AWAY, AWAY, WHERE ONLY MEMORY CAN FIND YOU... AND PHOTOS.... AND GPS... AND WHEREIS... AND, YOU KNOW, PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE KNOWS.

I don't know when you started your year, but for me, this is the first weekend of 2016.

For the first time in six years, I've actually managed to have some proper holidays, and while New Year's resolutions are fine and dandy and wonderfully worthwhile things, I'm damned if I'm going to remember what they are when I'm sitting in a Kripsy Kreme at 10 o'clock at night with a vanilla slice doughnut in one hand and a fuck-off-sized banana malt milkshake in the other.

In other news, we spent a week in Melbourne, and yesterday I recorded a 1.7kg gain at my Weight Watchers weigh-in......

Nominally, the trip happened because the kid's grandparents took them away for a week, but it was really a chance for me to exhibit at my 2nd Lego exhibition, the incredible Brickvention, where something in the region of 26,000 members of the public descended upon the Royal Exhibition Building to view the works of Lego artists from all over the country, for Lyn to catch up with her cousin Sue, and for us both to catch up with our good friend Grant Watson. Plus, you know, Melbourne.

Let's start with the Lego, shall we?

BRICKVENTION

I've been niggling abut getting over to this massive exhibition for a couple of years now. Brickvention 2016 took place at the Royal Exhibition Building, a beautiful old building next to the Victorian Museum. The 2-day exhibition is preceded by an AFOL day: an entire day set aside for seminars, mutual admiration, frenzied discounted-sets buying, fan auctions, lectures, drinking and an enormous game of Dirty Brickster. The day started at 9am. We arrived in Melbourne at 6am. It's fair to say that working a full day, then going straight to the airport to catch a red-eye flight, then dropping your exhausted wife off in the middle of a strange City by herself while you fuck off for 12 hours of self-indulgent Lego activity is not a practice I'll replicate next time I do this event.

I have a very loving wife.

The AFOL day itself was a lot of fun. Registration was accompanied by a goodies bag that would be the envy of most of the professional conventions I've attended-- a backpack stacked with free Lego, including an exhibition-exclusive set designed by Australian AFOL Shannon Sproule; branded high-quality water bottle; exhibitor t-shirt; and a range of vouchers designed to make me feel welcome and pampered. Bloody worked, too. Once I'd picked up my goodies and signed up for some of the ore interesting events, I sahayed into the several-thousand square feet building to admire the astonishing skills of the other builders, and meet my co-exhibitors.

Due to distance, unfamiliarity, and weight restrictions, I was making perhaps the smallest contribution of any exhibitor: a 32x32-stud module towards a Micropolis collaborative build. Micropolis refers to a tiny-scale modular City built collaboratively by any number of contributors: the Brickvention version contained contributions from Queensland, South Australia and Victoria as well as my spaceport-in-a-backpack. I placed my little offering at the edge of the city, met and chinwagged with Cherie and Shaun Patrick, Queenslanders who had made the journey down to be a part of the build, then spent the rest of the day wandering around in my own little world, taking photos, going back again and again to the commercial stalls for just one more custom-printed block or baseplate, and generally geeking out like a geeky little geeker geek.

After meeting Luscious for dinner, we both trooped back to the hall to show Lyn the much-more-impressive-than-her-husband's works on display and to finish the night off with Dirty Brickster, a round-table game that involves unwrapping mystery Lego packages and then madly stealing them off each other while the rest of the crowd hoots and hollers in mock outrage. Having picked up a sweet submarine set at 20% off earlier in the day, I set my eyes on a duplicate that was unwrapped late in the game, and came away with it in a state of high glee, the calls of 'Dirty Brickster' loud in my ears as I casually swiped it from the person who'd swiped it from the person who'd swiped it from the person who unwrapped it. Stolen three times, the set was officially out of the game and under my chair: a great part pack of colourful elements that will find their way into a spaceship MOC very soon.

Saturday and Sunday were spent behind our display table, answering questions and chatting to the unending stream of visitors who attended the public exhibition, bar a couple of hours on Saturday when I snuck out to join Luscious at the National Gallery's Hamer Hall to see visiting naturalist Steve Backshall on stage, a pre-paid performance that was a much-anticipated highlight of the trip. And then, after three days of full Lego immersion, it was all over, and I said goodbye to new friends like Damien Saunders and Paulius Stepanius, and old ones like Sue Ann Barber, and headed out into the night for four days in the supposed cultural capital of Australia with Lyn.

Before that, though, we're going to need a gallery:

Brickvention! After 7 hours on a plane, a 45 minute walk from the hotel, and 27 hours since any form of sleep, I make it!

