I’m around 11,800 feet in the air on a flight from Buenos Aires to Johannesburg. It’s Thursday, 2nd of July and it’s a beautiful morning up here above cloud cover. It’s pink and a kind of soft, golden orange in places. The clouds are like fairy floss (I’m sure that’s been said a good many times before) and I regret not having a window seat.

By the time I get to Anriette’s house I will have slept on no less than 75 surfaces in two years. That includes couches, floors, tatami mats, bare ground and many, many beds. I don’t count planes as I rarely sleep on them.

Anriette is Executive Director of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC). We’ve just had an APC Board meeting in Argentina where I’d spent two weeks. Over the next few days I’ll work with Anriette to finalise post-meeting matters. This is my second term on APC’s Board and the first as its Secretary.

Don’t think we’re so well cashed up that APC can fly its Secretary around the world just to finish up minutes of our meetings. I’m taking the opportunity with my return ticket to stop over in Johannesburg to not only attend to my Board responsibilities, it affords me the opportunity to spend more time with friends and the chance, finally, to take one of the great train journeys in the world – the Premier Classe, Johannesburg to Cape Town.

I wasn’t able to make this journey last year and as each trip I now take feels like the last, I take every opportunity to stretch my budget and time to immerse myself within the opera of life, from the comic to the tragic, the latter of which is staggeringly relentless. Day after day, year after year, and there seems no end to it, humans continue to terrorise each other and our home world with increasing voracity and disregard.

Seed for optimism or alarm?

Thankfully there are seeds for optimism, but frankly, I doubt there is enough at this time to address the most urgent of concerns. There are many and they are inter-twined, so much so that I cannot see climate change being addressed without the fundamental protections and rights issues of our time dealt with in a just and equitable manner. Includes access to land, freedom of expression and association, sustained culture and biodiversity.

And yet with more information at our disposal, more wealth and opportunity than at any time in human history, knowledge and wisdom is surely counted on the low end of the scale. We are becoming the product of our own cleverness and avarice, something new, defined by the coercions of the Market the worrying lust for instant gratification.

I got to tell you, pretty soon I’ll need to spend some time around tangible, wholesome down on the ground stuff of encouraging change – real change! Take me to a working Transition Towns program, a successful permaculture community, any where where forest peoples live on fully protected custom native title land, an ample supply of GM-free farms and farmers markets… even a few episodes of Australia’s Landline, perhaps one of the most compelling programs on TV, will do.

I’m telling you how it is through my eyes. You may see a different world. But I can assure you, I don’t seek it out.

If you saw the amount of wastage, unfettered consumption of diminishing resources, the war on indigenous cultures and the forests they live in and do protect, largely unknowingly, for all of us, you’d think we were still in the dark ages.

I reckon the enlightenment never happened.

It’s well overdue!

We’ve all heard of the islands of plastic and debris floating in the oceans, the diminishing fish stocks and the melting of the Andean water reservoirs. People – there is cause for alarm! Anyone looking at what we’re doing from the outside would think we’re insane, hell bent on suicide, taking all life down with us as blue planet Earth goes about its extraterrestrial business regardless.

It’s this thought and the deeply profound experiences I’ve had of late that keep me going, that motivate me to write, film and walk this planet. I’ll be doing more of this in the coming months.

Reflections on the road

By Monday afternoon I will be back in Kalk Bay, Cape Town, for a once in a life-time opportunity to perform with South Africa’s free improvisation trio, Benguela. Early August I’ll head back to Malaysia where I’d spent a month in Sarawak working on a new micro-documentary series prior to my brief stay in Buenos Aires.

September will see me back in Australia. It’s Ma’s 80th and I’m so looking forward to seeing my family and friends again. I have an increasing urge to go home, but have no idea where that is… some where warmer, closer to family, some where leafy with panoramic skies and communities engaged with progressive change would do nicely. Idealic? Why not?

At Buenos Aires international airport I wondered how much longer it would be before there’s a perceived difference between those that do and those that don’t wear face-masks. Are those that do protecting me from them, or do they believe they’re being protected from me?

The flight stopped at Cape Town and picked up many more passengers. Most of them school boys all jammed around me sneezing, sniffling and coughing. I’m immunised to the max for just about everything, I just hope I get through this flight without picking up anything I can’t shake off. Since I’d left Melbourne, prior to it’s swine flu invasion, I’ve been so very fortunate to remain free of ailments. At times it does feel as if this H1N1 virus is chasing me.

I’d not seen as much of Buenos Aires as I’d wanted. In fact, I was so tired from the Board meeting and with my companion, insomnia, so very demanding, I filled in the spaces with walking, a variety of different cafes and writing. I’m making a point to write as much as I can from those places I draw profound influence from as soon as I can. Much has been lost over the years. For instance, the very few days I spent in Barcelona three years ago were so intense I had expected to write for days having planned out the exercise with street names, photographs, cafes of import and sites tremulous with wonder, art works, stone works and markers for further reading. It remains to this day an unfinished work, much of it contained in copious notes in my journal.

