what the hell — let’s go for three in a row. i don’t expect people come this way anymore looking to read about food anyway, so here’s another post about printed paper.

on my way down to the comics last friday, i made a detour into city gallery — a little room at the melbourne town hall — for “paper city“, an exhibition of historical melbourne letterheads. yeah!

featuring an assortment of letters sent to the town hall since the mid-1800s, this collection showcases the evolution of design, print technology, language, industry, society and culture all in one fell swoop. even if you just go for the pretty pictures, you will witness how the overwrought charm of the victorian-era specimens eventually gave way to the unfortunate clunk of the 1980s. inbetween, there is a great mix of striking and quirky.

each piece of correspondence was worded most eloquently. each missive received was stamped and dated by the office, with an annotation by the clerk of what action was to be carried out. of course, there are some samples of lovely handwriting. ah… i used to have handwriting.

the grey threat that winter’s summery turn was about to end forced me out onto the streets today. that and the fact that i hadn’t really left the house in a week, and i thought i might chew my own arm off in protest. i’d been feeling blue, it’s true, and i wondered if buying myself treats would cheer me up. i tested this theory with an ink pad of sky blue, and then fingerless gloves crafted in navy wool, with white anchors handknitted into them. it totally worked!

my meandering eventually led me to “inherent vice” at the ngv studio at federation square, in which eight local comic artists have been holed up for some weeks, drawing. here you may walk freely amongst this elusive species in their (somewhat augmented) natural habitat. observe them at work. quiz them about their craft. look at their stuff.

and there was much stuff to look at: every last skerrick of wall space was covered in pictures…

every desktop a fascinating curation of bits and pieces…

(i must admit, there was more fruit than i’d expected to see on the desktops of comic artists…

…in comic-drawing mode, i’m sure it was chocolate i had within easy reach.)

this beautiful and inspiring installation is on for another week. after a couple of visits, i still gape at the walls in wonder. any minute now i might give in to the urge to draw something. good thing i didn’t gnaw off my arm after all.

apparently it is 19° today, and sunny. i should pop outside.

we did pop outside last sunday, when it was cloudy and grey, and some 4° cooler. no matter. a good section down by the yarra was festooned with big orange balloons (and all manner of installation and artwork) to celebrate the 150th birthday of the art gallery. lured by the promise of a dancing rhinoceros (and for some of us, a taco) we sauntered across the river, impressed in varying degrees by: an ancient indian carpet recreated in coloured rice and lentils; a staircase covered in ornamental stenciled mud and ash; the goddess guanyin sculpted in sand; a painting of a digger rendered in real life by a street performer; a bronzed and smiling buddha walking serenely down the avenue… and then, finally, across the road: the rhinoceros. the kid was surprisingly disappointed to find that it was only a puppet, albeit a life-sized puppet operated by two concealed humans.

nevermind. life’s great disappointments can be soothed with a cupcake. outside the arts centre, at the very edge of the sunday craft market, sophisticakes had a stall with some very compelling specimens. billowy buttercream, sugar butterflies… that sort of thing. a sea of pinks and pastels which the kid eschewed for a brown on brown cookies ‘n’ cream cupcake topped with a miniature oreo. i was sucked in by the gold-glittery new york, new york — chocolate cake with tahitian vanilla buttercream. the frosting was not great; it had a rich vanilla flavour, but it was more sugary than buttery, a little too crunchy and harsh. the cake, on the other hand, was quite amazing: all dark chocolate moistness. when it was gone, i was immediately wistful.

in lieu of more cake, we tracked down the taco truck, tucked away amid a grove of orange balloons, and ordered lunch. from a modest menu of three tacos — fish, chicken or potato, i got us a taco plate: two tacos and corn chips for $12. and then we waited, and waited, and reminded ourselves that it was fresh food, cooked to order, and then after a few more minutes of admiring the lovingly handpainted truck (sweet video on the painting of here)…

