Monday, August 10, 2009
This blog now moved to: www.nicoleskeltys.com/blog
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Monday, June 15, 2009
Allegheny Cemetery
Allegheny Cemetery
Here are some lyrics I wrote on the evening (in August 2006) I found out about my mother's death:
Gentle soul
May you lie in the arms of your father who loves you
These few ragged minutes we are apart
I'll wait for you the way you did for me
Every wish that is not for love is vanity
Take my pen and pledge this for me
You are the arc of every story
The only life thats ever been
We all touched what you touched
We all saw what you saw
And all the kindness in your heart
Is why we'll hope for evermore.
You do what you can to get through grief, even when getting through it seems impossible. Musicians, artists, writers grasp onto the implements of expression - thats how we know we are still holding on, by the scratch and rustle, every day leaving marks. 'Now' waits behind the grief stricken like a warm engine, its presence insistent but impersonal. For a long while, nothing seems real.
I have been reminded of grief's journey by the deaths, in the last two weeks, of two elderly men, fathers of people who I know, one in Pittsburgh, the other in Melbourne. The week before these events, my own father appeared strongly in my dreams, an unusual occurrence, and my mother too.
So last week, by the light of the strawberry moon, I went for a walk in Allegheny Cemetery with the intention of doing a little ritual, to give thanks for being alive, ask for help for the grieving, and say hi to Mum and Dad.
Allegheny Cemetery is one of America's oldest and largest cemeteries and surely one of the world's most breathtakingly beautiful tributes to mortality. As far as the eye can see, there are stone monuments flung out amongst the the lush hills and oaks and maples, like a sculpture park. Some display the wealth of Pittsburgh's deceased elite, family surnames like Baum and Vandergrift hammered into soaring columns and white marble pillars. The private mausoleums of great families line many of the cemetery roads, like small Greek temples. Their wrought iron gates appear to have been shut decades ago and never reopened. At the other extreme, there are the hundreds of small grey gravestones of the 19th century poor, so weathered with time that all that is barely legible is the date of death, sometimes not even that. My favorites figures are the angels - soaring in various poses of elevated feeling, eternally caring underneath the grime and oxidisation of age, never forgetting the names of the long gone people they hover over. I wander down the heavily wooded paths of Allegheny Cemetery every day (as does Tanya), and it has become my sacred place, my sanctuary.
My new buddy John accompanied me. He too felt the need to say hello to his mum who died of cancer a few years ago, and to make some wishes for the summer ahead. The cemetery revealed its night beauty: gold headstone inscriptions winking in the moonlight, immense pillars and statues looming even taller than in the day, palely glowing, fireflies sparkling and moving fast through the silhouettes of trees. It felt like walking through a mysterious ancient city.
After we found a nice high spot with views of the city, I laid out my Tibetan prayer rug and a handful of objects of significance, including some things belonging to Mum and Grandma. We said our private prayers, then ended up chatting about far less spiritual matters such as camera lenses (John is a highly gifted photographer around town and also columnist for the local gay mag Out) and also the old favorite, how to scrape together a living from creative projects. I had had several LBIs (Latest Big Ideas) which all stood a chance of making money, but was finding it hard to summon the energy to push them ahead. As we walked back to 45th St under the pulsing moon, I asked whoever was listening, for good measure, for a bit of help on the abundance front.
Death defying adventures
One thing you can say about the thought of death (and its handmaiden, the life-threatening illness) is they can lead you on some adventures. My adventures began in Melbourne only days after the initial breast cancer diagnosis, spinning me round-eyed into the worlds of 'healers' who try to push death away using sometimes the most startling of means.
Jeff was a 'vibrational healer' who also used 'color therapy'. I must have seen Jeff very early on in the cancer diagnosis (January 2007) as he was quick to offer the opinion that I didn't have cancer. Not really. It was some kind of energetic malfunction, but he could help jimmy it all back into place. Our session consisted of my lying down in his comfortable suburban lounge room with many large rocks (crystals) placed on my body. Jeff shook and rattled a variety of Tibetan instruments over my (hopefully steadily recharging) energy field, scaring the bejeebers out of me every now and then when he bonged one of his Tibetan singing bowls. After the session, I felt exactly the same, but Jeff pressed a small patch of purple paper into my hand and told me to wear it on my person for several weeks. That should do the trick. Upon leaving, I admired Jeff's collection of singing bowls, and he told me repeatedly I looked "biologically very young". That remark alone I thought made the $60 fee worthwhile.
I also found myself sitting in what felt like a psychiatrists' office with Carmel, a 'medical intuitive' and healer who dressed more like a successful real estate businesswoman than a shaman. Perhaps it was because we were both (silently) put off by each other's shoes (my pale blue runners, her canary yellow leather pumps) that Carmel's intuition about my condition was less than spot on. She pronounced that surgery would find that cancer had spread to my lymph nodes - but after the operation a few days later, we found, to my enormous relief, that it hadn't. She also glared at me and indicated that I had anger issues which I needed to let go of. I didn't feel that great about handing over dosh to Carmel as I slumped out of her office, more shaken than when I went in.
In mid 2007, I undertook Reiki sessions to help with healing from months of radiotherapy treatments. I was fortunate enough to meet Grant - a particularly gifted practitioner. Grant seemed to have acquired extraordinary powers due to having almost died from testicular cancer. He had strong friends in high places - a couple of weeks before he was given his shock diagnosis, he was paralysed on his way to the lavatory one night by a white light that embraced him and held him close for some time. Then the cancer diagnoses came, with metastases in his lungs, back. At one time he was so weakened by the chemo, he couldn't get out of his hospital bed. He told me he used to try and stay awake as much as possible because he was so afraid that he would not wake up if he fell asleep. But he pulled through. He was glowing with health now, and gratefully credits his cancer experience with having "woken him up" to his soul's destiny. Which was to become a healer, a Reiki master. I found Grant's story all the more remarkable because his day job was as a policeman. When I asked him if his colleagues knew about his double-life, he laughed and said no, they wouldn't understand.
Grant was one of those practitioners who could sense things about your body/ energy field without you saying anything. For example, he would say "your kidneys are hurting today" when all I'd done is just say hello and lay down - and he would be right. He was developing the ability the sense internal organs with his hands. His powerful friends were also on hand to help him out - on a couple of occasions, when Grant took his hands away from one part of my body, and moved onto another part, the sensation of two hands pressing down remained. I had the very strong sense of another presence in the room, that his hands were moving inside the hands of another body - another being. Later, he told me that he often called on Isis to help with healing. I was very grateful she decided to drop in on me.
Grant said to me on a couple of occasions - "Your heart is all in pieces, its completely shattered. I'm trying to put it back together". I reflected that it was not everyday a law enforcement officer offered to put your heart back together....
Back then, I didn't need memento moris to remind me of the shortness of life and the miracle of existence. But now, two and a half years later, on the other side of the world, as my life is in the process of being reconstructed from the ground up, I find myself grateful that Allegheny Cemetery has taken over the roles of both mortality reminder, and healer. In a gentler way. And its free.
The banjo: the "happiest sound in the world"
The short promotional films that Tanya, Scott and I did for CitiParks are now being shown around Pittsburgh's many beautiful parks at their outdoor movie screenings over the next few months (Tanya has put them up on her YouTube channel here). And as spring ripens into summer, I am trying to get basic life infrastructure rebuilt. First and foremost, a car must be purchased, so I am better set up for work opportunities and I can actually acquire and lug musical equipment around again. And the second purchasing priority, I have decided, is a banjo.
According to the Pittsburgh Banjo Club, the banjo is not only "America's Native Instrument" it is also, "the happiest sound in the world". They may well have a point. One of my favorite albums of recent years is William Elliot Whitmore's "Hymns for the Hopeless" all raw banjo-based punk-bluegrass meditations on death. Despite all the lyrics about watching true love get interred in "boxes of pine", and losing the will to live, the album never fails to get me in a toe tapping mood and puts a grin on my face every time I hear it. It must be the banjo. I intend to learn it.
With the beautiful weather, both Tanya and I are itching to hit the road again. Tanya and Scott are hoping to make a few short trips and explore more of south west Pennsylvania. John and I have also started to plan a big road trip for August. An Americana music road trip. The trip will involve going into the heartland of bluegrass territory - the Appalachians, through West Virginia, down through Kentucky, into Tennessee and country music heartland, Nashville, Dollywood!, back up home through the back roads of North Carolina (home of the Moog synthesiser) and Virginia. John will document the musicians and the landscape with photos and video, I'll be the geek with the digital Zoom recorder and the notebook. And just like a line out of 'Oh Suzannah!' written by Stephen Foster, one of Pittsburgh's most famous sons, who is buried Allegheny Cemetery, I fully intend to travel across the South with " a banjo on my knee":-)
Here are some lyrics I wrote on the evening (in August 2006) I found out about my mother's death:
Gentle soul
May you lie in the arms of your father who loves you
These few ragged minutes we are apart
I'll wait for you the way you did for me
Every wish that is not for love is vanity
Take my pen and pledge this for me
You are the arc of every story
The only life thats ever been
We all touched what you touched
We all saw what you saw
And all the kindness in your heart
Is why we'll hope for evermore.
You do what you can to get through grief, even when getting through it seems impossible. Musicians, artists, writers grasp onto the implements of expression - thats how we know we are still holding on, by the scratch and rustle, every day leaving marks. 'Now' waits behind the grief stricken like a warm engine, its presence insistent but impersonal. For a long while, nothing seems real.
I have been reminded of grief's journey by the deaths, in the last two weeks, of two elderly men, fathers of people who I know, one in Pittsburgh, the other in Melbourne. The week before these events, my own father appeared strongly in my dreams, an unusual occurrence, and my mother too.
So last week, by the light of the strawberry moon, I went for a walk in Allegheny Cemetery with the intention of doing a little ritual, to give thanks for being alive, ask for help for the grieving, and say hi to Mum and Dad.
Allegheny Cemetery is one of America's oldest and largest cemeteries and surely one of the world's most breathtakingly beautiful tributes to mortality. As far as the eye can see, there are stone monuments flung out amongst the the lush hills and oaks and maples, like a sculpture park. Some display the wealth of Pittsburgh's deceased elite, family surnames like Baum and Vandergrift hammered into soaring columns and white marble pillars. The private mausoleums of great families line many of the cemetery roads, like small Greek temples. Their wrought iron gates appear to have been shut decades ago and never reopened. At the other extreme, there are the hundreds of small grey gravestones of the 19th century poor, so weathered with time that all that is barely legible is the date of death, sometimes not even that. My favorites figures are the angels - soaring in various poses of elevated feeling, eternally caring underneath the grime and oxidisation of age, never forgetting the names of the long gone people they hover over. I wander down the heavily wooded paths of Allegheny Cemetery every day (as does Tanya), and it has become my sacred place, my sanctuary.
My new buddy John accompanied me. He too felt the need to say hello to his mum who died of cancer a few years ago, and to make some wishes for the summer ahead. The cemetery revealed its night beauty: gold headstone inscriptions winking in the moonlight, immense pillars and statues looming even taller than in the day, palely glowing, fireflies sparkling and moving fast through the silhouettes of trees. It felt like walking through a mysterious ancient city.
After we found a nice high spot with views of the city, I laid out my Tibetan prayer rug and a handful of objects of significance, including some things belonging to Mum and Grandma. We said our private prayers, then ended up chatting about far less spiritual matters such as camera lenses (John is a highly gifted photographer around town and also columnist for the local gay mag Out) and also the old favorite, how to scrape together a living from creative projects. I had had several LBIs (Latest Big Ideas) which all stood a chance of making money, but was finding it hard to summon the energy to push them ahead. As we walked back to 45th St under the pulsing moon, I asked whoever was listening, for good measure, for a bit of help on the abundance front.
Death defying adventures
One thing you can say about the thought of death (and its handmaiden, the life-threatening illness) is they can lead you on some adventures. My adventures began in Melbourne only days after the initial breast cancer diagnosis, spinning me round-eyed into the worlds of 'healers' who try to push death away using sometimes the most startling of means.
Jeff was a 'vibrational healer' who also used 'color therapy'. I must have seen Jeff very early on in the cancer diagnosis (January 2007) as he was quick to offer the opinion that I didn't have cancer. Not really. It was some kind of energetic malfunction, but he could help jimmy it all back into place. Our session consisted of my lying down in his comfortable suburban lounge room with many large rocks (crystals) placed on my body. Jeff shook and rattled a variety of Tibetan instruments over my (hopefully steadily recharging) energy field, scaring the bejeebers out of me every now and then when he bonged one of his Tibetan singing bowls. After the session, I felt exactly the same, but Jeff pressed a small patch of purple paper into my hand and told me to wear it on my person for several weeks. That should do the trick. Upon leaving, I admired Jeff's collection of singing bowls, and he told me repeatedly I looked "biologically very young". That remark alone I thought made the $60 fee worthwhile.
I also found myself sitting in what felt like a psychiatrists' office with Carmel, a 'medical intuitive' and healer who dressed more like a successful real estate businesswoman than a shaman. Perhaps it was because we were both (silently) put off by each other's shoes (my pale blue runners, her canary yellow leather pumps) that Carmel's intuition about my condition was less than spot on. She pronounced that surgery would find that cancer had spread to my lymph nodes - but after the operation a few days later, we found, to my enormous relief, that it hadn't. She also glared at me and indicated that I had anger issues which I needed to let go of. I didn't feel that great about handing over dosh to Carmel as I slumped out of her office, more shaken than when I went in.
In mid 2007, I undertook Reiki sessions to help with healing from months of radiotherapy treatments. I was fortunate enough to meet Grant - a particularly gifted practitioner. Grant seemed to have acquired extraordinary powers due to having almost died from testicular cancer. He had strong friends in high places - a couple of weeks before he was given his shock diagnosis, he was paralysed on his way to the lavatory one night by a white light that embraced him and held him close for some time. Then the cancer diagnoses came, with metastases in his lungs, back. At one time he was so weakened by the chemo, he couldn't get out of his hospital bed. He told me he used to try and stay awake as much as possible because he was so afraid that he would not wake up if he fell asleep. But he pulled through. He was glowing with health now, and gratefully credits his cancer experience with having "woken him up" to his soul's destiny. Which was to become a healer, a Reiki master. I found Grant's story all the more remarkable because his day job was as a policeman. When I asked him if his colleagues knew about his double-life, he laughed and said no, they wouldn't understand.
