A Red Question Mark for Australia?
We acquired our copy of Neville Cayley's "What Bird is That?" in the early 1960s. With it's mighty red question mark on the dust jacket, that well-worn edition remains our favourite.
Do we see too much through the filter of Big History when we imagine that red question mark and its jackass branch secretary morphing out of the red hammer and sickle? Cayley was born in 1886 and first published this work in 1931, so he had lived through the rise of Communism and the new consciousness of that strong red signage.
Thoughts too of Yeats' The Second Coming (1919), beginning with a trained bird of prey sickle-arcing beyond the falconer's call and concluding with a question, What Rough Beast is That?
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
History Plays
1979 : Return of the Laughing Inspectorate
1997 : The Cover of Rolling Stone
After listening to the interview with Artist As Family, it was time for the annual Hepburn Springs Festa Street March down to the Mineral Springs. The Daylesford Community Brass Band, the local school kids dressed and masked as animals and clowns, and anyone else who feels so inlined. This year we sent our cartoonist along to represent the local office of bLOGOS/HA HA
Lisa Gervasoni did but see them passing by : that's lovely Andrea and our bloke, cartoonish, with a model of the Yello Ideo, sign of all this interconnectedness. Those who don't march line the way to observe.
At the Springs Clare Gervasoni was about to record our rep when ... ah, here comes an actor now :
2015 : Theatre of the Passers-By
click images to enlarge
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
LOGOS/HA HA
someone looks at something...
LOGOS/HA HA