women, a market and mallwalking

real women © brent leideritz 2009: baby's got green eyes, beauty is pain, psalm 65:2, mannequinIt's been another action packed Saturday... not really that adventurous, but busy... and not really helped by the highly changeable weather...

Blah, blah, supermarket... blah, blah, unpacking groceries...

Once all the usual and not overly exciting stuff was over with, we decided to go to Norwood to check out the Real Women photography exhibition. Partly because they looked like they'd be groovy photos, but mostly because the photographer/artist is actually a friend of a friend (a friend I met through Raury in fact).

When we got down there we discovered that the gallery didn't open for another fifteen minutes or so... so to kill time we wandered down the road with the intention of looking in a few of the little chichi-lala shops on the Parade... we never actually made it past the first one we went in, because the woman who owned it came over to Ma and said she thought she knew Ma. I kinda rolled my eyes internally, because invariably these are random women Ma has met through work or training or whatever, but this woman was in the realm of Ancient History... I think we're talking before/around the time I was born. So I wandered around the shop while they stood around nattering about how everybody in various families were... and they weren't finished, so I wandered around again... and again... and again. Let's say that the shop wasn't that big, nor was it that interesting, but I'm pretty sure I saw every damn square inch of it.

Fortunately it killed the required amount of time and when we went back to the gallery it was open...

Brent has always had a particular style, and these photographs are very much within that style... they stunning and lush enough (especially at the rather large scale they're displayed in the gallery... 1 x 1.5 metres, although there were a couple of larger ones) to be beautiful, but at the same time there's something disturbing about them. My initial impression about most of them was "I like it, but I wouldn't want to live with it". The possible exception to that is the photo in the top right corner, "Beauty is pain"... but for the most part the woman are staring directly out at the camera, and it's a little confronting (which I'm sure is the point). But obviously other people liked them enough to buy several of them, and at about a grand a pop, that's not bad.

When we left there we really, really didn't know what the hell we were going to do next, but we kind of vaguely decided on a trip down to Marion, although we came at it from possibly a very strange direction, partly because that's just the kind of day it was, but also because we wanted to avoid all the Clipsal 500 crap in town...

We ended going down Goodwood Road, and I said to Ma that it might be worthwhile stopping off and browsing some of the groovy little shops along part of the road, so we were already thinking about stopping... then it turned out that they were having their Autumn Sidewalk Market. They only have them three times a year, Spring, Autumn and Christmas... and I actually saw the Christmas one on my way back from one of my solo shopping trips to Marion last year, but was too tired to stop. So obviously we were supposed to happen across this one...

Ma did better out of the market than I did... but then a large number of the stalls sold various kinda of jewellery... although we did discover a couple of shops we'll have to go back to another time (The Waste Not Want Not Shop where Ma bought a cute beaded seahorse from somewhere in Africa and The Eternal Spirit which was the main reason we were going to stop in the first place). But we wandered up the road, got given some really tasty free gnocchi, did the sausage sizzle thing, then we went back down the other side of the road, Ma bought a ring made out of an Apostle Spoon (well, the top of the spoon anyway).

The Eternal Spirit was fairly groovy... your typical "crystals, New Age, hippydippy" store, but a pretty good one. I ended up getting yet another little buddha to add to my collection (I think it will end up coming to work with me) as well as a Jizo Bosatsu statue (this one in fact) which I thought was a buddha, but turns out is a bodhisattva (interestingly it was another Anijain product, the same as my Bastet statue and one of my Ganeshas)...

Ma bought this cool Picture Jasper pendant... and it was interesting, the woman who was serving us and the guy behind the counter were trying to work out what the stone was, and the guy was actually talking to this seemingly random woman... they worked out that it was Picture Jasper, and the random woman looked at Ma and said it was the perfect stone for her and that she would notice a difference as soon as she started wearing it. Now me, I just took that in my stride, but Ma had to ask how the woman knew... turns out she's a clairvoyant and, quote, "could sense the energies"... I did say to Ma later that it will be interesting to see if she does feel that way when she wears it, either because the woman said something, or whether the very fact of her saying it will stop Ma from feeling it.

Anyway, we wandered back to the car and headed onwards to Marion. And bonus, we got a carpark right near the door without even trying (woohoo... we did suffer for it on the way home though, because we got stuck behind/between/beside two huge trucks for a large chunk of the way)...

Blah, blah, tried on clothes that just weren't right... blah, blah, bought DVDs (and Ma paid full price for Lost In Austen, which makes it something of a Red Letter Day... although she did talk about putting it away for her birthday, so maybe I need to give her the money for it and make it part of her present)... blah, blah, Heartwood Creek Tinkerbell statue that's going away for Christmas...

By the time we'd finished wandering all around Marion we were pretty much exhausted... I am, however, starving, because we really didn't eat that much today...

And next week we have the Kite Festival... must my sure my camera battery is fully charged this year...

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