my map my summer

So, remember when I submitted footage to Map My Summer, the Australia-wide user-generated film project inspired by Life in a Day? Well, it turned out that two bits of my footage of the bats of Gordon were selected by Amy Gebhardt, the director of the project, and are included in the final Map My Summer film, WE WERE HERE.

That film premiered at a packed screening last Saturday night, before the Australian premiere of Life in a Day, as part of Sydney Film Festival. As a contributor I was an honored guest. Amy and executives from Screen Australia and YouTube introduced the film along with SFF director Clare Stewart. Dr George Miller, the distinguished supervisor of the project, was not there (he is too busy working on Happy Feet 2), but he sent a video greeting. I found myself wondering if at any point the dude who directed The Road Warrior looked at my bat footage.

You can watch the finished product embedded here, or on YouTube’s Map My Summer page, for a few more days at least. (I believe they’ll take it down on Saturday after a week’s run.) It’s about 25 minutes long. My footage occurs twice: once near the beginning, and again about two-thirds of the way through.

 

To tell you the truth, I spent some time being worried that there would be a conflict of interest; I work for Sydney Film Festival- and I just didn’t know what would happen when that came out. So I kept it on the downlow for weeks, while I was waiting for everything to be confirmed. But it turned out that when my colleagues were delighted when they found out about my part in the film, and wondered why I hadn’t boasted about it before.

The whole thing is a bit ironic. Recently I’ve been wanting to get back into film production, and have been planning a couple of different short film projects as a way of challenging myself. I didn’t imagine that footage of bats I shot on my iPhone would end up being the first effort of mine to be screened in public.

But I’m pleased. In general I think community-based filmmaking is one of the directions the industry is going in. I just took a workshop with Joe Lawlor, who has been doing some terrific things with his Civic Life project – collaborating with local communities on financing and producing films in places as diverse as Newcastle, UK and Singapore. User-generated films might be considered the logical extreme of this. At the very least, it’s one positive step towards making sense of the chaos of online video content.

I’m also happy about being included in this project because of being a recent migrant to Australia. I remember seeing a rude comment on one of the posted invitations for Australians to submit footage of what summer means to them: “Better get ready for hundreds of shitty clips of bands playing at the Annandale.” It was funny, but it also highlighted the fact that I haven’t had time to become cynical about anything here yet. I’m still amazed by so many things others take for granted – like seeing flowers blossoming in the winter and parrots hanging out in my front yard. I wanted anything I submitted to reflect that amazement – and it did.

I didn’t have to make many creative decisions – the bats themselves did all the work. Simply pointing the camera at the level of the horizon produces a pretty astonishing image.

Or, maybe all of that is just a roundabout way of saying it really doesn’t have anything to do with filmmaking – it was all pretty random and I’m just lucky. But that works too.

greenhouse by joost

On Saturday, we went to Greenhouse by Joost. It’s a pop-up bar right on Sydney Harbour, at Campbells Cove in The Rocks.

What the heck is a pop-up bar? That’s what I asked my wife when she suggested we go. Apparently it’s a new trend of temporary drinking establishments, the latest hottest thing in our fly-by-night global economy. Constructed with temporary (or reusable) materials, shaped any which way their creators see fit, they spring out of nowhere in hip and convenient locations and stick around for a couple of months or even just a couple of weeks. The owners are thus freed of many of the hassles and overhead of running a business. The point is to make a splash, make some cash, and then fold up and go on to the next thing.

The concept might be familiar to you – temporary venues are now a common sight at arts festivals and in urban parks during the summer. Many of them are sponsored by large corporations. If you’re familiar with the the Beck’s Festival Bar here in Sydney, or the Spiegel Tent in any number of major cities, you get the idea. They can be quite well-appointed, and feel more permanent than they are. My colleagues from the Abu Dhabi Film Festival will probably never forget the impossibly lavish Festival Tent at Emirates Palace.

Greenhouse by Joost is both pop-up business and green art project. It was designed by Joost Bakker, a Dutch-Australian artist, painter, florist and entrepreneur. He built his first Greenhouse in Melbourne in 2006, and since then has done a few of them around Oz. There’s a permanent one in Perth. The one here in Sydney (which is a restaurant as well as a bar) will be up until the end of this month.

The Greenhouse is built entirely of recycled and recyclable materials, it’s carbon neutral, and it’s waste free. But you probably could have guessed all that. The concept of sustainability is becoming a common one. Which is a good thing.

The place feels nice – it’s colorful and inviting; the exterior walls are a vertical strawberry garden. Inside, it’s clean and well-lit. The windows facing the Harbour are huge. As is often the case when green materials are put to good use in building, it’s attractive, with lots of interesting shapes and rough textures in the design. There’s bold visual art and text everywhere you look.

The roof is a great space. The deck is made of unfinished wood. There’s more color, more art, another bar. Most strikingly, there’s a long, long container garden planted with basil and parsley that runs around the whole thing. (The herbs are used in the kitchen. I read that other vegetables are grown there too, but I didn’t see them.) And you simply can’t beat the temporary world-class view. It was unseasonably chilly and wet on Saturday, and we had the roof largely to ourselves. I’m sure it would be hard to find a seat up there in nice weather. We chatted, enjoyed the drizzle, and watched a massive cruise ship depart Circular Quay.

I didn’t eat the food, so I can’t comment on that. I did drink a good amount of ale, and that’s my one complaint: the beers were $10 each. I guess it’s all to support the cause.