Grant was one of those practitioners who could sense things about your body/ energy field without you saying anything. For example, he would say "your kidneys are hurting today" when all I'd done is just say hello and lay down - and he would be right. He was developing the ability the sense internal organs with his hands. His powerful friends were also on hand to help him out - on a couple of occasions, when Grant took his hands away from one part of my body, and moved onto another part, the sensation of two hands pressing down remained. I had the very strong sense of another presence in the room, that his hands were moving inside the hands of another body - another being. Later, he told me that he often called on Isis to help with healing. I was very grateful she decided to drop in on me.
Grant said to me on a couple of occasions - "Your heart is all in pieces, its completely shattered. I'm trying to put it back together". I reflected that it was not everyday a law enforcement officer offered to put your heart back together....
Back then, I didn't need memento moris to remind me of the shortness of life and the miracle of existence. But now, two and a half years later, on the other side of the world, as my life is in the process of being reconstructed from the ground up, I find myself grateful that Allegheny Cemetery has taken over the roles of both mortality reminder, and healer. In a gentler way. And its free.
The banjo: the "happiest sound in the world"
The short promotional films that Tanya, Scott and I did for CitiParks are now being shown around Pittsburgh's many beautiful parks at their outdoor movie screenings over the next few months (Tanya has put them up on her YouTube channel here). And as spring ripens into summer, I am trying to get basic life infrastructure rebuilt. First and foremost, a car must be purchased, so I am better set up for work opportunities and I can actually acquire and lug musical equipment around again. And the second purchasing priority, I have decided, is a banjo.
According to the Pittsburgh Banjo Club, the banjo is not only "America's Native Instrument" it is also, "the happiest sound in the world". They may well have a point. One of my favorite albums of recent years is William Elliot Whitmore's "Hymns for the Hopeless" all raw banjo-based punk-bluegrass meditations on death. Despite all the lyrics about watching true love get interred in "boxes of pine", and losing the will to live, the album never fails to get me in a toe tapping mood and puts a grin on my face every time I hear it. It must be the banjo. I intend to learn it.
With the beautiful weather, both Tanya and I are itching to hit the road again. Tanya and Scott are hoping to make a few short trips and explore more of south west Pennsylvania. John and I have also started to plan a big road trip for August. An Americana music road trip. The trip will involve going into the heartland of bluegrass territory - the Appalachians, through West Virginia, down through Kentucky, into Tennessee and country music heartland, Nashville, Dollywood!, back up home through the back roads of North Carolina (home of the Moog synthesiser) and Virginia. John will document the musicians and the landscape with photos and video, I'll be the geek with the digital Zoom recorder and the notebook. And just like a line out of 'Oh Suzannah!' written by Stephen Foster, one of Pittsburgh's most famous sons, who is buried Allegheny Cemetery, I fully intend to travel across the South with " a banjo on my knee":-)
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Working on the Warrior movie (Part 2)
by Nicole Skeltys
Week two on the set of the Warrior movie
Last week, I brought down to the set of the Warrior movie a nice fat book called "Pennsylvania Spirituals" by Don Yoder (1961). I was working on Warrior as a full-time extra, my main duties consisting of cheering wildly as part of a large pretend audience to an MMA tournament set in Atlantic City.
My full-time status could have been more accurately described as a "total life elimination" status - an average of 15 hour days, 6 days a week on set - barely enough time left over to get home and get some sleep before the pre-dawn alarm shrieked my brain into consciousness again. This was followed minutes later by a run down Butler St to catch the extras' shuttle which hurtled from the Strip district to the Petersen Events Center, a half hour wait in line to be issued with my payroll slip, then collapsing in the corner of the 'dressing room' (a bit of floor draped with curtains) waiting to be called down to the ring-side for the day's screaming duties. Most of an extra's time consists of just sitting/lying around, waiting for shots to be re-set, so I had ample opportunity to read five books last week, which I counted as a perk of an otherwise totally perkless job.
In between the "spritzing" of fighters (spraying them with water to simulate sweat), fake tattoo touch-ups and lots of rehearsals (to get, for example, the exact right velocity of a mouth guard being spat from the mouth in response to a fist being smashed into said orifice), myself and many other extras quietly read our books.
I started week two with Yoder's book, which began by suggesting Pennsylvania has a much more interesting influence on Americana music history than I suspect even most Americans would realise. Yoder explores his idea that "the Negro Spiritual and the Pennsylvania Spiritual..are twin sisters, developing side by side at first and then only later maturing into distinctive types". Yoder is eager to build on on earlier ethnomusicological research which shows the transfer of the 18th century British evangelical song from New England to the "Southern Uplands" - Kentucky, Tennessee, Western Virginia and then to the "Negro, who made the spiritual, once borrowed, into something expressive of his own soul". He wants to stake out Pennsylvania as having a central place in the early development of this uniquely American and vastly influential musical form.
Yoder digs with relish through early 1800s accounts of Pennsylvania "camp- meeting" evangelical Methodist services which were attended by dirt poor white rural folk and "Negroes" - who were "free" unlike their Southern cousins. Being free didn't mean you weren't segregated from the whites by partitions or required to sit in designated areas behind the preacher man. But it did mean that you could drown the whites out with ecstatic shouts and chorusing over the service, and keep up the "tide of enthusiasm" after the service had ended, long into the night after the whites had crawled back into their tents and were trying to sleep.
The early American spiritual completely shocked British and European visitors, with its gushing emotionalism, crude folk-song repetitions, spontaneous made-up bits of verse, shouting, convulsions and general "hysteria". A British visitor to the Ebenezer Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1817 noted that both the "African" and white parishioners suffered from the same "extreme degree of fanatical violence in their religious exercises". Despite the rich musical tradition generated by their black and white (Pennsylvania Dutch) "religious folk-song" singing ancestors, official historians from the United Brethren, Evangelical and Church of God had (at least up to the 1960s) completely ignored its legacy. Largely because all those violations of established hymn structures, and ignorance of nicely arranged middle-class organ music (largely the preserve of urban churches), meant the spiritual was identified as the religious outpouring of the poorest of the poor, the illiterate, the barely shod. And it was damned by association.
Its no wonder then that America was the birthplace of that dirty irreverent shaking to music and spirit called rock and roll, and soul.
And how American that the rock and roll spirit (and the entertainment industry that latched onto it) would eventually reverse church history. The spiritual legacy in America has secured the quivering, fire-breathing, shouting and singing teleevangelist his mass appeal, and handed to his corporate religious empire the keys to the New Jerusalem. His rival churches, following more conservative forms of worship, watch as their parishioners (and economic base) slowly die off and are not replaced.
I was really warming to Yoder's history last Wednesday morning and flicking away the yellowed Carnegie library book pages with some enthusiasm when The Devil (in the form of one of the senior production assistants) marched around the ringside and shouted at everyone that all our books were now confiscated - we had to take all our reading material and put it away from set, in our 'dressing rooms' or wherever. Why? Someone said they thought that when viewing one of the rushes yesterday, the director noticed that one of the extras - instead of jumping up and down wildly and passionately imploring Tommy to beat the *** out of his opponent- was still sitting, head buried in a tome.
Whatever the reason, little did they know how this removal of our only perk would encourage many of us to openly rebel, only days later.
The Black Friday Showdown
Books I would have read by now and could write about had they not been confiscated:
. Sheila Rowbothom's "A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States"
."Coal Dust on the Fiddle: Songs and Stories of the Bituminous Industry in Pennsylvania" by George Korson
."The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality" by Brian Greene
But instead, for the rest of Wednesday and all Thursday, myself and all the other extras sat through 14-15 hours worth of boxing takes with nothing to distract us except our cell phones (on silent) and each other. There was even a rumor going around that none of us were allowed to stretch out on the stadium seats anymore for the occasional back-pain relief, as this potentially delayed getting people in position for new audience hysteria scenes. A lot of us, deeply fatigued already although it was only week two of a four week shoot, slumped submissively in our seats and blinked blankly up into the bright stadium lights for hours on end, like cows in a holding pen.
My new buddy Dan, a 50 year old long-haired heavy metal fan, who dropped me home of an evening in his crimson Chevy touring van (complete with stuffed devil doll passengers and a silver skull-head gear stick), showed a spectacular deterioration in motivation over this two week period, ending in the Black Friday Showdown.
On the first day of shooting, Dan was sitting a few seats from me and was taking every opportunity to jump up and run to the ringside and punch his arms in the air, for hours on end. In between takes, he would chat to me and any other woman who would talk to him. He told me repeatedly how much fun he was having.
By day three, he was not jumping up to the front quite as much. But he was still "having fun". By day six, he was not jumping up at all.
The following week, Dan was given a couple of days off by one of the PAs. But by Thursday, he was no longer even concerned about sitting in his usual seat, or wearing the Tap-Out sweatshirt handed out by the costume department. With nothing to do now for hours on end, he took to just finding corners of the stadium and just sitting there, no sign of air punching anymore.
On Friday, part-time extras poured in excitedly to make up extra bulk for wide-shot crowd scenes. Our numbers swelled to 700-800. Glamor-struck part-timers fussed with make-up, giggled with girlfriends and gingerly stepped in stilettos all over the half-sleeping full-timers who were, as usual, passed out all over the floor of the 'dressing room'.
Black Friday commenced at 6.30 am.
By 6.30 pm there was still no sign of a wrap. Agitated murmurings began, particularly from the part-timers who had expected their working day to end after 12 hours. Not a chance.
By 9.30pm, the groaning and complaining in the room was widespread and audible. All the extras had had enough. Some of us craving dinner and a decent sleep tried to escape up the stadium stairs to the exit signs, but we were trapped. Most of us relied on the shuttle to take us back to the Strip district car-park - the PAs glared at us and told us to "get back in there", the shoot was "nowhere near done", the shuttles weren't going anywhere. We retreated back in. A lot of the part-timers were in a state of shock - some of them just ran away, others staggered back in incredulously.
It was almost 11.00pm, and everyone was still in their seats, exhorted to cheer for Tommy, as usual. This was the final straw for Dan. He slouched deeper into his seat, with no intention to punch the air, clap or show any fake excitement whatsoever. One of the PAs noticed him and the following exchange ensued:
PA: Hey, you have to move over here with the rest of the crowd.
Dan: I'm not going anywhere.
PA: You have to do what I say.
Dan: I don't take any f** orders from anyone
PA: Man, you are SACKED.
Dan: You can't sack me COS I ALREADY QUIT!!!
Dan then stormed out of the stadium; but kindly waited for me on the steps of the Petersen Center, to give me a final lift home after the shuttle dropped us off in the Strip district somewhere close to midnight. We cruised home to the overwrought metal strains of Ronnie James Dio reminding men that women always let them down. As I staggered up the back steps to the apartment, my body implored me not to go in the next day (please oh please) or indeed any of the days after that.
Mid-morning Saturday found me horizontal in my bed and not on the floor of the 'dressing room'. Although I knew I was letting Nick down, I just couldn't be a full-time extra on his film anymore, I just didn't have the true grit needed to make the grade. I too could not be sacked because I had quit.
Week two on the set of the Warrior movie
Last week, I brought down to the set of the Warrior movie a nice fat book called "Pennsylvania Spirituals" by Don Yoder (1961). I was working on Warrior as a full-time extra, my main duties consisting of cheering wildly as part of a large pretend audience to an MMA tournament set in Atlantic City.
My full-time status could have been more accurately described as a "total life elimination" status - an average of 15 hour days, 6 days a week on set - barely enough time left over to get home and get some sleep before the pre-dawn alarm shrieked my brain into consciousness again. This was followed minutes later by a run down Butler St to catch the extras' shuttle which hurtled from the Strip district to the Petersen Events Center, a half hour wait in line to be issued with my payroll slip, then collapsing in the corner of the 'dressing room' (a bit of floor draped with curtains) waiting to be called down to the ring-side for the day's screaming duties. Most of an extra's time consists of just sitting/lying around, waiting for shots to be re-set, so I had ample opportunity to read five books last week, which I counted as a perk of an otherwise totally perkless job.
In between the "spritzing" of fighters (spraying them with water to simulate sweat), fake tattoo touch-ups and lots of rehearsals (to get, for example, the exact right velocity of a mouth guard being spat from the mouth in response to a fist being smashed into said orifice), myself and many other extras quietly read our books.
I started week two with Yoder's book, which began by suggesting Pennsylvania has a much more interesting influence on Americana music history than I suspect even most Americans would realise. Yoder explores his idea that "the Negro Spiritual and the Pennsylvania Spiritual..are twin sisters, developing side by side at first and then only later maturing into distinctive types". Yoder is eager to build on on earlier ethnomusicological research which shows the transfer of the 18th century British evangelical song from New England to the "Southern Uplands" - Kentucky, Tennessee, Western Virginia and then to the "Negro, who made the spiritual, once borrowed, into something expressive of his own soul". He wants to stake out Pennsylvania as having a central place in the early development of this uniquely American and vastly influential musical form.
Yoder digs with relish through early 1800s accounts of Pennsylvania "camp- meeting" evangelical Methodist services which were attended by dirt poor white rural folk and "Negroes" - who were "free" unlike their Southern cousins. Being free didn't mean you weren't segregated from the whites by partitions or required to sit in designated areas behind the preacher man. But it did mean that you could drown the whites out with ecstatic shouts and chorusing over the service, and keep up the "tide of enthusiasm" after the service had ended, long into the night after the whites had crawled back into their tents and were trying to sleep.
The early American spiritual completely shocked British and European visitors, with its gushing emotionalism, crude folk-song repetitions, spontaneous made-up bits of verse, shouting, convulsions and general "hysteria". A British visitor to the Ebenezer Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1817 noted that both the "African" and white parishioners suffered from the same "extreme degree of fanatical violence in their religious exercises". Despite the rich musical tradition generated by their black and white (Pennsylvania Dutch) "religious folk-song" singing ancestors, official historians from the United Brethren, Evangelical and Church of God had (at least up to the 1960s) completely ignored its legacy. Largely because all those violations of established hymn structures, and ignorance of nicely arranged middle-class organ music (largely the preserve of urban churches), meant the spiritual was identified as the religious outpouring of the poorest of the poor, the illiterate, the barely shod. And it was damned by association.
Its no wonder then that America was the birthplace of that dirty irreverent shaking to music and spirit called rock and roll, and soul.
And how American that the rock and roll spirit (and the entertainment industry that latched onto it) would eventually reverse church history. The spiritual legacy in America has secured the quivering, fire-breathing, shouting and singing teleevangelist his mass appeal, and handed to his corporate religious empire the keys to the New Jerusalem. His rival churches, following more conservative forms of worship, watch as their parishioners (and economic base) slowly die off and are not replaced.
