ART

UNDER

GROUND

V5 Sept.

2014

Ft.

The per-

Formers of

AU Aug ‘14

Cover artwork by J. McKinney and L. Harvey

SFX: CYMBALS

OLD MAN: THE AGONY!!!! MY EYES ARE RUINED FIELDS

SFX: A COYOTE HOWLS

OLD MAN: ART UNDERGROUND! DOWN STAIRS AT BEYOND Q, CURTIN SHOPS!

SFX: LOW MOANING

OLD MAN: PROBABLY CANBERRA'S ONLY OPEN MIC, FOR MUSICIANS, VISUAL

ARTISTS, VIDEOGRAPHERS, POETS AND ALL THE REST

SFX: A TREE FALLS (SLOWED DOWN 200%)

OLD MAN: EVERY SECOND FRIDAY OF THE MONTH; SIGN-UPS FROM 7.00PM,

SHOW FROM 7.30

SFX: A HUGE OWL FIGHTS AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER

OLD MAN: POLITE COUGHING AND THE STARS POURED OUT OF THE SKY!!!!

SFX: POLITE COUGHING

EXIT OLD MAN

1. Reasons Why I’m

Breaking Up With You Art Underground Audience

5. The Art of Zentangle Janet McKinney

7. Bill Posters Will Never Be

Prosecuted Anthony Hayes

9. The World on Sir J Herschel’s Miranda Lello

13. The Mountains are on Fire Thomas Brereton

15. Kimchi Ben Lee

16. So It Goes Marcel Berthon

17. Chris Endrey

19. Striking a Chord With C.F Reid

21. Over the Back Fence Jacqui Malins

22. The Cure Arrin Chapman

Art BY «

ART

UNDER

GROUND

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1. Because ummm your sick dyslexia

2. Because I’m a recovering alcoholic…and you are

not…

3. Because relationships are patriarchal institutions

that oppress the human possibilities of universal love

4. Because you’re breaking up with me!

5. Your body odour repulses me.

6. You put chopsticks in my tear ducts

7. I want to be alone…

8. I am getting in first!!

9. Cus you always pocket me lighter

10. Because I have a dog now

11. Because when I intimately rub your face, it feels like I’m grop-

ing someone’s buttocks!

12. You’re batshit crazy

13. Your breath causes the hair on the back of my neck to crawl and my stomach

churn with revulsion.

14. You are just annoying, snore and mooch!

15. I don’t want to kiss you again because I saw you mooching on the dog’s behind

16. You used to take my breath away, but now I feel you are sucking the life out of me.

Reasons Why I’m Breaking Up With You

2

17. You are a dud between the sheets!

18. You bite your toenails.

19. Your jaundiced moon.

20. There’s not enough room for you and my deltoids in this relationship.

21. You pretended to like tea more than you do.

22. Because I gave you up for lent (as an excuse).

23. Because you didn’t want to read my favourite book.

24. Because I hate you.

25. You gave birth to lizards AND THEY AREN’T

EVEN MINE!!

26. I love your robot parts but I cannot stand

your meat parts.

27. They’re me :(

28. They’re not me:(

29. Yours is not mine.

29. You never told me you ride BMX.

30. I found the dead racoon you left in the dumpster...it

was still wearing my panties.

31. Cause I would do anything for love, but I won’t

do that…

- Art Underground Audience

3

32. You put the tea in before the milk, heathen!

33. You’re soft like a cushion, but also you are a cush-

ion.

34. The pancakes are rotten!!!

35. Toilet seat UP, NOT down!!

36. My name is Inigo Montoya, and you killed my father.

37. Death and distance and illness...and then you got breast

implants?

38. I bought a vibrator

39. You fart every time I got down on you

40. Toe jam.

41. The gelatinous blob is everything you can’t be, baby.

42. You melted my skin, flesh and bones...but not my heart.

43. I found someone else. It’s your conjoined twin. And we’re eloping to raise a family

of lizards.

45. Because a vegan and a velociraptor were never meant to be (but we tried)

46. I didn’t realise that the mask was actually your face (still, sorry about nearly

pulling it off).

47. Because we were NEVER TOGETHER! Read the restraining order!

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Lauren Harvey

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The Art of Zentangle

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- Janet McKinney

Janet McKinney is the feature visual artist for Art Underground September.

2013 was a watershed year for me. After

years of progressive pain and loss of mobility, I

finally accepted that I could no longer work be-cause of disability.

In learning to manage the chronic pain, I discov-

ered drawing for the first time. Zentangle is the art of meditative doodling and this provided me

with an outlet to distract me from pain (google it). This lead to a prolific output of design

which just seemed to flow from within.