Here’s the review in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Notes on the sustainable restrooms: The toilet and sink are designed to work together – to save water I think. When you wash your hands after using the toilet, it flushes. But this backfired when I stepped into the restroom at one point just to wash my hands – I ended up flushing the toilet too, and thus wasting water. Also, the men’s toilet I used did not have a light. I guess this saves a bit of electricity, but using a toilet in the dark is not a practice I’d want to sustain for very long.

adelaide

Last weekend my wife and I visited Adelaide for the Adelaide Film Festival. Amo was on business; I was tagging along. Neither of us had ever been there.

I liked the place much more than I thought I would. I knew little going in: I knew it would feel a lot smaller than Sydney; I had an inkling of a decent arts and music scene; I’d heard about the heat. And a friend said that the huntsmen (large, creepy, dismayingly common spiders) are even bigger and that they jump. Bigger? How much bigger? Like the size of a dinner plate. You gotta be kidding. Even the biggest Amazonian bird spiders are only about the size of a dinner plate. Surely you mean something more like a saucer or a – Wait, did you say they jump? Jump?

It’s a wonder I got on the plane. Anyway, staying in a high-rise hotel, going to movies and wandering around the city center kept me out of the way of any really extravagantly huge spiders, or you would have already heard about it. But there were, oddly enough, lots of crickets and grasshoppers.

Yes, the citizens of Adelaide must have done something to mildly offend the Lord, because there was a harmless but puzzling plague of crickets and grasshoppers going on that weekend – the little buggers had taken over the town, hopping and flying everywhere, swarming around the streetlamps, getting in everyone’s hair – you’d look down and there was one on your shirt or in your beer, bodies piling up in the gutters, in hotel lobbies, in taco stands. The crickets freaked some people out, I think, because they are dark little things with long antennae and tend to look a little more unsavory than they really are. In said taco stand, there was a handwritten sign taped to the counter:

They are crickets. They are NOT cockroaches. They won’t harm you.

Maybe they came for the festival too?

OK, zero expectations, but it wasn’t a few minutes before I was really enjoying Adelaide. For one thing, I liked the layout. It’s very contained, sensible, and attractive, with wide streets forming a perfectly square grid that is, amazingly, completely encircled by a wide swath of green parkland. (Here’s an aerial view.) There are more parks within the grid too. Lots of green. Adelaide is also very pedestrian friendly. There are lots of bike lanes, trams and a number of pedestrianized streets. Rundle Street, one of the main drags in the CBD, becomes for several blocks a long pedestrianized plaza and shopping village, paved with cobblestones and featuring an attractive old arcade, hundreds of shops and sidewalk cafés. Street performers and salesmen with microphones harangue the crowd in every direction. It’s a fantastic place to be on a summer’s evening.

The buildings are attractive, too – a mix of well-preserved 19th century façades and silly but fun hypermodern stuff. For many of these reasons – the parks, the bike lanes, the trams, the old buildings, the street art, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Portland, Oregon. Even the vista out of town reminded me of the west coast – surrounding hills visible down wide, straight avenues. (Of course if it was Oregon, those hills would be a lot bigger. The hills outside of Adelaide are maybe like El Paso’s.)

The Portland analogy only continued the more I walked around and the more cafés, cool shops, record stores and great street art I saw. Clearly the scene punches above its weight. There were two major festivals on last week – the Adelaide Fringe was in full swing too – so of course that colored my outlook. Natives say Adelaide shuts down and gets pretty boring in the offseason. I don’t doubt it. Still, if it’s capable of all of this, it’s got a lot working. On Friday night I did little else but stroll around, enjoying the balmy air, wandering into shops if I felt like it, grabbing a falafel (it was surpsingly good), and sitting and having a couple of beers at a randomly selected pub. I wanted to try the local brew; come to find out the local brew in Adelaide is Coopers – already my favorite Aussie beer and fairly ubiquitous everywhere you go. But I wasn’t complaining.

The other thing about Adelaide is how incredibly friendly the people are. Everyone – cabdrivers, clerks, the terrific box office manager at the Film Festival, who acted like our personal concierge. It was nice, but kind of eerie. Sometimes people would just start having conversations with us, and I think we were taken aback. I hate to feel like such a hardened city type. And I don’t think I’d ever thought of Sydney as being particularly unfriendly. Quite the opposite – I’ve always found Sydneysiders warm and inviting, especially coming from New York. It’s one of the reasons I migrated here. But visiting a smaller place reminded me it’s all about perspective. And it’s true that most Aussies think of Sydney as the big, bad city.

Besides Portland, the other place Adelaide made me think of is, strangely enough, Abu Dhabi, where I’ve spent a lot of time over the past two years. That one is harder to explain – it’s mostly an impression. But it has to do with the wide streets, the uniformly medium-sized buildings, the gleaming postmodern architecture, the perfect grid, all of it bathed in sunshine under perfect blue skies. The comparisons mostly end there – Abu Dhabi’s about as unhip and pedestrian unfriendly as you get. But the impression stayed with me.

So there we are. A weird cross between Portland and Abu Dhabi, in South Australia. Maybe I’ve just been around too much lately – kind of losing a grip on where I am.

This feeling hit me really hard when on Saturday morning we visited the Adelaide Central Market – surely the jewel in Adelaide’s crown, and one of the nicest places I’ve been in Australia. It’s a huge indoor facility that’s exactly like a souk or a bazaar in the Middle East – a bustling maze of stalls filled with produce, meat, seafood, bread and gourmet foods side-by-side with more cafés. We sat at one of these and had coffee and baguettes.

The Central Market was built in the 1860s, and it has a real old-world quality, with lavish architechtural details and decorative tiles, and especially with all of the Italian and Greek purveyors of gourmet cheese, oil, wine and vinegar and sweets. And indeed, I felt nothing so much like I was back in Istanbul (where Amo and I went on vacation last November). Tiles, olive oil, coffee, wait – where am I? Oh, I’m in Australia. It was quite a perceptual slip.

