Deep in it.

time becomes slightly elastic when i land in New Orleans. 

i fly through the streets on my beloved bicycle, can't leave her alone for a moment though :: when i came out of the Bridge House after foraging for shirts i found her flirting with an almost more splendid velocipede. black feathers, no less. and fringy bits. bells, too.

i'm sure i heard her whimper as i rode her away from him.

i was in New Orleans to work on my preservation dye project at the Press Street Gardens, where i am a sort of de facto peripatetic artist-in-residence and discovered to my delight that Margee Green (the aptly named manager of growing things) has been growing coloured cotton.
blue and green, no less.

this cotton is softer than silk (though it comes tightly packed in hard sharp shells) and can be spun in the fingers to a lovely fine thread

the jars i set up last September are travelling well. i opened one to check and there were no nasty smells, everything behaving just as it ought. so i made nine or ten more and adorned the shelves of the glass house with them

while they were being sterilized in the big cauldron i found time to play on the tracks

possibly a little silly.

my friend let me bundle up a beautiful shiny new damask table runner. new in the sense it has never been used, though i am guessing it's some sixty years old at least.

it will be interesting to see if the preservation dye process manages to get colour into the cloth despite it never having been washed or scoured

i also had the joy of shooting for a new album cover with my friend John Fohl

(the link will take you to his last album from a couple of years back)...more about that when the next is released, fingers crossed my paws make the cut!

and then my friend Shelley kindly modelled for me.

the week in New Orleans went far too quickly.
after a day in the air i arrived back on the west coast
where the streets were littered with eucalyptus :: and where i kicked myself because i wasn't carrying a cauldron.

some of the eucalyptus was neatly piled in brown paper bags. i could have wept.
ah well. i hope someone else found it and used it

i spent my days here doing groundwork for the retreat in May (sold out, no drop outs, sorry)

and gathering materials together

wandering past the church of Saints Peter and Paul at a particularly ice-cream-cake moment

and taking time out for a glass of merlot at Caffe Trieste, so as to play with some paint swatch poetry. the trick is to choose a handful of colours at random, then write a line that corresponds to the romantic appellation of the shade. mostly nonsense but an amusing occupation between walking up and down the lovely hills of that fair city.

though when i reach the top of the Vallejo steps it occurred to me that losing the equivalent weight of this bag from my body would be a very fine idea indeed.

i'll let y'all know how that goes.

riding the rails

i deliberately scheduled a railway journey into New Orleans at the conclusion of our wandering in the land of enchantment. somehow i knew that i was going to need a good bit of thinking time, undisturbed by too much making or doing and preferably without the need to concentrate on driving

so

on April 2 i found myself sitting in a railway station

with a ticket for my destination

humming a song about being

"on a tour of one night stands

my suitcase and guitar in hand

and every stop is neatly planned 

for a poet and a one-man band"

none of which is true for me but

it's one of those songs that has stood the test of time

:::

i had secured a roomette to myself

and so could loll about in it in comfort

watching the whirled go by

and making soothing noises to myself

on the cedar flute newly acquired in Santa Fe

also

i made pictures with my batfone.

which was most entertaining, despite the fact that one of my favourite apps,

Autostitch, doesn't seem to work on the most recent version of the Fruit phone

 so i played with the Panorama setting instead 

which can be amusing on a moving train.

also i wrote.

the 31 hours on the train were enormously productive.

train travel allows the spirit to sit quietly on your shoulder

(it can sometimes fall off and get lost in flight)

at night i lay gazing at the stars until i was 

rocked to sleep in my little cradle shelf.

at some point in the night i awoke to see one streaking across the sky

in the hours before dawn the waning crescent moon rose 

i caught glimpses of my favourite constellation, the Pleiades.

train travel also allows poems to find you (sometimes when they stand by the roadside waiting with their thumbs out i'm simply travelling too fast to stop in time)

train travel can also put you into interesting social positions.

i discovered to my surprise that my ticket included meals.

on the first evening i shared dinner with a gentleman who had driven across America with his father because he didn't want his dear old dad driving a pickup across the country alone to his new abode in the Pacific North West. the trip back home was his first ever train ride. i think he said he had been on a train for four days already.
happily he was still enjoying it.

for breakfast i was directed to a table at which sat an older couple, on their way to share birthdays in New Orleans. they were quite clearly well off and seemed sweet but reduced me to the state of a stunned mullet when they left the table and he scooped up half the tip i had left for the server. (he had put down $5 for the two of them, i put down $4 for me and he then took $2 from mine. basically robbing the server).
i am rarely rendered speechless but by the time i had found my tongue they had gone.

my faith in humanity was restored by sharing lunch with a brother and sister (he slightly disabled, she taking him home from the west coast to live with her in Mississippi). i think, but i am not sure, that they were both adopted. the other person at our table was a grandmother of eighteen grandbabies who cheerfully announced that she was living day by day due to a brain tumour which, as she told us, had to be managed by "opening up my head every three years and scraping the surface back because the can't take it out" and that after that procedure she has to learn to walk and talk again but that the pain was worth it and she's just grateful to be here. 

the train crawled into New Orleans at sub-glacial speeds, which is probably just as well as the tracks are in a sorry state. and today, seeing the wobbly wooden trestles that the double-decker train had been balancing on, i was grateful for the slowness. 

