Readers look to this column for a dash of the surreal and today (just in case the prospect of Barnaby Joyce being our acting Prime Minister is not enough weirdness) we bring you an 'enhanced' famous painting. It looks rather like Ingres' Grand Odalisque.
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Yes, it is her, but here she is a tattooed odalisque (concubine) with tattoos digitally added to this work of an old master by a new master, Nicolas Amiard.
At the divine online art magazine Designboom you will find a gallery of Amiard's new tattooings of famously portrayed people (the Mona Lisa is one of them). Designboom explains that "With the ever-increasing popularity of tattoos ... Paris-based Nicolas Amiard pondered the effect body branding might have had on the art world's great master painters."
"Amiard envisions some of the world's most recognisable portraiture subjects as the corporeal canvases for sleeves, thigh pieces and face tattoos ... the digitally enhanced oil paintings bring together two time periods, mediums and artistic methods to find a provocative mix between masterpiece and modern culture."
But back (with a sigh) to unenhanced reality and to Thursday's column with its provocative mix of arguments for giving Canberra some ruins.
We are pining for some Canberra ruins because ruins give such character to a place. They provide keenly-desired "ruin porn" for those of us who find lovely ruins so aesthetically and emotionally titillating.
We have suggested that prominent Canberra buildings be allowed to majestically decompose rather than be demolished after they have outlived their function. For example why not let The Lodge stay and achieve ruination when the new prime ministerial residence is built?
Lots of readers loved these ideas and several have pointed to potentially promising ruins in the Woden Town Centre.
"I would like to suggest for your ruin porn delight," one reader trills, "a visit to the abandoned Alexander and Albermarle buildings in Woden."
"They're grimy, decaying, broken of window and brightly graffitied enough for any aficionado of the slightly sexy art of a ruin.
"Sadly they will no doubt soon be remade into hipster apartment buildings with community gardens and organic coffee shops!"
Another reader has seen the same pornographic potential at Woden.
"I loved your article on ruins and thought you might be interested in two ruins in the making – the increasingly derelict Alexander and Albemarle buildings in Woden. The idle visitor is most likely to notice the broken windows and boarded up sections at the moment, but given another century or so they could be marvellously evocative ruins, giving visitors an insight into the working lives of long dead public servants. Perhaps we should campaign now for the appropriate neglect necessary to develop really good ruins?"
Yes, it is my very point that we should have a campaign like that. As we are, thanks in part to our city's youthfulness but in larger part to an obsession with national capital tidiness, we have almost no ruins at all. This is a shame since a love of ruins, an affection for their strange melancholy, seems almost an evolved sense in all sensitive people.
It is time for federal and ACT governments to attend to this for Canberra's sake. A city has to be a real city first (a dirty old town we can feel knockabout affection for) and a national capital city second. A real city needs ruins.
This columnist is reminded of how Old Parliament House reached its peak of melancholy magnificence in the time between when it was vacated and when, mistakenly in my opinion, its promising career as a ruin was cruelly cut short by its being converted into the National Portrait Gallery (and now into the Museum of Australian Democracy).
This columnist had occasions to visit the abandoned old parliament while it was still in state of empty, cobwebbed abandonment. What promise the old house showed as a ruin, promise the powers that be dashed! Unlit, echoing, melancholy, cobweb-adorned and teeming with ghosts, it was magnificent. By now, had we left it alone, it would be a place of spectacularly crumbling splendour.
We invite readers to nominate Canberra structures that must never, ever, be demolished or refurbished, but that must be allowed to moulder gorgeously. To get that ball rolling we nominate the imposing, prominently-situated, mock-colonial Canberra Times building in Fyshwick. One day The Canberra Times will surely move to stylish new premises back in the CBD (all newspapers should be in their cities' CBDs) whereupon the present building should be left decay gracefully, inspiringly, like 12th century Tintern Abbey whose responsibly pornographic ruins made 19th century William Wordsworth buzz with nostalgia.
Talking of which, nostalgia, Sunday saw the 50th anniversary of the momentous day, 14 February 1966, when we adopted decimal currency.
In her timely biography of Canberran Neil Davey, CEO and Secretary, Decimal Currency Board and a man pivotal to the imagining of the change and to its success, Susan Winning explains that as the currency revolution loomed thoughts turned to designs for the coinage.
"Terry Larkin (Principal Private Secretary to the Treasurer Harold Holt 1960 and 1962, and Executive Assistant to Sir Roland Wilson, Secretary to the Treasury, 1962 - 1965) recalled that 'Five designers were invited to submit designs of the coinage. The committee thought Stuart Devlin's was the best. Harold Holt's 1964 Christmas card [with the coins displayed in a lyrebird's tail] tells the story best of Mr Holt's delight and approval of the Devlin designs ...' "
