Banksy Does New York

I love watching something interesting when I do the ironing. Often it's the French News, other times I watch something I've taped from the tv. Generally documentary or something light, I prefer to enjoy fiction when I have the opportunity to sit on the couch and fully enjoy it. Last night I watched Banksy Does New York. I quite like Banksy. I like his artistic style, his incorporation of the site he uses and signs or objects already present, I generally like his political messages, and I like his humour. He has a great twitter feed. I am astonished that he has maintained his anonymity in the modern world. That must be incredibly difficult to do.

I've watched other documentaries on Banksy before, but recently came across Banksy Does New York on ABC 2. In October 2013 Banksy did a month long residency in New York, and created a new art work every day. He would put clues up on his twitter account each day and New York would go out looking for it. Of course word would spread like wildfire on social media and crowds of people would go Banksy hunting.  One of the commentators called it the first hipster scavenger hunt which is possibly rather true. The response of the established art world and art journalism was especially interesting (yes they completely ignored the art taking the city by storm for a month).

Apparently you can be a Banksy hunter. I was hoping to see one when I went to London in 2013 but it wasn't to be. And if the folks in London act at all like the people in New York then I see why. Often these works were painted over within hours, or defaced by jealous and stupid "graffiti artists", or removed so that they could be sold. A Banksy art work is often a fleeting experience.

Banksy Does New York was fascinating, it made the ironing fly by. It's about art, politics, history, animal rights, philanthropy, greed, urban decay and renewal, even Nazis. Life really. In Australia it's available on ABC iView until Aug 20.

10 Must-Read Books That Should be Mandatory Reading in High School

I just came across this very interesting list this morning. It wasn't at all what I suspected. Just a little list, a mere ten books, and still with four that I've never heard of. 


The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

Citizen - Claudia Rankine

The House of Spirits - Isabel Allende

Persepolis. The Story of a Childhood - Marjane Satrapi

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

Parable of the Sower - Octavia E. Butler 

Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Woman Warrior - Maxine Hong Kingston

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie (see my review)

Angels in America - Tonu Kushner

3/10

It's nice to see The Handmaid's Tale cropping up on lots of lists lately. I need to reread it sometime soon, I read it way back in the 80s I think. Naturally I also need to make some time to watch the series. Persepolis is on lots of lists too. I bought it, I need to read it. 

How to Organize Just About Everything

So, I'm still going through my downsizing/decluttering phase. I'm watching lots of youtube videos on decluttering and minimalism, even though Minimalism isn't particularly my goal, I do find them helpful and inspiring. Somewhere along the line I came across Peter Walsh's name. It rang some faint bells from my Oprah watching past. Indeed I had read one of his other books, It's All Too Much at some stage (see my Goodreads review). Clearly that attempt didn't work, and I'm having another crack at it, and making a much better go of it. But decluttering seems to be a bit like giving up smoking (not that I ever needed to do that because I never actually started), you just need to keep having another go.

This book is completely bizarre. I'm really not sure who it was written for as in trying to cover "Everything", the more useful every day topics are lost amidst all the rest. I don't expect that I'll ever need to Fight an Ebola Outbreak, Become a Cowboy or Defend Against a Hostile Takeover but if I did I doubt that I would ever end up with this book in my hands. It's trying to do too much, be everything to everyone and we all know that you can't do that. 

It does have some more relevant sections for me though. Mainly the beginning of the book- Get Organised, Get Rid of What You Don't Want and Live with Less. I have been thinking about this quite a bit over the past few months and I don't think that I learned anything particularly different, although some of the Youtube channels that I watch cite Peter's methods, and then I skimmed through the rest of it. And you never know if I ever do need to Plan an Invasion or Organize a Recall then I know where to look. Or Deal with Amnesia, oh wait, how will I remember?

I've now found that Peter Walsh has his own Youtube channel so I'll check out some of that too, to keep the decluttering fire burning. 

Mrs Whitlam

Who can resist the lure of a book about a Clydesdale horse named after the wife of a former prime minister? Certainly not me. As soon as I saw this on the CBCA Shortlist this year I knew that it would be one of the books that I would search out. I'm so glad that I did.

Mrs Whitlam is a lovely slip of a book, a mere 77 pages. Local Aboriginal girl Marnie Clark is horse crazy and dreams of having a horse of her own, but her father is out of work and her family can't afford it. When a girl from her school dies her grieving mother finds that her daughter's horse and riding things are too painful to see, too powerful a memory to keep, so she gives Mrs Margaret Whitlam to Marnie. Marnie and the horse form an immediate bond. 

I pressed my face into Mrs Whitlma's neck, tears rolled down my cheeks. I was hoping they were for Vicki but really, I knew most of them were for me. 

Set in western Victoria Mrs Whitlam is a simple story, well written. Bruce Pascoe writes beautiful descriptive prose. 

The track was firm but damp and Maggie's hooves made a rhythmic sound like someone whacking a hot water bootle with a stack wrapped in lamb's wool. I could hear it echo faintly off the trees on the other side of the river. It sounded like a hostly rider was keeping stride for stride with me on the other bank. 

This little book fits in a lot, it deals with small town racism both towards Marnie and her family, and also the local immigrant families. It also deals with notions of family, class and bitchy pony club girls. There is a gentle warmth to the book, and a lovely humour in the dialogue. 

