Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦
Sunday 26 August 2018
Following a recommendation I braved windy William Street Darlinghurst and went down to the Australian Design Centre where I saw a remarkable collection of miniature streetscapes made by Joshua Smith. They were fine works of craftsmanship recreating the patina of urban decay in the shopfronts of poorer neighbourhoods. Here is a photo of one of them:
It reminded me of the dioramas that used to be in the War Memorial in Canberra, which were battlefields recreated in miniature – tiny toylike scenes made for adults.
MG xx
Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦
Saturday 9 June 2018
Sometimes I get the luxury of a little fireworks fatigue. I see a lot of fireworks from the balcony. There would not be a week that goes by without some fireworks near the City. So would it be possible to have anticpatory Vivid fatigue? I don’t even get to see much Vivid detail – the projections onto the Opera House are on to the West facing sails. But I do see some of the sky lit up by the Vivid festival lights, and then there is the Bridge which gets heavy neon treatment, such as this aqua tone for example:
And this year, trying to avoid being a bit grouchy about the ever present bread and circuses feel of the Vivid festival, I took myself off to see some of the sights including a visit to Luna Park at Milson’s Point, where the ferris wheel was looking exceptionally pretty.
And visiting Luna Park reminded me of the short time I worked there – a while ago now – an impoverished student bravely manning the fairy floss cart in my little french navy uniform in all weather. I didn’t do that job for long, but long enough to remember being reprimanded by management for wearing glasses (it was pre laser surgery so I was stilling wearing bookish specs), and for being too generous with the serves!
Your glamorous aunt
MG xx
Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦
Sunday 22 April 2018
Well the consensus seems to be that the curious cross over feature at the arch of the Bridge is just a product of the angle of the photograph. I am posting here some supplementary photographs of the Bridge because there were a few requests. These photos come from dated posts on made on the web.
This following photograph was taken on the 80th anniversary of the Bridge in March 2012:
The struts at the top of the arch definitely don’t look the same do they? The cross bar set up at the centre of the arch is reminiscent of an old timber railway bridge in country New South Wales – not an uninterrupted series of diagonal supports characteristic of the Harbour Bridge.
Maybe your glamorous aunt needs to go on an expedition down to the Bridge and stand under the relevant part of the arch to record what it shows directly…
Your glamorous aunt
MG xx
Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦
Saturday 10 March 2018
Recently I made a new friend who is an Australian living and working in the US. We talked about America and he asked me where I had visited. One of the places was Detroit where I visited for work quite a few years ago now. My new friend immediately asked whether I knew Shinola watches (which I didn’t). Shinola is all about the best in Detroit’s legacy of quality industrial design and processing.
I later spent time enjoying the Shinola website. I really appreciated learning about this venture. Here is a fine example of what they are about:
And here is a version for women that I like:
When I visited about 10 years ago Detroit it felt a city with a great past and great past wealth. The most striking thing first up was the miles of abandoned houses in what must have once been affluent suburbs. It was the closest thing to a culture shock I have experienced, just for a few moments, in the Anglo world.
When I first visited Detroit I had just finished reading a novel called Middlesex by Michael Eugenides which was set in part in Detroit, including Detroit during the civil unrest and race riots in 1967.
So when I arrived my conception of what had happened in Detroit was a work of my imagination based on this novel. And as I was driven from the airport into the centre of the city through these abandoned suburbs I could not believe what I saw. Street after street of empty boarded up overgrown and burnt out houses – a living testament to a disruptive modern historical event, a bombed out war zone that the survivors had never rebuilt, but had just abandoned there for 40 years. And the houses were clearly houses that had formerly been grand, there was an established well heeled life that went with these streets, and it was visibly wiped out. It was just inconceivable to me that this could be part of a modern peace time consumer city culture.
I searched the internet and found photos of the once splendid houses in those abandoned suburbs. The photos I have included here show the houses all overgrown with green. This is what it looked like to me because I visited in summer.
I recently saw a 2017 film by director Kathryn Bigelow simply called Detroit. It deals with a key incident that occurred during the race riots of 1967 and is quite a harrowing watch. I had heard about this film long before I saw it, in a radio documentary about the process of depicting living history. The documentary had remarkable interview material from people who had lived through the violence 50 years before.