The Royal Exhibition Building is a modest, understated little thing...

Modest. Understated.

It's hard to decide what the design brief for the lights were, but 'giant, fuck-off' seems to have been mentioned... 

40 feet above our heads, someone has folk-arted flowers on the ceiling. Which begs the question: who even decides to haul a Nanna that high, and how do they do it?

My modest little contribution joins the table.

The full Micropolis display, with my module on the right side. 7 contributors from WA, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria, including Sue Ann Barber, Cherie and Shaun Patrick, and Tim Burdon.

Every exhibitor received a brick-built badge consisting of 1x6 bricks with their name and the exhibition year engraved upon them. Here, AFOL Tim Matheson models a multi-year badge that might just have taken the whole concept over the edge......

Scottish builder and author Warren Elsmore takes us through his work.

Dirty brickster.... dirty brickster......

So many displays, even a dedicated NoLSO (Non-Lego Significant Other) like Luscious can find one she wants to be seen with.

A mildly popular event......

And what of the displays themselves? Here is a small (and I mean small) selection of what was on display. Where I know the name of the artist I've denoted it, but nonetheless, mad skills abound. 

Even in brick form, the Lancaster is a thing of beauty.

Ryan McNaught's Titanic. An absolute behemoth about 6 feet high and eight long, with unbelievable detail and narrative moment in every inch. 

He also contributed this. I'm sure he processes tax forms or something equally boring in his spare time...

As if that wasn't enough, Ryan also undertook a live 'mystery build' with patrons over the two days, creating these life-size, wearable and sittable, versions of the classic 886 space set. Talented sod.

Audrey, by Tim Burdon.

A classic space diorama by Donna Mee and family, from Tasmania, that had me drooling in nostalgia lust.

 

SHIP is an acronym that stands for Seriously Heavy Investment in Parts. Any questions?

God, I love spacecraft. 

Classic Space SHIP. I actually heard my inner ten year old squee.

More airborne beauty.

M-Tron. A space series that arrived after I had moved on from my childhood collecting. That colour scheme is insane.

Greebling: the addition of small detail designed to give texture and visual interest. Got it?

 And what of Melbourne itself? Well, that will need a part two, tomorrow.

LAUNCH IN T-MINUS...... (COUNTS FINGERS)......

My fabulous book-pimp Stefen has confirmed the details, so I'm overjoyed to announce that we’ll be officially launching Magrit at (drum roll):

Stefen’s Books

8 Shafto Lane, Perth

11am-12.30pm

Saturday 27 February.

We’ll be having a reading, some Q&A, and copies of the book to buy and get signed, of course, as well as some spooky fun things I still have to decide upon and/or fund. Then we'll be crossing the lane to hang out with us at The Generous Squire for lunch and beverages, which is the only reason I’m going…….

Come on down for fun, frolics, some other things beginning with 'f' that I haven't worked out yet, and the unforgettable sight of me pretending to be a ten year old girl in front of children!

OFF INTO THE WILD BLUE... THEN GREY... THEN SNOWING... THEN BLUE AGAIN.... THEN HURRICANES.... WTF, MELBOURNE? YONDER

So, here we are, sitting in the airport, waiting to board. The mail's been put on hold, the out-of-office message is programmed into the email account, Blakey-boy has taken up his house-sitting position with our fridge and our remote controls and the pin for the adult channel....

Off to Melbourne for a week. I'll be lurking about Brickvention for the weekend (many, many pictures to follow) while Luscious rests her foot and catches up with family and clothes shopping, then we'll be swanning around for the rest of the week spending egregious amounts of holiday cash on restaurants and theatre shows-- the Midsumma Gay and Lesbian Festival Leopold and Loeb bio musical tickets have already been booked-- and generally being windswept and interested.

See you when I get back.

OH, YOU PRETTY THING

So, a few muddled, incomprehensible words, because I still can't quite comprehend the event itself.

Like many of my friends, peers, and contemporaries, I've spent the last 4 days wandering around in somewhat of a daze, trying to come to terms with news of the sudden death of David Bowie at the age of 69.

Much like Robin Williams last year, I've experienced a form of genuine grief, borne of the fact that Bowie has been an ever-present flavour of wallpaper in my life. I've never been without a Bowie song somewhere in my consciousness-- on the radio, in my Walkman/disc player/iTunes playlist. When I checked, shortly after I heard the news, I had 98 Bowie songs on my iPod. Whenever I'm interviewed, and discuss my influences, he's the first name listed. Actor, artist, musician, fashion icon, Bowie was exactly the kind of polymath artist that fascinates and inspires me, and to which I aspire.

