Just About Now is A collection of things happening in our spaces & places, physical & digital, intersecting culture, community & CREATIVITY
“The Yoorrook Justice Commission, represented by the design at the centre of the logo, is central to the truth telling for injustices for First Nations people and in turn is central to making recommendations for healing, system reform and practical changes to laws, policy and education.
“The circles represent meeting and community and they are connected through the songlines of culture and understanding.”
COMMUNITY. PUBLIC ART. 2001. Bay Totem by Peter Blizzard. “The aim of the project was to mark 100 years of Australian nationhood around a theme that may be described as ‘emerging together’ – a concept equally relevant to Australia in the next 100 years as we tackle the remaining tests of tolerance and reconciliation. The water element is symbolic of continuity and an ongoing process of calmness and healing.”–Creative Brief for a public commemorative sculpture fountain to mark 100 years of the Australian Federation, WSKRA (2000)
COMMUNITY. Port Phillip Citizens For Reconciliation meet monthly on the third Tuesday, 6.30 pm, South Melbourne Community Centre. “It began in 1997 at a public meeting at St Kilda Town Hall attended by hundreds of people including Elders, Indigenous community members, politicians, councillors, musicians and the general public in response to widespread local interest in Reconciliation.”
ART. Triennial at the NGV. Free entry, 3 Dec 2023 to 7 Apr 2024. “One powerful and moving portrait of the world today.” @ngvmelbourne #NGVTriennial
ART. PUBLIC MURAL. The Melbourne Keith Haring Mural. “During his visit to Melbourne in 1984, Keith Haring undertook a series of public works including a now-iconic mural in Collingwood. Six years later, on 16 February 1990, Haring died at the age of thirty-one from AIDS-related complications.”–NGV
ART. COMMUNITY. [Above] Five Things to Know: Keith Haring. “Haring used his platform as an artist to raise awareness of AIDS. He himself was diagnosed with the disease in 1988. His poster Ignorance = Fear refers to the challenges people who were living with AIDS faced.”–Tate UK
COMMUNITY. World AIDS Day Street Appeal. “World AIDS Day takes place every year on December 1st. The day raises awareness around the world about HIV and AIDS, and gives the public the opportunity to show their support for people living with HIV and remember those who have passed.”–Thorne-Harbour Health (THH)
MUSIC. Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody (Live at Rock Montreal, 1981) “Freddie Mercury was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987. In 1991, the day after announcing his diagnosis, he died from complications of the disease at the age of 45. In 1992, a concert in tribute to him was held at Wembley Stadium, in benefit of AIDS awareness.”–Wikipedia
DOCUMENTARY FILM. Freddie Mercury — The Final Act, a story of friendship, love and a fight against prejudice. Winner of 2022 International Emmy Award for Arts Programming. “The extraordinary story of Freddie Mercury’s battle with AIDS and the ground-breaking tribute concert Queen staged in his memory after he died.” Aired on ABC iView on Monday, 4 Dec 2023; available until 3 Jan 2024.
COMMUNITTY. Thorne-Harbour Health | History. “We envision a healthy future for our sex, sexuality & gender diverse communities, a future without HIV — where all people live with dignity and wellbeing. As a LGBTIQ+ community-controlled organisation, we are governed by our members and work for people living with HIV as well as our sex, sexuality & gender diverse communities.”–THH
“In 2022, 630 000 [480 000–880 000] people died from HIV-related causes and 1.3 million [1.0–1.7 million] people acquired HIV. There is no cure for HIV infection. However, with access to effective HIV prevention, diagnosis, treatment and care, including for opportunistic infections, HIV infection has become a manageable chronic health condition, enabling people living with HIV to lead long and healthy lives.”–World Health Organisation (WHO) Key facts on HIV and AIDS, as at 13 July 2023.
