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Men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
Henry David Thoreau

You need to get up in the morning and say, "Boy, I'm going to - in my own stupid way - save the world today.
Sally Berger

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. - Martin Luther King, Jr. No Political Statements; BONDI'S famous Icebergs will endure a meltdown so guests of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit can do lunch. Tadross - Lunch leaves Bondi cold


Vista V Iceberg The term stirs the imagination to conceive of beautiful possibilities just around the corner. Raw Vista – Do Not Mention Quinten Demspter (sic)

Can we change the heart of Facebook or Myspace? Why Citizens Are Eating Media's Lunch On Broadband
Looked through the paper. Makes you want to cry. Nobody cares if the people live or die.
Leonard Cohen, In My Secret Life
Politico's Ben Smith brought up the issue of journalists "friending" their sources on Facebook.

"When a campaign or a government agency is trying to pin down a reporter's inside source, Facebook might be a good place to start," Ben wrote. "And when a campaign type is considering leaking to a reporter, couldn't the fact that you're "friends" on Facebook make the source queasy?" We were really shocked to read this coming from Ben, and not because the issue isn't important — it's a valid point, if not a new one. Pat Walters mentioned the same point in a Poynter.org post from July, and the CBC even instituted an official "Facebook policy" earlier this month, instructing its journalists not to add their sources as friends on Facebook (Canada is one of Facebook's fastest-growing markets, and Toronto was the home of the site's largest local network until it was eclipsed by London last month).

• Mother Teresa died ten years ago this week … Maybe journalists have to be extra-careful and engineer their privacy settings more judiciously than the typical Facebook user; [ Media Treated Mother Teresa As Inferior to Princess Diana, the 'Secular Saint'; ]
• · Why does a small-budget movie like Jozef Imrich’s Cold River matter? Because of the ripple effects. Mark Cuban Backed De Palma's 'Redacted' to Promote New Movie Distribution Business; Upon self-examination, I, too, also, uncategorically suck. It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Whirl
• · How pathetic are the posters on a large blog when its own founder berates them for being gullible fools for being easily scammed by an obviously phony story? Daily Kos Posters Berated by Founder for being Gullible Fools; Vlado Putin, the man who put a price on my head in 1980, is in Sydney and under torture, Kos has admitted that his pet of choice is the ferret. He once owned two of them. Vlado is irrationally and understandably jealous of life going on without him, incensed that his season in hell hasn’t stopped the world from turning.
Kos The Ferret Fan -- A Fitting Choice
• · · Monday brought the shocking revelation that Sen. Larry Craig was arrested after an incident in a Minneapolis airport bathroom back in June Taking your calls and e-mails, tonight! Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living! Mother Jones ; If Jozef Imrich were alive, he might writes scenes like this, though I kind of doubt it.
• · · · That's the accusation leveled by Republican strategist Mike Murphy yesterday on "Meet The Press" in reaction to the resignation of Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, because of a scandal involving alleged solicitation of another man in a public restroom. 'McCarthyism' By Liberal Gay Bloggers?; Edmund Tadros, not related to John Tadros - Almost half of Australians cannot afford basic preventative dentistry despite 90 per cent believing that regular visits are important to maintaining healthy teeth and gums. Australians lacking dental care
• · · · · Who's mucking up or who's getting it off with who always seems to be a conversation starter. Whether it's right or not, office gossip is a fact of life. Iceberg has many stories to tell as APEC Women pick up a swimmer or two ;-) Heard it on the grapevine ; In the meantime, don't be shy. Backstabbed in the background check?
• · · · · · Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. - Martin Luther King, Jr. No Political Statements; BONDI'S famous Icebergs will endure a meltdown so guests of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit can do lunch. Tadross - Lunch leaves Bondi cold

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My isolation is the darkroom where I develop my negatives.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
-Anais Nin

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy ...
-Desiderata

Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.
-Kurt Vonnegut, p. 44, "Like Shaking Hands With God"

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God respects me when I work, but God loves me when I read Blogs.
-Media Dragon

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Kushweer is the boy who likes Harry Potter and even dancing like Jackson boys ..

