WHAT BECAME OF THE O.G MANIFESTIVAL

In September last year I had my first official art show in Melbourne, The Manifestival, for party artists. Party generation is at the heart of any official punk document a party artist produces. We don't like to produce heaps because it's a waste of resources, so we tend to be very careful yet also tantalisingly loose about our usage and re-usage of materials. I zenly hand drew scores of fliers on the backs of envelopes and other half-used pieces of paper.

After I took it down I promptly crossed out the parts that had already changed and cut it into puzzle pieces to distribute as gifts. Here's a piece I gave to my main man at NZ Archives, Geordy Muir, when he picked me up from the airport.

PERPETUAL GENIES

Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
(from Emerson's Transcendental Vocabulary by Mary Alice Ihrig)

COHESIVE HOLE

Remember how I harked back to my time in Spain a few weeks ago with some travel excerpts from the blue diaries? Well I left my notebook at the A1 internet joint that day and only just realised.
Lucky they still had it!

Here's some more :


















I'd been thinking of studying at university but have since realised being a rogue scholar is the life for a party artist. NRG is precious and money takes time to acquire, so why not take love-soaked lessons from your friends for free? (not necessarily in a kinky way)

One of my dead friends J.Krishnamurti said this to me from between the pages of The Flame of Attention in the library today :

One needs tremendous energy to meditate and friction is a wastage of energy. When in one's daily life there is a great deal of friction, of conflict between people, and dislike of the work which one does, there is a wastage of energy. And to enquire really most profoundly - not superficially, not verbally - one must go very deeply into oneself, into one's own mind and see why we live as we do, for meditation is the release of creative energy.

I was like "yip" but silently on account of being in the library.

HOW IT GOT IN THERE

Found out the answer to my exclamation of a couple of posts ago :

All Buddhist teachings are the outcome of a warm heart cherished for all sentient beings, and not of a cold intellect which tries to unveil the secrets of existence by logic. That is to say, Buddhism is personal experience and not impersonal philosophy.

Dr Suzuki in Essays in Zen Buddhism
(But I got it from The Way of Action)

This may go some way to explaining why I dub my sensational experience 'The Party Within' and not 'The Factoid Within'.

ART STAR SYNCHRONICITY

Double page spread, Moonee Ponds, 2010.

Want to hear a little 'dote about a funny thing that happened?

A couple of weeks ago while visiting DPAG, (Dunedin Public Art Gallery) I found myself lingering over Ronnie Van Hout's book I've Abandoned Me, a companion piece to his show of the same name that I'd seen in Wellington and loved deeply (circa 2004). On about my third visit it kept absorbing my attention. I gave in and splashed out thirty big ones so I could take it home.

One evening within the same week I was lying on some grass in the town belt drawing in my yellow fluoro* notebook. Currently I am working on a world changing (for me at least) party philosophy book that is dedicated to my sweet friend and former colleague Vito. He looks like Prince but slightly taller and possibly a better cook. I was writing on the page in a semi-whimsical font : This Gentle Revolution is for Vito. While I was doing that a little fluffy dog went nuts at me, yapping uncontrollably for a really long time. Her owner tried to appease her to no avail. She assumed it was because I was lying down. I noted the presence of the unruly puppy, whose name was Poppy, on the page with my pen.

Then last Thursday some friends opened a new gallery down here,
rice and beans. I helped out cutting fruit and pouring drinks for a while then hung in the VIP lounge low-key studio chill out zone next door. Who should I happen upon? Ronnie Van Hout with his lady Poppy and tiny son Vito. Ha!

*Not actually fluoro but says 'fluoro' on the cover.

ACTION STATIONS

'Mastery of the inner world' wrote Carol Baynes, 'with a relative contempt for the outer, must inevitably lead to great catastrophes. Mastery of the outer world, to the exclusion of the inner, delivers us over to the daemonic forces of the latter and keeps us barbaric despite outward forms of culture. The solution cannot be found with deriding Eastern spirituality as impotent, or by mistrusting science as a destroyer of humanity. We have to see that the spirit must lean on science as its guide in the world of reality, and that science must turn to the spirit for the meaning of life.'

Carol Baynes in The Secret of the Golden Flower
As quoted by Christmas Humphries in The Way of Action

Lately I've been reading a few zen books and realising more and more that I've been groovin' to the tune of Buddhist thought convincingly disguised as my own thought for quite a while now.

How did that get in there!

PARTY ART ZINE

If you're in Dunedin this Wednesday 9th of Feb come down to Mou Very on George St for the launch of celebrated Zen Punk Party Artist Kerry Ann Lee's radical hot new zine, Permanent Vacation, from 8pm. DJ's! Babes! Small Spaces! Dancing! MAGAZINES!