FILM. How To Tell A Secret (2022), an experimental feature documentary about HIV in Ireland. Written and Directed by Anna Rodgers & Shaun Dunne. “It explores the act of disclosure of being HIV positive and the stigma that drives people to withhold their status in contemporary Ireland.”–IMDb
MUSIC. Direct from St Kilda, The Peptides! Sunday, 3 Dec 2023 at The Bowlo (St Kilda Sports Club, Fitzroy St, on the edges of Albert Park Reserve). Free entry and cheaper beers for Club members. A hoot every first Sunday of the month.
ART | PERFORMANCE. It’s more than just Art, it’s Moira, a legend very much alive. For one night only, for the annual fundraiser evening Cancel Everything. Nothing Else Will Compare. Acts Of Paradise, 7 Dec 2023 at The Sofitel CBD.
MUSIC. Chilly Gonzales’ A Very Chilly Christmas medley.
Chilly Gonzales’ Pop Music Masterclasses at 1LIVE, featuring Wham!: “Last Christmas“ or Mariah Carey: “All I Want For Christmas” or Queen: “Bohemian Rhapsody” or Queen & Bowie: “Under Pressure” or Drake: “Hold On, We’re Going Home” or Daft Punk: “Get Lucky”
IDEAS. Chilly Gonzales on Art & Artifice | Red Bull Music Academy (2016). “In his lecture at the 2016 Red Bull Music Academy, Gonzales opened up about his formative years, time in Berlin with Peaches and how Franz Liszt birthed the musician as celebrity.”
COMMUNITY. Dine With Heart at Sacred Heart Mission. “This Christmas is going to be very tough for many people. Rising inflation and costs of living mean that people are struggling to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table. For people without a home, this just gets tougher. For many people in our community, a meal from Sacred Heart Mission is the only food they receive each day.”–Deputy CEO Stephen Schmidtke
Sacred Heart Mission’s Campus of Care was officially opened on Friday, 6 October 2023. “Our warm, welcoming Dining Hall is the heart of the Mission, where hundreds of people who are experiencing homelessness and social disadvantage come to share a community meal and engage with our services, 365 days a year. Everyone is welcome to drop in for a free meal today.”
DESIGN. The Big Design Market | Melbourne Royal Exhibition Building, 1–3 Dec 2023. Food, Wine + Design. 250+ Exhibitors. “The Big Design Market has everything from homewares and ceramics to fashion, jewelry, kids toys, tech accessories, books, art prints and stationery.”
Also from 1–3 Dec, the Alliance Francaise Xmas Market at Spring Place CBD.
ARCHITECTURE. Inside the Melbourne Royal Exhibition Building, photographed on Friday, 26 Aug 2023, at Now Or Never Festival with Max Cooper, Autechre et al.
VISIT Melbourne Museum
MUSIC. Drake with Marvin’s Room (posted July 2018, 139M views). Drake’s Sticky (posted Aug 2022, 34M views). “Aubrey Drake Graham was born in Toronto, Ontario, the son of Dennis Graham, an African-American musician born in Memphis, Tennessee, and Sandi (Sher) Graham, a Canadian Jewish educator.”–IMDb
COMMUNITY. Out with the calendars y’all. Midsumma Festival from 21 Jan to 11 Feb kicks off on 21 Jan with Carnival, kicks back for MQFF Rooftop Cinema on 28 Jan, gets the whole community together for one big Pride March on 4 Feb, then let’s hair down and everything else loose for Victoria’s Pride on 11 Feb. That’s just the Sundays.
“The Regional Activation Program of Victoria’s Pride is made up of 13 events that will paint the state rainbow and culminate in a one-day free arts and cultural street party in Melbourne’s iconic Gertrude and Smith Street precinct on Sunday, 11 February 2024—Victoria’s Pride, a grand celebration of LGBTQIA+ communities from across the state.”
MUSIC. Flight Facilities Decade Mix: 2012 – 2022 (Official Visualizer). “It was a decade best summed up by podcasts, cancel culture, fake news and memeing our way through tragedy and triumph. But was 2012-2022 any crazier than eras past, or was it that the prevalence of social media put major international events on our digital doorsteps?”
MUSIC. In Jan 2014, Daft Punk et al win Grammy’s Album Of The Year: Random Access Memory.
