The Tricks of Art and the Art of Tricks

I thought I would eschew the use of exclamation marks!! And don’t you think I have been using too many question marks lately?? I know I find it annoying! Don’t you?

Of course, there is a point to punctuation. There are books written about it. I haven’t read them. It shows, I suppose.
Sometimes, it is said, with regard to punctuation and other things, less is more. I, personally, don’t buy it. Less is less and more is more, as far as I am concerned. I think the less-is-more brigade mean that less is best.

Either that or it is some salesman’s trick: “If you want this car with front and rear seats, climate control air-conditioning, six-stacker CD player, sat-nav, sixteen cup-holders, angora-like carpets, silk-touch safety belts, ivory-look steering wheel, silver-plated spark plugs, inbuilt vacuum cleaner, etc etc it will only cost you $39,999 drive away no more to pay. BUT, if you would like our sports model which has no frills but the engine makes a lot of noise so it sounds like you are going fast…then you will pay $69,999!” In that case, I agree, less is more.

Which leads me to “The Einstein Factor”. I was watching this on TV the other night(http://www.abc.net.au/ einsteinfactor/). I think quiz contestants have a lot to answer for. I notice that none of the contestants on “The Einstein Factor” has chosen “global warming” as their specialty. Oh! I forgot: we’re not allowed to say “global warming” any more since, apparently, if we say “global warming” too many times it might lead to another ice age. We now speak of “climate change” or better still “anthropogenic climate change”. Which leads me to a stunned silence.

I suppose the risk is that the adjudicators on the aforementioned show would start an all-in brawl about the questions, let along the answers. For example:

Question - If all the car-makers are putting “climate control ” air conditioning in cars these days why can’t we control the climate?

Is the answer: A. We can, but it only works in developed countries.

B. We can, but it is just too hard to get everyone to choose the same setting; or

C. We can’t, because you have to wind the windows down for it to work and no one is prepared to do that.

Cartoon “Martin Ferguson prods OPEC on oil prices” by Nicholson from “The Australian” newspaper: www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au

Nicholson is the excellent cartoonist in “The Australian”:www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au

This cartoon features Australia’s very own Minister for Resources and Energy and Minister for Tourism. The text is informed by Mr Nicholson’s careful observation of The Honourable Minister’s idiolect and manner of pronunciation of, what many quaintly refer to as, “the English language”.

Incidentally, when we arty types want to sound smart, we use the expression “informed by” at every available opportunity - I recommend you do too. Just throw in the occasional “informed by” whenever you can: people will think you are so well educated and knowledgeable. For example, when you see a film about robots, or any other film starring Arnie, you can sniff and say “the work is informed by post-modern notions of intertextuality, self-referentiality, parody, pastiche, and a frequent recourse to various past forms, genres, and styles etc” (see http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Independent-Film-Road-Movies/ Postmodernism-POSTMODERNISM-AND-FILM.html)

If you do this, you have no idea how this will change peoples opinion of you.

I painted the above picture while attending classes with a Kuranda artist, Claire Souter. The subject is a beach in South Australia. It was painted as an exercise in painting waves and stuff like that.

This picture is of Busselton Jetty. It is said to be the longest wooden jetty in the Southern Hemisphere. It certainly seemed very long when I walked out on it. I painted it for a friend for her office.

I just discovered how to put images in a post. So I did. These are some of my few pictures that don’t make me puke when I look at them. I also hope you don’t puke.

Some times it occurs to me that there must be something addictive about learning and performing magic tricks. How else can I explain to my long-suffering wife that I have just spent more money on yet another magic effect?

I think the addiction comes from the first electric sizzle of anxiety at every nerve ending that comes the moment, when, without sufficient practice, I recklessly launch into a new effect before a group of my “friends” and realise the great, horrible, empty, doom-filled cavernous gap between my imagined level of skill and my actual fumbling, numb-skulled level of skill.

This has happened once of a few dozen times, often among a group of fellow art students. At this moment my group of “friends” turn into a pack of critical, unsympathetic, spiteful, baboons, hooting and cackling with undisguised glee at my every slip and fumble. My voice, which I smugly imagine will boom out with calm assurance, emerges, squeaking and fluting with timid embarrassment as my “little magic trick” stutters to a tremulous, rambling, red-in -the-face-soggy-armpit-anti-climax.

At that point I slink away for a cup of coffee. And plan my next magic trick which will be soooo much better!

If this is the sort of experience that appeals to you, then my friend: IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU ARE MADE FOR MAGIC AND MAGIC WAS MADE FOR YOU!!!!

I was staggered by the explosion of words about Jana Rawlinson’s toe. On the other hand, the staggering may have been brought on by the red wine I was drinking.

At any event, I admit to stealing “Jana Drama” from the ABC news which I was watching at the time. (Jana is pronounced “Yahna” so it rhymes with “larger”, “drama” and “saga”.)