…

…

…a waxed paper box traversed the pass.

mmm… my fish taco had a freshly fried bit of fish — succulent in its crunchy batter. the red cabbage slaw was a perfect purple foil, cabaggy juices mingling with the poppyseed mayo to leave trails of vibrant violet as i made my way through it.

the kid was similarly impressed with her grilled, marinated chicken taco, and especially with its sublimely sweet and juicy corn relish.

we sat in the shadow of the truck and ate, and just a couple of bites in, a tableau of the sydney nolan footballer painting sprang to life around us. the kid ran off to play pretend footy, leaving me with a cluster of corn chips. i’m pleased to say they were all limey tang and salty crunch.

reading of dawn’s art collection over at handmadelove reminded me that i’ve been meaning to photograph my cake painting for the longest time. this is what greets me each morning when i wake up, and what sends me off to dreamtime as i lean over to turn off my lamp each night.

strangely enough, i have never had a cake dream. perhaps my average daily cake intake is enough to keep it permeating my subconsciousness.

i remember discussing the painting with the artist, lucy culliton, whom i was lucky enough to meet at the gallery, and who was kind enough to counsel me through choosing which of her paintings i wanted up on my wall. she had originally painted the background pink, she said, but right at the end, had decided to paint it over with white, allowing the barest whisper of pinkish hue to show through.

i like the pale primaries of the painting: pink, blue and yellow rallying round the golden crumby cake.

perched on top, an old advertising card for tea, procured at arthur’s circus a little while ago, and a vintage price tag that my kind sister mailed me last year.

elsewhere in the house, the art is not quite as fancy, but i love it anyway. here is the wall above my computer, filled with stuff the kid has done, mostly from last year at preschool. i’ll be sad to take it all down when we pack up the house, but we’re fast running out of wall space anyway.

i recently started the kid her own tumblr page for her current output, but so far have been not very good at scanning and uploading. it couldn’t be that hard for an almost-six-year-old to learn to use a scanner, could it?

we headed out of melbourne for a mini-roadtrip. it’s not my favourite thing, sitting in a car for hours at a stretch, watching the scenery whiz past, however the regional bakeries sort of make it worthwhile.

it was just after 9 on day 2 when we entered the bakery on the main street of kyneton — the country cob, i think it was — looking for a breakfast that would last us the drive back to the city (and out again to the snow). i cast my eye over the standards in the counter: scrolls, snails, slices, and would probably have settled for a large lamington when i caught a flash of colour from an adjacent display case.

look at that amazing pink cake! filled with chunky jam and just the right amount of cream, topped with sugary pink icing and shredded coconut. the cake itself was moist and strawberry-flavoured in a most agreeably artificial way. when it was gone i had to have a couple of stern words with myself about not getting another one for the road.

the other thing i like about the countryside is its easy curation of vintage signage. sometimes it’s a small moment of pleasure as you past it at 100km/h on the highway. other times you might arrive at a little town where the highway is the main street, and you might stop for a while for a more leisurely review.

pink cake can make you foolhardy, and will propel you into the middle of the road so that you can get a picture of that historic tea mural on an old building on the other side. or you might stand in the gutter just so you can fit a giant rooftop ice cream in your viewfinder.

these lovely signs will soon be just a smidge closer. come january, i am moving to melbourne. in short, the alternately estranged and absent boy came to the decision that he might actually want (and like) to have his family around him. for the last year or so he has been working a new job in melbourne, both of which factors have made him far less grumpy than we have been used to. so, we shall see.

i had been somewhat resistant to relocation, but then a couple of months ago i read of loobylu’s crazy plan to pack up a suburban melbourne existence and head off on an island adventure in british columbia. it struck me that melbourne wasn’t such a stretch after all.

