It’s easy – like one two three

And if there is a way

To find you – I will find you

Festival time is my favourite time.

Months of rehearsal slipping through your fingers on the stage. Last minute script changes, diva tantrums, late night confessions, insights inspired by sleep-deprived delusions, friendships made, flirtations indulged, collaborations plotted, bonds strengthened.

Discovering incredible new artists and shows and ideas.

The precious, lazily excited feeling of high school summer holidays. (Diluted somewhat if you’re festival-ing in your own town and have to get to work the next morning).

Riding along the bike path after the late show, with the smell of jasmine hanging heavy in the daylight-saved evening.

Gutter mouth kisses which say ‘I’m fucking well alive, and so are you, sweetheart.’

This shit is what I live for.

I’m writing this sitting on my couch, listening to Tori Amos’ ‘Boys for Pele’, a formative fucking album if ever I had one.

Sometimes I breathe you in

And I know you know

Tonight I saw two equally amazing, yet completely unique, cabaret shows at Trades Hall by two very talented, very inspiring artists – Geraldine Quinn and Mrs Bang.

Geraldine I’ve seen a couple of times now, and I love her energy and irreverence, as well as her mighty cajunas onstage.

Plus she is a mighty fine ranga warrior woman with a killer voice and biting wit – kind of a cross between Xena, Florence Welch and Sarah Silverman – just my kind of woman.

But I’ve got a place to go

I’ve got  a ticket to your late show

Mrs Bang I hadn’t seen before but was very much looking forward to experiencing, and she totally blew me away. Sultry, offbeat, brave and in possession of a sweet set of vocal cords that the sirens would kill for, Sheridan Harbridge (aka Mrs Bang) has a killer sense of deranged vulnerability that actually requires a fuckload of courage to be able to express onstage to a room full of strangers. I tip my hat and my heart to you, dear lady.

//

So. It’s been about a week now since I started this blog post, which was cut short due to extreme tiredness and wine.

Since I started writing this, we were nominated for and won Highly Commended for Best Cabaret at the Melbourne Fringe Festival, along with Geraldine Quinn – and the winner was Mrs Bang – snap!

Now looking forward to recording our first EP, which we’re starting THIS WEEKEND and which is the perfect follow-up to the Fringe, neatly avoiding crushing post-show comedown by throwing ourselves into ever more manic schedules – we’re doing a return season of the show back at the Butterfly Club (our second home on the south side of the city) at the end of the month (22-23 October), followed by two trips to Brisbane in November for the Live To Shine Festival (6 November) and a gig with the inimitable, kookysexybrilliant Emma Dean (26 Nov), topping it all off with another gig with Emma at The Toff back in Melbourne  (27 Nov).

Like I said, this shit is what I live for. I feel so lucky to be playing with/for some of the best friends and people I have ever had the privilege of knowing.

So much of ourselves went into this show. That made it both terrifying and exhilarating to have the honour of performing it for people who were generous enough to come out at 10:30 at night (on WEEKNIGHTS no less, you adorable little nuts) to hear two half-crazed, sleep-deprived cabaret tragics sing their little hearts out. To hear people’s feedback that they could relate so strongly to our words and melodies was incredibly gratifying and humbling.

So thank you.

PS I’m also extremely lucky and excited to be working on developing a show with amazing up-and-coming cabaret star Sophie Walsh-Harrington – this woman’s intelligence, passion, general gorgeousness and talent just blow me away.  And I guarantee she’ll do the same to you.

More to come on that soon…

Romantic space – feeling too crowded, feeling too empty, inside and out, feeling guilty and greedy for needing more space or needing less.

Love, romantic sexual passionate love, or whatever you want to call it, is a funny funny beast.

And now that I’m separate from it, that I can see my heart objectively, I don’t really want to write about it right now. I am exhausted from love and all its demands.

But you understand I’m lying. I’m not being objective about it at all. Is that even possible?

But the fact that I am so burnt out from love excites me… I want to know what happens next, in the space outside of love…

Space within ourselves – feeling unsure within our own bodies, within our own lives, those times when you feel so exhilaratingly and nauseatingly free that it seems your feet will lift right off the ground because there’s nothing connecting you to anything else, like a helium balloon or a ghost

Musical space – a famous composer once said that it’s not the notes that matter, it’s the space between the notes that makes it music.

My relationship with the piano – it’s my best and oldest friend, my confidant, my biggest love and fear and comfort and challenge, I feel safest behind the piano and yet I resent always sitting behind it. I want to get out from behind it but at the same time I cannot be disconnected from it, like an umbilical cord I can’t bring myself to cut.