We couldn’t help but think about how Sydney doesn’t have anything like the Central Market, and how much nicer it would be if it did. The thought is a little depressing. But overall, it was a real joy to find a town in my adopted country that is not merely a smaller and less hip and less convenient version of the big city, but is in fact lively and happening and very civilized in its own way. That’s one thing about travel: if you really give a place a chance, you’ll often find that the local flavor overrules all that’s generic and tired about globalization. I definitely look forward to being back in Adelaide.

lindfield rocks

My great downfall is that I can’t blog about just one thing. If you’re one of the seven or eight people who read this page with any regularity, you know this. One week it’s something about surfing. Then I’m going on about current events. Then it’s a review of a falafel joint. I have too many interests.

But if I was the type to focus on only one subject, one thing to blog about, I might make this a page about Lindfield, my neighborhood.

If you don’t know Sydney, trust me on this one: Lindfield is epically suburban and boring. But this is not a dis. Lindfieldites (I don’t know if that’s what they’ve been called previously, but I’m unilaterally declaring it the official demonym starting now) are proud of their boredom. It’s why anyone lives here. It’s safe and green and friendly and really nice – as boring as you wanna be.

But still, I think if someone blogged about this place and did it well, it’d be really interesting. It’d be like a document of suburban life in Australia – a multidisciplinary study involving anthropology, zoology, history, architecture. It could cover the the animals and birdlife native to the area – everything from parrots and wild turkeys to the world’s deadliest spider – the history of the Pacific Highway (one of the oldest roads in Australia – it runs right past our place), the independent bookshop down the street, the behavior of the kids on the train platform, the simmering controversy about high-rise development. It could include more abstract and moody pieces: snapshots of random things that define life here, from the little lizards that constantly scurry underfoot to the twisted piece of wire I saw in the street yesterday that looked like contemporary art.

I’ve already done some of this: I’ve written about our organic garden, and posted video of the local bat colony. But in general I’m not really thinking of imposing such a limit on myself – I’d only get frustrated after a while and be tempted to cover the book about Dubai I just read or my favorite Mexican restaurant in Byron Bay. And I’d get – well, bored. But if I was going to blog about this area in earnest, I’d start with Lindfield Rocks, which has become one of my favorite places to be.

When I call Lindfield “suburban,” I mean by Australian standards. Most Americans who live in metropolitan areas would be impressed by how wild this place is. We’re a ten-minute walk from Garigal National Park, a huge reserve that stretches for miles along Middle Harbour. When you’re inside this reserve – a thickly wooded range of hills and valleys bisected by the Middle River and featuring lots of hiking trails and huge picnic areas – you would never know you were still in greater Sydney, the most populous area of the continent. In most places you can’t see any development or hear traffic at all. You can hike all day, clamber up and down the hills and dells, get lost in the woods, commune with the kookaburras and goannas, blur your eyes and imagine what life was like here before 1788. It truly lives up to its billing as a national park. We’re 10 minutes’ drive in the other direction from the equally sizeable Lane Cove National Park. And there are smaller parks and reserves all over the place. There’s so much nature here I don’t know what to do with it. This is one of the reasons I migrated here.

Lindfield Rocks is at the edge of Garigal, along Two Creeks Track, a hiking trail that runs from our neighborhood to Middle Harbour, some 10 kilometers away. It’s not far from the intersection of two major roads, tucked away down a slope behind a tennis court, hidden in plain sight as it were. I can walk there in 15 minutes – and I often do. Being there always chills me out, makes me feel good about where I’m living.

I first heard of Lindfield Rocks from a friend, a fellow American living here in Sydney who’s an avid rock climber. It’s cherished in the rock climbing community as one of the oldest bouldering sites in Australia. Bouldering basically means climbing rock walls that are relatively low to the ground – so that if you fell you might not die instantly. It’s a kind of freestyle climbing, usually done without a lot of safety gear – as a workout, or just for the sheer pleasure.

I don’t know anything about rock climbing. It’s a pretty involved sport, with its own funky subculture, and lingo as impenetrable as that used by sailors. (Multi-pitching, atomic belay, panic bear, beta flash.) I respect and admire climbers – but I’m not great with heights, so I don’t think I’ll be scaling a cliff at any point. Lindfield Rocks, however, looks pretty manageable to me, and I kind of want to give this bouldering thing a go. I often see climbers at it when I walk down to the rocks, especially on a nice day. They seem to come from all over. It’s probably the only thing in Lindfield that brings outsiders here on a regular basis – the suburb’s greatest distinction, and I wonder how many of the residents know about it. (It’s also just about the only way you’d ever see a beard in this neighborhood.)

I like seeing the climbers when I go there, but I don’t really like to stand around and hawk them while they do their thing, and in general I prefer it when I find that I’m the only one there.

You walk through the woods behind the tennis court, descending the slope on a dirt path, right through a number of big round weathered sandstone rocks, harbingers of what’s down the hill. It’s already much quieter than it is back there on the road, the sound of everything absorbed by the pine needles, the air close. You can hear the sound of the traffic on Eastern Arterial Road, but can’t see it. It sounds strangely pleasant and natural, as if a fast-flowing river lay over there down the hill.

You reach the edge of a shelf, and there’s a staircase cut right into the rock, like something out of Tolkien. It’s the kind of man-made but faintly mysterious detail you find all over these national parks. And at the bottom of the staircase, you realize you’re here – these are the famous rocks suddenly looming right in front of you. A great blunt mass of sandstone, burnished and mottled by millenia of exposure, up to 25 or 30 feet tall in places, stretching away for a hundred yards or more into the woods. There’s a wide flat area at the base where you’re standing; beyond it the hill continues sloping down to the unseen road below.

