What do cars dream at night?

Some delightful distractions within Jahannes Sistermanns' presentation:

1. Windows with German words.
2. His resonant and sonorous voice. Didn't you just want to record him saying something, anything and then make music out of it?
3. The utter lack of direct causal relationship between the use of plastic as an artistic medium and entitling his works sound plastic.
4. The slow and sure realisation that we had moved out of Ramsey Street and into SBS heartland, where tiny cars frollick on grassed car parks.
5. His presentation moved between poetry and prose without explanation or apology.
6. I delighted in his anthropomorphic engagement with the world. Hats off to anyone who writes music from the tea's point of view....
7. Jahannes' understated, wry homour and art made me long for something - Europe perhaps?
8. His talk reminded me of a poem by frank o'hara:

why i am not a painter
by frank o'hara

i am not a painter. i am a poet.
why ? i think i would rather be
a painter, but i am not. well,
for instance, mike goldberg
is starting a painting. i drop in.
” sit down and have a drink “ he
says. i drink; we drink. i look
up. ” you have SARDINES in it. ”
” yes, it needed something there. ”
” oh.” i go and the days go by
and i drop in again. the painting is
finished. ” where's SARDINES ? ”
all that's left is just
letters, ” it was too much.” mike says.
but me ? one day i am thinking of
a color : orange. i write a line
about orange. pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
then another page. there should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. days go by. it is even in
prose, i am a real poet. my poem
is finished and i haven't mentioned
orange yet. it's twelve poems, i call
it ORANGES. and one day in a gallery
i see mike's painting, called SARDINES.


Sistermanns, Johannes presentation at University of Adelaide, 2 November 2006