picnikfile_oa2RIS

picnikfile_oa2RIS, originally uploaded by brita frost.

Ha! Just goes to show that if you stamp your foot hard enough someone usually responds. I have a new website + blog. Designed and built by Mr Matthew O'Shannessy. Thank you, thank you!
You can check it out here: http://www.britafrost.com/ and the blog here: http://www.britafrost.com/blog/

I'll keep this blog up for a little while but I won't be posting stuff here anymore.

For ages now I have been trying unsuccessfully to build a new website with a blog attached. I still haven't done it. The blog bit is fine, the website a disaster. One day I will fix it. Until then I will just continue to post things here.

I am in a new studio. I come here to write and it seems to be working out ok. Except on a Monday. I hardly ever get anything done on a Monday.

So anyhow. Some things that I love (because I do seem to love a lot of things):

I have read this transcript of a talk given by David Foster Wallace about four times now.

At the film festival I saw, among other things, the new Agnes Varda film


And the new Clair Denis film

which was breathtakingly beautiful...

Some gorgeous girls:


I have been reading the Bruno Munari book Design as Art. He writes about the Bauhaus:
"This first school of design did tend to make a new kind of artist, an artist useful to society because he helps society to recover its balance, and not to lurch between a false world to live one's material life in and an ideal world to take moral refuge in.

When the objects we use every day and the surroundings we live in have become in themselves a work of art, then we shall be able to say that we have achieved a balanced life."

It seems to fit so beautifully with the David Foster Wallace talk.

And more:

Last week I was lucky enough to meet and interview Rick Poynor. He also gave a fascinating talk about "design thinking" and critical design. I will write some more about what he said later.

A great interview with Agnes Varda here.
A great interview with Haruki Murakami here.

Oh and last night we saw the new Michael Mann, Public Enemies. I know the enthusiastic tone of this post makes me sound indiscriminate but seriously, I thought it was brilliant. And shot so beautifully on video. And Johnny Depp...

I am so happy to be back...
Again.
x

Once she would have liked to see a ghost. As if that would have confirmed everything she already knew about the world. Now, watching her son, she no longer needs the corroboration of an unhappy ghost. Life is diaphanous. Being alive is not much different to placing paper on bark and rubbing over it with a lead pencil. These days she feels as if she is surrounded by the scratchings of another world, a world too full of the shapes of things, of knowing and not knowing, where to think is to be certain.

(I love the photo above but I have no idea who took it or where I found it, if you know, please tell me)

one afternoon

fancy.
Under the Ivy (the film clip is kind of gorgeous, especially Kate's smile at the end).

Happy Birthday Lauren!

So I have a room with a view. Such a novelty in this flat capital. A great big room with a great big view. I live in an apartment above a big old shop and on the back of the building is this rather spectacular old sign.


I look out across Melbourne's lichen covered rooftops.


(no lichen on these rooftops, this is from the bathroom)

In this new elevated position a gloomy Melbourne winter takes on a new and rather enjoyable quality. The sky changes. And changes. And I can lie in bed and watch it shift. I think about taking photos only of the sky. Someone described Melbourne's winter skies to me as a bit like living under a tupperware lid. It is true, the sky does seem to be grey and low for much of the year but lately I have been quite taken with its shimmering quality. And the sky, for some reason, it always makes me think of the past. Of what this part of the world was like before Melbourne was here.

Lately, I haven't been sleeping. I tend to spend many hours awake in the middle of the night in what feels like an excruciatingly uncomfortable bed. Sometimes I read and sometimes I just lie there. Sometimes I stare in to the darkness. Sleepless nights are hardly pleasant or enjoyable, as everyone knows, but sometimes I can just let myself go and think. And think. And in its own way this tends to dissolve the small knot of anxiety at the base of my sternum.

I feel a little bit like a snake sloughing off an old skin, discovering how cold and raw you are underneath. A feeling that is both terrible and pleasant all at the same time.