Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster is adopting a healthier diet, according to an article on CNN:
“Even Cookie Monster is learning to control his cookie cravings…. His sage advice opened our eyes to the simple joys of a tasty cookie and now reminds us that moderation is the key to healthy living.”
Sesame Street has always had an educational impetus, but there is surely more fun and value in Cookie Monster being the antitheses to other characters doing the right thing.
Canberra has been convulsed over the naughtiness of one of the local government’s staffers who was caught doing a spot of anti-Howard stencil graffiti. You have to hand it to local politics for making mountains out of mole hills!
If you are interested in street art, take a look at The Wooster Collective: A Celebration of Street Art. They have some very cool images. For example, here is a Salvador Dali mural in Lima, Peru. They had an exclusive report on Banksy‘s activities in mid March, showing the works that he installed in four of the prestigious museums in New York.
There is also Wooster Mobile, ‘a Wooster curated art gallery of images which you can download onto your mobile phones in cities around the world’. The aim is to provide artists with a new revenue stream and at the same time generate funds for a non-profit organization called Keep A Child Alive, which provides life-saving drugs for AIDS sufferers in Africa.
Given my interest in big mascots, kitsch and otherwise, of course my attention was grabbed by the camel costume story a few days ago. A man travelling from Sydney to Melbourne on a Qantas flight checked in luggage which included both a camel and a crocodile costume. Twenty minutes later he saw a baggage handler wearing the head of his camel suit, driving to and fro on the tarmac. Apart from the usual concerns one might have about interference with one’s private belongs and security, the story has wider implications at the moment because of suspicions that Schapelle Corby is an innocent victim of domestic drug running, where baggage handlers might be involved.
Here are a few other links to pictures:
Camel and crocodile picture (via The Sydney Morning Herald, photo Northern Territory Tourist Commission)
Camel head face-on close-up (via The Courier Mail)
Report and picture of the characters in action at the gig they were on the way to, promoting (for the Northern Territory Tourist Commission) the Bulldogs-Carlton AFL game at Marrara Oval, Darwin, to be played onJune 18.
Qantas has launched a full inquiry, the baggage handler has been sacked and the airline has reimbursed the owner for dry-cleaning the camel’s head. And the Northern Territory Tourist Commission can’t be too unhappy. The unforseen advantages kind of remind me of those in Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant – “I didn’t get nothin’. I had to pay fifty dollars and
pick up the garbage”.
The Ten Days on the Island Festival in Tasmania, which started on April 1st, is drawing to a close. Terrapin Theatre Company, which is one of Australia’s oldest puppetry companies, presented a stage adaptation of The Garden of Paradise, a little known tale by Hans Christian Andersen. It was commissioned by the festival to mark the bicentennial of the
birth of Hans Christian Andersen, and included dancers from TasDance, choreographed by Graeme Murphy.
The bicentennial is being celebrated all over the world this year, and Terrapin has been invited to take their production to Denmark in August.
In January there was a preview in The Age, and a few days ago The Australian has a short review within a general article on the festival. Gentle Curiosity has a more personal and detailed response.
I’ve found a spray adhesive that sticks polystyrene with an instant grab – this is worth shouting about! Its in the 3M range, and is called Multi-Purpose Spray Adhesive. I’m amused by this graphic on the US site:
because there is a humourous appreciation there of the beauty and godsend of finding the right glue for the job, but also because it reminds me of my Darcy Venus from Pemberley days.
Just about all glues eat polystyrene. White PVA glue and epoxy resins like Araldite are the exceptions, but they take time to dry, and the work has to be clamped meanwhile. One or two of the liquid-nails-type adhesives can be used, depending on the job, but they melt polystyrene to a certain extent, and are lumpy.
The can of Multi-Purpose Spray Adhesive that I bought here in Canberra doesn’t have the ‘Super 77’ tag on it, and is half-green-half-black rather than red. I’m assuming that its just different packaging, and the content is the same, but it might be worth checking. It’s a 467g can, boasts 6 times more coverage than any other competitor, and is expensive: AU$29.95. But its worth it.