I was really warming to Yoder's history last Wednesday morning and flicking away the yellowed Carnegie library book pages with some enthusiasm when The Devil (in the form of one of the senior production assistants) marched around the ringside and shouted at everyone that all our books were now confiscated - we had to take all our reading material and put it away from set, in our 'dressing rooms' or wherever. Why? Someone said they thought that when viewing one of the rushes yesterday, the director noticed that one of the extras - instead of jumping up and down wildly and passionately imploring Tommy to beat the *** out of his opponent- was still sitting, head buried in a tome.
Whatever the reason, little did they know how this removal of our only perk would encourage many of us to openly rebel, only days later.
The Black Friday Showdown
Books I would have read by now and could write about had they not been confiscated:
. Sheila Rowbothom's "A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States"
."Coal Dust on the Fiddle: Songs and Stories of the Bituminous Industry in Pennsylvania" by George Korson
."The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality" by Brian Greene
But instead, for the rest of Wednesday and all Thursday, myself and all the other extras sat through 14-15 hours worth of boxing takes with nothing to distract us except our cell phones (on silent) and each other. There was even a rumor going around that none of us were allowed to stretch out on the stadium seats anymore for the occasional back-pain relief, as this potentially delayed getting people in position for new audience hysteria scenes. A lot of us, deeply fatigued already although it was only week two of a four week shoot, slumped submissively in our seats and blinked blankly up into the bright stadium lights for hours on end, like cows in a holding pen.
My new buddy Dan, a 50 year old long-haired heavy metal fan, who dropped me home of an evening in his crimson Chevy touring van (complete with stuffed devil doll passengers and a silver skull-head gear stick), showed a spectacular deterioration in motivation over this two week period, ending in the Black Friday Showdown.
On the first day of shooting, Dan was sitting a few seats from me and was taking every opportunity to jump up and run to the ringside and punch his arms in the air, for hours on end. In between takes, he would chat to me and any other woman who would talk to him. He told me repeatedly how much fun he was having.
By day three, he was not jumping up to the front quite as much. But he was still "having fun". By day six, he was not jumping up at all.
The following week, Dan was given a couple of days off by one of the PAs. But by Thursday, he was no longer even concerned about sitting in his usual seat, or wearing the Tap-Out sweatshirt handed out by the costume department. With nothing to do now for hours on end, he took to just finding corners of the stadium and just sitting there, no sign of air punching anymore.
On Friday, part-time extras poured in excitedly to make up extra bulk for wide-shot crowd scenes. Our numbers swelled to 700-800. Glamor-struck part-timers fussed with make-up, giggled with girlfriends and gingerly stepped in stilettos all over the half-sleeping full-timers who were, as usual, passed out all over the floor of the 'dressing room'.
Black Friday commenced at 6.30 am.
By 6.30 pm there was still no sign of a wrap. Agitated murmurings began, particularly from the part-timers who had expected their working day to end after 12 hours. Not a chance.
By 9.30pm, the groaning and complaining in the room was widespread and audible. All the extras had had enough. Some of us craving dinner and a decent sleep tried to escape up the stadium stairs to the exit signs, but we were trapped. Most of us relied on the shuttle to take us back to the Strip district car-park - the PAs glared at us and told us to "get back in there", the shoot was "nowhere near done", the shuttles weren't going anywhere. We retreated back in. A lot of the part-timers were in a state of shock - some of them just ran away, others staggered back in incredulously.
It was almost 11.00pm, and everyone was still in their seats, exhorted to cheer for Tommy, as usual. This was the final straw for Dan. He slouched deeper into his seat, with no intention to punch the air, clap or show any fake excitement whatsoever. One of the PAs noticed him and the following exchange ensued:
PA: Hey, you have to move over here with the rest of the crowd.
Dan: I'm not going anywhere.
PA: You have to do what I say.
Dan: I don't take any f** orders from anyone
PA: Man, you are SACKED.
Dan: You can't sack me COS I ALREADY QUIT!!!
Dan then stormed out of the stadium; but kindly waited for me on the steps of the Petersen Center, to give me a final lift home after the shuttle dropped us off in the Strip district somewhere close to midnight. We cruised home to the overwrought metal strains of Ronnie James Dio reminding men that women always let them down. As I staggered up the back steps to the apartment, my body implored me not to go in the next day (please oh please) or indeed any of the days after that.
Mid-morning Saturday found me horizontal in my bed and not on the floor of the 'dressing room'. Although I knew I was letting Nick down, I just couldn't be a full-time extra on his film anymore, I just didn't have the true grit needed to make the grade. I too could not be sacked because I had quit.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Working on the Warrior movie
by Nicole Skeltys
My life as an extra on an action movie ( so far)
Although I haven't actually met Nick Nolte yet, or for that matter even clapped eyes on him, I now feel closer to Nick than any other Hollywood actor I've never met. And thats all of them.
I'm working as an extra on Nick's latest movie Warrior. This is apparently Nick Nolte's third movie in Pittsburgh, after Lorenzo's Oil and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
I don't think the latter flick ever made it to Australian cinemas, or maybe it did and I just didn't have the insight two years ago to realize my destiny was one day going to be profoundly bound up with this wonderful town. And thus I may have passed it over in favor of spending another $7.00 on hiring out another tranche of Classic Albums DVDs from the local VideoEzy. This series, which was popular in Australia and the UK, documents the making of no less than 32 "classic" albums from Elvis Presley's Elvis Presley (1956) through to Nirvana's Nevermind (1991). The episodes I have seen in this series have always swept me away, jellyfish-like, into a sea of yearning to produce such an historic artifact myself - a feat I did indeed try to pull off with my Melbourne psychedelic country band Dust's last album Songs (2007). Recorded on no budget in my backyard shed, using scratched up old Neil Young vinyl as audio engineering reference material, the album features great dollops of hopeless nostalgic aspiration wedged into every note. But the sad fact is, the conditions of production - both economic (ie the pop music industry) and cultural (the way people think about and relate to music) - have changed so much since any of the "classic albums" were produced, that the day of the popularly acclaimed '"classic album" is long gone. I'd put Radiohead's landmark Kid A (2000) as the last one to reach out to a respectable sized audience, but really great, passionate, innovative music is simply not allowed out of its niche markets anymore, internet or otherwise, to penetrate the consciousness of the average Jo(eline).
But I digress.
Nolte plays an ex-Vietnam vet. retired mill worker and recovering alcoholic named Paddy, who raised his boys - Tommy (Tom Hardy) and Brendan (Joel Edgerton) as competitive wrestlers. To cut a not very long story even shorter, due to twists of fate and fortune, both sons end up having to fight each other for high stakes ($5m): at Sparta, a 16-man, single-elimination Mixed Marshall Arts (MMA) tournament set in Atlantic City but being staged at the Petersen Events Center in Pittsburgh with real fighters as well as stunt doubles.
The cast also includes Jennifer Morrison ("Star Trek," "House") as Tess, and local pro wrestler Kurt Angle as a Russian named Koba.
I'm a full-time member of 'Sparta Core', which is the 190 strong bunch of extras who turn up to fill up the seats around the ringside each day. I was not chosen to be a 'specialty' extra, which means posing as a security guard, or photographer, or journalist, or paramedic, or part of a fighter posse. I missed out on being special in large part because the only special roles for women at an event like Sparta are as ring-girls (a position apparently nabbed by a Pitt-Greensburg junior who auditioned in a bright orange bikini) and "hot babes" who get to wear the slinkiest of frocks in the front rows and shiver uncontrollably for hours in the stadium air-conditioning.
My role is the humblest of all, that of 'general fan', and my job is simply to sit with other general fans, scream my head off, clap wildly and jump up and down at intervals indicated by one of the many production assistants (PAs) through their megaphones. I am required to perform thus for a minimum of 12 hours each day, 6 days a week. After a week on the job, its become clear that the average working day is in fact 15 hours, and that doesn't include the getting up (often as early as 5.00am) getting there and getting back, which adds another couple of hours.
By the end of the first week, I had figured out that the most useful attributes for an extra were as follows:
I lacked all of the above. For the first week, I sat for hours on end, watching the same fight scenes set up and re-shot repeatedly, my eyelids constantly dragged shut by the gravity produced by pre-dawn awakenings. Unlike many of my fellow general fans (about a third of whom seemed to be U of Pitt students on summer break), I had no buddies to insult or share drinking stories with. I found myself on more than one occasion placed next to a genuine wannabe champion boxer, one of whom explained to me that he was prepared to suffer brain damage and slurred speech as long as "the money made it worthwhile".
Like the frail elderly confined to nursing homes, the only bodily pleasure I had to look forward to each day was food break ( 'breakfast' at 7.00, 'lunch' at 3.00, dinner non-existent). But what was on offer was largely junk food, and by day three the periodic dietary assault of snack bars, white bread sandwiches, chips, cookies and popcorn produced an immense gridlock in my innards which by late afternoon left me prone on the backrows of the stadium seating, like a beached pufferfish. This would occasionally attract the disapproval of the production assistants (PAs) who would eventually notice me and urge me to get up, get jiggy with it, and show my enthusiasm for the champs on set.
I must note for the record though, that the whole vibe of the shoot is very friendly and the PAs are doing an incredible job. They are at the shoot before the extras turn up and they are there after we leave, thus providing them with probably no more than four hours sleep a night. How they manage to keep concentrating and being polite I don't know, I would be as friendly as a wounded bull if I was them.
There are upsides to this job though. In less than a week, in the waiting around that comprises most of an extra's day, I have mowed my way through the following books:
I took today off to arm-wrestle with the Department of Social Security (6 months since I first applied, but still no sign of that magic SS number so I can actually get paid), to work with Tanya and Scott finishing off our drafts of the Grandview Scenic Byway Park's promotional films (due for screening at all the outdoor cinemas in Pittsburgh's parks throughout summer), and to cook up three days worth of fresh vegetable based dishes to take with me to the Warrior shoot. I have realised that by simply bringing my own food and avoiding everything on offer except apples and peanuts, my quality of life on this movie shoot is greatly improved. I am even starting to get used to it and even enjoy it - a meditative-like state of zonked can be achieved for days on end without having to pay expensive retreat fees to stay at a Western version of a Tibetan gompa.
And my latest book to read, in amongst all the testosterone charged grunts, thumps and whumps and constant exhortations to reverential cheering? Sheila Rowbothom's A Century of Women: A History of Women in Britain and the United States. Somehow, I don't see this tome being made into an action -packed genre movie anytime soon:-)
My life as an extra on an action movie ( so far)
Although I haven't actually met Nick Nolte yet, or for that matter even clapped eyes on him, I now feel closer to Nick than any other Hollywood actor I've never met. And thats all of them.
I'm working as an extra on Nick's latest movie Warrior. This is apparently Nick Nolte's third movie in Pittsburgh, after Lorenzo's Oil and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
I don't think the latter flick ever made it to Australian cinemas, or maybe it did and I just didn't have the insight two years ago to realize my destiny was one day going to be profoundly bound up with this wonderful town. And thus I may have passed it over in favor of spending another $7.00 on hiring out another tranche of Classic Albums DVDs from the local VideoEzy. This series, which was popular in Australia and the UK, documents the making of no less than 32 "classic" albums from Elvis Presley's Elvis Presley (1956) through to Nirvana's Nevermind (1991). The episodes I have seen in this series have always swept me away, jellyfish-like, into a sea of yearning to produce such an historic artifact myself - a feat I did indeed try to pull off with my Melbourne psychedelic country band Dust's last album Songs (2007). Recorded on no budget in my backyard shed, using scratched up old Neil Young vinyl as audio engineering reference material, the album features great dollops of hopeless nostalgic aspiration wedged into every note. But the sad fact is, the conditions of production - both economic (ie the pop music industry) and cultural (the way people think about and relate to music) - have changed so much since any of the "classic albums" were produced, that the day of the popularly acclaimed '"classic album" is long gone. I'd put Radiohead's landmark Kid A (2000) as the last one to reach out to a respectable sized audience, but really great, passionate, innovative music is simply not allowed out of its niche markets anymore, internet or otherwise, to penetrate the consciousness of the average Jo(eline).
But I digress.
Nolte plays an ex-Vietnam vet. retired mill worker and recovering alcoholic named Paddy, who raised his boys - Tommy (Tom Hardy) and Brendan (Joel Edgerton) as competitive wrestlers. To cut a not very long story even shorter, due to twists of fate and fortune, both sons end up having to fight each other for high stakes ($5m): at Sparta, a 16-man, single-elimination Mixed Marshall Arts (MMA) tournament set in Atlantic City but being staged at the Petersen Events Center in Pittsburgh with real fighters as well as stunt doubles.
The cast also includes Jennifer Morrison ("Star Trek," "House") as Tess, and local pro wrestler Kurt Angle as a Russian named Koba.
I'm a full-time member of 'Sparta Core', which is the 190 strong bunch of extras who turn up to fill up the seats around the ringside each day. I was not chosen to be a 'specialty' extra, which means posing as a security guard, or photographer, or journalist, or paramedic, or part of a fighter posse. I missed out on being special in large part because the only special roles for women at an event like Sparta are as ring-girls (a position apparently nabbed by a Pitt-Greensburg junior who auditioned in a bright orange bikini) and "hot babes" who get to wear the slinkiest of frocks in the front rows and shiver uncontrollably for hours in the stadium air-conditioning.
My role is the humblest of all, that of 'general fan', and my job is simply to sit with other general fans, scream my head off, clap wildly and jump up and down at intervals indicated by one of the many production assistants (PAs) through their megaphones. I am required to perform thus for a minimum of 12 hours each day, 6 days a week. After a week on the job, its become clear that the average working day is in fact 15 hours, and that doesn't include the getting up (often as early as 5.00am) getting there and getting back, which adds another couple of hours.
By the end of the first week, I had figured out that the most useful attributes for an extra were as follows:
- no central nervous system
- a gold fish-like brain (ie finding the same actions interesting, no matter how often repeated)
- no skeletal structure
- lots of friends with nothing better to do than be an extra too
- a goat-like digestive system (ie can successfully ingest and excrete trash at any hour)
I lacked all of the above. For the first week, I sat for hours on end, watching the same fight scenes set up and re-shot repeatedly, my eyelids constantly dragged shut by the gravity produced by pre-dawn awakenings. Unlike many of my fellow general fans (about a third of whom seemed to be U of Pitt students on summer break), I had no buddies to insult or share drinking stories with. I found myself on more than one occasion placed next to a genuine wannabe champion boxer, one of whom explained to me that he was prepared to suffer brain damage and slurred speech as long as "the money made it worthwhile".
Like the frail elderly confined to nursing homes, the only bodily pleasure I had to look forward to each day was food break ( 'breakfast' at 7.00, 'lunch' at 3.00, dinner non-existent). But what was on offer was largely junk food, and by day three the periodic dietary assault of snack bars, white bread sandwiches, chips, cookies and popcorn produced an immense gridlock in my innards which by late afternoon left me prone on the backrows of the stadium seating, like a beached pufferfish. This would occasionally attract the disapproval of the production assistants (PAs) who would eventually notice me and urge me to get up, get jiggy with it, and show my enthusiasm for the champs on set.