The thing that strikes you about the rock face is its perfection. It’s perfect for climbing, no doubt – with cracks and rills and folds and other subtle and weird features that only rock climbers have names for running up its surface – but you don’t have to be a specialist to appreciate it. Sydney sandstone comes in many colors and erodes into the craziest forms and shapes – it’s a constant source of wonder no matter where you go in the region – but there’s something in particular about this outcropping. You just want to stare at it. I’m not sure how to explain it. Even with all the flaws it’s so remarkably uniform and vertical for sandstone; as if its changeable nature were suspended for a moment in time, like the parting of the Red Sea. The word wall is right: it really does look like a fortification, a fortress.

Up close, there are a million details. Colors and textures that are different everywhere you look, that seem to change from one day to the next; walking along the wall is like watching a stream constantly change shape and hue as it reflects sunlight. You really understand why rock climbers get so into it – the desire to just be close to and touch this rock, understand the way it flows.

It’s one of those places where nature rises up, reaches out to amaze, makes you stand still and stare, even in a place as prosaic as Lindfield. It seems like it’s… communicating something. I’ve heard the same thing about Uluru. Not that I’m comparing the two.

But though Lindfield Rocks inspires awe, and something a little deeper and harder to quantify, it’s not really a heavy feeling – it’s not ominous, like something’s out to get you, as in Picnic at Hanging Rock. Maybe because the most genteel of suburbs is just around the corner, it feels like a benign place. And it’s so perfectly, so hilariously realized as a thing for people to climb on, or to just look at and enjoy, that it seems like it was done on purpose. Out of friendliness. Despite the sheer weight and dark mass of the thing in front of you, there’s a lightheartedness that bubbles up when you take it in.

It always makes me think of Andy Goldsworthy, the artist who creates surreal and sublime works using only the materials from nature that he can improvise on the spot. His pieces – weird leaf sculptures, capricious rock formations – always look like they might have been left behind by the most primitive humans, or better yet, like they might have just happened by themselves. Many times his pieces are designed to collapse or decay in interesting and beautiful ways – the way a limestone rock does, over vast stretches of time. “Process and decay are implicit.” Part of the point is to make us see the art that’s all around us in nature in the first place – the beauty in all the process and decay. And after a while, it might make you fleetingly wonder why we bother with art at all.

When I visited Istanbul last year I was amazed by a couple of artifacts that were built in remote antiquity, including an Egyptian obelisk brought to Constantinople by the Byzantines that was carved over 3000 years ago. But I wonder if I should be so impressed with bits of granite or marble fashioned by puny men, when Lindfield Rocks has been here for ages and ages longer, and is just as beautiful and – dare I say – artistic. When the Garigal who lent this park its name arrived here 40,000 years ago this wall was already very, very old. Sitting here all this time, waiting for people to come along and make use of it. I wish I could know what the Garigal thought of it. I imagine they liked being here too.

Note: I looked, and could not find a good, comprehensive page about Lindfield Rocks from a rock climber’s perspective, with history, anecdotes, and notes about the various routes (or whateveryacall’em). There are a few pages that are part of larger climbing or travel sites, but all of them are pretty dry and scanty and leave a lot to be desired. Surely there’s gotta be a few rock climbers out there who are also bloggers or web designers? Let’s get to it guys – this place deserves a nice online tribute.

maps

Screen Australia are collaborating with Youtube on an Australia-wide, crowd-sourced film initiative called Map My Summer. It’s similar to and no doubt inspired by Life in a Day, the experimental documentary shot by hundreds of people worldwide on one Saturday last July and fashioned into a feature film by producer Ridley Scott and director Kevin McDonald; the completed film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this month.

The idea of Map My Summer is that thousands of ordinary Aussies will film – well, anything they want to film, as long as it sort of has something to do with summer, and upload it to Youtube by March 31. Selected footage will be fashioned into a short film (not a feature, alas) by an up-and-coming Aussie filmmaker under the supervision of Dr George Miller. I guess Miller is meant to be the Aussie-surrogate Ridley Scott for this undertaking – famous director to give it some clout y’know. But considering he directed the Mad Max films and Babe – four of the finest artifacts ever created by man – that’s all right by me. Anyway, the resulting film will be screened at Sydney Film Festival in June.

I liked the idea of Life in a Day, and I’m pretty psyched about Map My Summer too. Seems like a nice, unforced way to combine experimental and populist filmmaking.

Incidentally, Life in a Day got mixed reviews; some critics say it’s a predictable mishmash, and maybe even a little manipulative. Others call it innovative and uplifting, a Koyaanisqatsi for the new new age. I’ve not seen the film, but I like this take on it by reviewer Kirk Honeycutt in, of all places, the Hollywood Reporter:

The fact that terrible news didn’t dominate the world that day allows the film to concentrate on everyday life. So the film is quite cheerful on the whole. Whether people are skydiving or walking down a chapel aisle with an Elvis impersonator, the film expresses a collective hope in the present and in better days to come.

Onstage, Macdonald and Walker insisted that this mood came about through no editorial nudging by them. The preponderance of the videos submitted was playful, optimistic and positive. Do you suppose our 24/7 news media has gotten this wrong, that much of the world isn’t in the grip of depression, malevolence, cynicism, backstabbing and pessimism?

Exactly. Thank you.

