The Postcard Files: Dessau

I nearly broke my ankle performing this. (Photos by Kolja Harms)

This one has been on the refrigerator for months because I like it so much. I was in Hamburg, Germany in April of 2010, visiting my friends Kolja Harms, Alexandra Merten and Gerald Kappelmann. All three are architects. When I'm in town, it's our habit to make a field trip together to some place of architectural significance. In 2007, it had been Prora, the Nazi holiday resort on the island of Rügen. This time, it was the Bauhaus in Dessau, a Mecca for devotees of Walter Gropius and modern design.

Alexandra had made arrangements for all of us to spend two nights in the dormitory tower, giving us ample time (or so we thought) to explore the campus and surrounding town. On our first morning, after breakfast, Kolja and I circled the main building. A handsome but sinister railing bounds the grass here; it runs low to the ground, nearly invisible, like a series of staples holding the turf in place. It's perfectly engineered to trip and wrench the ankles of careless visitors. So Kolja took pictures while I demonstrated how not to approach the Bauhaus. He sent the series of photos to me months later on this homemade postcard, which got wet in my leaky mailbox before I could retrieve it.

The New Arrival

GI Joe's photo op with Barbie gets silly.

It was a red-letter day for Joe, Greg and Skip. Disappointed about not being able to keep the model I'd borrowed for my story (see "The Desk"), they'd been occupying themselves by being wise guys and making a general mess of my desk; dismantling my stapler, playing "52 pick-up" with my Rolodex, and cutting up my pencils for lumber to build a hutch for the dust bunnies lying around. Well, they cheered up considerably when she appeared.

At first, they were content to watch eagerly from the sidelines as I took a few shots of Barbie in her display box. Then Joe (a little star-struck, I guess) insisted I take a few pictures of him standing next to her. I agreed, but before I could get things set up Joe had pulled off the box lid and crawled inside, wedging himself beside her. And once Joe had his turn, Skip and Greg had to have theirs, too. At that point, it pretty much became a competition to see how many of them could cram themselves into the frame at once. Barbie was the consummate professional, not letting on at all that this was physically uncomfortable, and more than a bit ridiculous. Actually, it was almost eerie how she never once lost her poise. I just assumed she was accustomed to that kind of attention.

Then she explained. She's a reproduction of Barbie in 1964 (as advertised in the upper right-hand corner of the package), which was the very same year GI Joe made his debut. The guys just wanted to reminisce, and she didn't want to spoil it for them. Welcome aboard, Barbie.

The Desk

Damien Wright's model of "Harry's Desk".

Greg places the objet d'art just so.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been working on a story exploring the role of sketching in the process of design. The editor was eager for me to include a discussion of the work of at least a couple of Australians, and I decided to collect some remarks from my friend Damien Wright, a craftsman who makes furniture from native Australian wood. Damien draws a lot of working sketches, but he gets more mileage from the scale models he builds. The other night, he dropped off one of those models with a couple of his sketchbooks for me to look over, to see what might be useful in illustrating the article. I took a few shots of the tiny desk using my tabletop cyc. He calls this one "Harry's Desk."

Inspecting the joinery.

I refused to caption this one.

I took a short break for lunch, and by the time I came back, Joe and Greg had discovered the desk and decided they wanted to keep it for their office. It's a little small, but they complained they don't have anything to write on at the moment, and they thought their Hovitos idol (a trophy from a mission to Peru) looked good on it. I explained they could borrow it for a few days, but that Damien is getting it back. Thus ensued some further inspection and horsing around, until I'd had enough and put the model away.

Crocktails

Apropos of nothing, I'll take a moment to share my thoughts on the state of mixology in Australia. More specifically, the martini. Before I moved to Melbourne I enjoyed many of them, alone and with friends. Now that I'm here, it doesn't happen anymore. Why? Here's why.

G'day!

Wine is good here. Beer, too. Cocktails are shitty.

As far as I can tell, Melbourne bartenders don't know ass from elbow. And it doesn't help that most folks (especially the under-40 crowd) seem to like their martinis "dirty," with olive juice tipped into the mix. In my view, "dirty" is hipster branding for a crappy drink. It may sound cool to swill something dirty (as in edgy, sinister and outlawed), but if there's enough olive juice for you to taste, it means the bartender didn't care enough about getting a tip to rinse the nosh before putting it into the glass. But no matter how ardently you plead for a dry martini, they'll spill liberal amounts of vermouth (sweet as often as dry) into the ice and gin. Then they'll make a big show of shaking the damn thing, pour it into a room-temperature glass, and smugly garnish it with an olive (beware-- pit intact) glistening not with brine, but oil. I once was served a martini that was warm to the touch and without a trace of ice, the cocktail glass having come directly from the sanitizer.

If, by some miracle, you manage to get your hands on a martini that's at least drinkable, you're still going to be charged 18 or 19 bucks for the privilege. ["Pardon me, waiter? Go to hell."]