I must note for the record though, that the whole vibe of the shoot is very friendly and the PAs are doing an incredible job. They are at the shoot before the extras turn up and they are there after we leave, thus providing them with probably no more than four hours sleep a night. How they manage to keep concentrating and being polite I don't know, I would be as friendly as a wounded bull if I was them.
There are upsides to this job though. In less than a week, in the waiting around that comprises most of an extra's day, I have mowed my way through the following books:
- a fat biography of Einstein by Walter Isaacson (lovely, recommended)
- a history of Pennsylvanian music written in the '30s (dull)
- a history of bluegrass music in New York and Eastern Pennsylvania (the bits about the banjo were good)
- The Road, a post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy - converted to a movie, some of which was shot in Pittsburgh, due for release in October (depressing)
- Panic - edited by Michael Lewis, a collection of essays about the last 20 years of periodic hysteria in financial markets, starting with Black October (1987) and ending with the sub-prime mortgage global wipe-out. If you ever suspected Wall St and dependent financial markets to be no more rational or socially useful than teens on crack then this book will make you feel vindicated. No less for the fact that most of its contributors are either trader insiders, internationally respected economics policy advisors, or long-standing financial rag/ NY times journalists. Not just highly recommended, I'd say put this book in the 'compulsory reading if you want to know what the *** is going on with your economy and lets face it, your own future livelihood' category.
I took today off to arm-wrestle with the Department of Social Security (6 months since I first applied, but still no sign of that magic SS number so I can actually get paid), to work with Tanya and Scott finishing off our drafts of the Grandview Scenic Byway Park's promotional films (due for screening at all the outdoor cinemas in Pittsburgh's parks throughout summer), and to cook up three days worth of fresh vegetable based dishes to take with me to the Warrior shoot. I have realised that by simply bringing my own food and avoiding everything on offer except apples and peanuts, my quality of life on this movie shoot is greatly improved. I am even starting to get used to it and even enjoy it - a meditative-like state of zonked can be achieved for days on end without having to pay expensive retreat fees to stay at a Western version of a Tibetan gompa.
And my latest book to read, in amongst all the testosterone charged grunts, thumps and whumps and constant exhortations to reverential cheering? Sheila Rowbothom's A Century of Women: A History of Women in Britain and the United States. Somehow, I don't see this tome being made into an action -packed genre movie anytime soon:-)
Friday, May 1, 2009
Pittsburgh - The Hawaii of the Mid-Atlantic
by Nicole Skeltys
Hot tubs and city parks
After only three days back in Pittsburgh, I found myself sitting in an frothy outdoor hot-tub on Mt Washington, framed by stunning views of the city. Bedecked with lurid plastic leis, with a handsome young gentleman by my side, I quaffed a strawberry daiquiri and cracked jokes to camera about how Pittsburgh was internationally famous as the Hawaii of the Mid-Atlantic. You would not normally find this activity listed in a job description. Unless, of course, you wrote that job description yourself. In November last year, Tanya and I were commissioned to write and shoot a short series of films for the Mt Washington Community Development Corporation promoting their new regional park - the Grandview Scenic Byway Park. I managed to include a hot-tub scene in the storyboard, which goes to show anything is possible when you put your mind to it.
While the journey from Melbourne to Pittsburgh was an aerial marathon that left my body clock thoroughly mangled, it was nevertheless a relief to get back to the USA and put my antipodean hospital holiday behind me. MOFO (the giant uterine fibroid that took me medical hostage when I got to Australia) seems to be finally giving up its civil war on my nether regions. And Pittsburgh now looks glorious in full spring mode, worthy of a Shakespearean sonnet - complete with waving daffodils, courting red robins (one of whom has made a nest on our kitchen door) and streets splashed with blossoming pear trees and redbuds.
Tanya and I are now working hard to finish off these films in time for our deadline of 1 June: they will be screened at the outdoor cinema events held throughout summer in the city's parks. Scott has also joined us to help with shooting and animations, and we now even have a (working) name for our little multimedia team: Cheek Productions.
PeduTube
The week after I got back, I decided to get involved with local politics and try and make a civic contribution to my adopted home. I had spent years involved with the Green Party in Australia, and felt the need to get involved with environmental and social justice campaigning again. I volunteered to help out with the Peduto primaries campaign and, later in the year, do what I can to help his reelection to Council. Quite apart from being a 100% nice guy, Bill has an impressive track record on local green issues, a completely sensible approach to cleaning up local government finances and rorts, and an impeccable record on helping disadvantaged constituents.
Last weekend, I found myself stuffing envelopes in the Peduto headquarters in Shadyside, a mail-out for a fundraising night at the Center for the Arts. Thus began my education in local American politics, Pennsylvania style. I learnt, for example, that voters are almost drowned with democratic options - here you can vote directly for a mess of positions that in Australia are neatly taken care of by bureaucratic and political appointments: Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, Coronor, School Director, District Judge, to name but a few (but not dog-catcher - I checked). Apparently voter turn out for these elections is "dismal". I have a long way to go to figure out how this town ticks politically, but at least I have made a start.
Peduto, on the other hand, running for the position of Councilman for City Council District 8, has so much popular support that his one Democrat rival for the position recently dropped out of the primaries race. The campaign is now about voter eduction and empowerment, or "building the base" as Bill calls it.
After envelope stuffing, I continued to further the cause of base building by heading down to Cappys, a bar on Walnut St, Shadyside, where once a month Bill hosts a night of VJing where he plays people's favorite YouTube clips for a $5 donation. All proceeds go to a changing range of worthy community groups. Last Saturday, Friends of the Urban Forest were the beneficiaries. This group encourages the planting and protection of Pittsburgh's city trees. I got chatting to some of the members while Cappys filled up and images of giant Cookie Monsters with death metal voices and two year old evangelical preachers flickered over the big screens. To my delight, at one point someone requested an old Parliament-Funkadelic clip, and I got to revel again in seeing an aging Garry "Starchild" Shider prance around stage wearing nothing but diapers.
As midnight came and went, the urban foresters decided to drop into Lawrenceville's once a year 'Art All Night' celebration and I tagged along - particularly pleased to get a lift back to my suburb given I had otherwise no idea how I was going to get home. 'Art All Night' proved impressive - hundreds of artworks by local established and amateur artists arranged in large warehouse spaces not far from the riverside. Despite the wee hours, the event was still packed and garage bands thrashed away. At one of the community tables, I noticed a considerable number of brochures for local neighborhood community and arts groups (such as Construction Junction which recyles old refrigerators by encouraging artists to decorate them then turn them into arthouse kegs!) The diversity indicated Pittsburgh's capacity for healthy grassroots innovation, albeit mostly at the single issue and small scale art enterprise level.
After about an hour, I left the still milling art crowd and started to make my way home down Butler St. As I shuffled along I ruminated on something one of the urban foresters had told me, that "there wasn't much eco-raver or hippy culture in Pittsburgh", which I was disappointed (although not really surprised) to hear. My Melbourne group household would often refer to ourselves as 'hippies', despite the fact I don't think any of us actually own a tie-dyed T-shirt (although Roland did look really good in a large fluffy pink top hat I once found in an op shop). The term 'hippy' functioned as a kind of shorthand for our identification with greenie/ collectivist values and lifestyles (not to mention old school techno parties in forest settings).
But just when I was having my "I miss hippies" moment of sadness, a bike wobbled up beside me, and I caught a flash of rainbow tie-dyed T-shirt, sandles, long hair and scraggy beard. "Hey, Thunderbirds is a great bar! Why don't you come inside and let me buy you a drink?". I found myself staring at what looked to me like a bonafide aging alternative lifestyler sporting a big grin, so I said "Sure" and we headed into the bar. As Ed introduced himself and bought me a screwdriver, I fairly quickly realised that looks can be deceptive: Ed quickly explained he had been "drinking all day", happily lived off "hamburgers, they're the best food you could possibly want" and, despite my probing, seemed to have no idea about local organic farms or ecology groups. Nevertheless it was fun to chew the (factory farmed) fat for a while. However, Ed eventually brought the conversation around to how "hot" Australian women were and that I was no exception. That was my cue to thank Ed for his generosity and continue my shuffle down home to 45th St under the milky warm night sky.
My future role in a martial arts action flick
Once my jetlag wore off, I started to apply my newly cleared mind in earnest to the fairly substantial problem of how I was going to survive for the duration of my three year artists' work visa in America. My nights were now (once again) punctuated with brainstorming sessions with Tanya, exploring ideas for creative enterprises that might bring us in some cash.
Late one restless night late last week, I had a Eureka moment and hatched an idea for a music project that might - just might - attract the interest of a few local sponsors. It was a project I would feel completely passionate about and had the potential to bring a lot of joy to people involved with it, myself included. It was my Latest Big Idea. I hastily scribbled out the proposal, crunched the numbers and nervously sent a draft off to Charlie for comment.
A couple of days later I fired off an email applying for the job of an extra in a Nick Nolte martial arts action movie called Warrior which is about to commence shooting in Pittsburgh. Within minutes, the phone rang and one of the casting crew was putting my name down on the full-time extras list, requiring my presence on set for 5-6 days a week for 4 weeks starting 11 May. While the pay is minimal and the hours long, nevertheless its an income, and the opportunity to see how a medium budget (by American standards) mainstream film is slammed together.
And who knows - maybe I will be 'discovered' and I will find myself playing character female bit parts in future B-grade movies (chain-smoking school canteen mom, hot roller derby coach, love-lorn ferris wheel assistant at a Pennsylvania county fair) or best of all, both Tanya and I could star as The Jilted Brides, a faded glamor girl duo playing dim old Southern saloons in a cool remake of Easy Rider from a girl's perspective directed by Gillian Armstrong and starring the ghost of Heath Ledger.
Well, at least I can dream:-)
Hot tubs and city parks
After only three days back in Pittsburgh, I found myself sitting in an frothy outdoor hot-tub on Mt Washington, framed by stunning views of the city. Bedecked with lurid plastic leis, with a handsome young gentleman by my side, I quaffed a strawberry daiquiri and cracked jokes to camera about how Pittsburgh was internationally famous as the Hawaii of the Mid-Atlantic. You would not normally find this activity listed in a job description. Unless, of course, you wrote that job description yourself. In November last year, Tanya and I were commissioned to write and shoot a short series of films for the Mt Washington Community Development Corporation promoting their new regional park - the Grandview Scenic Byway Park. I managed to include a hot-tub scene in the storyboard, which goes to show anything is possible when you put your mind to it.
While the journey from Melbourne to Pittsburgh was an aerial marathon that left my body clock thoroughly mangled, it was nevertheless a relief to get back to the USA and put my antipodean hospital holiday behind me. MOFO (the giant uterine fibroid that took me medical hostage when I got to Australia) seems to be finally giving up its civil war on my nether regions. And Pittsburgh now looks glorious in full spring mode, worthy of a Shakespearean sonnet - complete with waving daffodils, courting red robins (one of whom has made a nest on our kitchen door) and streets splashed with blossoming pear trees and redbuds.
Tanya and I are now working hard to finish off these films in time for our deadline of 1 June: they will be screened at the outdoor cinema events held throughout summer in the city's parks. Scott has also joined us to help with shooting and animations, and we now even have a (working) name for our little multimedia team: Cheek Productions.
PeduTube
The week after I got back, I decided to get involved with local politics and try and make a civic contribution to my adopted home. I had spent years involved with the Green Party in Australia, and felt the need to get involved with environmental and social justice campaigning again. I volunteered to help out with the Peduto primaries campaign and, later in the year, do what I can to help his reelection to Council. Quite apart from being a 100% nice guy, Bill has an impressive track record on local green issues, a completely sensible approach to cleaning up local government finances and rorts, and an impeccable record on helping disadvantaged constituents.
Last weekend, I found myself stuffing envelopes in the Peduto headquarters in Shadyside, a mail-out for a fundraising night at the Center for the Arts. Thus began my education in local American politics, Pennsylvania style. I learnt, for example, that voters are almost drowned with democratic options - here you can vote directly for a mess of positions that in Australia are neatly taken care of by bureaucratic and political appointments: Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, Coronor, School Director, District Judge, to name but a few (but not dog-catcher - I checked). Apparently voter turn out for these elections is "dismal". I have a long way to go to figure out how this town ticks politically, but at least I have made a start.
Peduto, on the other hand, running for the position of Councilman for City Council District 8, has so much popular support that his one Democrat rival for the position recently dropped out of the primaries race. The campaign is now about voter eduction and empowerment, or "building the base" as Bill calls it.
After envelope stuffing, I continued to further the cause of base building by heading down to Cappys, a bar on Walnut St, Shadyside, where once a month Bill hosts a night of VJing where he plays people's favorite YouTube clips for a $5 donation. All proceeds go to a changing range of worthy community groups. Last Saturday, Friends of the Urban Forest were the beneficiaries. This group encourages the planting and protection of Pittsburgh's city trees. I got chatting to some of the members while Cappys filled up and images of giant Cookie Monsters with death metal voices and two year old evangelical preachers flickered over the big screens. To my delight, at one point someone requested an old Parliament-Funkadelic clip, and I got to revel again in seeing an aging Garry "Starchild" Shider prance around stage wearing nothing but diapers.
As midnight came and went, the urban foresters decided to drop into Lawrenceville's once a year 'Art All Night' celebration and I tagged along - particularly pleased to get a lift back to my suburb given I had otherwise no idea how I was going to get home. 'Art All Night' proved impressive - hundreds of artworks by local established and amateur artists arranged in large warehouse spaces not far from the riverside. Despite the wee hours, the event was still packed and garage bands thrashed away. At one of the community tables, I noticed a considerable number of brochures for local neighborhood community and arts groups (such as Construction Junction which recyles old refrigerators by encouraging artists to decorate them then turn them into arthouse kegs!) The diversity indicated Pittsburgh's capacity for healthy grassroots innovation, albeit mostly at the single issue and small scale art enterprise level.
After about an hour, I left the still milling art crowd and started to make my way home down Butler St. As I shuffled along I ruminated on something one of the urban foresters had told me, that "there wasn't much eco-raver or hippy culture in Pittsburgh", which I was disappointed (although not really surprised) to hear. My Melbourne group household would often refer to ourselves as 'hippies', despite the fact I don't think any of us actually own a tie-dyed T-shirt (although Roland did look really good in a large fluffy pink top hat I once found in an op shop). The term 'hippy' functioned as a kind of shorthand for our identification with greenie/ collectivist values and lifestyles (not to mention old school techno parties in forest settings).