So, I plan to take part in Map My Summer. Here’s a rough sketch of my idea, filmed last night. It’s the famous flying foxes of Gordon – large bats that come out en masse every night like clockwork a few minutes after sundown. Gordon, about ten minutes’ drive from our place, has the largest bat colony on the North Shore of Sydney, and there’s a bridge overlooking a wooded little valley or dell that offers a perfect view of the thousands of bats as they swoop out of their shelters.

I don’t know if you can call lots and lots of big bats cheerful or optimistic – but it’s certainly really cool in my book. Am I creeped out by the bats? Not at all – not even when they come and roost in the trees in our yard in the middle of the night, making weird squeaks and gurgles that we can clearly hear right out the window. I like them. Spiders on the other hand… well, never mind.

I’m tempted just to leave this footage, which was shot on my iPhone, it as is – I love the distorted, hypnotic repetition. (And the time limit on an uploaded clip for the project is three minutes – though it’s true you can upload as many as you like.) But more clarity and more angles to work with might be good too. We’ll see what I come up with – I’ll keep you posted.

Here are the relevant links:

Screen Australia’s Map My Summer homepage, and the press release

Map My Summer’s Youtube page

the montgomery method

Recently I posted a piece about Martin Luther King Jr’s global legacy, and later another one about religious unity during the protests in Egypt. Those two strands are tied together in this story on Comics Alliance:

Egyptian Activists Inspired by Forgotten Martin Luther King Comic

(Thanks to my friend Steven, who posted it on Facebook.)

The article details how The Montgomery Story, a comic book about King originally published in 1958 by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, was recently translated into Arabic and Farsi by the American Islamic Congress and distributed in the Middle East – including Egypt. The comic is an account of the historic bus boycott led by King in Montgomery, Alabama, and includes a primer on “the Montgomery method” – the program of nonviolent action that King initiated in the American civil rights movement and which proved so crucial in the struggle. The article hints the comic may have had an influence on some Egyptian activists during the resent uprising, and helped shape its largely peaceful nature.

Look, The Montgomery Story probably won’t ever win any artistic awards, but for a comic it is remarkably thorough and insightful in disseminating the spiritual values of nonviolent resistance and… well, love. It even includes a thoughtful recap of Gandhi’s satyagraha movement in India.

The translation and distribution of The Montgomery Story‘s Arabic edition was spearheaded by activist Diala Ziada, director of the AIC’s Egypt office. Ziada tirelessly promotes peace, civil rights and nonviolent change in the region with various media projects and sheer determination. Among her noteworthy projects is the Cairo Human Rights Film Festival, now in its third year.

It’s fascinating to read this Time Magazine profile, published in 2009, identifying Ziada as part of a “soft revolution” of Middle Eastern women pushing for change within Islam. It really highlights how the earthshaking events in Cairo this month have changed the paradigms completely – the story is so right and prescient about some things, and so completely wrong and outdated about others. How quickly our perspective has changed. Note the description of the trouble the first edition of the film festival encountered from the government authorities, and Ziada’s heroic efforts to keep it going:

The censorship board did not approve the films, so Ziada doorstopped its chairman at the elevator and rode up with him to plead her case. When the theater was suspiciously closed at the last minute, she rented a tourist boat on the Nile for opening night – waiting until it was offshore and beyond the arm of the law to start the movie.

I hadn’t heard of this woman until I read this article, and I have to say I’m seriously impressed with her courage and energy and her commitment to nonviolent principles. (And she’s only 28. Ever feel like you’re not doing enough with your life?) In covering the Middle East, the mainstream media has generally focused primarily on victims and bad guys, giving us impressions of violence and pathos and little else. That’s why so many of us were caught off guard with the uprising, a genuine people’s movement defying lines of class, gender and religion, and not dictated by the agendas of elites and foreigners.

The Comics Alliance article admits that since only 2000 translated copies of The Mongomery Story were distributed, its influence on the events in Egypt could not have been widespread. But righteous seeds have a way of germinating at just the right time, and having an impact far greater than it may seem at first. In this letter, Zadia insists the book has had an important effect on those it reaches:

When, at first, we went to print the comic book, a security officer blocked publication. So we called him and demanded a meeting. He agreed, and we read through the comic book over coffee to address his concerns. At the end, he granted permission to print, and then asked: “Could I have a few extra copies for my kids?”

The comic book has been credited with inspiring young activists in Egypt and the larger region… Last week I distributed copies in Tahrir Square. Seeing the scene in the square firsthand is amazing. Despite violent attacks and tanks in the street, young people from all walks of life are coming together, organizing food and medical care, and offering a living model of free civil society in action.

It’s quite an image, a young Muslim woman handing out copies of a 60-year-old comic book about the revolutionary vision of an American Baptist minister, right in the middle of her country’s greatest crisis. As the writer of the Comics Alliance article says, “It’s certainly cool that a comic book starring one of America’s greatest real-life heroes has inspired even one person to take to the streets in the way we’ve seen over the last several weeks.”

Click here for complete PDF versions of The Montgomery Story in Arabic, Farsi and English.

singing bridge pelicans

My friend Jackie got these photos of pelicans feeding at night on the Myall River from the Singing Bridge. Jackie, my wife and I were walking from the beach at Hawks Nest across the bridge to Tea Gardens, where my wife’s parents live in a house right on the river.

The Singing Bridge is so named because it makes a humming sound in the wind. I’ve not heard this phenomenon, but I do like to walk on the bridge as often as possible. It offers terrific views of the Myall estuary, with Port Stephens and Yaccaba head in the distance, and it’s a great place to watch pelicans, black swans, egrets – and with any luck, dolphins, which come up the river to fish in the morning.

