Sebastian Smee, our favourite expat arts writer – and let’s all hope he stays that way – likes to decorate his writing with what he knows. His recent piece for The Australian’s Review section displayed Smee’s mad passion for the baroque but went so far over the top we suspect that Seb is enjoying a little absinthe at bath time:
“[Joe Furlonger] was on a high but needed a change: new subject matter, a different scene. I was spending that winter in a hotel in Paris’s 19th arrondissement. My wife was playing violin in the orchestra at the Cirque d’Hiver , the Winter Circus. The circus building — a neoclassical octagon in the Marais — was built under Napoleon in and has been under the control of the same family, the Bougliones, since the 1920s. The show is traditional: horses and tigers, dancing girls and acrobats, jugglers and tightrope walkers. A storyline always runs through the performances and this winter it revolved around the ‘Tool august’, a mischievous, childlike figure played by Gianni Fumagalli, the son of one of Federico Fellini‘s favourite collaborators, and himself one of Europe’s great clowns. A few weeks after [Ray] Hughes‘s call, Furlonger arrived in Paris with his wife, Heidi, and their two sons. They rented a large apartment decorated in Provencal style, near the Louvre. ‘Heidi hadn’t been to Paris for 15 years and that was hanging over me,’ Furlonger explained with a sideways look, half smirk, half grimace.”
You’d have to think that The Penrith Regional Gallery has to be as far from Paris and the Cirque d’Hiver as it is possible to get. Are they even on the same planet? The PRG is running a residency program until September 22 where some artists live in the actual gallery space. According to the story about the residency that ran in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Domain liftout, the concept for the show was to revert the gallery back to its original function as a house and a studio as it was for Margo Lewers and pay tribute to the spirit of bohemia. Five artists get to stay in the gallery – Arlene TextaQueen, David Griggs, Jose Legaspi, Elizabeth Pulie and Michael Butler – and share each other’s moods, idiosyncrasies and preferred TV programs:
“Griggs and Butler describe the work space as ‘wonderful’, though Butler – accustomed to spending the day by himself in ‘ordinary life’ is finding it challenging to adjust to a breakfast table full of strangers. “At least there’s good things to talk about,” he says. “They could be a bunch of deadshits.’”
Over at The Telegraph’s Sunday Magazine, their writer Simon Garfield has just caught up with an exciting new trend called “blogging” – which is some sort of online journal that people keep with their thoughts and experiences laid out in chronological order. His article New Kids On The Blog described the spread of the trend and its typical devotees:
“The blog came of age five years ago with the emergence of blogger.com and LiveJournal.com – two publishing sites from where even the most technobasic could unburden their thoughts within a simple mouse click. Last year, a survey of 3000 blogs by the software company Perseus concluded that in the United States 91 per cent are maintained by those under 30 and “the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life”
It’s spooky how closely they know us!
