Week 31 – home alone

On Tuesday Maisie and I met up with Sally and Iggy at the Melbourne Museum, our winter rainy day activity destination of choice. They have a well-designed children’s gallery with building blocks, costumes, drawing, mammoth lego (I’ve never seen any so big!), outdoor games etc. I liked this old tram traffic control (which was in use in Melbourne before they introduced traffic lights) – the arrows on the various dials spin round the different coloured segments showing when it’s safe for different road users to use the junction.

Neil flew off to Hong Kong in the evening to take part in an expert forum on Discourse, so Maisie and I were home alone for most of this week.

On Wednesday, without Neil to wake us(!), we had a lie-in till almost 9am, followed by an hour in the park chucking pebbles into puddles. In the afternoon we went to the Linden Gallery to see an exhibition of works by various artists inspired by the irreverent attitude of a well-known (dead) Australian artist called Mike Brown. There were some fun pieces – one was a huge chaotic room-sized construction made of a rainbow of brilliantly coloured plastic tat – children’s toys, flowers, fruit, dildos etc. with little motors spinning things around and making bells tinkle, and lots of f*** this slogans, some carefully tapestried with lots of shiny beads. Maisie was really enchanted! She spotted a clock-face with a penis-shaped hand spinning round it and excitedly shouted out ‘cock’ (her word for clock). There was also a nice canvas covered with smears of plasticine, and Lynne (the gallery attendant) was telling me how we could attempt to reconstruct it with home-made playdough!

We walked from the gallery up along the pier to see the diggers busy building the new harbour walls – one of them is operating pretty much in the sea, it was very precarious! We saw a Crested Tern perched up on the railing and it posed for a portrait. Unusually, perhaps because it really was quite a chilly day, Maisie was happy just to sit in the buggy and take everything in, which made it a very pleasant afternoon.

In the evening I watched a pretty bad film called ‘Elles’, with Juliette Binoche playing a monied glossy mag journalist researching a piece on pretty young female students resorting to prostitution to pay their way through college. Really, it was just soft-core porn, all very clean and stylish, with Binoche, bored with her husband and brattish kids, drawn to the glamour and excitement of it all. It was by a female director too, so somehow particularly disappointing!

Swimming was chaos on Thursday – they’d merged two classes so there wasn’t the time or space to do any of the activities properly, but Maisie didn’t seem to mind. In the afternoon we met up with Sally and Iggy at the National Gallery of Victoria to catch a couple of new things. In the foyer they’ve installed a large circular blue pond filled with white china soup bowls, that a gentle current sends spinning around (see picture). When they collide they chime softly – it’s a beautiful, peaceful sound. Sally and I agreed that we need one at home to instil some daily moments of calm.

There was an exhibition of new work by Robin Rhode, a South African artist who draws on concrete floors and walls. His are wonderfully playful pieces – in chalk he’ll sketch a see-saw, roundabout or bike, photograph kids to pose as if they are riding it, then redraw it at a slightly different angle and get them to pose again, photographing each stage, and putting the images together in a stop-motion animation, so it looks like the kids are on a moving object. Sometimes he puts the stills together in a series, with himself as the focus interacting with the drawing – in one he wields (and draws with) a giant comb, in others he releases as flock of birds or a fleet of ships. Maisie loved an animation of a snapping crowd of pegs on a clothes line advancing on the artist and grabbing his hooded top and pulling it off – she watched it several times over shouting out at the evil pegs and sadly proclaiming ‘oh dear hoody’ at the end. One half of the exhibition was a nicely designed children’s room full of crayons and lined with wall-vinyls which children were encouraged to draw on. It was well thought out (designed by the artist), and there were lots of kids there enjoying it. Maisie was mainly into re-arranging all the stools, but she did a bit of scribbling. We’ve just introduced drawing time at home, and she always goes for the orange and brown pens (the other colours just don’t interest her!).

Friday was all about Maisie – morning storytime at the library and an afternoon running around at Playgroup. I had a nice chat with a mum who I haven’t spoken to before, Kellie, who had a very cosmopolitan life before her baby arrived, having lived all over Europe with her musician husband. She’s still not come to terms with the idea of settling down!

