User:Mr oCean

A page for mr oCean

Wonders and delights: preliminary planning for next year or A brighter, shinier Brisbane in 2012

Expeditions

• did you know there are caves in Mt Gravatt? I didn't until a couple of days ago. I would like to go there.

my dad grew up around there in the 50's and 60's... my grandparents had a house on lindwall st.... dad told me about the caves, they used to play around there when they where kids... apparently there was a young boy back then who went missing in a cave and it was too dangerous to go in any further searching for him... after that they blasted the entrance to that cave and others, so no more kids or people could go in there... aparently there where quite few caves in mt gravatt -- http://eo-eo.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=52937746728&topic=11050

• Dragon themed New Farm Park playground

• Bunya nut harvesting - late January 2012

• Springbrook & Lamington NP

• Mountainy bits on Qld/NSW border

• Yum cha!!!

Projects

• Obviously I need to get my expression of interest in for QPF.

• I've promised to have a CD recorded in time to sell at QPF 2012. Talking with Eric last night (22/11/11) about his plans for his next album, I got to thinking it would be nice to record at a bunch of different locations, with/without audience.

• Brisbane (or transglobal) and extended version of Nick Ilott's & mr oCean's Trawled project, in which one person mashes together another person's unfinished musical (and potentially other) bits to make a coherent whole.

• Writing group, meeting either monthly or fortnightly, for spontaneous creativeness.

• Chapbooks, esp. of unusual variety. There was a delightful collection set up in a reading room installation at Etsy Labs in Berlin. Tiny, hand-made books around specific themes. Labour-intensive, small run, but the sort of thing that can really delight people enough they'd be willing to pay a premium for such. CD chapbooks also an option. Collaboration encouraged! (in the content, production and/or marketing)

• Ideas lab to help keep boffins inspired and creative.

• A spin-off of this could be a regular presentation of laboratory failures. I think there's a lot to be learned from methods and experiments that didn't work, so it's time to give them the spotlight they deserve!

• Ginko walks (this also belongs in Expeditions)

• Renku (collaborative poetry)

• I want to get into story-telling performances in the vein of Daniel Kitson's shows like "Stories for the Wobbly Hearted", "22a Church Road" and "The Interminable Suicide of <name I don't remember>". It might be laser-worthy if we could do this as a semi-regular event, with different people telling stories, esp. if they could be shiny tales that were written in our writing group sessions (see how I've already co-opted you guys into the group? :) ). The writing group in Berlin is where I've written most of my strangest and most beautiful pieces (mostly still unfinished) in the last few years. I think it would be nice if the shows stuck to a certain type of story, with my current leaning towards what I guess would be the kind of fantastical realities of "Winter's Tale" and Shaun Tan's books.

• Delight tours

• Are we getting a band together? Maybe just for musicks, but would be nice to mix it with spoken word, I think. And I believe Brisbane is big enough to accommodate more than one such group :)

• Getting all my old musics transferred from tape to electronic formats

• QPF2012 performance

• mr oCean's Berlin Poetry Map and Memory/Legacy Project

• Brisbane poetry map (poetry maps like this [1] are fun, but I'm thinking more of pieces written at/about or inspired by certain places, rather than poem-like things found in those places, in this case)

Crazy and/or Long-Term

• Mixed media story performances (I'm imagining poetry with live music, sound effects (of machines, primarily) and projected visuals with perhaps some props/stage setting and mechanical animations/puppetry :) )

• Walk-through theatre I've heard of theatre productions in parks where the audience walks between scenes. I'd like to try this indoors as well - a kind of theatre apartment or labyrinth. Sam's friend Kathryn Jamieson did a fashion show here like that, and it could also horn in with the Torstrasse 166 idea: in that exhibition, an entire building was handed over to artists, with each taking an apartment and doing with it what they would. It could either follow the park concept (in the way Kathryn's show did), or each room could continuously repeat the same part, with the audience getting the story as they move from one to the other in small groups. Are there ever any accessible abandoned buildings in/near Brisbane? Would be good to find a building about to be demolished or extensively renovated and take it over for a week or a month.

mr oCean's cousin, Steve, said he and a friend have been searching for abandoned places, so there will be things to follow up. He is another person who has many talents but whose creativity sometimes needs some stoking (and dedicated time), so you'll meet him too :)

• If I can't find any existing sources of funding for potentially clever ideas that need proof of principle testing before they can work towards applications or something otherwise saleable, maybe I need to look into how such a thing could be set up (targetting probably philanthropic organisations more than government for funding).

