It’s hip to be white

Excert from The Age…

Michael Lallo accompanies Stuff White People Like author Christian Lander on a tour of Melbourne in search of our whitest suburb.

‘MELBOURNE is definitely whiter than Sydney,” says Christian Lander, before taking a sip of organic Fair Trade coffee. “In Sydney, most people seem to spend their days jogging around large bodies of water,” he adds. “Melbourne is more chilled. If I lived in Australia, I’d live here.”

We’re in North Fitzroy, huddled over a small table in a trendy cafe-slash-grocer. It’s the sort of place that sells organic vegetables, bio-dynamic meat and expensive pots of jam. On weekends, it’s overrun by couples with babies on their chests and The Age under their arms. It’s the perfect place to begin our search for Melbourne’s Whitest Spot.

More from The Age.

Green is in art

Green Platform takes a complex critical view designed to examine at stake in an interdisciplinary fashion the issue of the environment in the dual sense of a crisis in our thermo-industrial society based on non-renewable sources of energy and of an ecological crisis caused by pollution and by the worrying overheating of our planet.

The environment theme is quite in fashion, and here is a new version: artists from various horizons have developed their creations based on this theme in an area bathed in artificial light. There is Amy Balkin, who bought a piece of land along the California highway to turn it into an international ecologic area; Lucy and Jorge Orta, who created an installation on water, as well as Michele Dantini, whose study subject is the pipeline in Chad and wrote a real-false diary. These artists who are active in this register are very close to politics. They tackle questions directly, such as the exhaustion of resources, global warming or the loss of biodiversity.

Girls With A Purpose

Cosima De Vito (Australian Idol) gives girls inspiration

The latest national survey of young Australians found that the top three issues of concern nationally were body image, family conflict and coping with stress (National Survey of Young Australians 2007, Mission Australia). A program for girls called Girls With A Purpose believes it can help change these worrying trends.

Lifehouse Project, a Gold Coast charity, knows only too well that adolescence can be a difficult and even frightening time for many girls, which is why they are launching their program “Girls With A Purpose” nation-wide.

Program author and President of Lifehouse Project, Ruth Knight says, “Girls today have many worries, it’s time to talk with them about these life issues, and help girls make good choices in the areas of body image and relationships.”

Successful singer and former Australian Idol contestant, Cosima De Vito, supports Girls With A Purpose and wants to see schools all over Australia offer the program. “If a program like this existed when I was young I would have definitely enrolled. The ten week course helps to develop self worth, build friendships and purpose in young women. It’s time to enjoy the best years of your life!”

Website, www.lifehouse.org.au/gwap

Lessons In Survival

The science that explains why elite military forces bounce back faster than the rest of us.

Ben Sherwood
NEWSWEEK

In a laboratory, it’s extremely difficult to study why some people are better at bouncing back than others because it’s so hard to simulate the real stresses and strains of life. Scientists can show people scary pictures or movies to trigger their reactions and measure how they recover, but it’s hardly the same as a mugger in an alley or a grizzly bear on a hiking trail. Dr. Andy Morgan of Yale Medical School set out to find a real-world laboratory where he could watch people under incredible stress in reasonably controlled conditions.

He ended up in southeastern North Carolina at Fort Bragg, home of the Army’s elite Airborne and Special Forces. This is where the Army’s renowned survival school is located. It’s also where they believe in something called stress inoculation. Like vaccines, a small challenge or dose of a virus in your system prepares and defends you against a bigger challenge. In other words, they expose you to pressure and suffering in training so you’ll build up your immunity. It’s a kind of classic psychological conditioning: the more shocks to your system, the more you’re able to withstand.

(SIC)

While they’re frightening you and wearing you down with sleep deprivation, blaring music and semistarvation, they’re also interrogating you using enemy techniques copied from World War II, Korea and Vietnam. They claim that they don’t use torture, but the sessions are known to be very rough.