A remarkable story based on award-winning writer/director Tony Ayres' own compelling life, The Home Song Stories is a deeply emotive, dramatic, and exotic tale of love, hope, adversity and survival. Love My Exile Way

Balmain Boys Do Not Cry: Bruce Beresford Unforgetable Memoirs
Bruce Beresford had been approached to do a film about the 19th-century reformer William Wilberforce, who for years conducted a dogged parliamentary campaign against the slave trade. It came from production company Walden Media, known for its interest in family-friendly fare. The project had been around for some time: Australian director Bruce Beresford makes several references to his interest in the film in his new memoir, regretting that other commitments meant he could not take it on. Scriptwriter Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things)

In a recent panic that my memory is failing as I grow older, I have been writing my memories down before they all fade away. Surprisingly, this has been an enjoyable exercise, as more and more of my childhood shenanigans have come back to me while writing others down. I certainly don’t have any plans to write a full memoir, but after dredging up my own memories, attempting to put them in some kind of order and render them with as much honest detail as I can muster, I’ve come to wonder how people DO write memoirs that include quoted conversations, like scenes from a movie. None of my memories (including those from last week) are so crisp as that, and there are startling gaps in the continuity. Sometimes I can piece together a timeline, when memories can be crosschecked with documentary evidence. Mostly however, I don’t have anything to moor my memories to, and they are floating around inside my head like slowly deflating balloons…
Famous people not only hang-out together after they are famous but also even before they were famous… (This first struck me when reading books by or about Hemingway’s “lost generation” crowd of US expatriates in Paris in the 1920s).

• A graceful force for freedom ; [Baker; Murdoch's Australian broadsheet is still struggling to understand the blogosphere – Creative Cold Rivers of Economy A Streetcar Named Blogging Desire Seriously cool: marketing and communicating with diverse generations ]
• · If there is any justice, this year’s Academy Award for best foreign-language film will go to “The Lives of Others,” a movie about a world in which there is no justice. It marks the début of the German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, of whom we have every right to be jealous. First, he is a stripling of thirty-three. Second, his name makes him sound like a lover with a duelling scar on his cheekbone in a nineteenth-century novel. And third, being German, he has an overwhelming subject: the postwar sundering of his country. For us, the idea of freedom, however heartfelt, is doomed to abstraction, waved by politicians as if they were shaking a flag. To Germans, even those of Donnersmarck’s generation, freedom is all too concrete, defined by its brute opposite: the gray slabs raised in Berlin to keep free souls at bay.
It is a tribute to the richness of the film that one cannot say for sure who the hero is. The most prominent figure is Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), yet if you passed him on the street you wouldn’t give him a second glance, or even a first. He would spot you, however, and file you away in a drawer at the back of his mind. Wiesler, based in East Berlin, is a captain in the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, better known as the Stasi—the state security service, which, by the mid-nineteen-eighties, employed more than ninety thousand personnel. In addition, a modest hundred and seventy thousand East Germans became unofficial employees, called upon to snoop and snitch for the honor—or, in practical terms, the survival—of the state. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Jesus said. The German Democratic Republic offered its own version: watch thy neighbor, then pick up thy phone. The movie begins, fittingly, for four years after my escape across the Iron Curtain through Morava River, in Orwell's 1984. The Stasi machine still fulfills its Orwellian function, training its sights on anyone who might be construed as seditious Murder in mind ; All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy Giving good face
• · Librarians are irrationally and understandably jealous of life going on without him, incensed that his season in hell hasn’t stopped the world from turning. What Librarians read ;-); Making Films and Parliaments Our parliaments and political leaders have failed to update Australia's system of law and government in line with the modern world
• · · This white paper provides a big-picture analysis of our changing times and generational shifts, and points to some of the drivers of the generational debate. In the process it delivers insights into both marketing strategy and the marketing and communication tactics that will result in deeper engagement with the diverse generations. Marketing; Big Brothers and Barons Challenges of Wiki
• · · · Cast Your Vote On The Wikipedia Editing Wall Of Shame Wiki exposures; Wikipedia Scanner has traced Wikipedia changes to people at several large companies who appear to have altered potentially damaging content. ... Damage to big
• · · · · PC world on Shame; Forbes on trespasses
• · · · · · Australian politicians 'doctor Wikipedia entries ; This research brief considers the American experience of ownership deregulation from 1996 to the beginning of 2007 and makes comparisons with the Australian media landscape. It discusses whether differences in media traditions between the countries could deliver different outcomes from deregulation. It considers too if the existence of an entrenched public broadcaster culture in Australia is sufficient to counter the possible emergence of a private media landscape that may be more homogenised and more restricted and restrictive in content. Research Paper - Parliamentary Library; 'Media ownership deregulation in the United States and Australia: in the public interest?'

