Intention

• “You have to listen to the notes she doesn’t play,” Lisa says in the music’s defence.
• The scene is meant to poke fun at the perceived pomposity of jazz, but it got me thinking about lyrics instead.
• Which brings me to the recently released Dark Side of The Moon: Redux by former Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters.

Revisiting Dark Side of the Moon

• He’s gone mad” – before launching straight into the opening line: “The lunatic is on the grass.” This positions himself as said “lunatic”, instead of – as the original does – allowing the listener to wonder who the subject is (former Pink Floyd bandmate Syd Barrett?
• The media?
• Humanity in general?)

The problem with overwriting

• He chooses to replace the largely wordless original track with a monologue about a friend who died of cancer.
• Waters is explicitly telling us the meaning, and as a result, he risks losing our engagement altogether.
• In Redux, Waters goes from the extreme of understatement in his earlier work to the extreme of overstatement and overwriting.
• Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays.

• The Synod of Bishops was established by Pope Paul VI in 1965 as a permanent body in the Catholic Church, although its members do not meet on a regular schedule.
• It specifically refers to a meeting of selected bishops from around the world to advise the pope on matters of governance.
• Paul VI instituted the Synod of Bishops as a way for Catholic bishops to exercise this authority.

A more open church?

• The pope can also call an extraordinary meeting to discuss a more pressing topic and problem.
• Catholics from around the world were invited to meet in their local dioceses, pray together and discuss questions about their church.
• This meeting is therefore significant because it pictures the Catholic Church not as a top-down hierarchy but rather as an open conversation.
• As Francis himself puts it, the synod offers an opportunity “of moving not occasionally but structurally towards a synodal church, an open square where all can feel at home and participate.”

Working document

• This number will include representatives of religious orders and other Catholic organizations, as well as theologians from Catholic universities.
• Those gathered in Rome will meet in both large sessions known as “general congregations” and small working groups, divided by the synod’s official languages – Italian, English, Spanish, French and Portuguese.
• The working document outlines four broad areas of discussion: synodality, communion, mission and participation.

Francis’ leadership style

• This Synod of Bishops reflects Francis’ style of leadership and his vision of the Catholic Church for the future.
• Francis himself has modeled a different version of the papal office by rejecting many customs that he associates with clericalism.
• For example, he has continued to live in a modest apartment rather than in the Vatican palace.

• This is the circuitous premise of Australian writer Anna Kate Blair’s debut novel, The Modern, set in contemporary New York and centred on the life, half-loves and near-loves of Sophia, an Australian research fellow at MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art).
• Review: The Modern – Anna Kate Blair (Scribner) Sophia’s engagement shakes out a constellation of loose questions about potential choices, possibilities and limitations.
• When Robert departs, Sophia meets the mercurial, filament-like Cara, an unlikely assistant in a little-frequented New York wedding boutique.

Is marriage modern?

• The question “Is marriage modern?” is less the fulcrum of Sophia’s personal narrative than, increasingly, a perplexing nonsense rhyme, or rhetorical question weighed down by its own glowering question mark.
• Is marriage modern?
• In the context of same-sex marriage, which Blair touches upon, marriage is modern, so long as you don’t drill down to its ideological underpinnings: the history of marriage as property transfer, its requisite reproductive labour, the spectacle of grim-lipped, decades-long resentments sustained under the oath of “til death do us part”.
• By what barometer might we gauge “modernity” in marriage?

Smacked in the face by a dress

• A flounce-ridden, gorgeously deep-red wedding dress in a Moonee Ponds wedding boutique window.
• For one second, I entertained the idea of a wedding, but only because of that dress.
• But the phenomenon itself – the overweening presence of the wedding dress in young women’s lives – remains under-explored.

Modern art ‘at every turn’

• If the novel’s central question is not answered or adequately dissected, questions of modernity in art are more fulsomely, if curatorially, examined.
• The Modern tosses “modern” artists and art at the reader at every turn, assuming a familiarity with art history on the reader’s part.
• The Modern overflows with ideas: musings on modern art, and on the masculinist orientation of art institutions, in which female curatorial assistants doggedly do the work their male supervisors put their names to.

Curated, rather than known

• She is curated rather than known; she’s a collection of iterations.
• Perhaps this is Blair’s intention: Hartigan as surface, knowable only through her work, her private self inured to the public gaze.
• But every character in The Modern feels somewhat like a bit-part: fleeting, insubstantial, or, in Robert’s case, downright wooden.

• The Serbian artist stood naked next to a table on which she had arranged 72 objects associated with pleasure and pain.
• They included a bunch of grapes, a jar of honey, a feather, a whip, chains, a scalpel and a gun.
• Accompanying text instructed the audience: “There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
• I am the object.” The performance, entitled Rhythm 0, lasted for six hours, during which Abramović was tickled, cut, written on and chained.
• Half a century later, Abramović is the celebrated grand dame of live, performance, or body art.

The limits of re-staging

• They are avatars for Ulay and Abramović in the 1977 performance Imponderbilia.
• Intending to photograph the silhouetted profiles the pair cast on the floor, I reached for my phone, only to be admonished by a security guard.
• This absurd interaction reinforced the limits of re-staged performance art.

Transitory objects

• These are made from materials associated with healing that you might expect to encounter in a wellness spa: crystals, green onyx, chamomile flowers.
• Abramović claims these objects induce feelings of transcendence when they are stepped into, lain on or leaned upon.
• The objects are theatrically lit so that anyone interacting with them becomes part of the exhibition spectacle.