TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

Thursday, November 1, 2007

11:57 PM
Posted by jodi rose

This afternoon I took my coffee in a little red thermos and walked the three blocks to Maybach Ufer, to sit and watch the ducks. There is something inherently calming about ducks, the way they are just so... like ducks. It's all going on underneath. A flotilla of swans paddled up, looking fake like blobs of polystyrene, thinking I was going to feed them but all I had was words. That's all I have to feed myself too. One swan in particular made friends with me, wagging his/her tail feathers and swimming around excitedly, while the others all drifted off back to the bridge and people with bread.

Then I came home and made another strange meal - spaghetti with precisely one eggplant, one tomato, a dash of basilikum/tomato paste and 6 slices of fried halloumi. Mmmmm. Now I have to go down to the cellar for more coal. I can't believe my day involves that last sentence. Life really is very bizarre. But we all adapt.

Tried listening to the micro.fm talk from c-base - yes it's just up the road but I really couldn't leave the house tonight, am having one of those 'it's all too hard and everything aches' days. Intermittent hum was interupted now and then by faint crackly far-away voices, microphone scuffles and what sounded like a bridge in a high wind.

So I chatted with Philippa in Zagreb and Sophea in New Delhi instead.
Also heard from a friend in Brisbane who is trying to get out of a rut - hell, I'm trying to get in one! - another friend from Sydney now living in Vienna who has a show opening here next week, and the editor of a magazine based in the USA who is publishing an article about my work and needed pictures. Then wrote a proposal for a public art project in paris next year, and replied to my collaborating artist in ljubljana who is organising a gorilla bridge playing activitiy sometime, and another composer who works with me on the surround symphony in sydney about the sound biennalie in new dehli we have work in next year.

All up it's a strange juxtaposition of almost complete inertia tinged with hypermanic workaholism. Slowly the next step is starting to come into focus, still waiting for that moment to articulate it. Just a moment, in between many other moments, it will come in time.
Framing, facilitating, fantasising....

I can feel it's about to be a very busy month. Everything at once. Always. You should see my list of submission deadlines. At least I got to cross one off today. And another was deferred until next fortnight.
Still more to come, but can feel myself gingerly climbing out of the pits of limbo, scraped knees and burnt fingers, back into the world of international art operatives. Integrity, innocence and imagination intact. It's been a close call this time, but I feel that hard-won battle for my faith - in life, in myself, in music, in art, in bridges - is somehow over. Now it comes down to lifting one foot in front of the other, and keeping on breathing. I've heard the bridges singing. A vocation... an invocation... always an invitation.