Bruce Pascoe was a new author to me. I'd seen his previous book Fog a Dox around a bit the past few years, but don't really know anything about it and haven't read it, and indeed I didn't actually put two and two together for a while. Bruce Pascoe was born in Melbourne and has Bunurong and Tasmanian heritage, he writes fiction and nonfiction, and has been a publisher and editor. I look forward to reading more of his work. 

Teacher Notes

The Outsiders

The Outsiders is a seminal YA novel, indeed its publication in 1967 is credited with creating realistic YA as a genre.

S.E. Hinton was only 15 years old when she wrote a 40 page short story that would evolve into The Outsiders. She rewrote her story when she was 16, it was accepted for publication when she was 17, and published when she was just 18 years old. It has now sold more than 15 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. S.E. Hinton grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and this is where The Outsiders is set.

Somehow I didn't really know that much about The Outsiders before I read it this month. The Outsiders tells a tale of two rival groups of teenage boys, The Greasers and The Socs (Socials). The Greasers are poor and are named for their fondness for hair oil, while The Socs are kids from the richer families in town. The story is a first person tale told by Ponyboy Curtis, and yes that's his real name. Sadly S.E. Hinton can't remember why she gave her characters names like Ponyboy, Sodapop and Two-Bit, but she has said that she's glad that she did as they are much more memorable than the common 1960s boy names. Although the Socs do  have more traditional names like Bob and David.

We're poorer than the Socs and the middle class. I reckon we're wilder, too. Not like the Socs, who jump greasers and wreck houses and throw beer blasts for kicks, and get editorials in the paper for being a public disgrace one day and an asset to society the next. Greasers are almost like hoods: we steal things and drive old souped-up cars and hold up gas stations and have a gang fight once in a while. 

A lot is made of the different temperament of the two groups too. 

'That's why we're separated,' I said. 'It's not money, it's feeling-you don't feel anything and we feel too violently.'

So all the Socs are supposed to be sociopaths? But everyone can recognise and relate to teenage tribes and cliques. We all experienced them at high school.

Ponyboy is fourteen and lives with his two older brothers as their parents have been killed in a car accident eight months earlier. His brothers Darry and Sodapop work, while Ponyboy is still a school. Darry is strict with Ponyboy and keeps a watchful eye on him. Ponyboy doesn't appreciate his strict rules and misinterprets his methods. 

The book gets off to a bit of a slow start but things really pick up 45 pages in when there is a rather sudden, dramatic event. The rest of the book is really the fall out from this one night. While I did enjoy the story arc of the book, I found Ponyboy's voice contradictory and inconsistent. He does well at school, is reading Great Expectations and relating to Pip, and "nobody in our gang digs books and movies the way I do" (it was the sixties after all), and yet he can't spell Socs. "I'm not sure how you spell it, but it's the  abbreviation for the Socials". I wondered at the beginning if it would take me a while to settle into Ponyboy's voice - but I never was able to settle in and enjoy it. 

I'm very glad to have read The Outsiders given its fame and influence. I just wish that I had liked it more.

312/1001

A Frosty Start

It's winter in Australia, and sometimes getting to your day shift takes a little longer. The frost has been quite heavy of late. Some days it looks more pretty than others. 

Saturday Snapshot is a wonderful weekly memenow hosted by WestMetroMommy

Gilmore Girls

I was particularly excited last year when news broke that there would be a new series of the Gilmore Girls. I'd always loved Lorelei and Rory's super fast talking banter. But I'd never watched all of it. I knew I'd seen most of the first few series but was pretty sure I hadn't seen all seven series. I have a DVD set of Series 1, and had started that a few times but never really got to the end of it.

Enter Netflix and the era of binge watching. Not that I have a lot of time for binge watching. Two maybe three episodes is a binge for me. But late last year Master Wicker and I started on the quest of watching all seven series of the original Gilmore Girls so that we could watch the four new episodes.

I'm so glad we did. Yes, it's taken quite a while. But there are 22 episodes every series. 22. For seven series. 154 episodes. Those Girls did a lot of machine gun talking. It's funny. It shows a mother and daughter can get along (generally). And it's kind at it's core.

I realise now that I was most familiar with series 1-4. Which is not surprising. I'm not a great series fan. I don't generally like endless series of the same show as generally they will run out of ideas rather soon. The Simpsons is a rather obvious exception to this rule. I don't like reading book series either.

I thought it all lost a bit of direction in series five when there were quite a number of story lines that I found annoying. Look away right now if you don't want to know - the whole Emily and Richard situation, Lane and Zach- really?? Really? Although there was a whole episode devoted to Pippi Longstocking and that's just great.

But there were some particularly excellent lines in Series 6.

Episode 1 Emily to Rory:
There's plenty of time for sleeping in when you've gone up a few dress sizes.

And Episode 21 of Series 6 was a cracker episode- perhaps one of my favourites!
Liz: I'm going to do all the things I didn't do last time I was pregnant, like not binge drink.

Richard - I'm sitting in one of South Dakota's finest hotels. It smells like a foot.

I did find some of the toing and froing of the last few seasons a bit tedious. Will they? Won't they? It all flip flopped a few too many times. 

And the four new episodes? Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. Most of it was good, and it was nice to see the characters again. I thought Summer was totally bonkers, and was worried it had all lost it's way. It didn't get tied up in the way I expected, but I'm glad to have watched them, and glad to know what the long anticipated final four words were (but no spoilers here, but I'm not about to spill).