But just when I was having my "I miss hippies" moment of sadness, a bike wobbled up beside me, and I caught a flash of rainbow tie-dyed T-shirt, sandles, long hair and scraggy beard. "Hey, Thunderbirds is a great bar! Why don't you come inside and let me buy you a drink?". I found myself staring at what looked to me like a bonafide aging alternative lifestyler sporting a big grin, so I said "Sure" and we headed into the bar. As Ed introduced himself and bought me a screwdriver, I fairly quickly realised that looks can be deceptive: Ed quickly explained he had been "drinking all day", happily lived off "hamburgers, they're the best food you could possibly want" and, despite my probing, seemed to have no idea about local organic farms or ecology groups. Nevertheless it was fun to chew the (factory farmed) fat for a while. However, Ed eventually brought the conversation around to how "hot" Australian women were and that I was no exception. That was my cue to thank Ed for his generosity and continue my shuffle down home to 45th St under the milky warm night sky.
My future role in a martial arts action flick
Once my jetlag wore off, I started to apply my newly cleared mind in earnest to the fairly substantial problem of how I was going to survive for the duration of my three year artists' work visa in America. My nights were now (once again) punctuated with brainstorming sessions with Tanya, exploring ideas for creative enterprises that might bring us in some cash.
Late one restless night late last week, I had a Eureka moment and hatched an idea for a music project that might - just might - attract the interest of a few local sponsors. It was a project I would feel completely passionate about and had the potential to bring a lot of joy to people involved with it, myself included. It was my Latest Big Idea. I hastily scribbled out the proposal, crunched the numbers and nervously sent a draft off to Charlie for comment.
A couple of days later I fired off an email applying for the job of an extra in a Nick Nolte martial arts action movie called Warrior which is about to commence shooting in Pittsburgh. Within minutes, the phone rang and one of the casting crew was putting my name down on the full-time extras list, requiring my presence on set for 5-6 days a week for 4 weeks starting 11 May. While the pay is minimal and the hours long, nevertheless its an income, and the opportunity to see how a medium budget (by American standards) mainstream film is slammed together.
And who knows - maybe I will be 'discovered' and I will find myself playing character female bit parts in future B-grade movies (chain-smoking school canteen mom, hot roller derby coach, love-lorn ferris wheel assistant at a Pennsylvania county fair) or best of all, both Tanya and I could star as The Jilted Brides, a faded glamor girl duo playing dim old Southern saloons in a cool remake of Easy Rider from a girl's perspective directed by Gillian Armstrong and starring the ghost of Heath Ledger.
Well, at least I can dream:-)
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Melbourne (Part 3): Tales from two hospitals
by Nicole Skeltys
The Bliss Button
A friend of mine who worked in the drug addiction field told me ages ago about a very simple series of medical research experiments where rats (rattus norvegicus strain) were given two buttons to push with two distinct outcomes: one button gave them food, the other gave them doses of cocaine. If the survival instinct is as hard-wired as popular versions of Darwinism would have us all believe, then you'd think that the rats, way back in the traffic jam on the evolutionary turnpike, would prefer to chow down on some rodent nutrients. This would enable them to bulk up and continue to cane it past other muroids, and even eventually give the bird to homo sapiens, against which they apparently currently hold the number two spot in the 'most successful mammal' race.
But no. Faced with a choice between life and bliss, the rodents chose bliss. Over and over again, they jabbed their snouts against the cocaine button and forgot all about dinner. And breakfast. And lunch. Eventually, they moved on to that rat disco in the sky.
I related strongly to those lab rats when I was wheeled back into my hospital room after the uterine fibroid embolisation operation. This is whats called a 'day procedure' which starts with a 90 minute suite of pelvic pokings and manoeveurs under local anaesthetic, and ends with wobbling patients trying to follow the 'exit' signs, 24 hours later.
Wheeled into my hospital room after the procedure, I was shown a device which looked a bit like a TV remote only it was hooked up to a drip. I was told that if I hit the green button, I would be given doses of morphine. But not to worry, they were controlled transmissions so I couldn't overdose, no matter how many times I hit 'play'. The local anaesthetic was wearing off fast. Even before the nurse had left the room, I started to jab at the 'morphine play' button.
For the rest of the afternoon and all that night, I lay semi-conscious with no more mobility or motivation than a potato. My only foray out of my heavily doped reverie was courtesy of the pre-programmed blood pressure machine, which mechanically tightened its velcro grip on my arm and squeezed me out into some kind of hospital gown awareness at hourly intervals. I had (perhaps recklessly) agreed to be part of a pain control research project, so when my eyes slit open as my upper arm lost feeling, I would then behold a lady research assistant with a quiet lisp leaning over, handing me a pen and asking me gently to rate my pain on a graph. I remember looking very hard at the paper, trying to understand what was going on, then looking pathetically at the assistant as her hand hovered anxiously over the long black line. "There'" I said, gesturing as much with my snout as my hand. She reached over and obligingly did a smart cross right about where 'eight' was in relation to 'ten'.
I kept snouting to 'eight' for what seemed like a long time. I hit 'play' for hours with total abandon. I got as high as a kite. At one point, I remember my surgeon and his team swimming into my field of vision, asking me questions, and I more or less just grinned. When the pain eventually started to lessen after several hours, I pointed to the camera next to my bed and asked one of the nurses to take a photo of me toasting the bliss button with my medicine cup. When she looked startled, I explained "I'm supposed to be on holidays, so I better take some happy snaps of my adventures."
By the time I was due for discharge from The Alfred the next day, I had not eaten for 48 hours and I had successfully self-medicated myself into a glowing, spongy blob. But I realised then no matter how high I got, the tracks of the operation still throbbed away with varying intensity. The morphine certainly dulled the pain, but only up to a point; after that, all it did was separate the thinking and the feeling parts of me. As Kerry came, gripped my arm, guided me towards the elevators, then down to her utility truck in the carpark, I said "This is what its like to be a junkie!". She laughed, but I was serious. As we slowly nosed through Punt Rd traffic on our way to my favorite Vietnamese eaterie in Richmond, I looked up at the pale blue Melbourne sky and thought this is how the world can be so beautiful and serene in its touch, while in the distance you can always feel the wounds.
Emergency roadside assistance
My GP prescribed some opiate based painkillers to help me through the next few days, a brand I remembered fondly from the last time I was recovering from an operation to remove an alien growth - my breast cancer tumor of 2 years ago. The tablets gave an optimistic shine to everything, so much so that in a couple of days, I felt well enough to contact Graeme and Eugenie - who have acted towards me over the years with the support and kindness of adopted parents - and said I was finally going to make it up to Canberra to see them. As luck would have it (or synchronicity again), their son Alex was in Melbourne and was driving up that Tuesday, a week after my operation, and I could get a lift with him.
As we pulled up outside Graeme and Eugenie's two storey townhouse that night, I felt a knot of apprehension form in my stomache. I knew that Graeme was still very disabled from his massive stroke five months ago, was confined to a wheelchair and needed 24 hour assistance with all personal care and living tasks, which was provided largely by Eugenie - who was now as much a nurse as a wife. When Alex and I bustled into the loungeroom with our baggage and Thai take-away, I saw a figure with thinning grey hair stooped over in a wheelchair and my heart missed a beat. I bent down and gave him a hug and kiss. To my relief, Graeme looked pretty much the way he had always looked, a man with a sturdy frame and kindly, intelligent eyes. The big difference was, though, his arm hung lifeless in a sling, and when he saw me, he didn't smile.
Later, Eugenie explained that one of the many side-effects of a right brain stroke was that you lost the ability to register facial expressions, and your ability to express your own emotions with facial movement and rising and falling vocal inflections was also lost. This was one of the many things that Graeme was having to learn all over again. Over the next few days, I also realised that my old dear friend could indeed return to his former animated and witty self, but that these periods were often cut short by the chronic fatigue that accompanied the stroke. Graeme would suddenly become very quiet and then start to nod off in his chair, or sometimes he'd gently ask Eugenie to help him back into bed.
After a few days of hanging out in the loungeroom, broken only by trips to physiotherapy and medical appointments, I think all of us felt a heaviness building in the air. At one point Graeme looked at me over the dining room table and said in a voice that carried the shadows of many nights waking up and lying still for hours "If I thought I was never going to improve beyond how I am now, I'd rather die."
I just nodded and glanced over at Eugenie. We understood. Graeme may be on powerful anti-depressants, but the prospect of a life where you can't even get yourself out of bed in the morning, where even the most basic of independent living tasks was beyond you, a life of infant-like dependency on another human being - who wouldn't feel betrayed by their mortal coil, who wouldn't want to shake it off? I understood, but my heart grew so very heavy with that understanding.
We decided to break the routine by making a trip to Mt Darragh, a beautiful part of the Snowy Mountains range where Graeme and Eugenie had bought a plot of land several years ago. They had almost finished building their dream home there, what was to be their retirement house, when Graeme suddenly collapsed to the floor one night in early October and for the next five months, the center of their lives was dramatically relocated to the wards and rehabilitation units of Canberra hospital. Somehow, through all of this, Eugenie had had the presence of mind and fortitude to take over the remote supervision of the final stages of building, and the house had finally been completed. Graeme had been there once since his release from hospital, and they both found the beauty and deep quiet of the land spiritually healing. It was a two and a half hour drive to the property, but we were all keen to go.
The trip down was uneventful, and Graeme chatted amiably all the way down, his spirits already lifted at the prospect of seeing their gorgeous patch of nature again. However, when we finally got there and helped Graeme into the bare loungeroom to look at the view, he quickly grew quiet - even more quiet than usual. After a while he said weakly "I don't feel well. I need to lie down." Both Eugenie and I felt alarm - there was no furniture in the house, nowhere to lie down except in the car. We took Graeme back out to the Subaru, Eugenie all the time probing for symptoms, asking Graeme if we should take him to the local hospital about 20k away. He just kept repeating that he wanted to lie down, and after Eugenie had placed him back in the front seat and tilted it back, Graeme quickly fell asleep. We wandered slowly back to the house.
Eugenie and I ate our sandwiches on the front patio and stared out over the silent eucalyptus covered ranges, undulating from deep green to misty blue in the distance. As we talked, we were both acutely aware that Graeme was missing out on the very healing wilderness experience he craved. The situation felt hopeless. I felt a sense of crisis in the air.
Suddenly a sound came from the car. It was the mobile phone, which Eugenie had left in the car - we were both startled as reception was so patchy out here. Eugenie ran over to the car and reached inside to grab the phone. As she walked back to the house, I could hear her puzzled conversation: "Roadside emergency assistance?? No, I didn't place a call for help- who is this? RACQ? I'm sorry, but you have the wrong number, I'm not even in Queensland, this is a Victorian number!" She hung up and looked up at me with surprise - "That is so odd - why would the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland think I called for help? And I can see by the missed calls that they've tried at least 3 times to reach me!"
At that moment, I got goosebumps and chills down my spine. On the drive down, I had thought about my deceased parents, as I often did. How I had always felt that they had something to do with Graeme and Eugenie reaching out to me like I was family, given they were no longer around on earth to provide that kind of protection anymore themselves; and I wondered vaguely what they would think now, when my adopted family was struggling to keep going. Mum and Dad had lived in Queensland, I grew up there. The fact that the bizarre offer of emergency roadside assistance came from Queensland, when Graeme was so unwell in our car, struck me like a call from heaven. No doubt I was still under the sway of the synchronicity book I had recently finished reading, and all the other coincidences I had been experiencing over the last 3 weeks, and no doubt I very much wanted to believe in guidance from the beyond, but the call filled me with a strong sense that help was on its way.
When Graeme woke up, he felt much better, and even started to apologise for "mucking up the afternoon". We shushed him, enormously relieved that he was ok. and bundled the wheelchair and commode back into the car. The drive back to Canberra into the fading light of the afternoon was spectacular - the sunsets in the high country of Australia are amazing, a fresco of saturated gold, pink and purple clouds swirling across ultramarine - the acid trip skies make up for the parched monochrome of the scrub and pastures that crawl underneath them. Graeme and Eugenie chatted all the way home, and I realised with another small chill, that I had dreamt this scene earlier, I had seen this sunset in a vivid dream a week ago.
The journey to Mt Darragh felt like a turning point. For the remainder of my trip, Graeme's mood seemed, on the whole, to have improved. On the last day before I had to leave, Graeme and I spent the afternoon absorbed in doing Tarot spreads, a passion we both shared. That evening over dinner, I asked Eugenie if she'd like her cards read but she said no, she only liked to consult the cards "When I am feeling optimistic. I'm afraid I am not feeling so optimistic right now." Graeme turned to her then and urged: "Now love. We have to push on. Make the best of the situation. Onwards and upwards, right?"
Wisdom McNuggets
A couple of days after the fibroid operation, I had decided that I was going to be alright. MOFO would surely shrink and stop frigging around with my innards. Surely I could go back to the States and not worry about needing any further medical attention. I hopped onto the internet, found an amazingly cheap flight to LAX on 15 April, booked it; booked another getting me to Pittsburgh, arriving early hours 16th. There. Done. No going back now. I eagerly emailed Tanya with the news. T wrote back excitedly, enormously relieved to hear I was indeed coming back and that I felt confident I would be fighting fit again soon.
How could I not go back, when I knew there were so many good people egging me on? Scott told me that he and T had done a little candlelight ritual and prayer the night before the operation. I was extremely touched. His parents and Granny, devout Christians who lived in Butler, just north of Pittsburgh, were also praying for me. Our 45th St neighbors, Tim and Jim, sent healing energy my way (Tim is a reiki practitioner). Americans I don't know sent kind responses to the last blog post. Charlie called on the morning of the procedure to wish me well. While I will miss my friends in Australia terribly, the tug to go back to the US, to Pittsburgh in particular is still strong. Made so much stronger by the empathy and support of Tanya, who has kept the faith that "opportunities will present themselves, we'll be ok!" - and our small, but growing, circle of warm-hearted American buddies.
A couple of days ago, my faith that MOFO would eventually cease to engage in lower abdominal delinquency got its first boost. The MRI showed the fibroid - creepily, by far the biggest object in my lower body - completely sapped of blood, upon which it had been feeding and growing, vampire like, for goodness knows how long. My handsomely bearded interventional radiologist looked up from the lurid 3D image on his MacBook that we had both been craning over, and announced that the operation had been "perfect". He leaned back in his office chair and explained that I could expect to get symptom relief from organ pressures in about 4 weeks, and after that there was every likelihood that MOFO would continue to slowly wither for up to a year. He stood up, and we shook hands: "Good luck in Pittsburgh" he smiled, and then added in an accent more suggestive of a bloke from the bush than a well-heeled 4th Avenue specialist "Cheerio then!"