On Saturday Maisie and I went to the zoo, and fortunately the weather was lovely, mild and bright. It was definitely Maisie’s best zoo experience yet, and she worked hard at pronouncing all the names of the animals.

She was very excited by the leaping lemurs (‘lemur’ she shouted at the top of her voice – she has a favourite toy lemur) and other monkeys, including the orang-utans who were as scarily human as ever – you can see them plotting as they stare unflinchingly at you.

The seals in their glowing aquamarine tank were a hit, as they always are, and she enjoyed peering into a lovely pool of rays and tiny sharks.

All the Australian animals – koalas, wombats, kangaroos and emus went down well too. The giraffes were amorous today, the male just wouldn’t leave the female alone – it’s quite an odd thing to see giraffes mating! I was rather taken by this wonderful Common Iguana.

On Sunday Maisie and I saw two new exhibitions at ACCA. The first one celebrated urination/defecation as some sort of masonic ritual – we moved swiftly through it! The second one, by an artist called Daria Martin, was a collection of elegant shorts shot on 16mm film (the darkened gallery was full of projectors whirring away in a very satisfying manner), featuring brightly-clad dancers exploring spaces including the wonderful De La Warr Pavilion, and interacting with abstract shapes and odd little robotic creatures. Maisie was very engaged and chose to sit down on my lap and watch one of the films in its entirety.

Week 30 – Mainly Maisie

A very mumsy entry this week I’m afraid – I’ve had a bit of a cold so my limited energies have mainly been focused on Maisie!

On Tuesday a friend from Playgroup, Michele, invited a few of us round to their multi-level townhouse (a challenge once you have children!) for our kids to try out her newly purchased trampoline. Her daughter, Sophia, is a natural gymnast, but Maisie didn’t really get it at all! She was happy pushing a toy buggy around endlessly (this is her modus operandi at Playgroup). We were all either British or Kiwi, and all unsure about our future plans. Jenny, from the Midlands, has tried living in Australia twice (her British husband would like to settle here) but she’s decided it’s not for her, so instead they are going to try a new place – Ireland!

In the evening I saw the new film by the director of ‘Blue Valentine’, entitled ‘The Place beyond the Pines’. It was an ambitious triptych, the first part starring the undeniably gorgeous Ryan Gosling as a fairground motorbike stunt rider, drawn into bank robbery when he discovers he has a young son and becomes desperate to provide for him. The second section focuses on the idealistic young cop who shoots him down, is hailed as a hero but gets sucked into a coterie of corrupt officers, and makes the brave decision to whistle-blow.  The final segment pits the sons of these two men against each other, when they meet aged 17 (in a ham-fisted set-up) at school, not knowing who their fathers are. It was a shame that the film lost its way in this final section, when up till then it had been thrillingly intense, both men convincingly compromised and complex.

Maisie screamed (for no apparent reason) for 40 minutes through Wednesday’s workout, and was only calm if I chain-fed her grapes, so I didn’t build up a sweat at all (even though our helpful trainer, Leah, gave me alternative exercises to do by the buggy). As soon as we got to the café Maisie was as right as rain, running around with Elka, attempting to drink from all the dog water bowls! We strolled into town to revisit the Mexican photography exhibition we saw last weekend, as Neil and I had been thinking about the images and had decided that we might like to invest in one. They were just as strong on a second viewing, so I took a deep breath and handed the money over. The one we chose is particularly dramatic – a close-up of a fabulously painted female face, roaring. Hopefully it’ll inspire (rather than scare) Maisie! The picture below is one of Melbourne’s famous ‘laneways’ – old cobbled back alleys which run parallel to the main streets.

