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June
   The bits of stuff that fall in the cracks between Life, Music and Outrageous Fortune.
 
     
 
Three days in Hobart to salve our souls..

1) The view of fishing boats from the window at our Zero Davey accommodation.

2) For francophiles - Daci & Daci (pron. dutsee) where we breakfasted 3) A rainbow to greet us at Mona

4) When you finally get to the top of the ninety-nine steps you see these parking spaces for David Walsh and friend

9) Gould's fish! Just as described in the book		 Oh MONA..
28.6.14 - Maria has never been to Tassie, but she has visited most of the world's finest galleries and art museums and was keen to check out David Walsh's MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) and so a month or so ago she happily planned a three-day visit to Hobart. We left Melbourne just as a wintery storm rolled in and so we were delighted to find that Hobart was chilly, but bathed in sunlight when we arrived - we were lucky with the weather for the whole three days really.
We checked into our hotel and found our room exactly as represented on the Net - the view of the boats (pic 1) is verging on charming I think you'll agree. We went for a walk to check out Hobart's famous Salamanca Place and had a very nice lunch at Smolt before checking out the adjacent touristy shops, (all
sporting similar '50s and '60s cool jazz soundtracks) before heading back to the hotel. We couldn't make up our minds where to eat that night and reluctantly settled on Fish Frenzy, one of the many fish-type cafés on the docks, which turned out to be the only disappointing meal of the trip.
The next morning we ate breakfast at Daci & Daci, (pic 2) a quite fabulous French-style pâtisserie we'd spied the previous day and were in plenty of time to board the MONA ROMA ferry at 11.00. It was at this point I started to realise the scale of the MONA operation. For instance, the ferries (there are two of them) are pretty much brand new and presumably purpose-built. I suppose because I'm attuned to such things I noticed the piped music was modern and idiosyncratic, as opposed to say, the music in the Salamanca arts & craft shoppes, just a couple of examples of the kind of macro and micro-managing that's entirely absent from state run institutions and there were many more examples of this unprecedented attention to detail to come.
I should warn the verging-on-unhealthy (like myself) that there are ninety-nine steps to negotiate to reach MONA's entrance (which is itself an installation) and we were quite breathless when we reached the top. In a daze we wandered into the reception area and showed our tickets and were advised to take the see-through tubular lift (with muzak) or the stairs winding down to the bottom basement (pic 3) to pick up our 'O's and start our tour of discovery.
I could go into detail about what we experienced over the next nearly five hours but mere words (or pictures for that matter) wouldn't adequately explain the exhiliration we both felt at the end of it all - and we didn't even get to see everything either. (Mind you, that was probably because we indulged in a smashing ninety minute lunch at the in-house restaurant, The Source). (pics 4, 5 & 6)
I've never felt anything like exhilirated at a gallery or museum before, and Maria, who's vastly more experienced in this area than I am, was equally inspired. Still reeling from lunch we fasted that night (apart from the Freddo Frog I found in the fridge) and the next morning breakfasted once more at Daci & Daci before walking to Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) to take in a more conventional version of a museum/art gallery. I enjoyed seeing the stuffed Tassie Tiger (and some accompanying footage of the last live ones in captivity) and I got a slight thrill to see the Gould painting of fish (pic 9) (I recommend Richard Flanagan's book Gould's Book of Fish) but neither of us had the energy to drag ourselves around all the exhibits - the exhiliration of the previous day's experience had quite spoiled us for the mundane and the ordinary.

3) The bar - 17 metres underground! 4) Food porn dept: this is my lunch - a hanger steak and some other stuff

5) Cheers everybody! Not too many other people in The Source at this stage, but it filled up 6) The bill!

7) Time to go - down the 99 steps this time 8) A completely stuffed thylacine at TMAG
 
     
 

The Drs' Sellers join me, Maria and Maria's handbag for a birthday meal		 The Birthday Boy
23.6.14 -This is such old news already, but there've been extenuating circumstances preventing the prompt reportage of such events. James finally made it down from Shepparton and updated my PC with Windows 7 and that, combined with the acquisition of my first iPhone, has caused considerable fretting and enforced procrastination. As if I needed an excuse.
Anyway, on Sunday the Sellers' joined Maria and me at Rumi for a muted but classy celebration of my 69th birthday. It was an appropriate way to topple into the abyss.
 
     
 


The visiting Koehne Quartet take their first sitting O from an appreciative bunch of Boomers before even playing a note..
 A trip to the Woodend Winter Arts Festival
10.6.14 - I always know it's Queen's Birthday weekend because it's my mum's birthday on June 7th - and this year was special with my mum turning ninety for the first time. We had a synchronised party here in Mt Waverly with Chris and the Warrandyte Rudds in attendance and effected a live cross per Skype (thanks Jeremy and Susie) to the pre-dinner drinkies in Mum's room at the Auckland Hilton. That's when it's worth living in the Technological Age.
Maria and I barely ate on Sunday as we were still feeling the effects of over-eating on Saturday night. Maria had excelled herself with two majestic Greek dishes and the Rudds brought a swag of killer cheeses to complement them. We awoke on Monday morning still feeling a little indifferent, but there were things to do.
We'd booked to see Dr Betty Snowden's daughter Joanne (Lewis) playing with her Viennese-based Koehne Quartet (pic) in the modestly proportioned St Ambrose Catholic church in the mid-Victorian townlet of Woodend, which quite sensibly has a Winter Arts Festival over Queen's Birthday weekend. We arrived at the church early thinking the concert began at 1.00, but retired to the main street to secure takeaway hot chocolates after we realised the concert actually began at 1.30..
Things were quite busy in the main street as it turned out and we arrived back just seconds before the concert began. The next hour and a half was quite entrancing and I almost didn't notice that the pews were cutting off the circulation to my nethers. As I say, I almost didn't notice, but I was glad there was an intermission to re-establish contact with my buttocks. Maybe I should've purchased a cushion available at the door from the enterprising local scout troop after all. There were some sublime moments of musical congruence and of sonority and movement mixed with occasional waywardness and equipment malfunctions that you can only get at a live concert so I was glad we made the effort to actually be there to hear it. Thinks: I suppose Spectrum might've lowered the tone somewhat, but it would be nice to do that sort of thing every now and then..
 
     
     
 
 
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