When I’m playing, sometimes I’m completely in the zone and it feels like there is no interruption of the flow from my heart to my fingers to the keys.  i’m the conduit. Nothing else exists. The universe is ours, and I could live here forever. I can get so caught up in the relationship of one note to another, examine a chord progression like an exotic species, and marvel at the forms of life that I find in between the landscape of black and white keys. Like discovering the body of a new lover, but I find I have far more patience with the ivory coolness of my instrument than I could ever have with another person on a regular basis.

Other times, when I’m too drunk or too sober or too shy or too something else, I feel excommunicated from myself, from my family when I cannot find the right notes, find the right rhythm, find the right form. I feel like I’m scribbling in crayon on butcher’s paper when I should be playing with watercolour.

I went years without playing the piano properly. Instead I dabbled, which I despised, so I avoided it as much as I dared. I was scared. Intimidated by how much it demanded from me. But it’s part of my identity. I cannot escape it. And now I don’t want to, I don’t need to.

To be honest, it was through finding Tom, through finding this relationship and this person that I trust implicitly and love as platonically as fuck, that I know trusts and loves me the same way, that I was able to reclaim the space between me and the piano. Through, at first, rediscovering the safety and sanctity of playing for someone else that gave me the taste of this need that I have to play, to be on the stage, to be in that state of vulnerability and control. that I rediscovered this part of me that needs to be.

Death space

Death is the most final renderer of space that we can know. Three of our grandfathers died this year. It’s the space that cannot be reclaimed, cannot be overcome.

When I was 15, one of my best friends died. She hugged like a muppet. She sang like an angel. Sometimes she behaved like a devil, or at least told us stories that she hoped would make us believe so. We were music buddies, we got each other’s sense of humour and angsts and hopes and dreams. But everyone got her. That’s the way she was. It’s such a cliché that when anyone dies, to hear their eulogies you could not believe that anyone so amazing had walked this earth since Jesus. But in Meredith’s case, that’s the way it was – she was just everything. Brave, beautiful, sweet, talented, smart, creative, funny, caring… She was vodka girl. She was choir girl. She modeled for indy fashion labels one day then played the flute in the eisteddfodd then went off to work at Coles then hung out with her cool older friends and kissed hot boys that were madly in love with her despite her awkward braces and baby giraffe like height. We had mutual crushes on Drazic and Mozart. I was half in love with her and all in awe of her. And I’ve never really gotten over it. To be honest.

I used to think, after she first died, that nothing else could ever bring me to tears again, that crying over anything else would be somehow a betrayal to her memory. I used to dream of her, that I would see her at the shops and she would see me and hug me and cry, ‘why can’t anyone else see me?’. And I’d visit her parents and play them the music that we sung together and I wrote songs for her and I went half crazy because I believed that if only I couldn’t cope enough that God would see fit to bring her back to save me.

And three years after she died, as soon as I turned 18, I tattooed her memory on my belly and I cherished the pain of the needle on my skin because it meant I would never forget. And as the purple ink perforated my skin I felt only relief.

And five years after she died, I went three quarters crazy again with the thought that the half decade anniversary of her death represented some kind of portal through which if I wrote the right words, if I wrote the right notes, that she would be returned to me.  So I wrote and wrote and I wept and wept and I hoped and hoped.

Of course. She wasn’t. And long since then I’ve accepted that she won’t. And despite my promises to her and myself, I have cried over many things since she left, from stubbed toes to drunken frustration and exhaustion and worn down relationships to other deaths of other loved ones. I don’t think of her every minute of every day like I swore that I would. And so finally I think that I can say rest in peace and really mean it.

But ‘Let it be’ will always belong to her.

More recently, I’ve found myself falling from a different place, falling from the arms of a much beloved lover. Falling towards the unknown whilst fleeing from comfort. It’s an uncomfortable paradox that I can only fathom intuitively.

Leaving love for the sake of love – for the love of art, the lover you are leaving, the love of solitude, the love of the unknown and, with any luck, for the sake of a one day unshakeable self love that I can only believe comes through learning to sit still with your heart and listen to what it truly beats for.

It’s hard. Really fucking hard. Possibly stupid. Most likely necessary.

It’s not a logical step. And it’s a step that I’ve been fearful of taking for too long. But now that I have, while I feel so full of sorrow and guilt and wishful thinking that it seems there’s no room for anything else inside… there is something else.

Excitement.

Real excitement. The kind you feel when you’ve learnt to channel your stage fright – the kind that used to make you retch with fear- into a hunger for the unknown. You don’t try to stamp it out, or muffle it. You grab it and twist it into something useful. Something to get you through. Because you know that if it wasn’t there at all, well, then you may as well just go home now and call the whole damn thing off.