That night I started cleaning up my backyard studio, getting ready to vacate again, this time for good. I peeled off all the wall posters, most of them advertising events I had played at, or CDs I had released over the years. I stared at my old analogue synthesisers, all stacked up in a pile now, getting ready for their transfer to live with their uncle Byron, a super-nice guy with whom I had written TV and other scores over the years. Byron would give them the love and attention they deserved. Still, I felt a wave of sadness and nostalgia. All the intense times we had shared, how closely their circuit boards had listened to my yearnings and channeled them mysteriously into unique sounds. And this room had borne witness to the hatching of so many creative projects over the last seven years, the last, and perhaps the craziest, The Jilted Brides album and subsequent adventures.
On one part of the wall near my workstation, I had pinned up various motivational images and texts, something I had done shortly after I had received my cancer diagnosis two years earlier. One of those was a photocopy of the summary pages from "The Secret", a 'positive thinking' book that was then just starting to explode in popularity around the world, and which several friends had urged me to read. As I peeled off the pages, I now cringed at some of the New Age exhortations - reduced to statements so simple and often so fantastical that they were very hard to take seriously "You attract what you think about." "See the good things in people and you will get more of them." "The mind can heal the body". But at the time, I didn't want philosophical treatises or a full, balanced meal of cognitive therapy mixed with oncology research statistics. I wanted wisdom McNuggets, easily digested globs of hope, deep fried in magic. Something that would convince my brain that everything was going to be ok as quickly as non-complex carbohydrates would convert into a sugar rush.
Back at Mt Darragh, I had shared a wisdom McNugget with Graeme. He grew more and more quiet as we stared out at the property he could see but was currently unable to walk around. I instinctively kissed him on the head and grabbed his hand. "Everything is going to be ok" I had said, with some force. "Things unfold at their own pace, often not at the pace we would like, but at the right pace. I know it will take a long time, but you will pull through this." Graeme squeezed my hand. "I know" he said, but with an expression I found hard to read. "I know everything will be ok".
The Bliss Button
A friend of mine who worked in the drug addiction field told me ages ago about a very simple series of medical research experiments where rats (rattus norvegicus strain) were given two buttons to push with two distinct outcomes: one button gave them food, the other gave them doses of cocaine. If the survival instinct is as hard-wired as popular versions of Darwinism would have us all believe, then you'd think that the rats, way back in the traffic jam on the evolutionary turnpike, would prefer to chow down on some rodent nutrients. This would enable them to bulk up and continue to cane it past other muroids, and even eventually give the bird to homo sapiens, against which they apparently currently hold the number two spot in the 'most successful mammal' race.
But no. Faced with a choice between life and bliss, the rodents chose bliss. Over and over again, they jabbed their snouts against the cocaine button and forgot all about dinner. And breakfast. And lunch. Eventually, they moved on to that rat disco in the sky.
I related strongly to those lab rats when I was wheeled back into my hospital room after the uterine fibroid embolisation operation. This is whats called a 'day procedure' which starts with a 90 minute suite of pelvic pokings and manoeveurs under local anaesthetic, and ends with wobbling patients trying to follow the 'exit' signs, 24 hours later.
Wheeled into my hospital room after the procedure, I was shown a device which looked a bit like a TV remote only it was hooked up to a drip. I was told that if I hit the green button, I would be given doses of morphine. But not to worry, they were controlled transmissions so I couldn't overdose, no matter how many times I hit 'play'. The local anaesthetic was wearing off fast. Even before the nurse had left the room, I started to jab at the 'morphine play' button.
For the rest of the afternoon and all that night, I lay semi-conscious with no more mobility or motivation than a potato. My only foray out of my heavily doped reverie was courtesy of the pre-programmed blood pressure machine, which mechanically tightened its velcro grip on my arm and squeezed me out into some kind of hospital gown awareness at hourly intervals. I had (perhaps recklessly) agreed to be part of a pain control research project, so when my eyes slit open as my upper arm lost feeling, I would then behold a lady research assistant with a quiet lisp leaning over, handing me a pen and asking me gently to rate my pain on a graph. I remember looking very hard at the paper, trying to understand what was going on, then looking pathetically at the assistant as her hand hovered anxiously over the long black line. "There'" I said, gesturing as much with my snout as my hand. She reached over and obligingly did a smart cross right about where 'eight' was in relation to 'ten'.
I kept snouting to 'eight' for what seemed like a long time. I hit 'play' for hours with total abandon. I got as high as a kite. At one point, I remember my surgeon and his team swimming into my field of vision, asking me questions, and I more or less just grinned. When the pain eventually started to lessen after several hours, I pointed to the camera next to my bed and asked one of the nurses to take a photo of me toasting the bliss button with my medicine cup. When she looked startled, I explained "I'm supposed to be on holidays, so I better take some happy snaps of my adventures."
By the time I was due for discharge from The Alfred the next day, I had not eaten for 48 hours and I had successfully self-medicated myself into a glowing, spongy blob. But I realised then no matter how high I got, the tracks of the operation still throbbed away with varying intensity. The morphine certainly dulled the pain, but only up to a point; after that, all it did was separate the thinking and the feeling parts of me. As Kerry came, gripped my arm, guided me towards the elevators, then down to her utility truck in the carpark, I said "This is what its like to be a junkie!". She laughed, but I was serious. As we slowly nosed through Punt Rd traffic on our way to my favorite Vietnamese eaterie in Richmond, I looked up at the pale blue Melbourne sky and thought this is how the world can be so beautiful and serene in its touch, while in the distance you can always feel the wounds.
Emergency roadside assistance
My GP prescribed some opiate based painkillers to help me through the next few days, a brand I remembered fondly from the last time I was recovering from an operation to remove an alien growth - my breast cancer tumor of 2 years ago. The tablets gave an optimistic shine to everything, so much so that in a couple of days, I felt well enough to contact Graeme and Eugenie - who have acted towards me over the years with the support and kindness of adopted parents - and said I was finally going to make it up to Canberra to see them. As luck would have it (or synchronicity again), their son Alex was in Melbourne and was driving up that Tuesday, a week after my operation, and I could get a lift with him.
As we pulled up outside Graeme and Eugenie's two storey townhouse that night, I felt a knot of apprehension form in my stomache. I knew that Graeme was still very disabled from his massive stroke five months ago, was confined to a wheelchair and needed 24 hour assistance with all personal care and living tasks, which was provided largely by Eugenie - who was now as much a nurse as a wife. When Alex and I bustled into the loungeroom with our baggage and Thai take-away, I saw a figure with thinning grey hair stooped over in a wheelchair and my heart missed a beat. I bent down and gave him a hug and kiss. To my relief, Graeme looked pretty much the way he had always looked, a man with a sturdy frame and kindly, intelligent eyes. The big difference was, though, his arm hung lifeless in a sling, and when he saw me, he didn't smile.
Later, Eugenie explained that one of the many side-effects of a right brain stroke was that you lost the ability to register facial expressions, and your ability to express your own emotions with facial movement and rising and falling vocal inflections was also lost. This was one of the many things that Graeme was having to learn all over again. Over the next few days, I also realised that my old dear friend could indeed return to his former animated and witty self, but that these periods were often cut short by the chronic fatigue that accompanied the stroke. Graeme would suddenly become very quiet and then start to nod off in his chair, or sometimes he'd gently ask Eugenie to help him back into bed.
After a few days of hanging out in the loungeroom, broken only by trips to physiotherapy and medical appointments, I think all of us felt a heaviness building in the air. At one point Graeme looked at me over the dining room table and said in a voice that carried the shadows of many nights waking up and lying still for hours "If I thought I was never going to improve beyond how I am now, I'd rather die."
I just nodded and glanced over at Eugenie. We understood. Graeme may be on powerful anti-depressants, but the prospect of a life where you can't even get yourself out of bed in the morning, where even the most basic of independent living tasks was beyond you, a life of infant-like dependency on another human being - who wouldn't feel betrayed by their mortal coil, who wouldn't want to shake it off? I understood, but my heart grew so very heavy with that understanding.
We decided to break the routine by making a trip to Mt Darragh, a beautiful part of the Snowy Mountains range where Graeme and Eugenie had bought a plot of land several years ago. They had almost finished building their dream home there, what was to be their retirement house, when Graeme suddenly collapsed to the floor one night in early October and for the next five months, the center of their lives was dramatically relocated to the wards and rehabilitation units of Canberra hospital. Somehow, through all of this, Eugenie had had the presence of mind and fortitude to take over the remote supervision of the final stages of building, and the house had finally been completed. Graeme had been there once since his release from hospital, and they both found the beauty and deep quiet of the land spiritually healing. It was a two and a half hour drive to the property, but we were all keen to go.
The trip down was uneventful, and Graeme chatted amiably all the way down, his spirits already lifted at the prospect of seeing their gorgeous patch of nature again. However, when we finally got there and helped Graeme into the bare loungeroom to look at the view, he quickly grew quiet - even more quiet than usual. After a while he said weakly "I don't feel well. I need to lie down." Both Eugenie and I felt alarm - there was no furniture in the house, nowhere to lie down except in the car. We took Graeme back out to the Subaru, Eugenie all the time probing for symptoms, asking Graeme if we should take him to the local hospital about 20k away. He just kept repeating that he wanted to lie down, and after Eugenie had placed him back in the front seat and tilted it back, Graeme quickly fell asleep. We wandered slowly back to the house.
Eugenie and I ate our sandwiches on the front patio and stared out over the silent eucalyptus covered ranges, undulating from deep green to misty blue in the distance. As we talked, we were both acutely aware that Graeme was missing out on the very healing wilderness experience he craved. The situation felt hopeless. I felt a sense of crisis in the air.
Suddenly a sound came from the car. It was the mobile phone, which Eugenie had left in the car - we were both startled as reception was so patchy out here. Eugenie ran over to the car and reached inside to grab the phone. As she walked back to the house, I could hear her puzzled conversation: "Roadside emergency assistance?? No, I didn't place a call for help- who is this? RACQ? I'm sorry, but you have the wrong number, I'm not even in Queensland, this is a Victorian number!" She hung up and looked up at me with surprise - "That is so odd - why would the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland think I called for help? And I can see by the missed calls that they've tried at least 3 times to reach me!"
At that moment, I got goosebumps and chills down my spine. On the drive down, I had thought about my deceased parents, as I often did. How I had always felt that they had something to do with Graeme and Eugenie reaching out to me like I was family, given they were no longer around on earth to provide that kind of protection anymore themselves; and I wondered vaguely what they would think now, when my adopted family was struggling to keep going. Mum and Dad had lived in Queensland, I grew up there. The fact that the bizarre offer of emergency roadside assistance came from Queensland, when Graeme was so unwell in our car, struck me like a call from heaven. No doubt I was still under the sway of the synchronicity book I had recently finished reading, and all the other coincidences I had been experiencing over the last 3 weeks, and no doubt I very much wanted to believe in guidance from the beyond, but the call filled me with a strong sense that help was on its way.
When Graeme woke up, he felt much better, and even started to apologise for "mucking up the afternoon". We shushed him, enormously relieved that he was ok. and bundled the wheelchair and commode back into the car. The drive back to Canberra into the fading light of the afternoon was spectacular - the sunsets in the high country of Australia are amazing, a fresco of saturated gold, pink and purple clouds swirling across ultramarine - the acid trip skies make up for the parched monochrome of the scrub and pastures that crawl underneath them. Graeme and Eugenie chatted all the way home, and I realised with another small chill, that I had dreamt this scene earlier, I had seen this sunset in a vivid dream a week ago.
The journey to Mt Darragh felt like a turning point. For the remainder of my trip, Graeme's mood seemed, on the whole, to have improved. On the last day before I had to leave, Graeme and I spent the afternoon absorbed in doing Tarot spreads, a passion we both shared. That evening over dinner, I asked Eugenie if she'd like her cards read but she said no, she only liked to consult the cards "When I am feeling optimistic. I'm afraid I am not feeling so optimistic right now." Graeme turned to her then and urged: "Now love. We have to push on. Make the best of the situation. Onwards and upwards, right?"
Wisdom McNuggets
A couple of days after the fibroid operation, I had decided that I was going to be alright. MOFO would surely shrink and stop frigging around with my innards. Surely I could go back to the States and not worry about needing any further medical attention. I hopped onto the internet, found an amazingly cheap flight to LAX on 15 April, booked it; booked another getting me to Pittsburgh, arriving early hours 16th. There. Done. No going back now. I eagerly emailed Tanya with the news. T wrote back excitedly, enormously relieved to hear I was indeed coming back and that I felt confident I would be fighting fit again soon.
How could I not go back, when I knew there were so many good people egging me on? Scott told me that he and T had done a little candlelight ritual and prayer the night before the operation. I was extremely touched. His parents and Granny, devout Christians who lived in Butler, just north of Pittsburgh, were also praying for me. Our 45th St neighbors, Tim and Jim, sent healing energy my way (Tim is a reiki practitioner). Americans I don't know sent kind responses to the last blog post. Charlie called on the morning of the procedure to wish me well. While I will miss my friends in Australia terribly, the tug to go back to the US, to Pittsburgh in particular is still strong. Made so much stronger by the empathy and support of Tanya, who has kept the faith that "opportunities will present themselves, we'll be ok!" - and our small, but growing, circle of warm-hearted American buddies.
A couple of days ago, my faith that MOFO would eventually cease to engage in lower abdominal delinquency got its first boost. The MRI showed the fibroid - creepily, by far the biggest object in my lower body - completely sapped of blood, upon which it had been feeding and growing, vampire like, for goodness knows how long. My handsomely bearded interventional radiologist looked up from the lurid 3D image on his MacBook that we had both been craning over, and announced that the operation had been "perfect". He leaned back in his office chair and explained that I could expect to get symptom relief from organ pressures in about 4 weeks, and after that there was every likelihood that MOFO would continue to slowly wither for up to a year. He stood up, and we shook hands: "Good luck in Pittsburgh" he smiled, and then added in an accent more suggestive of a bloke from the bush than a well-heeled 4th Avenue specialist "Cheerio then!"
That night I started cleaning up my backyard studio, getting ready to vacate again, this time for good. I peeled off all the wall posters, most of them advertising events I had played at, or CDs I had released over the years. I stared at my old analogue synthesisers, all stacked up in a pile now, getting ready for their transfer to live with their uncle Byron, a super-nice guy with whom I had written TV and other scores over the years. Byron would give them the love and attention they deserved. Still, I felt a wave of sadness and nostalgia. All the intense times we had shared, how closely their circuit boards had listened to my yearnings and channeled them mysteriously into unique sounds. And this room had borne witness to the hatching of so many creative projects over the last seven years, the last, and perhaps the craziest, The Jilted Brides album and subsequent adventures.
