Ephemera


Some years ago a tree in our backyard was cut down, and the stump cleared. Now, all through the year we have this weird fungus that keeps on growing up where the roots were. Violet Towne likes to ruthlessly lay into it with the mattock, but despite her best efforts, a little bit of rain and up it comes again.

It’s really quite an unsettling organism. It has a kind of a dead fleshy texture and colour… If you look very closely, it’s sort of brain-like. And recently it’s started to ooze something that looks awfully like blood…

If anyone actually knows what’s going on here, I’d love some more information. What is the red stuff? It seems very slightly oily… not particularly sticky. It washes off in the rain and you can quite clearly see little pits where it was – so it’s something that the fungus has evolved to do. It doesn’t seem to attract insects and I can’t for the life of me think of what it might be for (other than to conjure images to disturb my sleep).

My current fixation with soap bubbles came about as a side-effect of some research I’ve been doing for my new animation project. To be specific, I was looking at how transparency and refraction work, and although I can easily see it in glass, I wanted something more organic and also less refractive. Hence bubbles. The animation, though, is more of a watery affair – mysterious and slightly eerie. Here are some stills. I’m in early stages just yet, but I thought you might like a sneak peak.

I also have some exciting news to tell you about one of my other works, but more of that in a bit.

Enjoy!

My friend Kirke snapped this shot out of his Bondi apartment window yesterday…








I was browsing in a local shop the other day and I noticed a pile of these curious volumes. It looks like a book, right? But no, dear Acowlytes – it’s a cunning ploy to make you think it’s a book. It’s actually a box in which you can hide your valuables!

Brilliant! I’m going to get one of these tomorrow – it will totally solve my problem with illiterate thieving Creationists! ((It will only work on the illiterate ones – the literate ones will spot the title blunder instantly)) And just to really screw with them, I’m going to hide all my fossils in it!

Conversation in our kitchen last night:

Violet Towne: The dealer called and said that they’ve set aside 250 grams of the Cuban for you. It’s ready to collect.

Me: Cool.

Viridian: Dealer?

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I get my coffee from Jasper in Brunswick St, Melbourne. It is the heaven of coffee.

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A few nights ago I had one of those weird dreams that includes particular moments that are vividly memorable on waking. In this one, I dreamed that I had the number 17051 tattooed on my left hand, near the knuckle of my forefinger. In the dream, I had never noticed the number there before. This is the kind of thing that happens in dreams, although as you might remember there have been happenstances in my waking life where I’ve noticed for the first time something almost as unsettling on my hand.

This number’s main claim to fame appears to be that it is the zip code for Pennsylvania – a fact of which I had no previous (conscious) knowledge. It is also the ChEBI (Chemical Entities of Biological Interest) number of fluoride and the number of a main belt asteroid called Oflynn. It isn’t even a date or a prime number, which is quite disappointing.

I’m particularly interested in unusual words or word combinations and odd numbers that appear in dreams. Yours?

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