“Daft Punk is French duo Thomas Bangalter (guitar) and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (drums). Born in the mid-70’s in neighbouring Paris suburbs, they met in 1987 at Lycee Carnot, Paris 17th.”–Wikipedia
Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter Reveals Himself: As a Composer | The New York Times (Apr 2023). “After more than two decades at the forefront of electronic dance music, the French artist is releasing Mythologies, a score for traditional symphony orchestra. From his late teens, he and Homem-Christo began to explore a style they thought of as retrofuturist, borrowing elements from the past — disco, ’80s electropop, R&B — to build an increasingly grand vision of joyful populism, touring with an enormous pyramid-shape stage set and taking on their robot personas in a spectacle simultaneously ironic and sincere. Thanks in large part to Daft Punk, dance music went fully mainstream.”
Daft Punk Memory Tapes, a collection of insights into the collaborative productions of some of Daft Punk’s most unforgettable tracks down the electronica years.
POSTSCRIPTUM. Now more than ever.
This Christmas season of rising interest rates and cost of living going through the roof may have unintended consequences other than the record profits of the big retailers: a decrease in consumption, an increase in imagination, a decrease in meaningless gift-giving, and hopefully an increase in more meaningful conversations that lead to more engaging relationships. One such conversation could just be about David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to Kenyon’s graduating class 2005, “This Is Water,” excerpt below:
“Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about “teaching you how to think.” If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.”
–David Foster Wallace, on the purpose of a liberal arts education, from his commencement address to Kenyon’s graduating class 2005: “This Is Water”
IDEAS. David Foster Wallace unedited interview (2003). The full unedited interview David Foster Wallace gave to the German television station, ZDF, in 2003. From Manufacturing Intellect, posted 26 Dec 2016.
IDEAS. The Roots Of Identity Politics [Making Sense Podcast] | Sam Harris and Yascha Mounk. In this 2-hour conversation Yascha and Sam dive deep into the murky waters of identity politics to offer some clarity as to how and why we got here.
BOOKS. 2023. The Identity Trap: A Story Of Ideas And Power In Our Time by Yascha Mounk. “The origins, consequences and limitations of an ideology that has quickly become highly influential around the world.”
“For much of their history, societies have violently oppressed ethnic, religious and sexual minorities. It is no surprise then that many who passionately believe in social justice have come to think that members of marginalized groups need to take pride in their identity if they are to resist injustice.
“But over the past decades, a healthy appreciation for the culture and heritage of minorities has transformed into an obsession with group identity in all its forms, one that has quickly become influential around the world. A new ideology – which Yascha Mounk terms the ‘identity synthesis’ – seeks to put each citizen’s matrix of identities at the heart of social, cultural and political life. This, he argues, is the Identity Trap.
“Mounk traces the intellectual origins, consequences and limitations of these ideas, explaining how they have been able to win tremendous power over the past decade and why their application to areas from education to public policy is proving to be deeply counterproductive. In his passionate plea for universalism and humanism, he argues that the proponents of identitarian ideas will, though they may be full of good intentions, make it harder to achieve progress towards genuine equality.”
POST-POST-SCRIPTUM. “We feel acutely the repudiation of our peoples and the rejection of our efforts to pursue reconciliation in good faith.”–From the Open Letter penned by First Nations Indigenous Leaders post-referendum
Knowing the score of the referendum by division, by polling place, by city suburb, by township, by remote community…, is as important as its outcome and the manner by which this outcome was won, if not more important from this point on in informing the reconciliation process for non-Indigenous Australians and the First Australians.
It is significant to note that in spite of the active opposition wielding disinformation campaigns capitalising on ignorance, indifference, prejudice and vested interests, four of ten Australians supported the Uluru Statement’s call for constitutional recognition by enshrining a First Australians Voice to Parliament.
The division of Macnamara voted 64.6% Yes, with polling places St Kilda & St Kilda West voting as high as 80+%. I reckon members of our community lead with the heart.
To close this with an even more positive note, I’m off to Acts Of Pleasure on Thursday, 7 December. Moira is all heart.
Gerome Villarete, Secretary