One of Neil’s birthday presents was a DVD of Steve Coogan’s most recent incarnation of Alan Partridge, as the presenter of ‘Mid Morning Matters’ on’ North Norfolk digital radio’. It’s completely compelling, whilst being virtually unwatchable! Apparently there’s full-length film of it due to come out in the not-too-distant future – the mind boggles…

The temperature has dropped 10 degrees since last week. It was a gloomy day on Thursday (a brief ray of sun made the leaves of our neighbouring trees glow), the sea darkly opaque and choppy. Torrential showers kept us inside for a long afternoon.  I was glad to escape to my gamelan rehearsal (although Jeremy’s carpet warehouse is freezing – we huddled round an ancient electric bar heater), where I finally made it to the end of a tricky meandering gender wayang piece called ‘Candi Rebah’.

On Friday morning my lovely friend Rochelle (mother of Holly and Alexis), invited Maisie and I to coffee at her place with several other friends. She rents a beautiful decaying 1930s art deco flat complete with geometrically moulded ceilings, and complemented by her and her partners’ choice 1950s furniture. I hadn’t met the other mums before but they all had interesting tales to tell and useful tips to pass on. Holly and Alexis were the perfect hosts, having no problem sharing their toys (in marked contrast to Maisie later on in the week when Sally and Iggy visited and she threw all her toys around the room rather than share them with Iggy!). The afternoon was spent at Playgroup, where Maisie discovered the push-along trike (see picture).

A low-key weekend started with an afternoon in upmarket South Yarra buying Maisie (non-upmarket!) winter clothes and tools for indoor activities. We found a small art gallery, showing quirky neon artworks (see picture). In the evening I babysat for my friend Rachel. Her husband works for an art-house film distributor, so they had shelves full of films that I was dying to see! I picked a documentary recently released here, called ‘Chasing Ice’, about a photographer who set up time-lapse cameras in the Arctic to capture the melting of the glaciers. The footage was stunning and absolutely devastating. Without sensationalising the topic at all, it was quite clear by the end of the film that man has already destroyed this planet once and for all. It was hard to know what to follow that with, but at that point (before 9.30pm), Rachel’s husband came home (he had some work to do and wanted an excuse to escape from the party!) so I got home earlier than usual.

I was a little unwell on Sunday so spent the day in, but Neil valiantly kept the cultural flag flying, taking Maisie out to two exhibitions – one about trams, the other on street art, and in between catching some sword-dancing at a Buddhist festival where a kindly-looking guy rushed up to Maisie to give her the last blessed ribbon bracelet of the day.

Week 29 – Mother’s Day and a 40th birthday…

On Tuesday we were treated to this dramatic sky on our way back from a ‘playdate’ in the park with the Playgroup mums…

Our exercise class was cancelled on Wednesday, but a couple of us met up anyway and nobly ran the perimeter of the botanical gardens pushing the buggies (although the uphill section did defeat us!). We drank our coffee reward in the children’s garden which Maisie loved – she hugged the sculpture of the Magic Pudding and was off exploring every corner, wading in the vegetable beds, climbing the rockery (you’d be proud of her, Lizzie!), getting soaked in the fountain. They’d roped off the areas around the trees as there were so many bees busy pollinating – nice to hear that the bees here are thriving still. We took our usual route back home though Albert Park, which took an awfully long time as Maisie insisted on walking, and not in a straight line! I spotted some new birds today – an Australasian Darter (or, better-named, the Snakebird!), and a Great Egret. There were a few pairs of Pelicans too, which always make me happy.

In the evening I hurried into town for the early start of a Bollywood film. Entitled ‘Three Idiots’, it is apparently the highest grossing Bollywood film ever. Released in 2010, it is modern in its sensibilities, with a well-plotted story about three young engineering students and their college hi-jinks. You can see why it has such broad appeal – it’s zippy, funny and entertaining, utterly wholesome (albeit peppered with toilet humour) and wears its deeply moral stance fairly lightly. It also throws in the spectacular scenery of Ladakh for the finale. The three leads were far too old to be playing students, but Aamir Khan, who’s actually a decent actor, had just about enough zany energy to suspend disbelief! As I walked out of the cinema, Federation Square had become a big Bollywood movie theatre. They were showing one of Amitabh Bachchan’s greatest hits (Kaala Patthar) on the big screen, for free. There weren’t many people watching (it was a bit chilly) which was a shame as it was an excellent spectacle. I watched a big song and dance number and a dramatic sinking ship scene before my energy started to wane.