(last night i was not so sure)

a tutorial (of sorts)

yesterday i received an email which said "tutorials, how natural color really stays on fabric, please". i'm pretty sure i've covered that topic (the 'why' as well as the 'how') comprehensively in 'Eco Colour', 'Second Skin' and 'The Bundle Book'

but i was still thinking about it in the shower this morning and then fell into a puddle of verbage. so, from the bear who (almost) never writes rhyming poetry, here is a tutorial. in verse. in my somewhat dodgy handwriting.

running red lights on memory lane

so i was looking for something yesterday 

(which i didn't find yet)

and while i was rummaging 

i found some old photo albums

from a time when pictures were regularly printed

when i made collages by cutting and pasting

not Photoshop (which hadn't been invented yet)

i found pictures from nearly thirty years ago

when my friend Yasmin (with whom i also shared a house) and i

co-taught for the former Arts Council of South Australia 

(which has now been reincarnated as the Country Arts Trust)

and went out on the Tea and Sugar train

with an exhibition of T-shirts

hand-painted and screen printed by South Australian artists of the time

(don't ask me why there are Flake bars sticking out of my ears

i have no idea)

 we went to Cook, Barton and Tarcoola

Hawker and Maree

(all in the arid lands of South Australia)

 and taught workshops in lino-printing and hand-painting t-shirts

at Tarcoola, the teacher of the 15 student school

happily dumped them all on us

and went off to the public house

that was the day we realised we should have packed a first aid kit. 

all we had for cut fingers was masking tape and toilet paper

i fancied myself a new David Hockney

sticking pictures together

which is why Yasmin appears twice in this one

back then i also had a dog with a spirit eye

and a very silly haircut.

we were too young to know better

threw mad parties

drove too fast

danced too long

sang too loud

they were very fine times

and

we are still friends

i'm glad i was there

the missing page

there was one more page i wanted to include in the recently published book of student work
but
for some reason i had filed it as 'z.doc', i suppose because i intended it to be the last page
and then
it got lost in the electronic filing system.

but as they say in the old country
"wer suchet, der findet"
and today i found the page so here is the text it would have contained.

I have on many occasions also been a student and would like to acknowledge and thank those who taught me. I wish I could remember all of your names but alas, age hath wearied and the years condemned...and some of the detail has become fuzzy with time.

But here’s a spirited attempt to list at least some of you :

Mrs Pownall [Nature Studies, Shelford CEGGS, Melbourne]

Mrs Williams [English and History, PLC, Melbourne]

Michael Peake [Art, Heathfield High School]

Nalda Searles [string theory]

Karen Diadick Casselman [lichenologist and dyer]

Dorothy Caldwell [textiles]

Christopher Orchard [storyteller and magician of charcoal]

Helen Carnac [enamellist]

Robin Best [ceramicist]

Julian Roberts [fashion]

Roz Hawker (metal magic)

Velma Bolyard (shifu)
Sandra Brownlee (notebooks that beg to be held)

John Kelley (my sax teacher)

Naomi Shihab Nye [poet]

John Schenk [Architect]

David Thomson [nurseryman]

Karoly Szabo [nurseryman]

Bob Blows  [nurseryman]

Tex [whose “real” name is lost but who was a stylish and erudite Professor in the Architecture Department at the University of Adelaide in the 70s]

Victor MacFarlane [Professor of Anatomy, University of Adelaide]

Brian Grigg [human encyclopaedia of sheep]

Arthur Phillips [watercolourist]
Joyce Schulz (milliner, cocktail appreciator and philanthropist)

Nikki Jackson [the miracle of the trashcan kiln]

Nancy Harford (interior designer, collector and passionate "liver of life")

...and of course my entire family, that goes without saying

+  +  +  +  +

i feel much happier now that's done.

in fact, i look a lot like i do in this picture, shot by the fabulous Haley Renee

x marks the spot

a LOT of pictures of the big apple

i have a confession to make.

i have been in New York since yesterday morning

and not set foot inside a single museum

instead i am living in the present

taking note of the everyday

and wearing out my boot leather hoofing it around town

blessed be the waitress at the Diner on 9th avenue

who made my day by asking to see proof of age before supplying me with a margarita

 

even though i am as wrinkled as the vinyl on that chair

 she probably just forgot her contacts

but it made my day

New York is full of marks and signs

delicious bookstores and really interesting clothing stores

like Mieko Mintz, where Eiko kindly let me take her picture

loved the road markings laid out in ducktape

 who knew that wedding gowns had a season

and that they were stored when it was off

the boots have the last word