what will be a challenge, will be packing up the house. i’m hoping that when i open up the boxes on the other end of the move, there will be less — maybe even a lot less — than i have around me right now. i like my stuff, and people who’ve been around here have been kind enough to point out what a blast packing it up will be, but i’ve also been reading of people who live with 50 things (or even 75, or 100 things). so, um… we shall see.

i am working on convincing myself that it’s actually just the idea of my stuff that i’m attached to. so far i have been very bad at even starting the cull, and i know this relaxed attitude will turn around and bite me in the ass in four or five months.

in the meantime, i calculate how much gelato i can eat at messina before the summer arrives, and i watch the sunsets over the harbour, coloured ever more rosy by their finiteness. aside from my lovely aunt, who cried out, “how can you leave me?”, people have been saying, “oh melbourne! i love melbourne! i’d happily live in melbourne!”, and i’m hoping that they follow through and come with me.

more drawing! i was hunched over my lightbox on wednesday, drawing a bowl of soupy noodles, when the bell on my inbox went. it was the editor of pan magazine, asking me how the illo was coming along. spooky.

(well, perhaps not so spooky: i was quite late.)

have you bought yourself a pan yet? apparently it is going so swimmingly that a reprint of issue one is scheduled in the coming weeks. i filed my copy for my second column a couple of weeks ago, and it was a vote of confidence when the editor wrote back and asked for an illustration to go with.

i don’t expect issue two to be out for some months yet, but that there’s a taster for ya.

then yesterday, i was persuaded to make a short film for two ply, the annual low-fi film festival held in the loungeroom of a house just at the top of my street. fancy: a salon, in the heart of the upper-middle-inner-west. this year, the theme was “tongue”, and there i was, with no paid work to sully my schedule. the only downside was that two ply was a mere day away.

after dropping the kid off at school, i scrambled myself an idea, and drew a few things with a 6B pencil. i don’t know if it’s conventional, but i put it all together in photoshop, exported several hundred jpgs into quicktime, saved them into 11 separate clips, and then stumbled my way through the edit, all the while googling stuff like “how to lengthen transitions in imovie”.

(which is not possible?)

anyway. 10 hours later…

i premiered “sugar shanty” a few hours ago, to warm applause and kind comments, and despite listening to the same 40 second segment of the song over and over and over again, i am completely not sick of it. in fact, i can’t get it out of my head. rum tara tra la la la la!

it’s been quiet ’round here, i know. well, not so much literally: we’re currently a week into school holidays, so it’s round-the-clock chatter (and singing, and shrieking) from at least one of us. the other of us has been afflicted with the endless lurgy, and then somewhere in there, halfway through the course of yummy yellow-brown antibiotics, i started laying out a textbook on managing blood-thinning medication. 300-odd pages of text and tables and fun diagrams with lots of arrows. lots.

i am less than halfway through, and it may turn out to be 400 pages after all.

i can’t work during the day, so instead we do school holiday things like wake up at 9.30, and eat brioche and apricot jam, and go to the art gallery, or see children’s theatre… this afternoon we walked through misty drizzle to see mr freezy down at the sydney theatre company, in which a high-octane tale of an ice cream scoop unfolds, as does a great mess of flour and sprinkles and jelly babies and drinking straws, and a chocolate-iced donut is thrown into the audience.

afterwards i had a hankering for an eton mess and tried in vain to find the fratelli fresh down by the pier so that we could go to sopra — does anyone know where exactly it is? but anyway, the rain kicked in a couple more notches and sent us scurrying back into the city, where, oh hey! central baking depot.

moments after we plonked our umbrellas in the bucket by the door, the skies broke open. but we didn’t care — i had just enough cashmoney for two hot chocolates and a slice of blueberry-cinnamon-apple butter cake. the large hot chocolate is only a dollar more than the regular, but twice the size, and fully chocolatey. and just look at that cup — so covetable with its heavy china and gold trim.

on monday, it was too wet to sit outdoors with a pie floater from across the road, but we armed ourselves with BBQ pork buns — the baked kind, with the sticky glaze — from furama cake shop in chinatown, and holed up inside the powerhouse museum for several hours. the fashion week exhibition was good fun, and the 80s exhibition was more sensory overload than trip down memory lane, but it was the interactive batik design simulator which held the kid’s interest for more than fifteen minutes. that and the wonderful school holiday activity inspired by sonya gee‘s historic matchbox project.