Summer appears to have returned this week, but a gentler version, more like the golden English summer days that we vaguely recollect from our youth! On Thursday Myomi and Christopher joined Maisie and I for an afternoon at the beach. At last the children are beginning to entertain themselves – Christopher burying himself in the sand, Maisie driving all the plastic trucks along the boardwalk. There was actually time to relax and chat and soak up the rays!

It was Neil’s 40^th birthday on Friday, and we all spent the day together. The weather was glorious so we had a picnic at the beach, and Maisie enjoyed paddling (the icy chill of the water didn’t bother her at all!) and flying (see picture!). She had a big tantrum when it was time to pack up and go!

My friend Rachel babysat for us in the evening, and Neil and I went out to see a film together. It was called ‘German Brothers’ and was part of the German film festival. The director had a fascinating back-story, born in Australia to German/French Jewish parents – one a leader in the French Resistance, one who escaped from Auschwitz, who together, successfully brought the best of European culture – food, modern art, fashion, to Melbourne, establishing legendary restaurants and galleries. His film touched on all this, but was mainly documenting his recent friendship with a German musician who has spent his life trying to come to terms with his family’s Nazi past. The two of them toured key WW2 Nazi sites in Berlin and Poland and tried to reconstruct history and make sense of it. It was an interesting idea, but a rather scattershot approach meant that it was never more than the sum of its parts. And it was almost drowned in 1970s-style synth noodlings (courtesy of the German musician).

Neil had to teach on Saturday morning so Maisie and I headed into town to meet him off the train at lunchtime. We visited a couple of commercial art galleries on Flinders Lane. The first featured some incredibly striking photographs by two Mexican/Australian artists working in collaboration. One is a costume designer, another a photographer/cinematographer, and they had dressed as Mexican goddesses – vivid in make-up and traditional costume, in iconic Melbourne and Sydney locations, and had staged a shamanistic ceremony in a crumbling warehouse. All the images had huge energy and power – they had quite an impact on me! The second exhibition was in a gallery that focuses on craft-based work (it reminded me of the now-defunct Crafts Council gallery in Islington that I used to love going to). There were a series of garments hung on hangers on the wall (see picture) – at first glimpse they appeared to be just that, but on a closer look, they turned out all to be wooden sculptures!

As we left the gallery, the street was filled with protestors marching towards the state government buildings, campaigning for the introduction of gay marriage (note the pink Australian flag above). In Australia gay people have no legal relationship rights at all – there isn’t even civil partnership here. It is shocking.

Behind Federation Square we came across a pop-up allotment patch – neat rows of wooden-walled square raised beds apparently tended by members of local businesses in their breaks(!), full of vegetables (peppers, aubergines, lettuce, red chillies), herbs (a wonderful scent of basil) and little citrus trees.

In the late afternoon, on the Federation Square stage, there was a free-style street-dance showcase, with live street art (unusually the artists were painting rather than spraying their images). The highlight was a face-off between several pairs of superb dancers from a local street-dance school, who had to aggressively demonstrate their best moves to a randomly selected track. There was a real mix of physiques and styles – reggaeton, breakdance, body-popping – one guy was huge and wobbly, but amazingly light on his feet. The girls were the best (see picture) – their strength and flow and attitude was amazing!

On Sunday it was Mothers’ Day in Australia (Maisie’s gift to me is pictured below – note that it isn’t quite as it appears – the most basic bottle of any spirit costs $40+ here, so it’s a treat rather than a daily necessity!). Mothers’ Day is a pretty big occasion here with lots of special events scheduled, including the inevitable fun-run (I was able to resist the temptation!!) and an afternoon of classical concerts. We took Maisie back to an exhibition I had attempted to see before, showcasing Australian artists active in the 1980s (perhaps the only internationally well-known one being Leigh Bowery). Maisie had a 15-minute meltdown where her screams seemed to penetrate all three floors of the gallery, but after that she was quite amenable so we’ll have to hope we’ve broken through some kind of art barrier there! I popped into a little exhibition of art by sixth-form students and was surprised by how polished it was – beautiful Claymations, delicate engraved portraits on blackened coke cans, an elegant evening dress made of neckties, a svelte sculpture of seaweed and mussel shells and some beautiful lino-printing and lettering.