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Red today at the Hyde Park cafe Quater:

THERE are thousands of Elvis
impersonators and hundreds of
Beatles tribute bands.
Bjorn Again, the Abba rip-off
outfit, is now a multi-milliondollar
business operating out of
four continents.
And The Sketch has it from
impeccable sources that all-girl
group Lez Zeppelin enjoys an,
ahem, dedicated following.
Imitation isn't merely the sincerest
form of flattery; done
properly, it can be entertaining
and bloody profitable.

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I did not drown this morning at the Iceberg where water is cold like COLD RIVER whereas the coffee is as hot as exotic Indian honeymoon ;-) At Iceberg there are no ordinary moments ;-) There are moments in life and even our every day, that unbeknown to us, Warm droplets of wisdom fall upon us


Some people you come across coffee shops are better than others and Charles Bali could not disagree less ;-) Chariots of Sun: Steve Burton

What does Bondi Iceberg stand for. The Russians and the French have revolutions. Australia has passion for swimming and running. Today, Paul and Jennifer informed me that it only rained once in the last 37 years on the Sunday when the notorious CITY to SURF run takes place. There were waves of human bodies rolling down the Ben Buckley's cliff this morning as depleted Iceberg swimmers lapped the pool on the Notts Avenue ...

Definition of Iceberg:
A unique representation of a fast disappearing Australian culture; one that doesn’t take itself too seriously, one where competition is important but where a fair-go, generosity and mateship are even more so.
– Larry Mounser, Media Dragon from the Sunday Life Magazine

For the first time in the 37-year history of the event, The Sun-Herald is helping you to change the lives of others by raising money for your favourite charity as your run. Considered to be one of most famous fun-runs in the world, the 14km event attracts up to 60000 people each August. LISA TAYLOR: top fundraiser

Icegergs of Bondi: Lord Ted and Terry People are like stained glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within
The spaces between your fingers were created for swimming and so that another's could fill them in ;-) Characters like Lord Ted will tell you that when you want to test the depths of a stream, don’t use both feet...
Science obsessed Terry likes to share this snippet from Roger who said: Doctors and scientists said that breaking the four-minute mile was impossible, that one would die in the attempt. Thus, when I got up from the track after collapsing at the finish line, I figured I was dead.
Roger Bannister (After becoming the first person to break the four-minute mile, 1952)

The sermon on the mount has long been rightly understood as both a starting-point and a summation of Jesus ’s teaching. It begins with the Beatitudes (Mt. 5:3-12), in which Jesus delineates the categories of people he says enjoy special favor. The Beatitudes are all familiar to us as sayings, the best known being blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. But what, really, are they? Is Jesus merely pronouncing a blessing, offering good wishes to those whom he chooses to single out? In fact, there ’s more to the story than that.

The Beatitudes provide a dizzying commentary designed to turn upside down the political and social world of the Roman Empire of Caesar Augustus and of the Jewish religious elite of Judea and Jerusalem. This is the opening move of a more drastic and fundamental reassessment of political and social affairs, applying not only to its own time but to all future times, down to our day. More still: It points to the increasing fulfillment in this world of the promise of the human condition as such — and of the struggle against vast and daunting but not insurmountable obstacles that such fulfillment will require.

