THANK YOU NEIL YOUNG AND CRAZY HORSE

The setting was the Hill Winery near Geelong.  It was Neil Young's last concert in Australia on his current tour.  And; it was raining.  And raining.  And raining.  

If you looked around the venue all you could see were 1,000s of people.   All wet but mostly happy people.  

It was the first real rain for many weeks so we couldn't complain, except for the timing .... an outdoor gig with a legend and centimeters of relentless rain.

The music?  Magnificent.  
Crazy Horse?  Everyone looked like they were having a ball. 
Mr Young himself?  Magic.  He asked for dry towels to mop down his guitar; and he played and played and sang and sang and, in true creative artist style... lost himself in his music and only noticed the audience when he finished a song.  

The set list was irrelevant because all the songs were classics.  The sound quality was brilliant from where I was standing.

If you had to pick a 'remember that' moment it had to be during 'Like a Hurricane'. 

The stage crew lowered the keyboard from the rafters. The keyboard swayed in the wind and forced the organist had to sway with it to play! And then the rain became a frenzied horizontal deluge as Neil started the familiar ... 'you are like a Hurricane...'  surely the most prophetic line in the whole concert.  And the crowd down the front where I was loved it.

A concert to remember for a long, long time. 

A hot, hot shower, big cup of tea and fluffy slippers were compulsory when I got home.  

Dali's animal icons

I recently watched Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’; where famous 1920’s Parisian-based artists, designers, authors, composers and mentors were depicted in wonderful, quirky characterisations. 

Allen’s Salvador Dali was humorously wacky; insistent on painting a portrait of the lead character (Owen Wilson) as a rhinoceros shedding an oversized tear drop holding a reflection of Christ.

In the context of the movie you laugh; how bizarre; what a vivid caricature of the man (Dali); how weird would that painting look, etc. 

Dali’s fascination with animal images was represented in many of his works from the 1950 onwards.  The rhinos in his paintings and sculptures are elongated and majestic. Much is written about the iconography: Dali painted rhinoceros horns, signifying divine geometry, because they grow in a logarithmic spiral. Dali also linked the rhino horn to the legendary unicorn horn, a symbol of chastity.

My favorite are his butterflies: I am absolutely captured by them. The colours and the essence of them, on sailing ships and windmills, creating images of freedom, travelling in course-less directions, where ever the wind takes you.  

In ancient Greek, the word ’psyche’ means soul and butterfly.

I wonder what my psyche is trying to tell me?