Appropriately for the day (or not, maybe), I went to see a Filipino film entitled ‘Thy Womb’. Set in a remote sea-dwelling community (precarious clusters of stilt-houses), it was about a middle-aged midwife and her devoted husband who are unable to have children, but are so desperate to do so that they seek a second young wife to bear them one. The film successfully combined their wrenching quest with beautiful ethnographic cinematography of local life – rug weaving, medicine ceremonies, fishing, markets and weddings. There were some stunning and shocking shots – huge basking sharks drifting under the protagonists’ little fishing boat, lightning storms, and most unusually, actual footage of a woman giving birth – the latter made the audience gasp, as it’s not something you ever really see at all!

Week 28… Around the world in 5 films (and a dance competition)

On Tuesday I met up with my elusive journalist friend, Madeleine, who has just bought a house in the next suburb. She told me about the auction process (the way most houses are sold in this area). She and her partner were one of four couples bidding, but the auction is staged in the street outside the property, and over 60 people had turned up just to watch. At their sale, the bidding didn’t reach the reserve, but as they’d made the highest offer, they was taken inside to negotiate an agreeable price, and 45 minutes later, they handed over a 10% deposit and the house was theirs – and that was that, there is no cooling off period. It sounds terrifying (as was the price that they paid!).

In the evening I joined Rachel at the Elsternwick cinema, to see the film ‘The Other Son’. Based on a true story, it was about two families who discover by chance that their 18-year-old sons had been mistakenly switched at birth by hospital staff. And one family happens to be Israeli, the other Palestinian. Although a little obvious in places (the two sons completely took after their biological families, not the ones they’d grown up in), it was an impressively unsensational film, full of well-observed and telling details.

Wednesday was a cool grey day, which started with a run round the perimeter of the Botanical Gardens – we were meant to do it twice, but I only managed one circuit (3.5km) before my bad knee kicked in. I did it in 20 minutes though, which wasn’t so bad! Maisie and I walked back through Albert Park in the rain, and there were so many wonderful birds. A flock of pelicans were sieving the lake for food with their big floppy pink beaks – a rare sight as you usually only see them in the distance circling out to sea. There were also parrots – white corellas with brilliant blue eyes and blush-pink heads, and salmon/grey galahs. And various types of cormorants, flocks of tiny grey crakes, purple swamphens (black with brilliant indigo chests), lapwings, ducks, swifts and swallows.

Another Indonesian film in the evening, ‘Love but different’, about the impossible love affair between a young Sumatran Christian girl and a Muslim Javanese chef, who meet in Jakarta. Although it had a serious point to make, it was culturally adrift, clumsily aping a Western teen movie. She was a Fame-type contemporary dancer (the routines she performed were excrutiating!), he worked in a Gordon-Ramsey-style Italian establishment (‘yes chef’!) and their rigid traditional families were comedic.

The weather on Thursday was beautiful – in the morning the sea was like turquoise glass, more brilliant than the sky. We went down to the beach in the afternoon, the sun a blinding white glow reflected back by the sea, as it gradually sank towards the horizon. Maisie was happy just to sit and watch the world go by. And there were some interesting things to see – including a guy on horseback trotting along the promenade dressed in a full Mexican cowboy outfit with huge-brimmed black and silver hat. He’s a local character we’ve read about in the paper – apparently various people would like to stop him roaming the streets on his horse, but there are no bylaws that can prevent him doing this!