As we crossed, I saw the pelicans feeding in the calm, glassy water and tried a few snapshots, but I had a hard time finding a good setting and did not get anything of value. Jackie joined me in shooting almost as an afterthought, did not adjust her camera at all, and the results are really interesting.

I love the way the pelicans are reduced to mere sketches or figures, but very much identifiable as pelicans. No water is discernible; the bird-figures swim in a black field. Perspective is lost completely – the photos almost look like printed patterns – but still the pelicans’ characteristic lazy, contented movements as they feed are apparent, especially in the repetitions between frames.

The plan is to go back to the bridge to recreate this setup, but shoot with video instead, and make a short film with the same aesthetic: pelicans floating on black, nothing else. We’ll see if it can be as serendipitous and oddly perfect as these snapshots.

reverse garbage

Last Sunday I visited Reverse Garbage, a non-profit organization that collects all kinds of junk and secondhand goods – especially industrial discards – and sells it to the public out of a warehouse in Marrickville. The concept is sound enough; it’s the type of thing I think we can all agree we need more of. But the experience of the place itself was unexpectedly inspiring and fun.

The first thing you see in the unkempt lot outside Reverse Garbage is a huge sculpture, welded together out of scrap metal, imposingly postapocalyptic, roughly the shape of some sort of larger-than-life toy mobile. Suspended from one of the arms of the mobile is a scrap-metal creature that’s part giant spider, part praying mantis, with the lithe torso and head of a bare-breasted mannequin. You know, I’ve seen a lot of found-object installations in my life, and a lot of them really lame, but something as well-executed as this still has the power to amuse and disturb. The only way it could get any better is if this she-monster were robotically animated and did battle with a cyber-scrap giant wasp.

Behind this attraction is a junk yard-cum-art garden, featuring an ugly foam sculpture of the Sydney waterfront and a bicycle graveyard, leading you to the warehouse. Inside is the largest collection of used stuff I’ve ever seen. In the front it looks like a garage sale or a vintage shop, except it goes on and on and on, tables and shelves full of decor, toys, jewelry, stationery, lighting, kitchenware, pottery, knickknacks, bric-a-brack, sundries, hand-me-downs, flotsam and jetsam and whatnot stretching for what seems like hundreds of yards into a haze in the far reaches of the building.

It’s hard to know where to begin. There’s an entire shelf full of sheets of stickers, the kind that are used to decorate kids’ schoolpapers and notebooks. Honestly, I get lost just with those. There’s some nice furniture here. Over there are plastic flowers, and some weird old VHS tapes. Further back are heaps of used speakers and other audio equipment, some of it unidentifiable.

Moving into the far corners of the warehouse, you find the purely industrial detritus, some of it hilariously, almost childishly alluring, stuff you just wanna play with: rectangular portions of pink foam stored in clear plastic bags bigger than I am, vast shelves loaded with cardboard tubes. Out back is the hardware, the unclaimed makings of infrastructure: metal pipes, lumber, restaurant equipment, PVC tubes.

Out of everything here, what draws me in the most are the loose ceramic tiles. They come in many forms and colors, the loose and haphazard stacks defying the geometric order we naturally associate with them. The cool feel of the tiles, their surprising weight as I pick them up, the earthy scraping sound they make, is strangely appealing. Especially as I was recently in İstanbul (tile central), I’m seized by the urge to take a bunch of them home, break them into pieces, and teach myself to make mosaic art. But I reckon I don’t have time for a new hobby – I have too much on my plate as it is.

Obviously the main clientele here will be artists. I see a couple of them milling about, with their piercings and boots and torn stockings, longingly touching the cardboard tubes. The pink foam alone would be enough raw material for an entire group show. And, perhaps to make them feel at home, there are more of the found-object sculptures here – a life-sized T-rex skull, and a smiling robot towering overhead, its readout saying WOMEN NEED TECHNICAL JOBS NEED WOMEN.

Often secondhand shops depress me. This is particularly true with records. As much as I love music, sometimes sifting through bin after bin of beat-up old records and CDs gives me a terrible sense of how much bad music has been mass produced. Reverse Garbage, on the other hand, makes me feel lighthearted. I think it’s because it’s not just an inert pile of trash, but a living collection of quality goods, lovingly tended and promoted with activism and a definite aesthetic. Like an enormous punk-industrial antique shop.

But honestly this place also makes me feel a little guilty. Yeah, I’ve spent money at Ikea recently. And, why, why, WHY? Considering the cheap fiberboard and plastic crap they trade in will crumble to dust before any of the great old furniture on display here, or anything I could fashion for myself with the lumber and PVC in the back if I was halfway clever enough to learn how. (I’m so damned unhandy it’s not funny.) If there’s one lesson to be learned at Reverse Garbage, it’s that we as a society probably can probably just stop manufacturing things right now. There’s enough material and resources in all of the mountains of stuff that’s already out there in the world to get by just fine. The indictment of our consumer addiction and our environmental crisis is too obvious to go on about in depth, even for me.

I find myself thinking again about İstanbul. There you see men pulling big wooden carts through the narrow streets, calling for people to bring them their junk and scraps – dead appliances, bits of metal, anything. And people do; the carts get filled up, the stuff gets re-used. You get the feeling that nothing there is wasted. It points to an economy of conservation that we’ve almost forgotten about in the West, where we’re taught to feel self-conscious about a faded polo shirt or a TV that isn’t brand-new and perfectly flat.

What’s even more impressive about Reverse Garbage is that the secondhand wealth on display isn’t limited to the one facility. Stretching around the property are a number of other storage buildings open to the public, inviting us in to survey more collections of junk and ceramic tiles and used speakers and tubes. And out in the grassy, tree-lined area between the buildings is a big Sunday market: dozens of stalls offering local and organic produce, wine, the inevitable jams and chutneys – and more used stuff, much more.

