really sure what to expect, British Library Brain Fry and all. Maybe it was the hours of reading about monuments and democracy and the individual versus collective experience, but it turned out to be quite breath-taking seeing this tiny woman atop this huge plinth, just sitting and drawing. It was lovely too to just sit myself for a while and let my brain cells re-coagulate. While it wasn't terribly exciting up there on the plinth, there was still something quite impossibly cool about it, in the great tradition of anti-establishment gestures perhaps. And then the hour was up. And the crane came. And the lady with the sketch pad was replaced by a young girl with a banner that read "Happy 5th anniversary Sarah-Jane and Phil". It wasn't Shakespeare by any stretch of the imagination - but I think that's the point.


Speaking of Shakespeare though and funnily enough El Bulli comes to mind. Laughter, tears, confusion, strange nonsensical words and a period in the middle when we thought it would never end. Never mind being transported to a magical otherworldly place. And no, I don't mean the Costa Brava.

But that is a tale for another day. Soon. Ish.