Detroit already had problems by the time of the unrest in 1967 – the chief being declining manufacturing sector and car industry.
Sadly the GFC brought more disruption to the political geography of Detroit when the collapse of mortgage securities enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saw more houses abandoned in outer suburbs, with owners forced to walk away (literally) from their untenably financed houses.
But there is often talk of rebuilding Detroit – with high tech, the film industry and similar ventures. First stop Shinola watches. Thanks to my new friend for telling me about them.
Your glamorous aunt MG xx
Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦
Sunday 25 February 2018
In the background of one of my selfies I must have included the part of my loungeroom wall that has a scroll of Chinese characters hanging on it. I say this because I had the pleasure of meeting a man who had taken the time to get a translation before we met. He had read the characters from one of my photos. I also had pleasure of hearing from him an interpretation of the words on the scroll which was a totally new to me and quite different from any interpretation I had thought of.
The scroll itself I had made about 4 or 5 years ago. I had found a beautiful Zen saying entitled Subtlety. I searched about and discovered a Chinese scholar who worked at Macquarie University who was skilled in calligraphy. He agreed to do the calligraphy. He also recommended a man who could mount the work in traditional Chinese paper and fabric form. So the calligraphy was done and the work taken to the scroll maker, and in time I came to own this lovely thing:
The translation of the Zen saying is as follows (reading down first the column on the right, then down second the column on the left):
Entering the forest, he moves not the grass;
Entering the water, he makes not a ripple.
I had, and still do have, a fairly literal interpretation in mind. But my new friend had another interpretation, thus: when you enter the forest you are so small in such a great expansive world inevitably your presence does not create any special disturbance. And the same with water. When you merge with the ocean you do not disturb the huge body of water, you become part of it. You cannot disturb it. And following on from this my new friend drew another parallel – the difference between the city and the village. In the city your conduct will not be noticed but in the village everything will be the subject of judgment and comment. And we both agreed how grateful we were that we lived in the city. In the village we would not be so free to meet.
Yours MG xx
PS On another subject altogether, I give you this week’s before shot:
and the (glamorous) after shot:
Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦
Sunday 7 January 2018
It’s the New Year and I don’t do resolutions so much as I find myself somehow embarking on various new projects, generally a bit domestic. This New Year it seems to be Rejuvenation Grout.
Well I have bought the product and I am hoping it will transform the tired tiles of the bathroom into something a bit more, hmmm luminous may be :-), or just a bit whiter would be ok.
It’s been a nice start to the year otherwise. I had a lovely unexpected visitor on Saturday afternoon. I don’t often get magpies up on the 12th floor so it was a treat to hear that melodic gargling sort of song so close by.
I drove back from the country on Saturday and listened to the radio on the way – as a lot of you know, I love the radio. On this trip the ABC was rebroadcasting a feed from the US National Public Radio (NPR) and I had a couple of treats. One was a show on bluegrass which was an excuse for me to rummage around for favourite modern blues music when I got home. Here is a link to a performer composer I really like and who is a great blues hero for souls who live rough. It’s Chris Whitley with his melancholy guitar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI8ISl7xpg4
The other interesting program I caught was the end of was an interview with the columnist Michael Wolff who has just published Fire and Fury – a book on Donal Trump’s more or less accidental ascendancy and the pathology of his White House reign so far. Perhaps I’ll make it to Abbey’s later in the week to see if I can pick up a copy, it is from all reports, an alarming and worthwhile read.
So, the year seems to have started quietly but hopefully, in your glamorous aunt’s happy domain
Wishing all the best to all of us for the coming year
MG xx
Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦
Sunday 26 November 2017
I had the pleasure of looking at some photos just recently that one of my excellent ostensible nephews had taken of the three parrots he is responsible for – all of them beautiful ringneck parrots. In discussion about the birds, a consensus emerged, that I should devote a post to my own beautiful native parrots, the lorikeets. It would be the right thing to do because they are a lively presence in my daily life, and while they have had a little walk on role in a couple of posts, I have never given them their very own post.
I looked through some of my photos and found way more than I need to illustrate my long and lively relationship with these boisterous little guys. So I have included just one snap taken about Christmas three years ago. This pair were right inside the apartment eating at the table. I posted the photo to facebook and a Czech girlfriend asked me, first, were they real and second, were they dangerous (they being Australian animals people always have to ask thank you Bill Bryson). I told her lorikeets could be dangerous to your sleep if you are trying to sleep in lol.