My first exposure came relatively late in his first great period-- the video for Ashes to Ashes, at age 9, on Countdown (where else?). There was nothing else like it in the world. I was simultaneously awestruck, intimidated, and scared-- it was clearly dealing with subjects and emotions I was unaware of, and using a suite of imagery I wasn't able to process. I was only just discovering music in any meaningful way. My world was still dominated by my parents' 50s and 60s MOR sensibilities. My mother hated the Beatles for turning into hippies, for fuck's sake: what chance did I have? The man, the song, and the video stuck with me, and stuck hard, but at the more threatening, deeper end of my experiential awareness. It is, of course, exactly where he would want to be, and where he deserved to be.

Ashes to Ashes. The first Bowie video I recall seeing.

While I grew into a Bowie fan, I grew into a 'classic' Bowie fan. I loved the songs, but they were the same suite of songs that the entire Western world seemed to love: those genuine classics that dominated the 1970s and early 80s. Apart from the radio standards, his currency dropped off my radar by the time I was in Uni in the very late 80s, sometime between Tonight and regular sex. A brief flurry of interest around the time of  The Saint movie in the mid-90s, when his song You Little Wonder made the soundtrack and a couple of rotations on JJJ, almost as a curiosity notwithstanding, it was his acting that I was drawn to. Sure, there was his performance in Labyrinth (Oh, the hair, oh the codpiece, oh the second-rate Muppets), but discovering The Man Who Fell to Earth and (of all things) The Linguini Incident opened up a new appreciation for the man's ability to switch roles and faces. And, of course, he could act. Merry Christmas, Mister Lawrence was a revelation, a high watermark he did not surpass until a perfectly-pitched turn as Nikola Tesla in the otherwise teeth-itchingly irritating The Prestige.

The Man Who Fell to Earth.

But there he was, always there. Always Ziggy, and The Thin White Duke, and Aladdin Sane, thanks to radio and my burgeoning music collection and the sheer weight of his presence within popular culture. He had become an ornament, pressed in amber.

Then, a few years ago, a chance comment to my good friend Grant Watson opened a discussion of Grant's Bowie fandom, which was gathering strength just as mine was receding. In the process, I was exposed to the music I'd missed, all those synth and electronica-heavy experiments from the 90s, and (what we thought) were the final, atmosphere-heavy mood pieces from (what we thought) his final works, Heathen and Reality. And I fell in love all over again. My favourite songs come from this period, particularly his jungle-and-synth-infused trio Outside, Earthling and Hours. Indeed, apart from Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Earthling is the only album I have in its entirety on my iPod. And, in the last few days, Blackstar, as I listen to it over and over, trying to unpick the last messages to the world of a dying man. But that, of course, is a different thing. And, of course, that's what the man could do. Disappear from public view for ten years, and stop the world with his return. The greatest prodigal son 20th Century art ever had. Even his absence was an event.

So, here I am, with that final statement, like everyone else, not so much listening to the songs as trying to assemble the narrative behind them, the one that speaks of an artist using his last remaining moments not to enfold himself with family but with his art, to shout one last time from the edge of the cliff in the hope that this time, this final time, the world will get it. He's not the first, of course: he's not even the first in my playlist. The stories behind Queen's Made in Heaven, and Freddie Mercury's long solo sessions in the studio, laying down vocal tracks for the rest of the band to orchestrate after his death, have become musical legend, as has Warren Zevon's unbelievable last album The Wind. And they're both legends, and I miss them both and the impact they had on my life.

But this is Bowie. And, in some ways, those four words sum up the man's impact, not just on my life but on popular culture as a whole over the last 40 years. No matter your argument, over legacy or influence or cultural impact or precedent; no matter who you nominate as greater, or better, or whatever; no matter how I try to rationalise that what I got from him is no more or less than what he gave to the rest of the world-- 27 albums, a bunch of movies, some art, some characters; no matter how much I try to rationalise and place him in the context of every other distant, unknowable public figure I've only ever experienced as a man-made object. The answer is the same.

Yeah. But this is Bowie.

I still keep waiting for the new that it was all a mistake, that he's alive and well and there's a new album coming. I still keep waiting to get it.

Can I pick a favourite Bowie song? Can I even pick a dozen? No. Here's one that, maybe,

you've not heard. Because it seems there's always more to discover, even amongst those

who've had him a our constant travelling companion our whole lives.

MAGRIT IMAGE PORN!

Because that's not a creepy weird title, given the book's about a ten year old girl.....

Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss'anywaaaaaaayyyyy...... the publisher has sent me some groovy hi-res images of bits of the book!

Wanna see them?

Course you do.