On Friday evening I caught a new Thai film at ACMI. With the catchy title of ‘In April the following year, there was a fire’, it was a meandering autobiographical feature framed round Camus’ four stated conditions of happiness (life in the open air; love for another being; freedom from ambition; creation). A young engineer (the film-maker) loses his Bangkok job and returns home to the quiet of the countryside to pursue his passion for film-making and discover what it was that shaped his family’s course in life. It was a lovely film, meditative but not offputtingly mystical. On my way home I spotted the glass-baubled deer glowing through the glass wall of the NGV.

My Saturday afternoon escape was to a showing of a forgotten 1950s musical entitled ‘Les Girls’, starring an ageing Gene Kelly, with music by Cole Porter. It was a clever story (apparently based on the strucutre of Kurosawa’s ‘Rashomon’) about a libel court case, where three completely different accounts (told in flashback) are given of the same events. The story is of three showgirls and their lascivious (or not?!) co-star and manager and it was full of smart quips, dashing dance moves and gorgeous costumes. It was a treat to see such a lavish and colourful production on a huge screen.

Out in Federation Square, a large crowd was gathering for the opening spectacle of the second Melbourne Indian Film Festival (a big deal, with several multiplex cincmas involved and free open-air showings of classics). The event was a Bollywood Dance competition, judged by top choreographer Farah Khan, director Kabir Khan, and ‘India’s Michael Jackson'(!) Prabhudeva. Everyone was very excited (lots of families and young people, mainly of Indian origin), and armed with banners handily provided by the sponsors, which were waved enthusiastically at the end of each act. The competition was open to anyone, so it was a charming mix of wonderfully polished dance-school numbers and brave stars of their own bedrooms. Popular acts included a transvestite comedy rendition of a 1960s lovelorn classic, a chubby young guy doing his best Akshay Kumar moves (one of Bollywood’s worst dancers, and my least favourite as he never fails to look and act like an accountant!), and a slickly choerographed super-high-energy bevy of pre-teens in silver and aqua sequins. The host of the evening, a slight, heavily pregnant lady insisted on asking the judges what they thought of each performance, and their answers were always supremely diplomatic.

On Sunday we discovered an interesting commercial art gallery at the heart of our favourite Melbourne shopping mall, the QV – so yet another excuse to go there, if Big W (Australia’s equivalent of Argos), and the Asian food court (cheap sushi, paper rolls, bubble tea and green tea flavour iced yoghurt) weren’t enough. The exhibition was of work by the Designer’s Republic, graphic designers active in the 1990s with a Japanese/technological bent, who are known for their work with Warp records and a number of pop/electronica bands. It was a striking collection of bright spiky images in a grey concrete space, being admired by monochrome-clad visitors. Maisie was in a foul mood, so it was hard work to have a proper look at any of it! We went on to Federation Square, where there was an exhibition of temporary shelters for disaster areas designed by well-regarded Australian architects. There were two types of project – those that were designed to be constructed out of any surviving materials – sheets of corrugated metal, plastic piping, fabric remnants, plastic bags, earth etc., and those that were flatpacked to be parachuted in. I was impressed by one that was sort of like a stack of wooden boxes – it was tall and solid, with an architectural form which included a tower, making it distinctive and helpful to navigate by (it reminded me of the beacon towers that were successfully introduced in a Soweto township to help make sater routes across them). An igloo made of plastic bags full of earth was a nice (and cleverly soundproof) idea, but perhaps not quick to erect.

I went on to the Kino cinema to see the Danish film ‘The Hunt’, concerning frightened children and a horribly insular rural community. It starred Mads Mikkelson, an immensely successful (and impressive) but very strange-looking actor, as a man viciously persecuted by this community when he is (wrongly) suspected of abusing a lonely young girl. It was an unnerving watch, extreme but always plausible. It reminded me of Michael Haneke’s ‘The White Ribbon’ (although that’s almost too hard to watch, whilst being utterly brilliant!).

Monday was another stunning autumn day. I met up with Sally in the magnificent Fitzroy Gardens, where Maisie ran as far away as she could, swishing through the crispy brown leaves, and a bleary-eyed Iggy kept tight hold of his mum, refusing to smile and refusing to sleep. But the gentle warmth and rays of white-gold sunshine flickering through the tree branches made that a little more bearable for Sally.