Jesus describes those who are truly fortunate, the lucky ones of their day. But it is not emperors, conquerors, priests, and the wealthy who enjoy this favor. Rather, it is the common people, those whom earthly success has largely passed by: the poor, the meek, the persecuted, the peacemakers. How can this be? Because though they may have been denied worldly success, what cannot be taken away from them is their potential to live rightly by one another. It is all too easy for those who enjoy the pleasures of this world to try to float above such obligations. Jesus goes on to say that so long as ordinary people stand for the right things and do not retreat in their rightness before those who seem to have more power, what ’s right will prevail. It’s their kingdom — a kingdom organized not from the top down, but from the bottom up. In the Beatitudes, Jesus offers a description of the community of goodwill his teaching will build in this world...

• Havelites shall inherit the earth not shallow characters we tend to come across in who accumulate the riches ; We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly. The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty: it's twice as big as it needs to be; [Sometimes bluetongue winner who swim in 14 degree freezing water are not grinners ;-( Lap 15 First over the line without blowing it ;-) Media Dragons - Joe aka Jozef Imrich ... ; Life lessons ]
•• On Thursday Bob Carr invaded another Sydney Iceberg, the Glebe Bookshop, just before the parliamentary staff farewelled Ian Wotton Glebe and Parliamentary Stories filled with intrigues and myths ; Anthony Loewenstein was busy for the last four months travelling around Cuba and the Middle East Dubai, Egypt, Iran etc; amazingly he enjoyed Iran the most Anthony ; Jack and others including Mr and Mrs Loewenstein were part of the great debate My Israel Question Launched at Gelebe Books by Peter Manning

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Elton John's war on the Media Dragons Elton John hates this blog

Unlike years past, efforts to overhaul the much beleaguered Freedom of Information Act are gaining real traction on Capitol Hill. Momentum More

Open Government Groups Push FOIA Overhaul
A lawyer and an expert in whistleblower law, Gualtieri founded Federal Accountability for Initiative Reform (FAIR) in 1998

. Many public service scandals have come to light in Canada over the past several years. A few notable examples are:
o The Tainted Blood Scandal, in which 60,000 Canadians were infected with hepatitis C, many of them fatally.
o The Gun Registry Scandal, in which a program with a budget of $2 million spent $1 billion without authorization or reporting of the cost overrun to Parliament.
o The Sponsorship Scandal, in which millions of dollars of public money were diverted illegally to government-favoured advertising agencies.

