Issue 174

I
have a ritual when I’m looking blankly at a blank
Word page with no idea what I’m going to write about
in this month’s P&W. It rarely helps by the
way, but in any event I go to the New Yorker website and
consume as many cartoons as I can get for free, desperately
looking for some cartoonish inspiration.
This time round I notice there’re even more anti-Trump
cartoons, which is probably about a 50/50 ratio with the
regulation off-the-wall New Yorker-style cartoons of which
I’m particularly fond, and I’m disappointed
with this Trump fetish because the Donald is intrinsically
such an easy target. I’m inclined to believe the
New Yorker is aligned with some of the other conservative
American press in their incessant railing against Trump,
principally because they all so comprehensively failed
to see it coming.
Anyway, while casting about for some more cartoons I caught
sight of a picture of a monument in an article about the
Provincetown (Massachusetts) Aids Memorial, which is one
of quite a few recently dedicated around the States apparently.
I’m not sure there are any such memorials in Australia,
but the subject matter wasn’t what caught my attention.
It was a picture heading the article of a skillfully hewn
giant stone slab in memorial of the many Aids victims
who gravitated to the town during the crisis years in
the ‘80s and where many of whom subsequently died.

The top of the slab looks like the surface of a lake or
sea, indeed the stone’s inscription reads ‘a
unique moment in the living ocean.’ Because the
nature of stone is so opposite to the fluidity of water
it caught my attention, but on reflection I suppose it’s
no different to the classical tradition of lifelike renderings
of flesh and bone from marble first practised by Greek
artists from 500 BC and perhaps perfected by Michelangelo
and his contemporaries in the Renaissance.
Maria and I visited the Rodin exhibition while we were
in Paris. Having never seen any work by Rodin previously
I was astonished at his ability to transform inert stone
into flesh and bone, adding character and movement to
the equation. Anyway, it’s not often I have cause
to admire the sheer craftsmanship in a sculpture these
days – I’m much more likely to be simply unmoved
or even slightly annoyed.
If you check July’s A Separate Reality
page you’ll see that M and I visited the Sculpture
Park at the Pt Leo Estate (that the Apple Maps’
woman on the GPS insisted was the P T Leo Estate) –
but in fact we visited it twice within a couple of weeks!
The second visit wasn’t entirely duplication –
the first time around the sculpture park the wind was
howling and it was very cold and we took some short cuts,
meaning that on our second visit we discovered we’d
missed a good third of the sculptures). read
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