Kate Hennessy : Freelance Writer

First published on Mess+Noise, here.

‘Il Futuro Fantastico’

I am out on a limb. Way out, in fact, head in foliage. I’m convinced I’ve divined the source of Ned Collette’s inspiration for the first song, ‘Il Futuro Fantastico’, on his new record, 2.

When I call Ned in his Berlin apartment, the album is still a couple of weeks from being released. Had I been the type who scours the internet for other people’s interpretations (I’m not), no insight could have been gleaned on the song’s meaning. It’s too new. This is one of the pleasures of being a music writer. We hear music fresh and three-dimensional, when the meat of it still throbs perceptibly with its original muse; before the weight of the world and the written word bears down and flattens it onto a page.

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You might be lucky enough to have felt it yourself. A connection with a place that’s both instant and profound. Maybe it’s the light, the culture, or the architecture. Whatever it is, you fit. For fashion designer Frances Carrington, this place was Dehli when she arrived in 1995. Denied her dream to do aid work in Africa, Frances was assigned a place by Australian Volunteers Abroad in India instead.

“I’d visited a friend in South Africa and I really wanted to return to work somewhere in Africa, anywhere! Arriving in Dehli was a real shock. The pollution was extreme and there were so many people. I didn’t know how to respond to the beggars, especially children or mothers with babies. I was wondering what I’d done, signing up to stay here for two years.”

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Wellbeing Magazine, January 2011

In a sparse, working-class home in Calgary, Canada, a mother is feeding formula to her newborn baby. ‘It’s best for the baby’. The mother is 20-years-old and this is her third child, a girl named Sherry. It’s 1967 and the formula is still laced with monosodium glutamate (MSG). Her first two babies were breastfed and later she returns to breastfeeding for her fourth. It’s cheaper that way.

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A CAREER GAZING INTO THE FAR REACHES OF THE GALAXY AND BACK TO THE WONDERS OF THE TINIEST MOLECULE HAS BLESSED SPACE ARTIST JON LOMBERG WITH UNIQUE INSIGHT.

“Thirty-two years ago something extraordinary happened to me,” wrote American artist Jon Lomberg in 2009.

“I was sitting in the viewing stands at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, watching the launch of NASA’s Voyager 2 mission to the outer solar system and beyond.”

Lomberg had reason to be watching Voyager so keenly. Something he’d laboured over very hard was on board. It was August 20, 1977, and in the six weeks prior to take-off a small team selected by NASA had created the Voyager Interstellar Record, a 12-inch gold-plated phonograph record that contained the best account the team could summon of our world to date.

Its intended audience? Extraterrestrials.

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First published in Mess and Noise, here.