I miss my former neighbourhood bar-- the lounge at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse in Seattle-- where I can go swimming in ice-cold razor blade soup for 4 dollars at happy hour. So unless I'm visiting my family in the U.S., the only time I drink martinis is at home, when I invest in a bottle of Gordon's (which isn't often) or score a bottle of the good stuff from the duty-free shop at Tullamarine Airport.

Cheers.

New Mallet / New High Score

After a two-week hiatus due to Easter and holiday closures, I played trugo this afternoon with the gang at the Brunswick Trugo Club. My first round was shockingly bad. I scored 13 out of a possible 24 points, leading me to reconsider my choice of mallet. I pulled two more from the rack to see how they performed; one was very short and heavy, the other long and heavy with a slightly crooked handle. But both had a striking face at least a centimetre wider than the mallet I'd been using. The long-handled one improved my game immediately, and I finished the afternoon with a game against Helen in which I scored 20 points. Helen scored a new personal best of 21.

Bad hit: Champ the Trugo Dog pursues an errant ring.

Champ the Trugo Dog was supervising play again today, but his enthusiasm flagged a little bit early, perhaps because his owner, Gerry, wasn't feeling well himself. He'd managed to pull a rib muscle this past weekend and figures he'll be out of action for the next few days. 

Five Bucks

I found a $5 bill on the bike path yesterday. Sweet.

I looked around to see who might have dropped it. The only folks in sight were two shuffling mom types pushing a pram in the opposite direction, and they were almost a block away. But I was in the mood for a good deed, so I turned around and pedalled back the way I'd come. By the time I got to the intersection, they'd vanished. I'd never have believed their flabby keesters could give me the slip, but they did. The money's all mine.

Weekend at Metung

The power plant at Yallourn North.

Alison, Bronwyn and I drove to Metung to spend Easter weekend and ANZAC Day with their grandfather, John Sedgley. Metung is a tiny place built on an appendix-shaped peninsula in East Gippsland. John lives there alone, on a wooded hillside overlooking the waterfront, in a house called Rosebank.

Bron catches 187 winks.

We'd been warned that there would be some roadworks to avoid as we approached Moe from the west, so we made a looping, inland detour through a town called Yallourn North. We discovered a power plant nearby with three cooling towers that I liked the look of, so we pulled over to stretch our legs and let the dogs pee. As usual, Bron had passed out in the back seat, so we woke her up and made her walk around a bit, too.

I'd recently dusted off my Nikon 8008s camera and started shooting the 35mm film I'd stockpiled and brought with me to Australia. I thought the earth toned towers looked great and vaguely sinister surrounded by the green, bucolic hills of Victoria. From their appearance, I guessed they were designed in the 1960s; smooth and muscular earthenware vessels cushioned by a narrow ring of crisscrossing basket weave threads at their base. We piled back into the car, and two hours later we pulled up to Rosebank just in time for dinner, which had already been prepared.

" A fine vessel she is...a very fine vessel."

The very next day John took us sailing on his boat, Shadowfax. After a perilous descent to the dock down a steep, treefall-strewn hillside (which John, at 94, negotiated with alarming swiftness), we motored the entire way out to Duck Arm on a calm, windless tide, past a string of slim islands that form the meniscus between mainland Australia and the capricious, open waters of Bass Strait. When we arrived, John climbed off the boat and ambled over to the members of a sailing club from Melbourne that had pulled up down the beach. I ran into the scrub to pee and take pictures of GI Joe on the dock admiring Shadowfax.
When John returned, we had coffee and sandwiches, and sailed home with assistance of a steady breeze that had come up. I had my hand on the tiller nearly the whole way back. I love sailing, and it was quite a thrill to feel the tug of the water and the eager lunge of the boat when the sails were trim.

We attended Easter service the next morning at the little Anglican church in town, and sat in the front row so we could see John as he did a short reading for the congregation. Later, we went to Michael and Helen's house (Alison's uncle and aunt) for lunch/dinner, then ended the day with the four of us-- John, Alison, Bron and me-- pretending to stay awake through an episode of "Midsomer Murders".

John Sedgley (white hair, centre) at the afternoon memorial service.

ANZAC Day started early, with a dawn service at the town square on Monday. ANZAC is an acronym standing for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, and the day of remembrance is akin to Memorial Day in the United States. Melbourne conducts a good large-scale service, but I think ANZAC Day is best enjoyed in country towns like Metung where the observance is simpler and more intimate, and the ground isn't littered with trash when people leave. About 100 people turned up, yawning and cradling cups of coffee from the local bakery, which had opened early. One man led the brief service from the base of the flagpole, around which both homemade and store-bought wreaths of roses and carnations had begun to collect.

As if on cue, when the service was over a single kookaburra called from a nearby gum, and the crowd dispersed.