So, tomorrow, I’ll go home to an empty house. No doubt I will find there many nights of solitary tim-tam and Sex and the City binges and boredom and loneliness and tears and doubts and anxieties – and yes, at times, there will be fear.

But there will also be inspiration and time to stay up all night reading and writing and playing and singing and listening and creating and wondering and dreaming and learning – and I’m damned if it won’t all be for love.

Well, I was going to write a lengthier blog post about this, but it seems the inestimable Melissa McEwen (she of Shakesville fame) has beaten me to it and, very characteristically, has given it a great treatment here. So I’m just going to briefly throw in my two cents.

Basically, a South African doctor has invented a female condom known as Rape-aXe which is designed to protect women from rape through its’ ‘teeth-like’ hooks which attach to an attacker’s penis, rendering the device unable to be removed without a doctor.

Needless to say, I think that this is a fairly problematic concept, not least because it again throws back the issue of rape prevention onto women, rather than looking at the wider issue of a rape-tolerant culture and how to redress this at a societal level (like, say, by focusing on initiatives that are aimed at stopping men from wanting to rape in the first place), rather than leaving women vulnerable to further violence through retribution – especially, as Melissa notes, in the case of gang rape, which is widespread throughout South Africa.

The cited advantage of having ‘justice be served’ through identification of rapists, I think, would be cold comfort to rape survivors who survive further brutality – and to the families of those who don’t survive it – as a result of this device. It also assumes that just because a perpetrator is arrested, even charged, with assault or rape, that ‘justice will be served’ through a criminal justice system which systematically finds ways to deny rape survivors justice (please note: this is not something which I believe is particular to the South African justice system, but is a distressingly widespread social norm).

So, it turns out one of the senior detectives investigating claims of rape by an AFL footballer (Saints player Stephen Milne) suffered pressure from other police to ‘drop the case’, and the survivor was slut-shamed by other officers as a ‘footy-slut’. The detective, Scott Gladman, has said that evidence was stolen from his desk and parts of the survivor’s statement were leaked to the press, presumably by other police officers.

I am not surprised. You shouldn’t be either.

I would be even less surprised if this is the only thing we hear about it from Australian mainstream media (unless it’s disguised in the form of ‘fair-and-balanced’ reporting by running a feature on ‘footy groupies’ and how women get their kicks by going out and having consensual sex with unsuspecting footballers just so they can ‘cry rape’ afterwards all the time – cause hey, that’s just how me and my post-feminist raunch-culture chick buddies roll these days! Girl power!)

Actually, what does surprise me is that this one detective has actually chosen to speak up – albeit six years later. But it makes me think about the survivor in this case, and all the other survivors who have been further fucked over by police investigations ”because the natural flow of justice was interrupted” by situations just like this one.

If this isn’t a convincing argument for the need for rape investigation reform, I don’t know what the fuck is. Needless to say, it also says a hell of a lot about our celebrification of footballers in Australia (particularly in Victoria, where you’re practically considered an enemy of the state if you haven’t ‘got a team’) and how that goes hand-in-hand with the perpetuation of rape culture here.

Need an example of rape culture? Rape culture is a culture in which ‘doing the right thing’ if you’re an officer investigating a rape case is ignoring evidence, dropping charges and dismissing rape survivors as ‘footy-sluts’. Rape culture is a culture in which you can expect that any backlash that comes from this story will be against Scott Gladman; the survivor in this case; and rape survivors in general.

And rape culture is a culture in which this is not only tolerated, but implicitly endorsed, over and over again.

Read the full story from The Age here: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/detective-pressured-over-saints-rape-claim-20100621-ys9o.html

ETA: WHOA YOU GUYZ – totally just realised I haven’t listened to Florence + the Machine for, like, a whole week now. This must mean the honeymoon is over… next I’ll be sleeping in a separate room and making pissy little passo-aggresso comments when she shows up uninvited on my iTunes shuffle.

Bat for Lashes – Fur & Gold

Look, I’ll be honest with you – when I first heard Bat for Lashes I was fairly underwhelmed. She just sounded so derivative of so many singer/songwriters that I luuurve, like Kate Bush, Tori Amos and PJ Harvey that I just kind of did a mental ‘pfffft’ and lost interest pretty much immediately. But, in this wondrous age of iPods and public transport delays which mean it takes 70 minutes to get into the city instead of 20, I eventually got around to checking her out again. And I kind of love her now. To be honest, I can never get past a good handclap beat and harpsichord AND piano in the same song, and why would I want to?