Fortunately the lorikeets who visit me now are a lot less noisy than they used to be. There was a period when they would arrive just after sunrise in waves of competing pairs to sit on the balcony and yell at one another. That noisy yelling period passed though. And now there are fewer pairs who visit. Some of the territorial arguments must have been resolved.
I usually feed them outside, in their own plates, a mixture of warm water and dissolved honey. I should feed them just once a day but often I will feed them two or three times – they ask so sweetly with little churring sounds. They are nectar eaters so the spiky little beak is for tearing flowers and stems more than it is for cracking nuts. When they feed you can see the nectar gathering tongue working hard – a feathery but hard looking thing that dabs up the honey mixture.
Every season I see a new crop of baby lorikeets. They always make a huge racket fluffed up, quivering outstretched wings, demanding to be fed beak to beak.
Every season also see some courtship rituals. There is a particular dance which involves craning and arching the neck, bobbing rhythmically and slowly snaking around in front of the target female, punctuated by little sneezings. This year I seemed to attract some courtship attention myself. I recorded part of the episode, so you can see for yourself.
With warm regards as always
especially to those of my excellent ostensible nephews who are bird fanciers
your glamorous aunt MG xx
Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦
Thursday 23 November 2017
Social media can teach you things. For instance I have learned from a Twitter account called @bodegacats that there are such things as bodega cats. For the uninitiated, in parts of the US the corner store is known as a bodega. These corner stores frequently have resident cats. Hence bodega cats.
These cats seem to be a pretty common feature, a bit like cellar dogs in Australia. Some might remember a nice little book published a few years back recording a vineyard tour by each dog resident at the vineyard visited, with suitable portraits of the hounds in their domains. I checked just now and the book was called Wine Dogs and they even have their own website winedogs.com
So the Twitter account posts only pictures of cats in corner stores, doing cat style things lying around in among the shelves, on the register and so on. It’s quite endearing. And now I have my own offering from a little corner store at the Paddington end of Darlinghurst.
Here is the corner store, somewhat run down:
When I crossed the road coming up to the store I glanced up and thought hmmm someone’s dropped their jumper on the steps.
But it wasn’t a jumper at all 🙂
from your glamorous aunt MG
xx
noticing the small things
Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦
Saturday 4 November 2017
We haven’t had any updates on flowering trees for quite a while, so here is an installment which presented itself in a really compelling way today after the rain. Your glamorous aunt was on a local adventure to the City and passed through Woolloomooloo where the jacarandas were enchanting.
First picture is in the area of neighbourhood closed to traffic, and it’s picture book pretty.
And we also have Cathedral Street (at the less salubrious end and with wheelie bins 🙂 ).
from the City garden of your glamorous aunt
MG xx
Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦
Wednesday 18 October 2017
In the last week I have been to Canberra and Melbourne and locally, to Parsley Bay, and also to the country and it’s been a pleasant time though busy and a little mixed too, with recurring flu.
Melbourne is a favourite place. I had planned to visit the National Gallery of Victoria*
to see the exhibition there of prints by the Japanese print maker Hokusai and had bought my ticket on line in advance. I also ended up going to see an exhibition of 70 years of creation by the House of Dior.
(*does anyone else think it’s odd to have a National Gallery _of_ Victoria? I mean it’s a National Gallery of Australia…).
Here is a very splendid gown from the Dior exhibition, designed by John Galliano who is the only designer I ever recognised – because of the striking audacity of the billowing sculptural forms he created. I have just never tired of them:
The other exhibition I went to, was of the Hokusai prints. It was beautifully curated, whereas so many exhibitions are dumbed down. This presentation by contrast, was a challenge because the subject matter was rich and the Japanese cultural context always so different. Some of the images have been heavily commercialised over the years, but even so, seeing them “in the flesh” , they didn’t seem old. These well known images include a series of Mt Fuji images, and here is the print of Mt Fuji with lightning:
I tried to take a selfie involving a steamy shower scene before I left Melbourne. The steam had the better of it on this occasion. I will try again in a different hotel room some time in the near future. For the record:
Adios mis amigos
xx Su tia glamorosa