Current Activities 2024

What have I been doing apart from going to art galleries? I had an intense interview, researched local art crimes, organised a hyper-local book fair, and lived life. I’ve been visiting artists at their studios (shout-outs to William Eicholtz, David Wood, and Joel Gailer), painting my fence black, eating at various establishments around Coburg, and enjoying the other good things in life.

photo by CV

I still do a lot of walking, but I haven’t written about psychogeography for a while. We all did so much walking during Melbourne’s many COVID-19 lockdowns that I didn’t think my readers would want to read about walking. Maybe psychogeography is useless until you consider it in relationship to radical action. Consider the University students renaming buildings after murdered Palestinians: Hind Hall at Columbia, Mahmoud’s Hall at Melbourne Uni, and the Refaat Alareer Library at Berkeley. These are great examples of the psychogeographical practice of not allowing the names of places in the city to be dictated to you.

The idea of walking, reading, looking at art, listening to music, or dancing as therapy is wrong; these activities are part of normal life, and if you do not do them regularly, you do not have a normal life. I’m still regularly visiting Hosier Lane and other street art locations, but you can find street art on a trip to the hardware store. I’m still going to galleries; I’m just not writing as many reviews.

In strange circumstances, the Upfield Urban Art Critics Collective interviewed me. They had hunted me down at the NGV like stalkers because they were mistaken about the meaning of a word in my review of their work. Sensing the situation could become violent, I appeased them with food and talked my way out of it like I was channelling Saul Goodman and Jacques Derrida.

I’m still selling copies of my book, The Picasso Ransom (you can buy a signed copy from me here). But I’d like to sell more so I thought what I need is a place to sell books, like a local book fair. It would only work if other people were there selling books to attract enough people.

More art and crime writing are on my horizon. I continue to take notes on art thefts, forgeries, and vandalism in case I can find enough for a “Picasso Ransom 2,” but give it a few more years. In the meantime, I’m writing a book about people doing art in prison in Australia, starting from when art was transported from Britain like a convict to the present day when artists with criminal convictions are deported back to Britain.

In order to sell more copies of my book, I came up with a brilliant idea that created a bit more work for myself but that I had to follow through with because it is simple and an alternative to the conventional book fair. 

The Merri-bek Book Fair is a hyper-local book fair featuring books by local authors and publishers. It is a free event at Schoolhouse Studio on Sunday, 25 August 2024, from 1 to 5 p.m. It is about the location as much as it is about books. The plan is to have twenty local authors and local organisations that publish books, like the local history societies, give short presentations and sell their books.

I have found a bit over half the local authors that I need for the event: local fiction, nonfiction, local history, biographies, zines and how-to books. I also need to find a volunteer to coordinate the publicity for it, someone who is local and active on more than two social media platforms.

That seems like enough.