$2 bought us an empty matchbox, a seat at the big table, and a steady stream of crafty supplies. the kid set out to make a robot cat, but in the end, it was just a regular cat… with a hidden stash of jewels in her slide-out belly. (it’s on until 18 july, if yer interested.)

and in-between? there’ve been rides on the flying fox in victoria park, a mid-week dimsum feast with grandparents, two loads of laundry in the face of the rain, and a little bit of a thrill to finally read myself in print (PAN magazine, last seen at magnation in newtown). also, i’ve been trying to see how best to get any work done during school holidays, but my shortlived experiment involving working until 2am has proved to be unsustainable, with me stumbling somewhat dizzy and nauseated through the rocks today, after just three late nights.

saturday morning, we’re headed to melbourne for week 2 of the holidays. i wonder how many pages of book layout i can squeeze in before then.

that last sunday before the rains came, we slathered up with sunscreen and walked into rozelle to meet family for brunch. i’d been curious about rosebud since before it opened months and months ago — a year? two? i’d watched its evolution from big empty space to slick cafe, but somehow had not made it past admiring the french aluminium stools on the footpath, and the big red mural above the pass.

inside is a big, open, sunlit space with bare lightbulbs on languid wires strung from the ceiling. inside is a big white plate with golden slabs of french toast, hewn from a brioche loaf, all soft and moist inside its caramelised crust. there are flaked almonds, sour cherries and a generous dollop of mascarpone. there is an artful pouring of maple syrup. it may be the most delicious thing you will eat all week.

i stopped short of licking my plate clean. accompanied by a tall glass of sweet, rose-infused egyptian tea, it was all the energy i needed for an afternoon on cockatoo island.

yes, the sydney biennale is on again. two years sure went by quickly! i don’t know what it says about me, but the attraction in heading out to cockatoo is the return trip through the harbour on the vintage ferries, and the island itself with its collection of old buildings and industrial relics.

the art, i found to be a bit hit and miss — in fact, there is a whole cluster of buildings on the south west end of the island that i missed on purpose, because every room housed a video installation. much too tedious for this philistine.

the turbine hall held most of the big statement pieces, though i didn’t photograph my most favourite of the lot because i didn’t think i could do it justice. french artist kader attia filled a hall with a recreation of a shanty town — actually, the roofs of a shanty town — with corrugated iron sheets going every which way, and tv aeriels and satellite dishes protruding haphazardly. walking across it was inexplicably moving and humbling.

another of my favourites was robert macpherson’s “chitters: a wheelbarrow for richard, 156 paintings, 156 signs”, which is just what it was. a larger-than-life celebration of the vernacular of roadside signs the artist encountered around australia. yes, yes, hand-lettering — i cannot go past it.

i was impressed by the spectacle of cai guo-qiang’s “inopportune: stage one”, which filled an entire cavernous warehouse space with a series of cars, in suspended animation, exploding with light. totally like watching a john woo movie.

there was whimsy, too, amidst the aging machinery. for example, the ornate dr moreau robot sculptures by rohan wealleans. they were fenced off from the public, so i never resolved the question of whether they commanded hugs, or fear.

i remember feeling a rare squeamishness in encountering the room of dead communist leaders, life-sized and waxen, lying in state. i may have whimpered and recoiled when i realised that fidel castro was still “alive”, his chest rising and falling with each mechanical breath.

and i could go on about the life-sized model of the hubble telescope, crafted by one peter hennessey out of nothing but sheets of plywood… but i won’t. instead, i will show you this sign with its jarring punctuation.