Taken all together it’s a zone covering a few city blocks in which everything is used or handmade or locally grown or DIY. It’s like a castoff carnival. Rejects rule. You could come here every Sunday, shop for the apocalypse, and never go to Coles or Ikea or Target again.

we’re all egyptians

Last Friday brought an incredible story among all of the other incredible stories from Cairo. In the middle of the massive protests that have rocked the nation of Egypt, Muslim protesters took time on their holy day to pray – and in many instances Coptic Christians (who make up 15% of the population) stood close by, protecting them from the police. The breathtaking images of these incidents have been circulated around the world ever since.

I also saw a couple of accounts of Muslim youth helping to guard an Anglican church when the police stopped their patrols and looting began. And I read more than once that during the protests a Muslim Brotherhood chant of “Allahu Akbar!” was overwhelmed by a larger crowd chanting, “Muslameen Mesiheen Kolina Masreen!” which means “Muslims, Christians, we’re all Egyptians!” (I love the way it rhymes in both Arabic and English.)

A lot of people are experiencing uncertainty about this turn of the tide in Egypt. I admit it, so am I. The agenda has shifted so fast. For a long time our main concern about Egypt was the possibility of sectarian violence, especially after the bombing of a church on New Year’s Day. But sudddenly, before we knew what was really happening, there was a mass uprising of Egyptians of every faith and economic class demanding justice and basic human rights. We aren’t sure what to make of it. We need Jon Stewart or Banksy to come along and clarify things for us, give us a reassuring summary of the situation so that we can go back to having an opinion.

Are we afraid this turmoil is going to permanently de-stabilize Egypt? Or even the whole region, especially if the aftershocks continue spreading (as they did from Tunisia to Egypt)? Or are we just afraid on general principle? It’s an unfortunate human tendency to value order above freedom most of the time. That’s what repressive governments count on. Revolution is a scary thing.

We’re used to thinking of the Middle East as a battleground in a quasi-medieval religious war, a divisive and hopeless place. Did anyone ever think we’d see anything like these Muslims and Christians struggling together and looking after each other any time soon?

First of all, we might want to question where we get our ideas from in the first place. We hear all about terror, everyone’s favorite flavor of bad news, but we haven’t heard much about the Mubarek regime’s human rights abuses, have we? And beyond that, how do we let ourselves get convinced that there’s no hope for reconciliation between faiths, that no change will ever come? What takes away our hope?

I’ve been listening to a lot of Bob Marley lately. His music always resonates during a crisis. (It’s all I could listen to for weeks after 9/11.) The lyric that spoke to me when I saw these pictures is this one from “Coming in from the Cold”:

Would you let the system get inside your head again?
Would you let the system make you kill your brotherman?
No, dread, no!

If these images, which almost bring tears to my eyes even as I look at them now, prove one thing, it’s that new paradigms are possible, and can spring to life after decades – centuries – of hate and despair. Indeed, I think the potential for unity, peace and goodwill is always present, always just around the corner, even – or especially – in the most dire circumstances. Love is always stronger than hate.

All of our highest spiritual wisdom demands that we love one another. Maybe in the middle of this emergency in Egypt, we see here a glimpse of a new kind of interfaith connection, arising exactly when it’s needed most.

I think this should be one of our keys to understanding this situation. I don’t know what to think, I don’t know where these events will lead Egypt, or where they will lead us, which is probably how we should look at it. But I trust what I see here.

urban farmers

My wife and I recently started an organic vegetable garden in one of the communal flower beds of our suburban North Shore apartment building. We’d been talking about growing vegetables for years – owning a bit of land one of these days and producing food with it is a key goal for us. When we got back from Abu Dhabi a couple of months ago, we finally had the will and the downtime to give it a test run. The flower bed was full of compost. Summer was approaching.

There were a couple of harbingers that the garden was meant to be. A cherry tomato vine had taken over much of the flower bed during the four months we were out of town. Though it had nothing to climb on, and was just sprawling on the ground, still it had produced lots of fruit – some of it harvested by my mother-in-law, some of it still on the vine, or falling off into the flower bed. I was sorry to have to pull it out to make room for new seedlings. And among the weeds I also pulled out, I found a little nondescript cucurbit seedling right at the edge of the bed. I wasn’t sure if it was a cucumber, a melon or a squash. But any of those possibilities were welcome. I left that one, carefully clearing away the long grass around it, to be the flagship seedling of our new garden. Both of these plants were volunteers – the seeds had come from the composted vegetable scraps we’d been systematically burying in the flower bed earlier in the year.

I was so happy to see with my own eyes that winter in New South Wales is mild enough that a tomato plant can grow and produce by itself. That’s totally alien to my experience in New York, where the growing season runs from April to November at the latest, and there’s not much for farmers to do over the winter but catch up on TV watching and go through seed catalogs. The mild climate here is one of the many reasons I migrated of course. You really can grow veggies right round the calendar here if you know what you’re doing.

Which we don’t, really. Neither of us have ever done this before. We both spent formative seasons working on organic farms when we were younger, and I spent ten years working in the organic produce business, but it’s very different when you’re growing your own.

It’s not easy. The host of problems we’ve experienced comes across like the lyrics to a bad folk song about hard times. The roma tomatoes have blossom-end rot. The summer squash have downey mildew, and they’re not pollinating. The habañero pepper plants aren’t producing at all. The jalapeño plant produced one lonely pepper, now it’s just sitting there. The yellow beans were attacked by slugs. The onion seedlings died a miserable death. The radishes are being eaten by… something. Seriously, I wanted to take some more snapshots to post here, but so far the outlook is pretty grim.