• Why This Subject Is Important to You; [ Gadgets ... ; More Gadgets; New Official Blog on Google Earth and Google Maps ]
• · After 7 uninterrupted years of writing this blog each day, I will be taking a brief vacation - no web, no email, no phone. Returning May 23. Feel free to send me updates so I can catch-up quickly upon my return. All your consideration is appreciated. With my thanks and best wishes Sabrina; A Site to See. In order to ensure that your PC is protected from malware, it helps to run a few tests. Auditmypc.com offers just that: a handful of free, relatively quick self-assessments. Options include testing the strength of your firewall and your protection against pop-ups. Auditmypc.com
• · Mark A. Phillips doesn't at all mince words when taking to task his fellow journalists, not sparing their feelings a bit. He even identifies by name one of the journalistic comrades of whom he is scolding. That being one Debra J. Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle. My suggestion for Saunders and others who believe they know who "real journalists" are: Get over it....The reality is that defining a journalist by the very narrow scope Saunders chooses to use is a symptom of the greater illness that plagues many, what I call "traditional" journalists.. It's called Big Ego ; Pundit Payola
• · · Who's a Journalist These Days? "Journalists with the "Big Ego disease" often point at bloggers and other people without press passes and accuse them of not being "real journalists." But bloggers who provide analysis about newsworthy events are journalists." Repeat By Mark A. Phillips ; There's a lot of talk about blogs being wonderful marketing tools lately. In fact, many big businesses are quickly working on plans to launch their own corporate blogs to serve as communication channels for their customers. When it comes to corporate blogging, some companies have stumbled, some have soared and others are facing serious start-up challenges. Case in point? GlaxoSmithKline's new blog for over-the-counter diet drug, Alli. Corporate Blogging - Alli "Oops
• · · · Blog: Friends in high places: As you'd expect, Myspace is still the king of social networking with 114 million unique visitors in June. That equated to growth of 72 per cent in the space of a year. But the Comscore figures also show how quickly Myspace rival Facebook, is catching up. It had 52 million unique visitors in June, up 270 per cent in the last year. Blog: Beautiful potential; ugly getting there ; Web alert: They know nothing about you
̶ ; · · · · Still some value in the old media ; IWR takes you back to basics again, and explains the not-so-dark art of finding out who’s reading your blog and what they’re saying about it. So you have set up and are running a blog, but how do you know if anyone is reading it and who those readers are? Just as importantly, how do you keep track of what others in the blogosphere are saying about your postings? Simple. You get to grips with the small matter of monitoring your blog. And that means understanding three simple principles: site analysis, trackbacks and specialist search engines. Master all three and you will have achieved blog management nirvana. Although Google does not release figures of blog coverage, Technorati is not so shy and currently claims to track in excess of 86 million blog Technorati
• · · · · · I shall assume that it is not the business of an author to respond in detail to the threads that commentators develop, since they clearly have a life of their own. The US intervened in two world wars to save Europe from itself' Blog of all blogs; A new website has taken office stories online, inviting users to provide juicy details of romance be it Russell and Rebecca or other tidbits O'heir's lispy stories or Tadros larry and hardy episodes or even Roussos's ex Stories about losers with plenty of money ;-)

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I get up every morning determined both to change the world and to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day difficult.
-E.B. White

Chasing your dream taking the road less travelled and all that jazz… In July 1980 I had the once in a lifetime pleasure to meet and work for Karel Schwarzenberg at his Viennese Palace a stone throw away from abode of an Australian Ambassador, Dr James Cumes, who lives with wonderful Heide and Kim. I never understood the better the sentiment of the statement than then ... To those who in their homeland have no freedom, and to those who in their freedom have no homeland.
Karel and Vaclav Havel have been good friends for a long time and Klaus never liked that fact… The appointment of Karel Schwarzenberg as foreign minister in the Czech Republic's latest temporary government has infuriated the Czech president, Vaclav Klaus * Prince Karl XVII von Schwarzenberg (to give him his Austrian title)

The Past is a Foreign Country A hero of his Bohemian time
He never went with the crowd and has written a political memoir like no other

THE publishers probably groaned on receiving the text of this unusual book. It seems scratched together and rushed—even a paste-up job. But there is craft in the casualness. Before becoming his country's first post-Communist president, Vaclav Havel wrote absurdist plays and prison letters about speaking the truth to those in power. An intellectual with a near-liturgical respect for words, he distrusts mass-media patness almost as keenly as he hated Communist doublespeak. A writer with his ear and his ironic humour was never going to spoon-feed readers with a smoothly blended fairy tale.
At the end of his presidency, Mr Havel left behind neither heir nor party. This was no surprise. His whole career, like this book, can be taken as a plea for individuality, for not going with the crowd. Mr Havel is sage enough to know that not everyone wants to stand out. Still, his lesson is a good one, and at times even funny.

