Making new toys with old ones

Sunday morning

Mulch Island

or, this is what we think of newspaper work (after Gertrude Stein).

Alphabet mask Zephyr (A :- Z)

April sketch (with Zeph)

Jason Workman is returing to Melbourne next month, so I'm looking forward to more WorkmanJones collaborations in the not-too-distant. In the meantime I have spent a few days trying out some things in the forest, a short walk from home. I'm currently developing a practice of biophysical poetry, while at the same time thinking about the physical comedy of Jaques Tati and Buster Keaton. Zephyr came with me one afternoon after school and I started to see the potential for more advanced father and son play too. 

April sketch from Patrick Jones on Vimeo.

Father and son free-dragging

At the local Neighbourhood House there are many great courses you can enroll in, including courses on self-sufficiency, crochet, blogging (taken by my great girlfriend) and Laugh Club. So last night after walking home with cuts and bruises from free-dragging with Zeph I devised a possible course I could run at Neighbourhood House. The ad in the brochure would go something like this:

Laugh Club not working for you? Then wreck yourself in a crash course in Free-dragging. The course tutor is one of the co-originators of this mutant form of Parkour (sometimes carried out in drag). Learn the poetry of hopelessness and the art of physical graffiti from a master free-dragger. Come with your own liability insurance and self-liberty assurance. Guaranteed to make you sore.

Film still from forthcoming video.

In the play of the everyday

A sun-bleached defence (or, camouflage now and down the track)

Lalgambook (or, this is what occupation looks like)

Visit my JustFreeWater site and find out how Coca-Cola occupies Lalgambook (Mt Franklin) as a brand name for their bottled water racket, and how Djadjawurrung resource and land theft continues today. There is not a single person of the Loddon tribe left to ask permission if we could camp at Lalgambook, let alone participate in the 'tanderrum', or freedom of the bush:

A diplomatic rite symbolising the landholder's hospitality, in which strangers were allowed temporary access to clan resources after a ritual exchange of gifts. Ian D Clark, 2003, p.117

Permaplay 1

I'm taking a short break, but before I do I'll leave you with this summer holiday flick.

This video has been removed at the request of The Fugs, whose song "The Ten Commandments" was used as the sound track. See comments below. As I no longer have the film on my laptop and therefore cannot edit the sound out I have taken the whole thing down. This film was only to appear as a piece of home-brewed digital theatre for free public enjoyment.

Today's post, All right's relinquished (or, 'Copyright Nothing' after The Fugs) (19/1/09), will examine copyright and intellectual (private) property relations within a capitalist system of culture.

The fox flies the Zephyr

Young people and the Yam daisy

This morning Barry Golding, from the University of Ballarat, led a group of us on a walk from inside the crater at Lalgambook (Mt Franklin) to Larnebarramul (Franklinford). Barry is a font of anthropological, geographical and archeological information dating from the earliest volcanic activity 20 million years ago, to more recent history, specifically that of the Djadjawurrung.



The other half of the day I spent at the senior citizens rooms behind Daylesford Town Hall with another group of people. The issue of heritage was a major sticking point with us, some people thinking that social heritage begins with Cornish miners. We were attempting to agree on a way forward for the contentious community reserve which adjoins the equally contentious youth (skate) park. On my agenda was public food, and I was sucessful in having fruit and nut trees (20-30%) considered as a recommendation for the final planting scheme.



Among the day's highlights was learning about the murnyong (Yam daisy). The murnyong was a major staple tuber that the Djadjawurrung lived off for tens of thousands of years, and which still grows wild in the area and across central Victoria. Barry had collected seed earlier in the morning and gave some out. I'm looking forward to propagating our five seeds. Another highlight was working with others of wide-ranging opinions to develop a common objective, and potentially the beginnings of a food relocalisation mind-shift, that local council backs on behalf of the community.

Chalkboard

Zephyr's War Music

Calvanism

The great social and ecological perversion that became Christian-capitalism.

One die mash around

Recalling: Daniel Spoerri post, Wednesday 29, October:
‘Spoerri's Magic á la Noix, p9’.

If the fact of becoming an architect after having built castles in the sand, of becoming a butcher after having pulled the wings off flies, of becoming a professor after having stuck one's nose in books, if all that indicates an incapacity to grow up, then I agree...

Soldiers of the Garden of Self Defence

Zephyr carves up Swallow

A few years ago Zeph, Michael Farrell and I were walking from one room at the Ian Potter (NGV) – a gallery for non-compostable toxiculture specifically obsessed with Australian art – to another room where Ricky Swallow's dumb Vader object sat mutely on the floor. Zeph took one look at the dark ziggurat-like mask and launched himself at it, quickly mounting the top. At the time I expressed my delight to Micki Faz (as nicknamed by Nick Keys) that Zeph, at age 4, had out-done his dad in terms of cultural achievement. This little flick, taken a month or two ago, reminds me of that beautiful spirit at the Potty.

Greenhouse and cubby