But some things are going well. The heirloom tomatoes (pictured) are looking great now – big green things that will theoretically be blackish-purple and juicy in a couple of weeks. A new crop of beans is growing. The herbs – basil, thyme, sage, marjoram and parsley – are really thriving in the hot weather and regularly contribute to our kitchen. Same with the rocket, mizuna and rainbow chard. And the little volunteer cucurbit has grown into an enormous vine that’s taking over our front lawn. Turns out it’s a butternut squash, and the fruit on it is getting bigger all the time. We’ll have plenty of squash this year if nothing else. (Figures the volunteer is the one that’s really producing. There’s a lot to be said for just letting things happen.)

It’s going to take years to get good at this – that’s what everyone who knows tells us. I have such great memories of helping my grandpa with his garden on long summer days in Oregon when I was a kid. I’m not sure if it’s the haze of nostalgia, but it seems the beans and tomatoes formed perfect rows of ten-foot-tall plants, and the crookneck squash and cucumbers exploded out of the ground. My grandpa had been doing it all his life. It’s not going like that in our small, overcrowded garden. There are a hundred mistakes we’ve made, a hundred tricks we haven’t learned yet.

But it’s amazing how satisfying it is, how it makes me feel like myself, how quickly the stress melts away and I get into my right mind when I’m down near ground level with the skinks and the ladybirds, weeding or mulching or just observing the plants. I mean to spend the rest of my life doing this. Even if it has to be part-time.

Once I thought I wanted to move to the country and become a farmer – get back to the land and get off the grid. It didn’t take me long to realize I have a lot more city in me than that. I just don’t want to be that far away from all the fun and the danger and the film festivals. Not yet anyway. At this point I think I’d be happy with a kitchen garden on a half acre. And maybe some chickens, like my mate who lives in downtown Denver. But this is the point I’m coming to: you can do a lot with that – you can grow a lot of food on a little bit of land.

I’ve always struggled to incorporate the different elements in my life: music, writing, film, a love of history, a love of everything nautical, a strong belief in organics and sustainable living, vegetarianism, a commitment to spiritual living, a passion for baseball. At times I think I just have too many influences. Sometimes the lifestyles that spring from these interests seem to contradict each other. How does playing funky urban beats fit in with growing food?

Well, the phrase I had stuck in my head as I was thinking about this entry was urban farmers. That happens to be the name of a house music production and remix crew from England; they released a couple of my favorite late-90s jams on the 20:20 Vision label, including this one:

I have no idea why those guys chose the name Urban Farmers. Might’ve just been random. But the point is it inspires me.

Then there’s the Rurals, a house-music collective from Devon, England led by a husband-and-wife team who live and produce music in a farmhouse in the country. They’ve made a career of incorporating pastoral concepts and imagery into their projects (contrary to the hyper-urban or futuristic motifs that are the hallmark of electronic music), naming albums Farmyard Flavours, Nettle Soul and Farming Grooves. The sleeve design of Messages, with its birds and bees and floral patterns in a tribute to old-school printmaking, is one of my favorites. (It was done by Studio NMO.)

So it doesn’t have to be either/or. Anyway I’m starting to realize that the so-called contradiction between urban and pastoral urges in my life could represent possibilities for integration, mapping the way my life can fit into a sustainable future. I can take what I’ve learned about organic growing and apply it to city living. You could say this is a necessity. The world’s population is urbanizing at a crazy pace; farming is going to have to become more urban to keep up with it. This is the crucial next step in the local food movement.

Take a walk around the neighborhoods of the North Shore and you’ll see plenty of gardens, some of them pretty ambitious – beanstalks or cornstalks towering over the fences. It’s not a new idea. People have always loved growing a couple of tomatoes and some basil with their extra garden space. But I think more systematic, widespread and large-scale food growing in the city and suburbs should be considered. The population density of greater Sydney is skyrocketing. Suburban living as we think of it, with its wasteful and selfish tendencies, won’t work anymore. Nor is crowded urban living desirable for anyone. Medium density is the way forward. We’re already seeing it in classically suburban Lindfield: apartment blocks are replacing detached houses in some places. The paradigm is shifting.

Integrating urban food production into the region’s economy seems to me a great solution for this medium-density, mixed-use future. Increasing the land’s productivity, reducing supply lines while decreasing fossil-fuel use, making food a more immediate and involved experience for more people: win, win and win. It will be especially important here in Australia, the nation with the most urbanized population on earth. Much of this continent is not suitable for growing food, and the little that is has often been mismanaged and damaged. (This issue is tackled in Jared Diamond’s Collapse, which I just finished reading.)

But think of all the fertile land that exists in the suburbs. It’s like a huge untapped growing region made up individual plots of land. Most of it being used to grow lawns. But there are alternatives. Recently my wife visited a home not far away in posh, über-suburban Killara that had a huge and very productive garden taking up the entire backyard, with a chicken coop on the side.

And growing food is something everyone can do. As much as I’m going on about the problems I’ve had, it’s not something you need a degree or a certificate in. It’s part of everyone’s heritage. And it’s something you can do while also having a job and having a life. We just have to find the collective will to make it practical and desirable for more city and suburban people to do it – in backyards, in containers, on rooftops, in little flower beds like ours.

So, yeah. Urban farmers. The other day I was in Hyde Park (in Sydney’s city center) and noticed a container flower bed full of vegetables: kale, chard, lettuce and lavender. Purely for ornamentation you know. But just think of how much food we can produce like this when it comes down to it. It’s gotta be another sign.