Go here to check out the awesome video version of Prescilla, which embedding has been disabled for. Bah.

Laura Marling – I Speak Because I Can

Oh my GODDESS. How can this woman have written so much amazing music and still not have seen her 21^st birthday yet? A lot’s been written about Lozza being older than her years, and the depths of hard-won wisdom she displays in her lyrics really do seem to be hard evidence of reincarnation. I seem to remember reading an interview with her where she says she actually failed English at high school – WTF? But then she got nominated for a Mercury for her debut album – best revenge, ever! Take that, clueless English teacher! While ‘Alas, I Cannot Swim’ will always hold a special place in my heart, I’m loving her new pared-back sound which somehow manages to not sound at all anachronistic but could still have been written side by side with ‘Song to a Seagull’.

Neko Case – Middle Cyclone

So, if you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll be aware of the raging musical hard-on I have for Neko Case right now.  I would pretty much lick broken glass for her voice. I love that she writes such stunningly unconventional song structures within such a highly codified genre. I love that she is so tits-out unapologetic about asking for what she wants personally and musically.  I love that she describes Shania Twain singing as ‘jizzing saccharine all over you’. And, of course, I love that she has red hair – and naturally too, as far as I’m aware.

Jónsi – Go

So, I know this is pretty much tantamount to musical treason of the highest order, but…. I never really got into Sigur Rós. I know, I know… I kill babies, and have no taste. Also, obviously don’t deserve to live in Brunswick. Wevs. However, I’m loving Jónsi’s new solo record, which somehow manages to be bittersweet and upbeat and sparse and lush and raucous and contained all at once.  I love the viscerality of his lyrics. It’s all amazing. Also, the build in ‘Tornado’ is so wistfully epic, and I just realised how many awesome songs about tornadoes and hurricanes there are and OMG I am totally going to make a tornado-themed mixtape now.

ALSO…

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings – I Learned the Hard Way

Pure rolled gold soul from Queen Shazza

David Byrne/Fatboy Slim with the best guest vocalist line-up ever conceived – Here Lies Love

Bonus points for being a conceptual song cycle about Imelda Marcos, WITHOUT ONCE MENTIONING SHOES.

Ute Lemper – Punishing Kiss

You pretty much need to listen to this, whoever you are

Look, you don’t have to admit to it. That’s just fine. I will say, however, that her post immediately touched a chord with me. So here goes…

When I was 18, looking over the employment contract that I was just about to sign for my first ‘proper’ job, I noticed that my middle name had been spelt incorrectly.

By one letter.

An ‘n’.

Where there should be a ‘w’.

In the name ‘Myfanwy’…

… a name which usually makes me feel rather proud of my Welsh heritage and helped me convince myself when I was little that, actually, I was a fairy princess who had just been adopted out to a human family, like a befreckled, gap-toothed, chubby changeling. Looking down, cheeks reddening, at my sullied middle moniker, I was feverishly struck with the concept that it was literally my vag thus wedged in between my first and last names, sails ahoy, right above the terms and conditions of my pending employment, and again before the dotted line on which I was supposed to sign. I pointed out, with all the dignity I could muster, this unfortunate bastardization of my name and the receptionist nodded solemnly and took back the contract to retype it.  As soon as she walked around the corner however, she SHOWED EVERYONE ELSE IN THE OFFICE to much hilarity which, since I was still only five metres away, could still hear clearly.

What still baffles me about this episode is that, presumably, someone in that office actually thought that ‘Myfanny’ was a real name. Like, one that a parent would willingly and with a straight face would give to their child.* Alternatively, even if they weren’t sure if that was actually a real name, and they were just misreading it… why in good goddess’ name would you not type something else, just in case? The only conclusion I can come to is that it was done on purpose.

So bah. Shame on you, nameless faceless office contract typing person. I hope you’re happy in your nameless faceless office world, deliberately shortening Richard Head’s first name to ‘Dick’, phonetically spelling poor Ophelia Mann’s personal file and resorting to other such nameless, faceless inane office amusements. Well, on behalf of me and Dani, I’d like to say a big FUCK YOU, nameless faceless office person. We’ll wear our Myfannies and Mongrels with pride from now on, and just be grateful not to be boringly-named douchey mcdouchewits like you (ETA – of course, if your name actually WAS Douchey McDouchewit, that would not be boring at all, but rather “ironic”, in the classically Morissette sense of the word).

* Look, not that I think it’s likely… but if you have, actually, called your child Myfanny, then… I’m not even going to apologise for possibly offending you. That is just NOT COOL. You’re a disgrace, and probably not even human.