And so it was that my week in the Ulu Baram would see lucidity empty me of the banal and ready me for that which I have yet to find words for… the forest! Uncut, virgin forest deep in Sarawak, vulnrable to the unshakable appetite for timber, home to the Penan who have struggled for near on 30 years to protect their lands and livelihood. You can read more about this in a later post on my blog, or wait till December when the micro-docs series I’ve been working on in Sarawak will be launched.

One of several video scratch pads I’ve started to make available on Youtube. Each are bits of songs or instrumentals I’m working on, some on the go for nearly a year. It’s taken me that long to decide to do this as they also chart my re-emergence as composer / musician – something I’d avoided for over 14 years.

For more bits and pieces go: http://www.youtube.com/garton

Stencil, Buenos Aires

I arrived in Buenos Aires just over a week ago to the 75th bed I’ve slept in in two years. I’d been in Kuching working on the next instalment of my video installation piece, NOTHINGKNOWN, and the micro-docs series, Sarawak Gone. More on the latter in the coming months.

It was the first face to face APC Board meeting since January 2008’s gathering in Ithala, South Africa, which brought me here. We’d accomplished a great deal in four days – approving the APC Governance Manual, the APC Strategic Plan for 2008 – 2012, audited financial statements,  two internal reviews, management and program staff reports and presentations… Always intense, necessarily detailed, never dull!

With every passing day I am enjoying more and more the bristling vastness of Buenos Aires, a place one can find much frustration with, but heavily counter-balanced by the fusion of cultural energy here. I was delighted and inspired to see a tango orchestra – a free concert and the theatre was full. Fascinating line up. Two double bass, acoustic bass, three violas, three bandoneón, flute, electric guitar, desks of first and second violins, piano. It was beautiful. So very very beautiful and sexy. When ever the solo violin appeared it felt as if the orchestra were chasing it, always a mere syncopated beat ahead, sometimes just behind, always racing towards highly pitched resolve, that never really quite ended, burying its intensity into the heart and head simultaneously.

One evening some of us went to a real, hard core tango night in an old part of the city, but the star attraction was ill, so not a great deal was happening. The venue was HUGE… like a warehouse, full of weird and funky art, a ceiling that went up to forever. I was happy being there… reminded me of the Shepparton Newman Warehouse and spaces like Alpha House in Sydney I’d either lived or spent time in.

There were beautifully lit spaces such as the never ending pool hall, the exterior of the old tango bar with its fluid graffiti under yellowed street lamps… Regrettably, to my horror the next morning, I would discover that I’d left my camera, a Canon Powershot SX1 IS, in a taxi.

I still can’t believe it’s out of sight. Keep thinking it’ll turn up in my hotel room, that I’d wedged it between something, but alas not. It’s gone. Lost in Buenos Aires forever. Unfortunately it’s not insured for forgetfulness.

Feels like I’ve lost a travel companion, but in a strange way, I find I’m more disappointed  at losing all those photos I’d taken that evening… But it does point to the fact that I’m not cashed up to replace such integral items to my work. I’m travelling on a bare bones budget, picking up gigs here and there, selling a CD here and there, but not enough to replace a camera let alone purchase an Argentinean made guitar, of which I am surrounded!

A hard lesson learnt – don’t go out at midnight after a feast of wine and meat with an early morning start scheduled in the midst of a Board meeting. But in Argentina, this kind of pumped living is normal… people take dinner at 11pm then go out. Given I rarely get a decent nights sleep and that I’m often awake till 4am, I took my chances.

I’d lso lost 2G and 32MB SD cards, full set of rechargable batteries, lens cleaning kit and an ergonomic mouse stashed at the bottom of the camera bag along with a small note pad! Not happy, but surprisingly calm.

Kind of rough sampling of my gig at the Ruai BAR in Kuching. I’d be amazed if anyone if anyone makes out what’s going on… but glad to have the vid… thanks Pang

After 16 years of visiting Sarawak this was my first gig in Malaysia… Saturday, 13 June 2009.

Did the lot – projections, spoken word, Fierce Throat works and a sampling of the kind of pieces I’d been performing in Japan and Austria.

Thanks to Pang, Xavier and Rheena for their help in making this happen.

Performance for solo voice, oral microphone, hard curve saturation and open licensed visuals. Performed for the launch of the book “Re-inventing Radio”, a Kunstradio initiative, at the The MAK, Vienna, October 2008.

GRIT 02 examines the death of analogue broadcasting by way of readings from numerous sources describing the process of enclosure on public spectrum, the airways and the cultural diversity it affords humanity. The digital spectrum promises to further the spread of sameness the world over.

Homogeneity means “being similar throughout”. What homogeneity brings to societies is an illusion. Sameness is celebrated. Difference is discarded. It is a monoculture, a folly. Sameness will be our undoing.

GRIT 02 includes extracts from the Frequency Post series curated by Garton for KunstRadio, samples from works by Warren Burt, Pei, Steve Law, Ollie Olsen, Jin Shan and Garton.

Visuals from Rot Emulsion by Andy Thomas and Andrew Garton.