The item was about Jana Rawlinson, an Australian Olympic athlete who hasn’t been the same since she stubbed her toe on a concrete step in Monaco last year. Her favourite event is the 400 metre hurdles. Some sections of the Australian public had labelled Jana a “drama queen” (and worse) after she suffered a knee injury before the Athens Olympics and was seen to be emotional about it.

More recently, she has pulled out of the Beijing Olympics because of a number of injuries she linked to her sore toe. Reading further on the infallible and inexhaustible internet, I see the doctor who sliced into one of the fastest toes ever to cross a hurdle denies the toe bone is connected to the Achilles tendon bone or the right calf bone. Yana had fingered her toe for causing problems in these areas and thus leading to her current Olympic angst - see http://www.smh.com.au/new/beijing2008/surgery-not-to-blame-for-toe-woe -jana-told /2008/07/10/1215658037283.html (and this is where I found “toe woe”)

For myself, I have no complaint about the “drama” part of the Yana saga. Neither does the media. It is all fodder for the hench-persons of the forest-pillaging, gas-belching, air-wave-raping and generally vile multinational media conglomerates. One imagines said hench-persons drooling as they contemplate their next instalments of vacuous drivel they plan to spew forth onto the long-suffering consumer.

I feel sorry for Yana. She obviously works very hard at her job of running and jumping things. To succeed at this would obviously require more self-discipline than a Trappist monk. You would also have to stay fit and skinny. There would be a lot of waiting around and dieting. I imagine there would be a fair bit of running and hurdling exercise involved. (Frankly, I could no more hoist my lard-filled body over even one of those hurdles than chew through a steel girder.)

After all this, the best you can hope for is a drawer full of gold medals, a sore toe and the petulant whingeing of the fattest nation on earth (http://www.theage.com.au/news/health/australia -worlds-fattest-nation/2008/06/19/1213770886872.html) And then you have to go on TV to actually apologise for being human!

I say, bugger it. Let the bastard doing the most whining take Jana’s place in the 400 metre hurdles and see how they go. I’ll bet they couldn’t even waddle their way to the starting line without panting like a dog. Actually, there’s a thought: We could train a dog to do the hurdles- a particularly savage dog that could leap onto the armchair critics and rip their throats out.

Somehow or other I wandered onto web page about medical conditions (illnesses, syndromes, disorders or diseases). For example: http://www.kcom.edu/faculty/chamberlain/Website/diseases.htm

I noticed many medical conditions are named after people. Apparently, these are likely the doctors or researchers who first identified the condition. Some have intriguing, long names like Hand-Schuller-Christian Disease; Or Caffey-De Toni- Silvermann Syndrome. Your correspondent imagines there was furious battling over the order in which the names are listed.

Other conditions have simple, short names but this does not necessarily indicate a simple disease. Innocent-sounding, short names do not mean that you will be any less sick. They all sound horrible. Take Q Fever. The “Q” stands for “query” and in the 1930s, the time it was being investigated, that was the protocol for identifying an unknown agent. It is possibly the most infectious disease in the world. The pathogen is everywhere except Antarctica and New Zealand.

Of course, illnesses such as Rat-Bite Fever are named after the cause of the condition, not a person called Dr Rat (or Dr Rat-Bite). Other examples: Cat Scratch Fever; Tennis Elbow (the latter not as you may suspect, being caused by being elbowed by your partner in a game of doubles.)

In other cases, a disease is named after a sufferer, such as Lou Gehrig Disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS - perhaps the most famous sufferer today being Stephen Hawking). As the American comedian Denis Leary said: “Poor Lou Gehrig - died of Lou Gehrig’s disease. How the hell did he not see that coming? We used to tell him, ‘Lou, there’s a disease with your name all over it pal.’”

Next, there are conditions that seem to be named after the place they come from. Ross River Fever falls into this category. The virus that causes it was first identified in 1963 from mosquitoes trapped along the Ross River in Townsville. This has given rise to a potential, though as yet unrealised, tourism bonanza: “Welcome to Townsville - home of the famous Ross River Virus!!!”

Similarly, Ebola virus was named after a small river in the former country of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). Incidentally, there is a lady dentist in Cairns called Dr Epi Bola: “My dentist is E Bola.”

Interestingly, some diseases names sound like the names of countries - Progeria: ” I should stay away from Progeria at this time of year; dreadfully hot don’t you know?”.  Others are named for the cries of their victims - Itai-Itai: Japanese for “Ouch! Ouch!”.  Sodoku, a kind of rat-bite fever, sounds very like that annoying  Japanese numbers game.

Then there are the grotesquely named Kabuki Make Up Syndrome and Happy Puppet Syndrome. These are truly just too awful to describe and one must be very sympathetic to any sufferers of either of these conditions.

Anyway, the point of all this is that you can become famous by doing nothing at all but dying of a new disease.