I have always been involved in creative pursuits and remember sitting on the back steps at

home, mum teaching me to knit a head band while she also man-handled the washing with

an old wringer machine. Despite its uneven finish, I wore it proudly to school. It was a 60s

bright orange.

I love to create with a wide variety of media – fabric and fibre, beads and paper, minia-

tures and icing, in fact anything that catches my eye will do.

Sales of my artwork will assist me purchase mobility equipment to give me some inde-

pendence including a lift chair, mobility scooter and adjustable bed (more than $15,000).

Thank you for your support. I am sorry that mobility issues prevent me from being with

you at Art Underground in person.

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Nevermore will the skin of the wine settle the young stretches of eternity milling outside

Nevermore will nocturnal anti-grav boosters reside in the interstices of the DNA code

Nevermore will a toothy mouth smile

Nevermore will the dough rise to the occasion

Nevermore will the breathe take orders from the wind

Nevermore will the staircase metamorphose into a shuffling crawl upstairs or down

Nevermore will a hairless whisper wither beneath my very own soul

Nevermore will my tuna refuse your cat

Nevermore will the girth of my rod be blamed for the vagaries of the weather

Nevermore will the feudal epoch pay cash for a bag of cement

Nevermore will fruit be imagined on the basis of particular fruits

Because the vast expanse of the cosmos

Bill Posters Will Never Be Prosecuted

- for Eric and for Benjamin Péret

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The gargantuan nether beast who knows neither from whence nor why it came

The soft shelled tacos who know even less

And what was left over from the construction of the third artificial moon of Wolf 359-57

Are fading away like the most persistent of fashions

That undoes the least of the living as it does the grand

Who see nothing of their mutual passions

And would remain heartbroken even if the last of the self-slung suicides

Took revenge upon the moment of creation

Painted in the insensible colours of a putrefying night

- Anthony Hayes

9 Courtesy of http://world-around-us-olia201.blogspot.com.au

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In this fairy tale, it is morning and we wake and

the sky is

cracking open and our warm embrace,

infused with sweat and dreams, is insufficient,

it seems, to hold things together anymore, to

keep the stars alight.

Outside, the frost lies

so thick on dirt, on grass, on leaves, on houses

still slumbering and cars left to their dreams;

renders drivers blind and drives caterpillars

into blind cocoons.

But the frost is not thick enough

or cold to freeze time, to keep the earth from cracking.

In this fairytale, the wallpaper is white with yellow roses,

and reminds us of the olden days when things were real and whole –

we woke with the sun and killed our own pigs and

made our own cheese from the milk from our own cows

and knitted scarves by the fire in the evening made from

The World on Sir J Herschel’s Projection

by John Bartholomew - Miranda Lello

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wool from our own sheep.

The wallpaper is white with

yellow roses, like in the olden days, but the paper

shifts and bulges, un-real, haunted by the dark thing

that whispers and waits, sharpening its teeth,

waiting for the cracks to appear.

In this fairy tale, knowing what the Earth looks like from space

has not prevented the stars from going out one by one

as we turned the lights on at home and turned our faces

away from the universe.

This fairy tale is in fast forward

as buildings rise and fall like ages have passed not time but us

shaping the world and wearing it down in this fairy tale we

wake and sleep and wake and sleep and fast forward is like

pause:

under the frost this world is a placid lake

concealing fearsome monsters which rage and churn,

nightmares made flesh and bone and teeth.

The World on Sir J Herschel’s Projection fails to capture

the new shape of this Earth. Our fairy tales,

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our stories, our poems are

breaking at the

edges, from the inside, however artfully

we design our lines and images and

meter and rhyme. This fairy tale is

broken, is

haunted

by monsters that will not be

vanquished.

Stirring under the wallpaper,

white with yellow roses, not like the

olden days, when things were real, were whole –

now teeth and whispers and darkness that

our warmth, our dreams cannot

keep at bay.

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The mountains are on fire again,

The gold flames thaw the gullies and seep towards the city,

One hundred spot fires spark in rotting bark,

And in the rising haze the buildings morph.

Then your windows splinter in the heat,

And in the fractured light the living room is an unorthodox cathedral,

You glimpse God in the smoke stained glass,

Or at least a saint,

(probably Anthony given the circumstances).

Your shattered reflection,

Staring wide-eyed yet serene at the garden burning in colour.

I watch as the people catch alight,

And they cry and dance and laugh.

Their limbs melt and their heads boil,

Then they finally collapse

As their pupils burst in disbelief.

Do you remember the time I left the burner on full,

And we watched as the bluest flames pricked my skin,

And my mind frothed over,

Spilled to the linoleum,

Trickled down the hallway,

And crawled into the bath,

Where it simmered uneasily.

Then bits of me started swirling down the plughole,

The Mountains are on Fire

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To dissolve in an unseen ocean,

Until you scooped me back into my skull.