now that raises a shudder.

but it’s true: there were lots of plugs.

used to light up artwork like this:

oh wait, like this:

hm.

let us pause, and take ourselves outside, where we can tread on the grounds that have seen the footsteps of convicts, labourers and shipbuilders over 150 years. let us picnic on bagels and hommous. let us wonder at the state-of-the-art shower block — all polished concrete and stainless steel and the most elegant of utilitarian ceramic toiletware — that now services the well-appointed campsite. let us admire the jaunty stripes of this bench that looks over the historic tennis court by the caretaker’s residence up on the hill.

ahhh… all better.

i’ve been juggling projects, and the fairground music (metaphoric) in the background is at a pace that is at the same time jaunty and unsettling, rather than frantic and horrifying. i have new spectacles, with a new — lower! — prescription, which has made it such that my left eye no longer feels like it’s being wrenched out of its socket after a not unreasonable amount of time in front of the computer. the constant rain has also been a help, keeping me inside, hunched beneath my mossy green poncho, with my trusty oil heater close by. really, i can’t complain; it’s all good.

it’s been raining for just over a week now. last sunday, we stepped into the grey and wet, and onto the slick deck of a sydney ferry bound for circular quay. we were there mostly to go to the MCA zine fair, and indeed we must’ve done four or five laps of the trestle table maze, because the kid has a girl crush on sonya gee and spent much of her time at the fair nestled in sonya’s lap behind her stand of ‘kind of like a party bag for the unwell’ — “zomg you’re sick”.

in between, we delved into the MCA proper and made a half-hearted attempt at appreciating the biennale, and headed out across the road for lunch and pastry in the drizzly courtyard at la renaissance patisserie.

we started off sharing a baguette filled with poached chicken and aioli, and it was pleasant and all, but we knew we were just passing the time until dessert. unfortunately, there were no rose cream macarons on offer that day (my number one favourite, you may remember from before), so we made do with a trio of jasmin (number two favourite), passionfruit-chocolate, and cassis. the la renaissance macaron is consistently perfect: i have never encountered a brittle hollow shell, and the plump, moist biscuits hold a good amount of well-flavoured filling.

at the counter, the kid had also requested this sunny dome of a gateau — the mango-jasmin mousse cake. beneath the golden jelly skin, it was lush and light, and the two separate mousses atop a thin sponge base burst with fruitiness. not quite halfway through though, the kid stopped, quite bewildered, and whispered urgently, “there are strange beans in here.” upon investigation, i uncovered an entire nest of pinenuts hidden in the mousse, which is all fine and good if you like pinenuts… but we don’t. here’s a fun rainy day activity: pick all the covert pinenuts out of your otherwise enjoyable mango-jasmin mousse cake.

the rainy day fun continued once i got home with my bundle of swag:

two issues of vanessa berry‘s “disposable camera”, each one a rambling little freeform narrative. one has an intriguing recipe for red rice involving a whole tomato, and i will surely give it a try. the other has an amazing fold-out thought map and a reference to the one bit of “microserfs” that i remember: where one of the characters has a meltdown and locks himself in his office, and his colleagues, concerned, slip flat foods like cheese slices under the door to him. i also got some sweet mini comics from miss helen, to whom we were recently formally introduced and with whom we shared pizza and table-top drawings of kawaii cupcakes.

a couple of aisles down, i got a tiny and adorable japan guide from dudley redhead, and the heartfelt memoirs of one girl’s relationship with tamagotchis. (the girl’s name is zombetty.)

from the table of georgia perry and my candy castle, i procured “nu yoik”, a dazzling technicolor tribute to new york, in photographs and hand-drawn type. the kid picked the hilarious “kitten club”, full of cheesy cat pictures improved through the power of collage.