• A bunch of the world’s most famous dissidents ; [A must link to journalism and exposure; A conference in Prague gives food for thought Refusenik: A Czechered meeting ]
• · It never fails to amaze me the things people spend time and money researching and the so-called "studies" they produce - It may seem obsessive, but every day — sometimes hourly — Aaron Shepard checks the Amazon.com sales rankings for his 12 self-published books Amazon of Cold River Ranking; Google has also developed prototype phones and talked over technical specifications with manufacturers including LG Electronics Gmobile: Google phone coming next year: report
• · Librarians as Change Agents: How You Can Help Influence Public Policy in the 110th Congress Dedicated to Dr Cope; The Government Domain: 'Insanely Useful' Legislative Sites - This is not your grandfather's online legislative research environment. It is not even your older sibling's legislative research environment Domain of key links
• · · Art of politics just follow the yellow rod brick road to tax havens or private equity - Political snag for Chalco. The Australian Nigel Wilson July 30, 2007. The biggest Chinese investment in Australia -- the proposed $3 billion Aurukun bauxite/alumina development -- is in danger because it has been blocked from receiving federal funding as a result of a federal-state political feud. Politicians, money always a bad mix: The inverted snobbery ; Fortunately, every now and then Media Dragon drops some knowledge about ex-communists: In this undated image released by Louis Vuitton former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sits in a car, a Vuitton bag at his side and the Berlin Wall in the background as he appears in an ad campaign for the French luxury label. Move over Scarlett - Gorby's in town
• · · · Today you can read all about my Villawood in award-winning Australian director Bruce Beresford's memoirs, Josh Hartnett definitely wants to do this . . . true stories from a life in the screen trade Director's trade talk ; A wickedly funny account of celebrity, Hollywood and everything in between
• · · · · Ocker films Cold River, hot destination = Brilliant director haunted by a traumatic past Bruce Beresford Instincts Of The Heart ; Books and reviews

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Many people reach their conclusions about life like lazy school children. They copy the answers from the back of the book without troubling to work out the sum for themselves.
-Soren Kierkegaard

From Niches to Riches: Anatomy of the Long Tail An Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday." A niche of one: Cold River

Media Dragons: worst of times, best of times Fooled by Randomness of Exile Life
This columnist has more guts than his wussy liberal colleagues at the Daily Telegraph and I'm not saying this because I happen to be Bohemian.

The book says that you can't predict anything—that when things happen, you try to construct a narrative around what happened, and that narrative is almost always wrong. Why is the market up today? Because home sales did such and such. It's almost never why, but we need to have an explanation. If managers can check themselves from making those all-too-tempting efforts to construct narratives, fundamentally they will have an advantage over the rest of us.

• Matthew Prior telss us - Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual ; [The "Airport Effect in blogging The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference; The Long Tail is safe from Google. On Google, the link-rich don't necessarily get richer. ]
• · The number of libraries participating in the Google Book Search Library Project just got a whole lot bigger with today's addition of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. The July 2007 Book Sense Picks & Notables Preview ; Oprah Picks Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex Next Cold River ;-) The Age of Turbulence ; Author Adichie wins Orange Prize
• · few simple keystrokes may soon turn blather into books. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered a way to enlist people across the globe to help digitize books every time they solve the simple distorted word puzzles commonly used to register at Web sites or buy things online Researchers turn Web blather to books ; Dogged by questions from the EU over Google’s data retention and privacy policies, Google say they’re following the rules Google takes care of its privates
• · · Australian companies are starting to twig that Web 2.0 isn't just the latest trend for designing web pages - it can be a vital business tool. It's web take 2.0
• · · · Once upon a time NIDA actors, or any actors, were in a position where they could turn down work they regarded as too commercial, The Sydney-based National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) is adjusting its practices to a changing world.

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An empty canvas, apparently really empty, that says nothing and is without significance. Almost dull, in fact. In reality, however, [it's] crammed with thousands of undertone tensions and [is] full of expectancy. Slightly apprehensive lest it should be outraged ... It can contain anything but cannot sustain everything ... An empty canvas is a living wonder -- far lovelier than certain pictures."
- My Polish mate, Wassily Kandinsky

Artists like Richard McSweeney are put on this planet to live an extraordinary life. These artists are born with innate knowledge of their own abilities. I'm sure you know someone who decided to be an actor or a painter at a young age, and stuck with it until reaching their goal.

