Dreams are weird

Woke from a dream in which Prince had written a book about sexuality for teens

It was written in that conversational style of his ‘Raspberry Beret’ lyrics and had scenes about people dealing with relationship issues.

One scene recounted his father as a younger man taking two girlfriends to the swimming pool.

They differed in a funny way, with one having large breasts and the other having a pronounced arse.

The young man overheard them fighting in the pool and realised he could avoid having to deal with their jealousy by staying in the change room.

Later in the dream I was sitting down to watch a TV adaptation of Prince’s book with my kids.

I was confronted to find that the lessons about recognising sexual energy were being told by characters in ’80s-style leather outfits with headbands, who walked around with their hands on their erect (but clothed) body parts.

Then, in a plot twist, I realised the Prince character was a young woman.

Dreams are weird.

Dream are eternal

My friend Nick posted an interesting observation about dreams:

Another reality filter.
We're all eternal beings, and our dreams are the experience of that eternity.
Eternity is living a life where everything is possible, as in a dream.
Being 'awake' is when a tiny subset of those possibilities are acted out in cooperation with other eternal beings - it takes effort.
Death returns us to eternal dreaming, to 'resting in peace'.
Pictures like this are so misleading, you don't dream 'in your head'.
Dreams are a full reality, they're eternity.
In our 'waking lives' little parcels of eternity still appear - our memories, colours etc., what some philosophers call 'eternal objects'.

Krautchi

I'm taking a further step toward merging kimchi and sauerkraut by substituting Chinese cabbage with ordinary cabbage

Since wombok are currently $19 each, I'm hoping the result will be tasty and will use fennel and horseradish again.

Cabbage requires weight as well as salt to squeeze the water out of the leaves, so I'm using myself and possibly contributing microflora in the process.

Oboe Cop


Tortilla toasties

After being impressed by pressing my own tortillas, it was only a matter of time before I attempted a tortilla toasted sandwich

The result is tasty and easy to prepare.

I expect I'll make a video in coming weeks, but currently I need to make a song for the soundtrack.

I feel strange

Aviatrix Remove Borders

The Disquiet Junto recently offered an opportunity to revisit a track from 2016



Remove Borders was a response to a Naviar Haiku prompt and I'd consciously develop a section of the song that sped-up and had in mind that it was a plane taking flight.



So when the Junto asked for "a short piece of music that is intended to blend in with the industrial drone of modern air flight," I'd remembered the earlier track and thought it could be reworked in an ambient style.

Gained in translation

I was admiring Julian Mithra's poetry in The Lifted Brow, particularly the one using a recipe format, when I noticed this "translator's note":
I've made English-to-English translations... 
In these experiments, I isolated nouns, verbs, adjectives, and some adverbs, and used a couple of wide-reaching thesauruses and online dictionaries to replace each word with a distant synonym. 
In selecting words, I was primarily attracted to sound, with some compensation toward theme and consistency of symbols. 
The process owes a debt to Dada's advice about incorporating chance...

It's a cool idea and a technique I can see myself using sometime.

I really appreciate it when an artist shares their process, as it allows the viewer to understand the work beyond whatever thought process it triggers for them.

Dark chocolates with roasted almonds

The supermarkets have been super recently

In the last week I've scored a small pile of discounted chocolate.

I thought it would be interesting to compare the dark varieties that contain roasted almonds.

The Lindt also has sea salt, which doesn't diminish the sweet flavour and silky mouth-feel.

In comparison, the Green & Blacks has an almost powdery mouth-feel and rich cocoa flavour.

Looking at the ingredients I see the latter is around 65% cocoa, while the Lindt is a minimum of 47%.

This might explain the difference in their energy labelling.

Mystery solved

A self-seeded vine started spreading across the yard recently

I thought it was pumpkin but was told the flowers were the wrong colour

Cucumber was my partner's first guess, but there didn't seem to be any seeds.

So, thinking it was zucchini, I added it to a couple of sauces and it seemed kinda sweet with pasta and tortillas.

Then I realised yesterday, it's a watermelon.

Seems so obvious now it's grown bigger.

Thinking I might try pickling it, since it's too late in the season for the fruit to mature.

Learning about Penny

It's been fascinating to learn about Leeton Art Society Inc's former President, Penny Paniz

The art prize named after her continues Penny's work in setting new deadlines for local artists and encouraging them to exhibit.

Some of her story will be told in the video I'm producing to accompany the exhibition next Easter in Leeton.

Shown is Glenn, her nephew and initiator of this CASP project with support from Create NSW and Western Riverina Arts.

Notes From Last Night

Shown is one of the illustrations in a zine I'm taking to the Halfway Print Fest in Wagga next weekend

Notes From Last Night is a collection of prose written in collaboration with a machine learning service.

Then I developed illustrations that aimed to represent the style of feeding images into a computer -- which was basically the process for developing the first draft of the poetry.