I never found the last two pieces,

But I can’t see where they used to fit.

- Thomas Brereton

Illustration by Thomas Brereton

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no matter how many times I brush

wipe

and scrub

push the tips

closer to surface

the red stain

will never wash off my hands

lips

or my breath

even though I bleach

hide

tear myself apart

I am just another cabbage

butt naked

Kimchi

- Ben Lee

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Memories flowing freely fading to forgotten

Clear blue memories remembered

Slowly seeping down the stream

Stagnating rot and rust rotten

Memories sadly lingering on

Now softy sliding south of town

Round and round a slippery slide

Now dumped into a pond and drowned

Oh no! My dear! My dear! It’s Clear!

It’s clear I don’t know what to say

I can’t remember things today

Thinking of it more and more

That love is kind of special sadness

More and more I do confess a certain

Gladness sad

Like scaly fishes gasping sad

Like old man gold he’s clasping

When we get cancer

God forbid

Chemo hand in hand together

God forbid and when we die

They’ll bury us in the ground forever

So It Goes

- Marcel Berthon

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By Chris Endrey

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Striking a Chord With

When does the journey begin?

I started playing classical guitar at 15, piano at 16, violin at 17, accordion at 19, and harp at 20 before realising I was talentless and decided to settle on strumming guitar arrhythmi-

cally and sticking to singing my half octave range to avoid frightening cats.

Which is more important to you? The music or the lyrics?

When I listen to Bob Dylan the lyrics are transcendent when the music allows them to be

so. The most beautiful poem I have ever encountered is Bob Dylan's 'Chimes of Freedom',

but in song form it does not bloom properly. The lines are not allowed to waiver as they do

beneath the breath of the reader. The images do not linger long enough to take their most

potent form. The result is a beautiful song, but one crippled by the necessities of the melo-

dy.

One of the biggest questions in my philosophies of art is whether such a song can bloom

properly if the right melody is found, and how, for more pedestrian songs of my own com-

position, I can best do justice to the spots of beauty or power that are found within my

lines.

What inspires you?

The moments of beauty and passion in life provide grist. A stock of images and circling

synesthetic thoughts; the tragedy of mortality played out in reflected gaze, the silent mo-

ments that stretch and linger over every parting detail of sleeping landscape beauty, and

the evening news of ideologies triumph over humanity. And then I read a poem, or an es-

say, or here a line rising up within me and the dance of trying to meld melody and word

begins.

If you could meet one musician who would it be and why?

Given the chance to meet someone such as Bob Dylan, the colossus bestride 20th century

lyricism, I feel I would be quite likely to flee. Given the opportunity to meet Nick Cave I

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C. F. Reid

would fear he might knife me

(poetically I'm sure, but I'd rather

postpone my death a while). If I met

Johnny Cash I'd probably have to hit

him in the head with a shovel to stop

him turning me into a zombie.

Billy Bragg however, is the loveliest

socialist I've ever had the pleasure to

meet.

Who is your ideal audience/ ven-

ue?

People who hear the lyrics. What skill I

have is contained to my words. Pub

audiences are unlikely to be struck by

what turns of phrases I have been

fortunate enough to happen upon, so I

feel if I am to grow an audience I need

to present my work to poets, and oth-

er songwriters, and the only mildly

drunk.

Where can the general public find you and your music?

https://soundcloud.com/cfreid

https://www.facebook.com/CFAReid

Before the end of the year I should hopefully be able to afford to get my first album rec-

orded and will be hawking it at gigs.

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Working at a wildlife park, the neighbour’s daughter

brought home a dingo pup.

Hidden by grey palings,

glimpsed only through cracks

except for one leap to brief freedom,

the golden not-dog grew as we grew.

While we could roam afield to find our kind,

it could not.

Alone all day, it called instead -

casting for kin with its ululating unanswered cry.

My mother, determined to re-enter the world

with more credentials than when she left to bear us

bent over her desk.

The poignant, penetrating song also persists,

One more reason to pass her test

and get out of the house.

Over the Back Fence

- Jacqui Malins

Illustration by Jacqui Malins

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Robert Smith taught me how to love

He said

And for that I am sorry

Because nothing

Is just like heaven.

The Cure

- Arrin Chapman

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Art

Underground

is a series of cries, acts and gestures that take place

the second Friday of every month at Beyond Q Bookshop

Curtin Shops (signups from 7pm; show from 7.30).The

wide-open microphones that stand at the front of

the room are like Scylla and Charybdis except

instead of luring Ulysses to his death they

lure your songs, poetry, stories,

images, dance and other

outrages to the eager ears

of a room full of bon

vivants and

parrots.

Art Underground will be back on the 10th Oct

staring magic, foxes and fairytales.

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