More from Newsweek

Official launch of 9 Lives at Cunningham Dax

The Cunningham Dax Collection consists of over 12,000 creative works on paper, paintings, ceramics and textiles, created by people who have experienced mental illness or psychological trauma. The Collection is dedicated to the conservation and ethical exhibition of these works, and the use of art in public mental health education.

Much more than an art gallery, the centre provides a multidimensional experience in the growing field of art in mental health. Increasingly diverse audiences reflect the broader community’s interest in creativity and the mind.

9 Lives is an exhibition of selected works from the Cunningham Dax Collection exploring the experiences of nine individuals through their creative works. From works made in hospitals in the early 1960s through to works created more recently in private studios and community settings, by both untrained and professional artists, 9 Lives brings together a rich variety of lived experience and creative expression.

6pm, Thursday 30 April 2009
The Cunningham Dax Collection
35 Poplar Road, Parkville, 3052
Melbourne

To be opened by Mr John Lesser, President, The Mental Health Review Board

RSVP for 9 Lives by Monday 27 April: info@daxcollection.org.au or telephone 61 + (03) 9342 2394

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PUBLIC PROGRAMS

6pm Thursday 28 May
Launch of a new documentary film Collected Thoughts 3: Richard McLean
Presented by Richard McLean and Dr Eugen Koh, Curator and Director of the Cunningham Dax Collection.

6pm Thursday 25 June
Intersubjectivity: gaze interrupted
Presented by Frances Salo, Psychoanalyst.

6pm Thursday 23 July
Framing the Self: contributions of psychodynamics and neuroscience in understanding subjectivity
Presented by Dr Edwin Harari, Senior Consultant Psychiatrist, St Vincents Hospital.

6pm Thursday 20 August
Artist-in-conversation, with artist Joan Rodriquez.

6pm Thursday 17 September
The Subjective Imagination: an art historians perspective
Presented by Dr. Alison Inglis, Head of Cultural Management, University of Melbourne.

http://www.daxcollection.org.au/exhibitions.html

Future ticks

At five minutes and six seconds after 4:00 on the 8th of July this year, the time and date will be –
04:05:06 07/08/09. This will not happen again for a thousand years.

The Pleasures & Sorrows of Work – Alain de Botton

Sydney Opera House presents Alain de Botton, renowned philosopher, best selling author and TV presenter for an exclusive engagement, Sunday 19 April, 2009. His soon to be published book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work will be the subject of his first talk in Australia since 2006.

Writing it saw him travel across the world for two years with a photographer in tow, looking at people in their workplaces and reflecting on the great themes of work: why do we do it? How can it be more bearable? What is a meaningful life?

With a philosophical eye and his characteristic combination of wit and wisdom, Alain leads us on a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art – in search of what make jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying. Here is the perfect guide to the vicious anxieties and enticing hopes thrown up by our journey through the working world.

According to Alain, his talk will “amount to a celebration and investigation of an activity as central to a good life as love – but which we often find remarkably hard to reflect on properly. Most of us are still working at jobs chosen for us by our sixteen-year-old selves.”

Exploring such diverse subjects as travel, habitat, philosophy, status anxiety in an accessible and stimulating manner De Botton, has, through his books and TV shows, become internationally famous for popularising a new approach to a ‘philosophy of everyday life’.

Tickets: $39/$29 + booking fees
Bookings: http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/whatson/alaindebotton.aspx

The Call of the Mild – Jarred Keane – MICF

The Call of the Mild is about the comedy triumphing over all. The beauty, the passion, and the love of it, just on simple terms. Ultimately however, it is a real, complete struggle to get to that triumph; the will to do this to myself. My whole life is stand up, and for what? It’s a battle between vanity, therapy and compulsion. Looking at the lines that separate the audience from the performer. I’ve sacrificed years of my life, years in menial useless jobs just looking to the next comedy night, my social skills have deteriorated, my contentment with the mundane has depleted and my psychology has changed, but ultimately, I can’t live outside of the regular world. I’m an outsider forced inside, but dammit, I bloody love it all; that’s just what Comedy means to me.

