After a few weeks of other creative endeavours, I’m back to my altered book “Escape” again, with the admonition to “Be your artistic self all the time…”
This double page spread includes copies of pages from another book I made – “About a Boy”, with Patti Smith’s lyrics of her song of that name, written and recorded after the untimely death of Kurt Cobain. The photo of Kurt, originally cut out of a magazine, was by photographer Stephen Sweet. Stamps of bird cages were used throughout that book, and I stamped more over the copies in here, also colouring in with the same pink and orange as the page backgrounds.
Here’s a detail of the multi-layering. The tree stamp is one I carved myself, during our trip to the Pacific North West a few years ago. I made a couple in response to each place we stayed. All you need is some cheap erasers and a craft knife – and a pencil to draw the image onto the eraser. If it’s relevant to your design, remember it will print back-to-front! Very important for text! carefully cut away the parts you don’t need, and you have a custom stamp ready to use.
One page is embellished with ‘found’ sequins, simply sewn in place, adding a touch of sparkle
Today was a fine, sunny May day, with blue skies and warm breezes.
So I give you this poem, in honour of the colour blue –
Azure
Kingfisher
Cornflower
Sea
Sky
Larkspur
Mountain
Slate
Cobalt
Lapis lazuli
Opal
Turquoise
Wren
Sapphire
Gas flame
Plumbago
Bruise
Streak
Bolt from
blue
Forget-me-not
Blue eyes.
Sure this poem is a basically a list, but please imagine it being declaimed by someone like Patti Smith, or Allen Ginsberg…
The photos are macro shots of some of my collection of coloured glass, the top two a fragment of a blue bottle – probably once filled with castor oil (yuk)- and the bottom one, a jar of old glass bottle stoppers, mostly picked up whilst gardening. Out tiny hamlet was, for a year or two, the site of a gold rush and a temporary home to hundreds of people, none of whom had any qualms about leaving their rubbish where ever it fell. Consequently, just below the surface of the soil, lie pieces of pottery and glass, and the occasional coin, which come to light after heavy rain, or after the road is graded, or when digging a new garden bed.
Music is powerful, it can take you to another place, another time. A song can be your personal Tardis. If I should happen to hear ‘Daddy Cool’, for instance, I am back in high school, 1972, for some reason in the gym, with it’s polished wooden floorboards and instruments of torture for those not athletically-inclined.
If I hear Muse’s ‘Knights of Cydonia’, on the other hand, I’m at the Big Day Out in Carlton, 2006, with thousands of other (mostly much younger) people, in a moment of pure joy. It’s 6 days since a huge bushfire (the Mt Lubra Fire) swept around our town, in a night of sparks, smoke and unnatural darkness. The fires burned on for days, around Pomonal and Hall’s Gap. I wasn’t sure if I should leave for the concert, but some rain came, and I went after all. Seeing Iggy front the Stooges brought the same primal awe as seeing Halley’s Comet just before dawn, years earlier. But when they performed ‘Raw Power’, I was remembering how I’d gone up the hill from home at around 9 on the Sunday before. The worst of the fire had moved past with the wind, and I went to see what I could see. I saw vast flames erupting on top of Mt William, glimpsed fitfully through rolling billows of smoke, a vision of gob-smacking natural raw power that made me (and the Stooges) seem a pathetic minor detail. At the festival that year I also saw the Violent Femmes (again) – Jesus Walking On The Water was my highlight of their set, Henry Rollins (spoken word), Sleater Kinney, the White Stripes, Mars Volta, Beasts of Bourbon, Magic Dirt, Magic Numbers – I forget who else. Mudhoney and Pearl Jam are playing in 2014, but I don’t think I can hack it any more. Maybe if they banned all those younglings, and put in more shade, I’d think about it…
Even if I’d heard the shout of acclamation that is ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, even if I’d known their music was going to Change My Life, I would never have been at the Palace in St Kilda to see Nirvana in early February 1992. I was almost 36, a ‘mother of five’ – the youngest only 8 months old – and if being the wrong demographic wasn’t enough, my younger sister had died on January 19th, and I wasn’t feeling brave or celebratory. So I never got to see Nirvana, live, in person. I’ve seen a lot of live video, though…
But I did get to hear ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ live, a joyous occasion when we went to see the great Patti Smith as part of the Melbourne Festival in 2008. It was in Hamer Hall, a splendidly traditional theatre. Our seats were in the stalls, quite close to the front, and as the night wore on, more and more people left their seats and crept to the front to dance before Patti. Introverts like myself don’t generally do that kind of thing, but I did stand up and sing along when the band played ‘Teen Spirit’, along with most of the people around me.
This isn’t what I planned to write at all. I was going to write about how I used to love to lie on the bed, eyes closed, cranking ‘Endless Nameless’, and visualising myself running up a narrow sandy path on a hill covered in granite tors. In places, where the music slowed, the going was steep, and where the music opened out, so did the path, as I climbed up, up around the south side of the hill. Finally, I would reach the top, where there’s a broad, flat rock, and as the song pants to a close, I flop down on this rock, and look out across the landscape to the east. It was so relaxing, I must do it again some time. I suppose I should add that this piece of music (the “hidden track” from Nevermind) is not to everyone’s taste, but I love it. It’s chili mac for the ears.
This endless, nameless hill exists in the State of Poetry, just beyond the pine forest where the little tea-house nestles under the rhododendron bushes…
Lord of the Dance,
Shiva!
Creator and Destroyer
in one-
Dance for me,
Show what I must
destroy
in order
to create anew;
Teach me to create
and dance destruction.
All that is born must die,
An endless cycle;
And that which is not born
Does not die.
I am that, Lord Shiva;
The Dancer and the dance.
I made this little book to hold the lyrics of Patti Smith’s “About a Boy”. I may share more of it later. Patti Smith is a great poet, musician and artist, truly an inspiration. If you haven’t read “Just Kids” yet, I suggest that you do so soon! She was a (fairly) ordinary girl who grew up to meet and work with extraordinary people in New York in the 70’s. Now she’s a living legend…
“…true love – any true love, no matter how impractical, improbable, or inconvenient – is not just one of the things around which to build your right life. It’s the only thing.”
Martha Beck
‘The Joy Diet’
“For emotional health, be true to yourself and follow the road that allows you to do the things that are appropriate, rewarding and relevant to you as a unique individual.”
Mary Dean Alwood
“The only responsibility you have is to work on yourself to raise your energy. That will become your gift to the world…nevermind security: preserve your soul.”
Stuart Wilde
All these quotes are, pretty much, saying “To thine own self be true.”
It’s a well known quote, but one that bears repeating, and expounding, because, in the press of life, with so many demands on our time and energies, it is so easy to forget.
‘Colour – love it!’, is from an altered post-card book, ‘Balance wildness and control’, from an Artist book called ‘Gridwork’ (featuring a lot of images of grids of various kinds), and the last book is one I made to hold the lyrics of Patti Smith’s “About A Boy”.
I love art, the act of making; it’s the road that allows me to be the most myself.
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