• Tourist Guide for Your Street/Suburb A community project in which any street or suburb is encouraged (with some facilitation like templates and a central compilation/editing facility) to put together a tourist guide for that locality. This is to encourage people to think about what's good in their neighbourhood, to think about their habitat beyond their immediate piece of real estate, to explore and interact, and also to imagine and work towards how they want their neighbourhood to be. The latter would be on the basis of, "if you can't think of anything worth seeing/doing in your locale, make it up... and then make it real!" People would be encouraged to not just think about things to see; notables could include talking to a certain person who has excellent stories or makes good tea or something.

• Collection & composting service What do greengrocers, supermarkets, cafes and restaurants do with their organic waste? In Berlin, there are designated bins for such, so the disposal service collects it to be turned into compost (I think). If such a service isn't available in Brisbane, surely it could happen. Would the compost produced be of sufficient value to pay for the collection and processing costs? Potential problems: people are often pretty dim-witted when it comes to disposal, requiring extensive sorting to ensure nothing wrong gets through (but if the collection were only from businesses, surely that would be easier?) and not all organic matter is equally suitable for composting.

• Lunchtime panto An improvised pantomime flashmob conducted in a workplace.

• Festival Hall Soundcheck As a tribute to What Once Was, set up hidden speakers in Festival Tower and play a sound-check.

Food Stuffs

• Garden/balcony requirements:

• kaffir lime, rosemary, oregano, chillis
• I'd like to get me some edible natives, too.
• If I could horn me in an apple, pear or stone-fruit tree (without being impossible to grow), it would be a delightful little slice of Europe and look hearty-evaporaty gorgeous in Spring :)

• If I don't have a garden myself, I should get involved in one of those community gardens, or maybe I can just make one at a friend's place?

Foods to look forward to:

• Ripe mangoes
• lime leaves (not allowed to be imported into Germany :( )
• Australian native noshes (bunya nuts, lemon myrtle tea, things I haven't tasted yet :) )
• rich, round Australian red wines, and crisp, flinty Australian white wines

Events

• Cook-off series 2012

• Symposium for Imaginary Research (likely 2014); this would also link to the Könnig sisters' idea for an imaginary research journal.

In this, papers are presented as formally as at any normal scientific conference. The methodology has to look plausible, as do the citations that lay down the presumed advances (ie the introduction of a paper in which time travel has been used needs to make it clear that time travel is an established technology). Papers would be peer-reviewed as per usual, and results would have to be plausible and the conclusions justified. Where it could become fun would be if subsequent congresses/papers cited common references, so that a whole body of imaginary scientific literature became established. Of course, these would not always be mutually consistent... I would also be massively pleased to see reports of failed imaginary research!

Potential support for such could come from the likes of [2] and of course [3].

Festival of oCean

(00:26:01) kokopops: But I propose a Festival of Ocean on your return (in fact a few weeks after you return to allow for jet lag and settling in - though maybe it should be for your birthday). And we have a full day of fantastic things and wonderful people, and get together as many of your favourite people as possible, but also some who you haven't met yet but whose company we think you would enjoy. And then we have games and foods and musics and poetries.

(00:26:10) kokopops: And of course he takes these things and runs with them:

(00:26:21) kokopops: I like you a lot, though. You have wonderful ideas, and I think this one will help me a lot. I'd actually be up for making it a pre-birthday thing - maybe start of Feb - so it has more immediate effect. Last time I was there, it was largely that session we had at 3 Monkeys near the end of my visit that really had me feeling sad to leave, for the first time in my life. Do you think maybe a place like that would let us take over the whole venue for the day? If they're reasonable about it, I'd expect they'd let us do that at no cost, as long as we can guarantee a certain number of people. Or maybe they'd let us reserve the courtyard area and set up a little stage there. I know enough folk that we could rustle up some sound gear. Maybe if we get a cafe, they would also let us bring Bunya nuts for them to whip something up with :) It would be great to bring all my creatives together, and yes! I shall be hungry to meet more! Thank-you so much, Nerissa. You're quite the shiny beacon!

General Stuff to Look Forward To

• Well, certain people, obviously :)
• Much less cigarette smoke
• More bird-song (although the birdsong at the start of Spring, esp. at night, in Berlin is heart-explody beautiful, every time)
• Nearer mountains
• Not feeling bad about presenting poems in English
• Singing lessons
• Sensibly sized kitchen
• More guitars and stuff
• QPF & SpeedPoets
• My full book and music collection
• Rainforest
• More variety when needing to buy stuffs
• Lack of enormous, baffling square pillows and availability of top-sheets
• Painting lessons (I promised a friend a painting for her 2013 birthday, so I need to get cracking!)
• Three Monkeys
• Not having to contend with GEMA blocking access to YouTube links people send me to recommend things.