On one part of the wall near my workstation, I had pinned up various motivational images and texts, something I had done shortly after I had received my cancer diagnosis two years earlier. One of those was a photocopy of the summary pages from "The Secret", a 'positive thinking' book that was then just starting to explode in popularity around the world, and which several friends had urged me to read. As I peeled off the pages, I now cringed at some of the New Age exhortations - reduced to statements so simple and often so fantastical that they were very hard to take seriously "You attract what you think about." "See the good things in people and you will get more of them." "The mind can heal the body". But at the time, I didn't want philosophical treatises or a full, balanced meal of cognitive therapy mixed with oncology research statistics. I wanted wisdom McNuggets, easily digested globs of hope, deep fried in magic. Something that would convince my brain that everything was going to be ok as quickly as non-complex carbohydrates would convert into a sugar rush.
Back at Mt Darragh, I had shared a wisdom McNugget with Graeme. He grew more and more quiet as we stared out at the property he could see but was currently unable to walk around. I instinctively kissed him on the head and grabbed his hand. "Everything is going to be ok" I had said, with some force. "Things unfold at their own pace, often not at the pace we would like, but at the right pace. I know it will take a long time, but you will pull through this." Graeme squeezed my hand. "I know" he said, but with an expression I found hard to read. "I know everything will be ok".
Monday, March 16, 2009
Melbourne (Part 2): Synchronicities
by Nicole Skeltys
Cosmic saloons and dangerous strangers
The last fairly hastily posted blog was about T and I returning to Melbourne, to sell or stow our few remaining possessions, catch up with loved ones, then return to Pittsburgh to quickly resume our film work there and other commitments. As I write this, T has safely flown back to Pittsburgh - after a whirlwind trip featuring her brief stay in my studio/ storage space, frantically turfing out her stuff like a crab hurling sand balls out of its beach hole, then racing up to see her Mum and buddies in Sydney, then back on the impossibly long flight to America. But I am delayed here in Melbourne - the discovery of a giant growth in in my womb which has been causing me an increasing number of ailments has pinned me here like a specimen in a medical display case, my life suddenly frozen.
The fibroid feels to me like "The Monster from the Id!'"- the unforgettable cry from Dr Morbius from '50s sci-fi classic film 'Forbidden Planet'. Towards the end of the film, Dr Morbius finally named the malevolent psycho-sexual force that was destroying the hope of his new planetary utopia, which otherwise had been looking very promising with his lovely daughter floating around silvery new blinking machines and Robby the Robot wrestling happily with bakelite knobs. Similarly, the giant fibroid (the size of a 5 month fetus) - or MOFO to call it by its emotionally correct name - has been the unexpected twist that has thrown into doubt my return date to Pittsburgh.
Before I posted the last blurb, I edited out a few phrases which I felt were a little too grandiose to leave in: one of those was feeling that I was in someone else's plot, that my life (or indeed, any individual's life) was being scribbled from 'the beyond', part of a cosmic soap opera complete with cliffhangers, created for The Great Whatever's own amusement.
This was no intellectual speculation, or poetic metaphor, but a feeling that first kicked open the saloon doors of my consciousness about a decade ago and occupied it for days, holding my gaze with the confidence of a dangerous stranger who knew more about me than I did. I spent days radically adrift from my 'normal' sense of self, experiencing my thoughts as part of a greater, infinitely mysterious, consciousness which was being broadcast as 'my experience'. A little while later, I tried to capture some of this 'cosmic saloon' encounter in some lyrics for an early country truckin' song for my band Dust called '111.0':
"Am I once forgotten, now remembered?
Am I something found then cast away?
All I know is the moment I am driving through
A frequency that soon will fade away..".
I posted the last blog very late at night, and the next morning I started sorting out my book collection, deciding which books I would give to my friend Paul who was starting up a second hand bookshop in Northcote, hoping of course I would still be eventually leaving Australia again. One of the first books that emerged from the pile was by a Californian psychotherapist Robert H. Hopcke which sported the title "There Are No Accidents!: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives". It was a present for my brother Kim, who had leant it back to me to read, but I had put it aside and forgotten all about it in the rush to leave for America in May last year. I opened it up and read the following words:
"What if I - or you - were a character in a story?... What if what we experience as our life was indeed a work of fiction? How would we know? How could we know?...Synchronistic events - meaningful coincidences - make us acknowledge that there may well be more to our story than we think, and that everything, even things that may seem frightening or bad...is part of the narrative structure of our lives."
I closed it and held in my hands for quite a while, as I turned and looked out the glass patio doors that separated our lounge room from the leafy, lazily dappled sidewalks of Clarence Street. I decided it was probably a very good time for me to read this book.
Everyday magic
There's no doubt that Tanya and I regularly look for signs and magic in our everyday lives, trying to work out the meaning of why this happened versus that, what we are 'meant' to bring to someone's life, what they are 'meant' to bring to us. "Am I following the spiritual clues correctly, am I on the right path?"
We are not alone, a lot of our friends think this way too - and as I have made my way through story after story in Hopcke's book over the last week or so, its pretty clear that this 'magical thinking' is not the preserve of New Age crystal gazers or Calvinist determinists, but something close to a basic human instinct - a version of the 'religious' impulse that William James so rigorously described and defended in his brave psycho-philosophical treatise 'The Varieties of Religious Experience'. Synchronicities - defined as 'meaningful coincidences' - hold powerful sway over our hearts and minds precisely because they suggest there is more out there than is dreamt of in Western survivalist/ rationalist philosophy. And we need to believe that: well, at least T and I do for sure.
For example when T and I first decided our destinies were intertwined, and we finished off our Jilted Brides album in a frenzied few weeks in January 2008 as a kind of offering to the cosmos, something that might act as a passport to a better future, I found (through coincidence of course) a highly gifted artist - Kuba Fiedorowicz - to create the artwork for the CD we had produced. Neither Tanya nor I had met Kuba until well after 'Larceny of Love' had been finished. Kuba listened to the music, looked at photos of us, then told us he had an image we 'might be interested in'. Several months earlier, he had painted a picture, a semi-medieval, mystical face of a full lipped, beautiful blonde bride. Then for some reason, a few weeks after that, he had added a second bride, a thinner faced woman with long reddish hair. T and I looked at the painting and we gasped: it was us. It seemed Kuba had seen our images and painted us as brides before we had met him, even before we had thought of ourselves as brides; even before we had got together as a musical/ creative duo. Kuba's dual bride image is now stamped on our CD, its our icon.
Now that I am once again facing an unexpected health challenge and my soul once again feels like a bunny in the headlights, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that in the last two weeks an awful lot of 'coincidences' have occurred, starting with my accidently picking up of Hopcke's book and reading my own phrases there. As they say in Pittsburgh (in another context altogether) "Here we go....!"
Synchronicity Central
A day after I got the MOFO confirmation, I was sitting on the couch of one of my oldest friends Kerry with whom I was staying; Kerry and I are very close, like the sister I never had. She slammed the front door, and walked into the lounge, having just visited the doctors to see what the mysterious pains in her pelvis were that had started around the same time as mine (ie a few weeks ago). She told me that she too had fibroids; not a single super-sized womb eater like mine, but a malevolent swarm: "dozens of them - Its a jungle in there!". I stood up and we hugged each other. I'd had a feeling that she was (freakily) suffering from exactly the same problem as me. We laughed ruefully in disbelief. "Well, " I said. "At least that means we can help each other through this journey together."
"Yes possum", she sighed. Then with her usual great sense of humor and resilience added. "Its FTF mate: Fight The Fibroid. We've got our own club!"
One of Hopcke's descriptions of synchronicities is when one unrelated event after another seems to reinforce a message or theme: the fact that I now had a buddy to share the research and medical system navigation was the first sign that dealing with a serious health problem was not going to be as traumatic as it could have been. The second signs were the ease and swiftness with which I was able to get tests and see specialists for advice - to the astonishment of my doctor, Jeff, who was sure I would be waiting weeks to see anyone at all, let alone get any treatment. It was Jeff's certainty, based on the experience of other patients, that I'd be stuck in Australia for months unless I could afford treatment in the private hospital system that got me feeling like Job: a petulant God was asking me to sacrifice my greatest object of value, my first-born - my vintage Roland System 700 synthesizer - to pay for my health and ticket back to America!
Ten days ago, however, it became clear that Old Testament testing and judgement was not to be visited upon me just yet. A gynecologist was quickly found and visited (her receptionist cried: "You've got the same birthday as me - what a coincidence!").
By last Tuesday I was sitting in the office of the head interventional radiologist at The Alfred, one of our best public hospitals. I'd called on the Friday to get advice and here I was three days later being assessed. He convinced me that a procedure called uterine fibroid embolisation was definitely worth trying, because it would probably alleviate my symptoms by shrinking MOFO to a less megalithic shape, and it was a "low intervention" procedure: in and out of hospital in 24 hours, about 10 days recovery. The alternative was major surgery - hysterectomy or myectomy. "You don't want to go there unless you absolutely have to, they are serious procedures of last resort." After asking me with some surprise "Why do you have to rush back to Pittsburgh?", he finally picked up the phone and said "Well, let's see what we can do. What about doing the procedure next week?". My heart leapt - so soon!! And in the public hospital (i.e. free healthcare) system! As we left the office, he grinned at me through his handsome salt and pepper beard with easy Australian humor: "I hope next Tuesday is soon enough for ya?". It certainly was!
The last few days have been a coincidence pandemic.
On Wednesday I am driving down to meet my old pal Tim Patterson for lunch - Tim ( a film editor) and I last worked together when I did some remixes for 'The Secret': the production team for this international 'power of attraction' movement is based in Melbourne, and Rhonda Byrne, its guru, is an Aussie chick, with a background in TV advertising. On my way to lunch, in a kind of daze, I suddenly thought: 'Hey, I should be alert to synchronicities'. No sooner had I thought this, than I looked up and saw a truck in front of me sporting a sticker with the company name of "Patterson". When I got to the restaurant, I waited for a long time but Tim did not show. I sipped my wine and went into a reverie again: I started to think about whether I should talk about Tanya having some precognitive dreams in the next blog. No sooner had this thought entered my mind, than a young woman at the table next to me started to tell her dining companion about a psychic lady a mutual friend of theirs had seen last year: "She made all these predictions about her having a baby, the size of it, hair color, and everything, and she wasn't even pregnant! But you know, within a year, it all came true!"
I got up (Tim did not show), drove back to the studio and started writing a piece about mental illness and bi-polar in particular. The last book I read before I left Pittsburgh was a memoir called 'Scattershot' by David Lovelace who was not only bi-polar himself but who came from a family where everyone (except his sister) had turned out to be bi-polar too. In his at once absorbing, horrifying and exhilarating account of life as a 'manic depressive', he briefly sites statistics that 'about 1% of the population' is clinically bi-polar. That statistic jumped out at me as implausabile, as I count amongst my current and former close friends, about half a dozen people so diagnosed. I started to jot down some notes about that, and also how some mental illness bleeds in and out of psychic phenonema and mystical experience. Then I hopped on a tram going down Lygon St into the city, and met a former work colleague for dinner. After I rattled off my two minute pot-boiler digest of my American adventures to date, we turned to her situation. She started by explaining that her holiday house investment had gone pear-shaped recently due to the fact that her husband's brother, one of their coinvestors, was bi-polar, and he had gone off his medication and was starting to turn their lives upside down with a prolonged manic episode...
Finally last night, holed up in my studio/bedroom, I was frantically trying to finish off some music for the Grandview Scenic Byway Park films that Tanya and I were working on in Pittsburgh. For one section, I pillaged some of my back catalogue, an old funky acid track called 'Authority Over the Fish' which I had not thought of, let alone listened to, for years: but it seemed to fit a particular action sequence very well. After I had finished editing it, I saw my Gmail blinking. I had been sent a message via Facebook. A friend of Tanya's who I didn't know, had befriended me, and part of his introductory message was a fond reminiscence of '90s Australian techno-acid favorites, including a track he'd heard on the radio a few times and taped it because it had this wicked psycho-acid bass line, brass stabs and funny sample about someone having authority over the fish....
Tomorrow I go in for a procedure that may or may not help me get better, and get me back to America. One of the most frequent ways I seek consolation and guidance is by laying out Tarot spreads, or flipping over other kinds of divination cards - most often alone in my room, intensely wanting some kind of conversation with my destiny, with the Great Whatever. T makes me feel good by flattering me on my knack with the cards; certainly since the three years that I have began studying and consulting them seriously, and periodically recording results, I have managed to give myself (and others) goosebumps with the seeming accuracy of what falls in front of me - and not just 'wishful thinking' at all, but warning messages which eerily come to pass. So tonight, as a way to finish this blog on synchronicity, what could be more appropriate than my asking the Tarot about the outcome of my operation? So, once again, here we go...
'Page of Wands'; Meanings: new beginnings on a creative level, ideas still forming but with much potential; a message of a new things to come; great promise and hope...
*phew*
Cosmic saloons and dangerous strangers
The last fairly hastily posted blog was about T and I returning to Melbourne, to sell or stow our few remaining possessions, catch up with loved ones, then return to Pittsburgh to quickly resume our film work there and other commitments. As I write this, T has safely flown back to Pittsburgh - after a whirlwind trip featuring her brief stay in my studio/ storage space, frantically turfing out her stuff like a crab hurling sand balls out of its beach hole, then racing up to see her Mum and buddies in Sydney, then back on the impossibly long flight to America. But I am delayed here in Melbourne - the discovery of a giant growth in in my womb which has been causing me an increasing number of ailments has pinned me here like a specimen in a medical display case, my life suddenly frozen.
The fibroid feels to me like "The Monster from the Id!'"- the unforgettable cry from Dr Morbius from '50s sci-fi classic film 'Forbidden Planet'. Towards the end of the film, Dr Morbius finally named the malevolent psycho-sexual force that was destroying the hope of his new planetary utopia, which otherwise had been looking very promising with his lovely daughter floating around silvery new blinking machines and Robby the Robot wrestling happily with bakelite knobs. Similarly, the giant fibroid (the size of a 5 month fetus) - or MOFO to call it by its emotionally correct name - has been the unexpected twist that has thrown into doubt my return date to Pittsburgh.
Before I posted the last blurb, I edited out a few phrases which I felt were a little too grandiose to leave in: one of those was feeling that I was in someone else's plot, that my life (or indeed, any individual's life) was being scribbled from 'the beyond', part of a cosmic soap opera complete with cliffhangers, created for The Great Whatever's own amusement.