Scrambling under the wire again… this is my entry for Loobylu’s Month of Softies for March. The theme was self-portrait of the artist as a young child.
I can’t say it looks very like me, but the essentials are there – round face, blonde hair, button nose, tom-boy. The Fair-isle vest is made from an an unfinished jumper that I rediscovered when I was rummaging for fabric. I knitted it years ago in Scotland and I had completely forgotten about it. The vest is a kind of present to myself, because when I was young one of my aunts made stripy vests out of odds and ends of wool for my brother, and I always fancied one for myself.
Update: I took some better daytime photos yesterday, much better than the midnight one.
The Stop Laughing This Is Serious Gallery in Blackheath ran a great exhibition of puppetry-related works during One Van, which I hope to get around to blogging about sooner or later. But they also had a small but interesting range of books, and I have been kicking myself for not buying one called ‘The Snail House’, by Allan Ahlberg, as its not generally available in bookshops here.
I’ve always loved Ahlberg’s picture books (‘Peepo!’, ‘The Jolly Postman’, ‘Each Peach Pear Plum’, (all illustrated by Janet Ahlberg, his wife) and ‘Mrs Plug the Plumber’ were favourites in our house), so ‘The Snail House’ caught my attention anyway, but its an absolutely beautiful picture book. Its about a grandmother telling her grandchildren a story about how they shrink until they are small enough to go travelling in the house on a snail’s back, and the adventures
they have.
Its charming in so many ways. The adventures are everyday, and yet exciting; for example, an apple falls next to them and it seems like an earthquake or bomb. It has all the joys of contemplating life in different scales and microcosms. The illustrations, by Gillian Tyler, are finely drawn and textured, with lovely soft muted colours, and I’m sure they have lots of secrets in them to spot, as Ahlberg books do. Most intriguing is the manner of the telling: its written so you can see the grandmother reacting and adjusting her story as the kids react imaginatively to what she is saying, just as it happens
in real life.
I like the humour, lightness, and modesty that comes across in interviews with Ahlberg, such as in this one with his readers, or when talking about his poetry (I hadn’t realized he had published verse). Penguin UK’s listing of him as one of their authors goes some way to describing the vitality and connection that must have existed both professionally and personally between him and his wife Janet, who illustrated many of the books. That ‘process of playing table tennis’ with ideas, jokes and visuals is a heady creative experience! Janet died in 1994, but it looks as if their daughter Jessica shares the family talent, as last year she illustrated her father’s book, ‘Half a Pig’.
Its interesting Janet and Allan Ahlberg are the subject of one of a series of books about famous people by Heinemann Library, along with others like Nelson Mandela, Mozart, Ford, and Disney.
Though its not widely known, March 21st is World Puppetry Day! Dario Fo, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, released a WPD message through Union Internationale de la Marionnette, (UNIMA), which you can read on the Unima Australia website.
It was rumoured that this wonderful six metre tall Mexican skeleton puppet (made by Karen Hethey and Bryan Woltjen), which was part of the Joondalup Festival parade in WA last Saturday, was likely to make surprise appearances today in celebration of World Puppetry Day.
‘Muckheap’ by Melbourne’s Polyglot Puppet Theatre was another favourite of mine at One Van in January. Described as ‘a galloping tale of two people who try to clean out their shed for hard rubbish day but find everything too interesting or full of memories to throw out’, it also weaves in a different version of Jack(y) and the Beanstalk, ideas about recycling, play, and memory, and an inventive mix of puppetry and scale. The puppets were designed by Paul Newcombe, and adapted and made by Graeme Davis. Here is one of them:
The relationship between the two main characters was pleasing in the way it ranged from tension and teasing to fun and fondness. I also liked the way it showed imaginative play and puppets as being able to be made out of anything. (The only thing that the actors deemed unable to be worth keeping at the particular performance I saw was a John Howard poster). Its good news that ‘Muckheap’ will be coming to Canberra in May as a Jigsaw Theatre Company ACT Schools Tour, and later in the year it travels to Queensland.