The show illustrates not just my wry, sardonic and playfully dirty humour, but rather that this is simply my way of making a point. The things I discuss are emotionally tied to how I live, and I weave dramatic themes such as racism, violence, and death into an overarching comedic story with respect and conviction.It’s not about getting laughs; it’s about making the laughs matter.

But what about Jarred Keane?…
He was born on the road, a wandering spirit with a robustly peculiar approach to his own life, compartmentalizing himself constantly; he belongs to no one and to nowhere. As a teenager he tramped his way across Ireland with nothing but his thumb and some pocket cash. Working for a cousin’s circus and small jobs, pitching tents in places as odd as a generous old man’s vineyard, his love for the solitary pleasures blossomed. Engaging music, poetry, hiking and photography were what made him come of age, but the complete unity of Stand-Up comedy gave birth to it all, and in the hectic lead-up to the MICF he took leave to the wild once again to question whether he wanted to come back at all… I guess for him, they coexist after all.

Call of the Mild
3-5 Hosier Lane Melbourne, April 2nd – 26th (no Mondays or Wednesdays) 10pm

www.comedyfestival.com.au/season/2009/show/the-call-of-the-mild

Why money messes with your mind

Dough, wonga, greenbacks, cash. Just words, you might say, but they carry an eerie psychological force. Chew them over for a few moments, and you will become a different person. Simply thinking about words associated with money seems to makes us more self-reliant and less inclined to help others. And it gets weirder: just handling cash can take the sting out of social rejection and even diminish physical pain.

This is all the stranger when you consider what money is supposed to be. For economists, it is nothing more than a tool of exchange that makes economic life more efficient. Just as an axe allows us to chop down trees, money allows us to have markets that, traditional economists tell us, dispassionately set the price of anything from a loaf of bread to a painting by Picasso. Yet money stirs up more passion, stress and envy than any axe or hammer ever could.

We just can’t seem to deal with it rationally… but why? Read the complete New Scientist article

Shadowless Summer: New Works By Liz McGrath

Los Angeles born self-taught artist Liz McGrath has been plundering the darker corners of the world from which to elicit her cavalcade of creatures; in her new works, she exposes the shadow-dwellers to the full effects of unrelenting sunshine. Inspired, perhaps, by the pervasive sense of exposure running rampant in the zeitgeist, McGrath apologetically illuminates that which our frail psyches prefer to keep in the dark, taking a much-needed closer look at our blind spots.

Heading up the exhibit is Boxer, a sad-eyed pony in the vein of Animal Farm’s betrayed proletariat hero. Neatly bisected  and perched atop two pedestals where snakes coil with indifferent menace, Boxer sports an impressive collection of Russian gang tattoos alongside the maxim fortes fortuna iuvat (fortune favors the bold). His exterior speaks to the hubris of a collapsed social and economic structure. Taking a closer look at his inside, however, tells a darker tale- a woe-begotten lighthouse facing an unheeded warning: Be careful what you wish for. In the face of our own economic collapse, Boxer’s plight is all too relatable.

A series of mounted animal heads makes up the series We Are All Ships in the Night; lonely figures with eerie apparitions reminiscent of ghost ships making up the tattered sails atop their antlers, unseeing eyes disconsolately speaking to their irreversible isolation.

…….Liz McGrath currently lives and works in Los Angeles with her husband Morgan Slade, with whom she plays in the band Miss Derringer, as well as her two tiny hairless dogs Blue and King Tut. Her work can be found in myriad publications,  including a published  collection of past works “Everything that Creeps”.  She has exhibited her work around the globe; this is her first solo show in NYC. 

For more works by Liz Mcgrath visit www.lizmcgrath.com

Sloan Fine Art
128 Rivington Street
New York, NY 10002
www.sloanfineart.com