From The Age:

An anonymous Iraqi woman was nominated today as a contender for a major literary award for her internet blog-based account of the Iraq war and its deadly impact on ordinary Iraqi people.

Using the internet as her outlet, the Iraqi author, who is in her late 20s, chronicles her anger and fear during "three years of occupation and bloodshed" in Baghdad.

It's great to see how the Internet and blogging is able to open up free-speech and potentially democratise the media. Obviously not everyone will be following this first-hand account of the War in Iraq; they will still quite happily be spoon feed by the world's Western-centric media. However, at least we can get a first-hand account - the opportunity exists. Think of only 60 years ago in World War II; all news and commentary was filtered through several stages before it reached the general public. It would be near impossible to easily get a first-hand account of the plight of the Jews, or of war-encumbered Berlin.

Follow 'Riverbend's' blog at http://www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

Another interesting Iraqi blog: Today in Iraq

Today in The Age:

If you're prepared to - or are preparing to - fork out the extra cash and go organic in your eating, it may be what you're not paying for that will do you the most good. Pesticides, for example.

Meanwhile:

A group of university researchers said today that they had created what sounds like a nutritional holy grail: cloned pigs that make their own omega-3 fatty acids, potentially leading to bacon and pork chops that might help your heart.

Modern science seems to think it is above Nature; that it can control and 'improve' the yield and so-called nutritional benefits of food. When will we learn to leave Mother Nature alone and stop our scientific corruption. If omega-3 isn't in pigs, it isn't there for a reason. We aren't Gods to dictate over Nature.

I also love the photo of the 'happy pig' alongside the article. It seems like a very content pig, having a nice relaxing day in the sun, not a worry in the world. Or maybe it is a little deluded; maybe it has forgotten the reality of modern pig factory farming:

Slew the flame of transparent thought.
Uprise and purge, within broken shatters,
Glass resurgence, overwhelm the spoken mutter,
whimper and clamp, hard grey ceil, blood. Dread, clamp within,
Clamp and restrict. Clenched and expire, within surge.
Glimmer, flame, uplift and restrict, bring
Down, up, down. Uplift.
Stretch of tongue and limp. Contract and pulse,
pulse... pulse... pulse
Silence, depth consumes worth
Worth despises sorrow. Fleeting arrows sprout
Grow and spray splinters of life
within woven threads.
Smelt splendour resurrects a passage,
to enter and expel. Forthward we are pulled
and backsome we restrain,
How shall we period. Break.

I have updated the the design for the painting, photography and short film sections of the site. They now display their respective items in a much nicer and easy to navigate manner.

Visit the painting, photography, and short film sections to take a look.

I was walking down Exhibition St. in Melbourne the other night and came across a massive piece of what appeared to be videoart being projected onto a building wall. It created a very interesting display surface. The projection wasn't incredibly bright but that actually gave the work an interesting texture, as if it was part of the building, not just some giant TV screen. I assume it must be part of the arts projects being displayed around Melbourne for the Commonwealth Games. Unfortunately I was too tired to stick around to watch the entirety of the work, but I did enjoy what I saw.

I am beginning my research into synaesthesia, abstraction and spirituality and started re-reading Wassily Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art. I randomly opened it up to the perfect page (19) concerning the combining of the arts and the movement towards abstraction:

And so at different points along the road are the different arts, saying what they are best able to say, and in the language which is peculiarly their own. Despite, or perhaps thanks to, the differences between them, there has never been a time when the arts approached each other more nearly than they do today, in this later phase of spiritual development.

In each manifestation is the seed of a striving towards the abstract, the non-material. Consciously or unconsciously they are obeying Socrates' command - Know thyself. Consciously or unconsciously artists are studying and proving their material, setting in the balance the spiritual value of those elements, with which it is their several privilege to work.

And the natural result of this striving is that the various arts are drawing together. They are finding in Music the best teacher. With few exceptions music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist's soul, in musical sound.

A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art. And from this results that modern desire for rhythm in painting, for mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated notes of colour, for setting colour in motion.

$350
76cm x 21cm
acrylic on board
2006

Streams of white and burnt embers,
Drift and splutter
wolfing within the wood and splinter
split, smash and corrupting.
Enter and exhaust the dripping
flow of time etched upon boarded divides.
Divide they do,
But do they combine?
The black fails not the ruby,
Yet faint gold succeeds,
To bring forth and shine.