This world is a bizarre, bizarre place. I’m trying to reconcile the reality of starting a new full-time day job when we get back to Melbourne – one which, luckily, I also happen to be pretty fucking excited about – with another, entirely separate reality in which we’re about to hit the stage again with Amanda Palmer at the Spiegeltent before starting our own cabaret show at 11pm. Staying with random lovely music supporters. Making connections with new friends that hopefully one day will be old ones. Dealing with marketing and promotion and the economic reality that it just has to be done. Walking the bone edge of safety and risk, comfort and strain, calmness and delight. I don’t know which way I’m going to fall in the end. For now, I’ll just keep walking.

And now, here’s some pretty pictures. Note the GIANT DROP BEAR of doom!

WorkSafe boss says sorry for 'offensive' farewell

Goddamnit! There go those feminists again, spoiling good ol’ boys harmless bit of wig-wearing fun. Why, it was just his way of sending off an employee who was going to work for the Office of Women’s Policy. Can’t we tell it’s all just a joke at our expense? Why do we have to take it so damn seriously?

What would be rather funny, if it weren’t so – well, just not – is that WorkSafe Victoria give advice and support to people who are victimised through workplace bullying. You know, like dressing up as someone and humiliating them and their gender in front of all their colleagues would, presumably, be a bit of a warning sign for.

The kicker, as so often when incidents like this happen, is that since ‘most’ people apparently found it funny, the underlying implication is that whoever was offended by it is just an overreacting, purse-lipped, blue-stocking cat-lady with no sense of humour.

Because of course, you wouldn’t expect senior executives for a work safety advocacy organisation to be able to regulate his own behaviour or consider that this may be offensive before people start complaining, would you?

The point is that there’s still people who do question the ‘need for women’s policy’ (as Eric Windholz did in his ‘light-hearted and good-humoured speech to ‘honour’ Mc McCabe). Who do think it’s funny – without a touch of ‘irony’ – to humiliate their female employees, in front of others or alone. Who use this humiliation systematically to sexually harass and intimidate their staff. Who continue to be chauvinist pigs, not only at work, but toward any other women in their lives. And so, to the almost one in three women who have experienced sexual harassment in their daily lives, and to the men who perpetrate it, seeing the general manager of WorkSafe – a body that’s supposed to support victims of workplace bullying – so ‘light-heartedly’ engage in this sort of behaviour, just serves to normalise and justify sexism in the workplace and deny women’s personhood as employees. Way to go, douchebag.

http://www.worldwithout.org/

Keeping in mind the incredibly disturbing fact that here in Victoria, intimate partner violence is the main cause of death, disability and illness in women aged 15 – 44 (VicHealth 2004), it really brings into focus the urgent need for us as individuals and communities to deal with the systemic abuse of women across all lines of class, race, faith and nationality. While in Australia we are fairly ‘lucky’ (although see above stat to keep this in perspective) in that abuse of women is not legally sanctioned, nor is rape used as a weapon in armed conflict here, we’ve still got a long way to go.

The silence and shame surrounding sex, that many of us feel at times, at least partly contributes to our lack of understanding of sexual assault and unwillingess/inability to deal with it when it arises in our communities. But knowing how to recognise and verbalise the sex that we do want is a great way to begin imagining a world – indeed – without sexual assault.

So here’s an exercise that’s not only radical, but potentially the sexiest thing you’ve done all year* – bonus!

Next time you’re getting intimate with someone (or even with yourself) try to consciously and verbally express how you’re feeling right now, what you want to do, what you don’t want to do, how you want to be touched, what words you want to use/be used… and try to encourage your partner (if you’re with one) to do the same. Some ways of doing this might be asking:

“Can I ____? May I ____?”

“What would you like me to do?”

“I like ____”

“I don’t like ____”

“Do you want to try ____”

“What do you like?”

(questions from a world without sexual assault 2007 newspaper)

And remember – consent is sexy! While it might seem a bit weird, or funny, or even scary, at first – it’s about having the sex that you and your partner really want to have. And what’s hotter than that?

*But remember kids, talking about this stuff can sometimes be pretty confronting, or full-on, or triggering, so be careful with yourself and others… it’s all about feeling safe and listened to, and listening in return – it’s not just ‘talking dirty’ (although by all means go for it, if that’s what you both want to do…). And I’m still learning and by no means an expert on this stuff, so here’s some other places you might want to go to find out more:

http://www.worldwithout.org/resources

www.casa.org.au

http://www.phillyspissed.net/

http://www.incite-national.org/