..with the Ides of March

G'day Possums,

Shane contemplates the Ides of March

Interesting times in Oz presently  but more of that later in "Wombat Droppings."
















The book I'm compiling of the last ballet performance photographed is nearly finished and has afforded during the lengthy post process, selection and lay-up, time to consider the value of books in comparison to individual or video images as a method of presentation.

Obviously I favour the book having produced and self published some 12 of them over the years.
I find that the photo-book falls into categories of A/ Collection or Album, B/ Collection/Record, C/ Narrative or D/ The subject/object itself.

Each book is without question an amalgam of all these categories but each should, I think, be looked at within the general category framing them.

Nude: Themes And Ideas is very much in category “A” as a collection of images taken over many years with the individual subjects grouped by theme or concept.

http://www.blurb.com/books/4001005-nude-themes-ideas

or

http://www.blurb.com/books/4450730-invitation-to-the-dance 

Invitation to the Dance may be seen as partly “A”, “B”, slightly “C” but mostly “D”.

The visual delights of cinema are many but ephemeral. 

As with the actual performance, all you retain in your memory is the sense of your response to discrete moments and the totality of the whole.

Video, (well the bog-standard, single viewpoint record of a performance, that is) contains little or no emotional engagement with the subject and is really just a very plain record that the event actually happened.

The book on the other hand by the very nature of its post performance process can elucidate an essence of a performance and bring together the overall “feel” of the whole in its discrete selection of images that are cropped and adjusted to enhance the moment. The disadvantage of movement being reduced to “stills” is more than compensated for by those “stills” being able to be read at leisure within the performance narrative.

Shooting video or film for cinema is a wholly complex creative business of another form but books contract that event into a more accessible one.

And this little meme from   http://bookriot.com/   says it perfectly.

I have just been notified of having been short-listed as one of the 25 images selected from around 100 entrants for the Kingston Arts Lens Mist 2015 Award at the end of February..... image below.

St Kilda Beach, Melbourne

Wombat Droppings 

or the chronicle of Australia's inexorable slide into Fascism.

Rabid-the-Hun’s constantly foolhardy “captain’s picks” have landed him like Julius Caesar, facing the Ides of March or more appropriately from his “Team Australia” rabble, a  (k)”Night of the Long Knives.”

According to Rabid, the “Far Northerners” of Queensland were being as “absent-minded” as the “Tardis State” Victorians, in their historic turnaround of their political landscapes by voting out in a single term, Conservative, right-wing, free-market oriented governments.

That people in this country look like they are awakening  that the agenda promoted by “The-Coots-With-Queer-Ideas-From-a-Parallel-Universe” (IPA) and being implemented by the Liarbril Office-Boy  rabble under Rabid-the-Hun is not to their communal advantage at all is a welcome change.

Attempting to salvage his badly listing, barnacle encrusted ship, SS Liarbril, Captain Rabid made one of his few forays to the Canberra Press Club to reset his now poisonous narrative.

Unfortunately, all he could do was reiterate the lies, slogans and blame of the 2013 election campaign with stuttering repetitions that the aforementioned public have really ceased listening to.

The most ludicrous of his assertions was that, "We've never been a country that's ripped off generations to pay for today. And under my government, we never will."

He forgot to mention the years of plenty under “Little Johnny” Howard when instead of investing in infrastructure it was all given away to middle class welfare for short-term political gain.

He forgot to mention his “Climate-Change-Is-Crap” idiocy; and in extolling the “virtues” of repealing Carbon Pricing and ruining the development of Alternative energies, he is inevitably condemning future generations to far greater expense and hardship.

He forgot too, to mention the dismantling of a “world’s best” National Broadband Network to satisfy the business plans of IPA Donor, Rupert “The Ugly American/ Phone-Hacker” Murdoch or that reducing wages and stripping penalty rates, introducing $100,000.00 University fees and dismantling one of the worlds best health systems is actually not conducive to a prosperous or civil society.

In short, with this mongrel Prime Miniature still ranting about Labor being a shambolic rabble is, as I said years ago, only a projection his own rabble’s incompetence and complete lack of ability to lead or think creatively about a vision for the nation other than destroying it.
They have to rule as they have no capacity to lead.

The Ides of March are on the 15^th of that month… will he last that long?

Hoo-roo Petals,

Shane