Lighting tomorrow with today

The artist is expecting a visit from the gallerist tomorrow after which we go to the countryside to celebrate the artist's father's seventieth birthday. (The children have been virtual tourists this evening, exploring the rooms in 360 degrees on the computer.) This may also mean being separated from the blog as I do not think the farmhouse where we will be staying, generously rented for three days by the artist's parents, has internet access. I feel mildly uncomfortable about this. It is as if underneath the neo-literary and pseudo-diaristic pleasure of writing it, some kind of useful if not too metronomic irrigation also takes place. Still, I will have to get used to being without it anyway as I doubt I will be writing one in the war zone. It might be interesting advertising creativity as a life force where many lives are threatened but I am convinced neither of its practicality nor of its tact. In the meantime, the artist is being incredibly relaxed about the gallerist's visit tomorrow. This is not arrogance on the artist's part and for me is reassuring. I think it has finally begun to sink in that this work really is as special as I drone on about. It is a wonderful thing self-belief and I understand any natural inclination towards modesty. I have touched upon this about the artist before and admire greatly hre absence of loud and garish pride. In the end, it is a fine line between modesty and invisibility and we shall just have to see what tomorrow may bring. ('Yesterday is but today's memory,' as Kahlil Gibran said, 'and tomorrow is today's dream.') Two weeks ago we had a dress rehearsal for the visit, a kind of useful false alarm, so it may be a winning performance.

Menstrual Gallery

From what I know of aboriginal art, it is all about story telling, rituals, myths, sorcery, and magic. The artist is often describing a dream, creation, spirituality. There's usually a link, as I understand it, between ancestral beings and the present. But what is aboriginal art doing on the artist's latest packet of tampons? Is this some kind of subliminal reference to women and their mystical union with the moon? As a man, I'm baffled. (I would be.) Actually I came across a woman artist today who uses menstrual blood as ink in her art. On the grounds that menstrual blood is the only kind of blood that's hidden in shame. (I'm not sure the artist of this blog likes the idea of suffering being seen as the single engine of feminist art.) But, still, I don't get why aboriginal art is featuring on my wife's packet of tampons. Don't tell me it's because the chosen decorative pattern looks like neat drops of blood. You know, when I sailed once on a restored 19th century brigantine that had just circumnavigated the globe, the women voyage crew members on the boat - who had been together for over a year - were menstruating at exactly the same time after only four months. In truth, I find menstruation just as baffling as art on tampon packets - and I'm a man with five sisters - but I do get tired of male indifference to the subject. Did you know that Walt Disney Pictures advised women in their long-lost 1946 animated Disney film The Story of Menstruation that 'once you stop feeling sorry for yourself and take Those Days in your stride, you'll find it's easier to remain even-tempered'? We men must seem so ignorant to women. We're more likely to ask why it takes three women with PMT to change a lightbulb. (Cos it does, RIGHT?) Anyway, all this would be even more meaningless were it not my birthday today. Like you, my life began when a sperm from my father fertilised one of my mother's eggs and about nine months later I was born: a mass of billions of cells. No risk of aboriginal art on the packets then, then. But maybe this was when that flighty person who dreamed up the whole idea of aboriginal tampon packets was born - presumably after reading Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines and watching Werner Herzog's aboriginal feature Where The Green Ants Dream. Anyway, this is the end of my birthday blog. Period.