Most of us, however, spend our lives searching for that purpose feeling fearful and unhappy, yet afraid to take the risks involved with change. Richard's creations are the most impressive debuts at Julian Ashton of an emergent painter in recent years. Richard tries to distill more than a mustard seed or the grain of truth in his masterpieces.

The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.
-Lucien Freud


*Painted by Richard McSweeney during 2005


Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the [enlightened] place where it leads.
- Erica Jong

Above all Richard keeps his imagination and colours fresh. An abstract of warmness in the rainbow forest of love.
*Richard is well aware that art is really people asking the eternal question, What is it all about?

*Sacred Trees by Richard McSweeney - drawn and imagined in his studio at 3/25 Mona Road - DARLING POINT 2027


The essential of painting is that something, that 'ethereal glue,' that intermediary product which the artist secrets with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial stuff of the painting.
-Yves Klein

Another masterpiece of light captured by Richard McSweeney in 2006

When I've painted a woman's bottom so that I want to touch it, then [the painting] is finished.
-Pierre Auguste Renoir

The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things -- but above all we must dare to fail. You must have the courage to be bad -- to be willing to risk everything to really express it all.
- John Cassavetes

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National Libraries in Australia and Czech Republic are filled with biographies, memoirs, deaths and taxes. If prophecy is an expression of our contemporary fears and wishes, so too, to a very great extent, is history. A Dead Certainty of Chance: Feelings and More Feelings Media Dragons wanted to experience everything, taste everything, go everywhere, do everything. Our notions of the future have something of that significance which Moravian born Freud attributes to our dreams dreamt along the Morava River July - Brave New World at 75: There’s nothing sweeter in the world

Arrived late Sunday night. So tired, and the rudest concierge I ever met. It’s the Paris Hilton prison diaries... If you read literary blogs you know that hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned. For their part, serious writers assume that those who can, do, while those who can’t, blog. The Scorn of the Literary Blog What is wrong with the modern literary novel? Why is it so worthy and dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring? Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good, said Nietzsche. There can come a point in life when this begins to make sense. Divine comedy

End of dreams, return of history. With the Cold War over at last, many thinkers blissfully hoped that conflict between nations would fade to a memory...
End of Dreams, Return of History

How can a country be so rich and yet have dreadful health care, a declining population, and a corrupt political system with almost no opposition?... The Russian Conundrum: Growing Economy, Failing Society

The body count among Russian reporters is now thirteen murders since Putin came to power. In each case the reporter was working on a story critical of government or business officials. Once upon the time Media Dragon had a price on his head by the KGB Putin Strikes Again

Romantics who visit Cuba from rich lands like to kid themselves that they have found a true alternative to capitalist democracy. Why? A Cuban death rehearsal

Can a woman with a literary bent, an editor, find the man of her dreams on the internet? Maybe, though it is clearly asking too much that he should learn to spell her name. One day, as a cure for a broken heart, a heart that had only barely survived a head-on collision with another heart, a heart just out of intensive care, bruised and limping and still shying at the sound of any traffic A Woman of His Dreams

Psychologists reduce happiness to a sensation and then regard it as the only thing that matters. Sure, but the Greeks knew a thing or two as well... More Happiness Please

Polygyny can benefit women, while men do well from monogamy. And beautiful people really do have more daughters: strange truths of human nature Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature: Handsome Media Dragons have daughters ;-)

Sure, some girls can sprint well and lift weights. But on the whole, boys are more excited than girls by the use of urine as secret ink. Let’s face facts. In Praise of Skinned Knees and Grubby Faces

What’s the relation between punch lines and laughter? What’s So Friggin' Funny? Nothing—laughter is simply how we connect

A-bombs, or the final particles of matter. There are some things that are so serious that you can only joke about them ... Last laugh before the cold war

Hallmark now offers consolation and strength to those faced with the awkward irrelevance of Father’s Day in some homes Happy Father’s Day, Mom!