Sunday, February 23, 2014

Enjoying it properly

She said that while she loved the animals, and particularly the shellac-tongued wolves who were hurling themselves against a sheet of nothing in Cai Guo-Qiang's Falling Back to Earth exhibition in Brisbane -- the whole experience of walking among all those oddly kiddy animation figures in empty spaces -- of seeming the only alive and impatient thing in a frozen room so long as the other tourists didn't move too quickly (and in the room with the jelly-like pool, her incomprehension that the white-mottled blue should actually be liquid: that the drop falling from the beam above was falling into something that ran rather than shivered) -- while she loved all this, as soon as she noticed the imperfections in the meetings of animal feet and floor or sand -- the gaps all over the place -- these apparently trivial imperfections stopped her from enjoying it properly since all she could think about now was how the thick splayed legs of stiffened fur were hollow. The Story Bridge, however, with its frequent signs that addressed imminent suicides was something she didn't expect at all: these signs and the bridge's continual groaning -- as well as its raised view of the red scraped cliffs under the place called Fortitude Valley.

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

No earthly use to them if we stopped

As soon as we saw the little red car with its hood up and three figures around it by the side of the Bylong Valley Way I thought, the poor suckers, and all the more poor suckers since Vance and I, as we've often said, would be no earthly use to them if we stopped -- we couldn't even ring anyone since there had been no mobile coverage for hours -- perhaps we could offer them water -- just perhaps we could squeeze a person behind (to take them where exactly? Vance was asking) -- but as I slowed a bit (there were ruts in the road) I could see that the figures I thought were worried about the oil or a broken pump were in fact just leaning towards each other over the engine to compose a selfie that they were sending, I had to assume, into a future that might include a show-off moment -- a joke at a party, a funny post -- about the time they broke down or appeared to break down on the Bylong Valley Way.