from the same table, i got a two-pack of mini posters: “things to know”, containing such hand-lettered gems as fetes are fun, and absolutely everyone should own a yellow + white striped beach towel, and everyone has two stomachs. one is solely for dessert. so true.

and then, from, uh, the same table, i could not go past the little compendium of illustrated junk food, nor the “save room for cake” colouring book, whose page of macaroons (sic) you would have seen beneath the macarons i told you about earlier.

i found a bunch of typewritten stories from maddy phelan, of which “ladybeard” — about her physical and psychological struggles with, and eventual embracing of, her hirsuteness — was particularly engaging; i still don’t know quite what to do with my hair. i also really liked “POTATOES” (much the same way i like potatoes), with its quirky little drawings and its potted history of… potatoes:

back in my day, everything was made out of potatoes.

we had to walk 15 miles to buy a sack of potatoes and they only cost 5c. or perhaps it was 5 shillings. i can’t remember. and i’ll have you know, our shoes were made out of potatoes.

and so on.

the bumper zine of the collection is lee tran lam‘s sold-out “speak-easy #11: the french issue”, really a magazine of interviews and recollections interspersed with photographs stuck down using ribbon and decorative masking tape. i’m still savouring my way through it, but i especially liked the list of memorable food experiences over lee tran’s four visits to france. the aisle of decorative sugar in the bon marché food hall in paris holds a special place in my heart too!

back in sydney, i wasted no time in recapturing a little bit of european je ne sais quoi. a week after touching down i talked singapore girl into a spot of luncheon at le grand cafe. we have figured out by now, that the best time for lunch at le grande cafe is “early”. just before noon, there are no queues, several empty tables, and a glass case full of options.

all morning, i’d been thinking of the terrine and cornichons that i’d enjoyed on a previous occasion. i considered maybe branching out and trying the duck liver parfait with brioche. however, once i discovered that the baguette on offer that day was filled with duck confit, my choice was made.

they showed up at the table a little while later, one for each of us. the sandwich had been freshly toasted, and there was a satisfying crunch to the baguette before it gave way to succulence: i was pleased to find that the bread was generously buttered, and the filling dressed with mayonnaise, and of course, to start with, there was a good amount of naturally occurring duck fat. it all made for a very moist and tasty mouthful. the slices of crisp, sweet onion provided a good foil to the fat, as did a little dimpled bottle of orangina.

we had planned ahead and picked our desserts when we ordered our sandwiches at the counter, to save us from rejoining the queue when the lunch crowd eventually swept into the cafe around 1. the attentive waitstaff brought them to the table as soon as we were done with the baguettes.

for me: the caramel tart, which turned out to be more of a very nice pastry shell filled with a sort-of creme brulee. the surface of it lacked the crackly, sugary shell of a proper creme brulee, but the mild caramel flavour and light custardy texture was pleasing all the same. the jaunty little beret of a biscuit bore a striking resemblance to a cookie from famous amos.

singapore girl had the petit pot au chocolat, which turned out to be too much chocolat for a girl who had just eaten a baguette filled with three kinds of fat. beneath the nutty crumble topping was a deep expanse of rich, dark, chocolate. at the bottom of that, was a puddle of thick caramel. perhaps she should not have also ordered a hot chocolate as a postprandial bevvie; there was still a good amount of pudding left when the waitress came to clear the table. (by contrast, the caramel tart was completely gone.)

we rolled out the door then, and had barely gone ten metres when we came across gaffa, three floors of art space / shop / cafe housed in a handsome pink heritage building. downstairs it’s little rooms of covetable and affordable contemporary jewelry and objet d’art; upstairs it’s galleries (and studios) around a central sunlit airwell.

one of the exhibitions we perused most appreciatively was food&company, an unprecious curation of food-related stuff: photographs, drawings, tiny interactive installations, and some lovely crockery. here’s the flourishing, by gemma o’brien.

ahh… so nice to see the flourishing of unstuffy, inspiring art space in the heart of this grimy city.