This was no intellectual speculation, or poetic metaphor, but a feeling that first kicked open the saloon doors of my consciousness about a decade ago and occupied it for days, holding my gaze with the confidence of a dangerous stranger who knew more about me than I did. I spent days radically adrift from my 'normal' sense of self, experiencing my thoughts as part of a greater, infinitely mysterious, consciousness which was being broadcast as 'my experience'. A little while later, I tried to capture some of this 'cosmic saloon' encounter in some lyrics for an early country truckin' song for my band Dust called '111.0':
"Am I once forgotten, now remembered?
Am I something found then cast away?
All I know is the moment I am driving through
A frequency that soon will fade away..".
I posted the last blog very late at night, and the next morning I started sorting out my book collection, deciding which books I would give to my friend Paul who was starting up a second hand bookshop in Northcote, hoping of course I would still be eventually leaving Australia again. One of the first books that emerged from the pile was by a Californian psychotherapist Robert H. Hopcke which sported the title "There Are No Accidents!: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives". It was a present for my brother Kim, who had leant it back to me to read, but I had put it aside and forgotten all about it in the rush to leave for America in May last year. I opened it up and read the following words:
"What if I - or you - were a character in a story?... What if what we experience as our life was indeed a work of fiction? How would we know? How could we know?...Synchronistic events - meaningful coincidences - make us acknowledge that there may well be more to our story than we think, and that everything, even things that may seem frightening or bad...is part of the narrative structure of our lives."
I closed it and held in my hands for quite a while, as I turned and looked out the glass patio doors that separated our lounge room from the leafy, lazily dappled sidewalks of Clarence Street. I decided it was probably a very good time for me to read this book.
Everyday magic
There's no doubt that Tanya and I regularly look for signs and magic in our everyday lives, trying to work out the meaning of why this happened versus that, what we are 'meant' to bring to someone's life, what they are 'meant' to bring to us. "Am I following the spiritual clues correctly, am I on the right path?"
We are not alone, a lot of our friends think this way too - and as I have made my way through story after story in Hopcke's book over the last week or so, its pretty clear that this 'magical thinking' is not the preserve of New Age crystal gazers or Calvinist determinists, but something close to a basic human instinct - a version of the 'religious' impulse that William James so rigorously described and defended in his brave psycho-philosophical treatise 'The Varieties of Religious Experience'. Synchronicities - defined as 'meaningful coincidences' - hold powerful sway over our hearts and minds precisely because they suggest there is more out there than is dreamt of in Western survivalist/ rationalist philosophy. And we need to believe that: well, at least T and I do for sure.
For example when T and I first decided our destinies were intertwined, and we finished off our Jilted Brides album in a frenzied few weeks in January 2008 as a kind of offering to the cosmos, something that might act as a passport to a better future, I found (through coincidence of course) a highly gifted artist - Kuba Fiedorowicz - to create the artwork for the CD we had produced. Neither Tanya nor I had met Kuba until well after 'Larceny of Love' had been finished. Kuba listened to the music, looked at photos of us, then told us he had an image we 'might be interested in'. Several months earlier, he had painted a picture, a semi-medieval, mystical face of a full lipped, beautiful blonde bride. Then for some reason, a few weeks after that, he had added a second bride, a thinner faced woman with long reddish hair. T and I looked at the painting and we gasped: it was us. It seemed Kuba had seen our images and painted us as brides before we had met him, even before we had thought of ourselves as brides; even before we had got together as a musical/ creative duo. Kuba's dual bride image is now stamped on our CD, its our icon.
Now that I am once again facing an unexpected health challenge and my soul once again feels like a bunny in the headlights, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that in the last two weeks an awful lot of 'coincidences' have occurred, starting with my accidently picking up of Hopcke's book and reading my own phrases there. As they say in Pittsburgh (in another context altogether) "Here we go....!"
Synchronicity Central
A day after I got the MOFO confirmation, I was sitting on the couch of one of my oldest friends Kerry with whom I was staying; Kerry and I are very close, like the sister I never had. She slammed the front door, and walked into the lounge, having just visited the doctors to see what the mysterious pains in her pelvis were that had started around the same time as mine (ie a few weeks ago). She told me that she too had fibroids; not a single super-sized womb eater like mine, but a malevolent swarm: "dozens of them - Its a jungle in there!". I stood up and we hugged each other. I'd had a feeling that she was (freakily) suffering from exactly the same problem as me. We laughed ruefully in disbelief. "Well, " I said. "At least that means we can help each other through this journey together."
"Yes possum", she sighed. Then with her usual great sense of humor and resilience added. "Its FTF mate: Fight The Fibroid. We've got our own club!"
One of Hopcke's descriptions of synchronicities is when one unrelated event after another seems to reinforce a message or theme: the fact that I now had a buddy to share the research and medical system navigation was the first sign that dealing with a serious health problem was not going to be as traumatic as it could have been. The second signs were the ease and swiftness with which I was able to get tests and see specialists for advice - to the astonishment of my doctor, Jeff, who was sure I would be waiting weeks to see anyone at all, let alone get any treatment. It was Jeff's certainty, based on the experience of other patients, that I'd be stuck in Australia for months unless I could afford treatment in the private hospital system that got me feeling like Job: a petulant God was asking me to sacrifice my greatest object of value, my first-born - my vintage Roland System 700 synthesizer - to pay for my health and ticket back to America!
Ten days ago, however, it became clear that Old Testament testing and judgement was not to be visited upon me just yet. A gynecologist was quickly found and visited (her receptionist cried: "You've got the same birthday as me - what a coincidence!").
By last Tuesday I was sitting in the office of the head interventional radiologist at The Alfred, one of our best public hospitals. I'd called on the Friday to get advice and here I was three days later being assessed. He convinced me that a procedure called uterine fibroid embolisation was definitely worth trying, because it would probably alleviate my symptoms by shrinking MOFO to a less megalithic shape, and it was a "low intervention" procedure: in and out of hospital in 24 hours, about 10 days recovery. The alternative was major surgery - hysterectomy or myectomy. "You don't want to go there unless you absolutely have to, they are serious procedures of last resort." After asking me with some surprise "Why do you have to rush back to Pittsburgh?", he finally picked up the phone and said "Well, let's see what we can do. What about doing the procedure next week?". My heart leapt - so soon!! And in the public hospital (i.e. free healthcare) system! As we left the office, he grinned at me through his handsome salt and pepper beard with easy Australian humor: "I hope next Tuesday is soon enough for ya?". It certainly was!
The last few days have been a coincidence pandemic.
On Wednesday I am driving down to meet my old pal Tim Patterson for lunch - Tim ( a film editor) and I last worked together when I did some remixes for 'The Secret': the production team for this international 'power of attraction' movement is based in Melbourne, and Rhonda Byrne, its guru, is an Aussie chick, with a background in TV advertising. On my way to lunch, in a kind of daze, I suddenly thought: 'Hey, I should be alert to synchronicities'. No sooner had I thought this, than I looked up and saw a truck in front of me sporting a sticker with the company name of "Patterson". When I got to the restaurant, I waited for a long time but Tim did not show. I sipped my wine and went into a reverie again: I started to think about whether I should talk about Tanya having some precognitive dreams in the next blog. No sooner had this thought entered my mind, than a young woman at the table next to me started to tell her dining companion about a psychic lady a mutual friend of theirs had seen last year: "She made all these predictions about her having a baby, the size of it, hair color, and everything, and she wasn't even pregnant! But you know, within a year, it all came true!"
I got up (Tim did not show), drove back to the studio and started writing a piece about mental illness and bi-polar in particular. The last book I read before I left Pittsburgh was a memoir called 'Scattershot' by David Lovelace who was not only bi-polar himself but who came from a family where everyone (except his sister) had turned out to be bi-polar too. In his at once absorbing, horrifying and exhilarating account of life as a 'manic depressive', he briefly sites statistics that 'about 1% of the population' is clinically bi-polar. That statistic jumped out at me as implausabile, as I count amongst my current and former close friends, about half a dozen people so diagnosed. I started to jot down some notes about that, and also how some mental illness bleeds in and out of psychic phenonema and mystical experience. Then I hopped on a tram going down Lygon St into the city, and met a former work colleague for dinner. After I rattled off my two minute pot-boiler digest of my American adventures to date, we turned to her situation. She started by explaining that her holiday house investment had gone pear-shaped recently due to the fact that her husband's brother, one of their coinvestors, was bi-polar, and he had gone off his medication and was starting to turn their lives upside down with a prolonged manic episode...
Finally last night, holed up in my studio/bedroom, I was frantically trying to finish off some music for the Grandview Scenic Byway Park films that Tanya and I were working on in Pittsburgh. For one section, I pillaged some of my back catalogue, an old funky acid track called 'Authority Over the Fish' which I had not thought of, let alone listened to, for years: but it seemed to fit a particular action sequence very well. After I had finished editing it, I saw my Gmail blinking. I had been sent a message via Facebook. A friend of Tanya's who I didn't know, had befriended me, and part of his introductory message was a fond reminiscence of '90s Australian techno-acid favorites, including a track he'd heard on the radio a few times and taped it because it had this wicked psycho-acid bass line, brass stabs and funny sample about someone having authority over the fish....
Tomorrow I go in for a procedure that may or may not help me get better, and get me back to America. One of the most frequent ways I seek consolation and guidance is by laying out Tarot spreads, or flipping over other kinds of divination cards - most often alone in my room, intensely wanting some kind of conversation with my destiny, with the Great Whatever. T makes me feel good by flattering me on my knack with the cards; certainly since the three years that I have began studying and consulting them seriously, and periodically recording results, I have managed to give myself (and others) goosebumps with the seeming accuracy of what falls in front of me - and not just 'wishful thinking' at all, but warning messages which eerily come to pass. So tonight, as a way to finish this blog on synchronicity, what could be more appropriate than my asking the Tarot about the outcome of my operation? So, once again, here we go...
'Page of Wands'; Meanings: new beginnings on a creative level, ideas still forming but with much potential; a message of a new things to come; great promise and hope...
*phew*
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Melbourne (Part1): Twists of fate
by Nicole Skeltys
Twists of fate
Tanya and I have been back in Australia for just over a week now. And in that short space of time, I have got some news which made me realize that my life over the last 2 years has actually turned into a series of novelistic cliff-hangers. My return to Pittsburgh - which was initially planned to be in 4-5 weeks time - is now uncertain.
Two days before we left for Australia, The Jilted Brides had our debut Pittsburgh gig and CD launch at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. It was a splendid night. Richard Parsakian dressed the band out of his stylish retro clothes collection and we could have been on Top of the Pops in 1969. There was a good crowd, and the band played extremely well. After the show, there was much positive feedback, people bought CDs and even asked us to autograph them. T, Scott and I came back to our Lawrenceville boudoir late that night on a high, cracked champagne and had a mini-party in Tanya's attic bedroom long into the night.
The first twist of fate happened the day after the gig. When I popped the question to our brilliant new backing band ie are we now all ready to move on to even bigger and better gigs? the answer was well, actually, no. Our drummer, guitarist and bassist all emailed me one by one saying they have other creative and professional priorities. That was it - one great performance that will never be repeated! Its always hard keeping a band together, harder than most 'blended families' I imagine...
On Sunday 16 we boarded the first of five flights that would, two days later, deposit us in Melbourne. From Pittsburgh to Denver, Denver to Vancouver, Vancouver to Taipei, Taipei to Sydney, Sydney to Melbourne, my mind circled two preoccupations like a demented vulture - how to make money from music in Pittsburgh, what was the 'Big Idea' that would keep The Jilted Brides going and help us prosper? And, more disturbingly, what was going on with my health - I had been in more or less constant pain for three weeks, there was something wrong with my stomache and it felt suspiciously like there was a growth. At the back of my mind I knew the first two years after a breast cancer diagnosis are the highest risk for metastases (tumors) to appear anywhere in the body.
At Taipei airport, T and I tossed around many business ideas - some whacky, some not so whacky. Suddenly, just as the boarding call came for our flight to Sydney, we hit upon it - we actually hit upon The Idea. The more we talked about it, the more excited we got, we thought 'yes! this might just work, this could combine a lot of objectives, spiritual and material!'. More of the 'Big Idea' in a later post, but it felt good to walk out of the departure lounge onto the China Airlines plane with a vision to pursue, a creative way to perhaps make a living when we got back to the USA.
If I got back.
Make-up sex and Brunswick revisited
As the Qantas plane dropped below the cloudline and began its descent into Melbourne, you could see the thick pall of smoke haze that hung over the city and the surrounding north-east countryside. Less than two weeks earlier, super-hot temperatures (47 degrees celsius/ 116 degrees fahrenheit) had combined with chronic drought conditions (or more precisely, global warming conditions) and galeforce windspeeds (up to 125km an hour) to create a firey holocaust - massive tracts of bush, and entire towns were incinerated within hours. And most horrificly, at least 209 people died, many as they tried to escape in their cars but were engulfed by the racing flames.
Despite this sombre context, we were nevertheless joyful to return. My dear old friend Aaron picked us up from the airport and took us back to our old house in East Brunswick, where he treated us to beer, wine and Indian take-away as we collapsed into the beaten up old sofa onto the front porch. My old flatties Roland and Hiroko welcomed us home, and I met the new couple that had just moved into my old bedroom. I noted with great pride that the little backyard vegie patch I had started all those years ago had, under the loving attentions of Roland and Hiroko, doubled in size over the last 9 months, and even the front yard now had been replaced by a permaculture garden. Pipes from the roof had been extended to the ground to ensure the (increasingly scarce) rainwater reached the plants and trees. Australians are famous for being obsessed with their backyards, and I realized how much I missed that connection to earth, the appreciation of fresh food pulled from your own garden.
Tanya moved back into my former backyard bungalow studio where we had spent the previous summer sweating, swelling and panting in the heat, recording our debut CD 'Larceny of Love' which is what we had launched at the Andy Warhol museum just before we left. I bunked down with one of my dearest, oldest friends Kerry, and her park ranger husband Chris, at their flat not far away in West Brunswick. The plan was for Tanya to spend a week sorting through and getting rid of the rest of her possessions (either selling them, shipping them up to her mother's house in Terrigal - just north of Sydney - or simply giving them away), then she was to head up to see her mum and visit her old pals in Sydney before flying back to Pittsburgh a couple of weeks later. Upon her departure from Melbourne, I was to move back into the studio to work out what to do with my remaining stuff, which mostly consisted of my beloved old synthesizers and recording equipment.
While T complained about the heat, which she was really feeling after chilly Pittsburgh, I found myself falling in love with Melbourne again in exactly the same way that you see the very best in your former lovers shortly after you've broken up with them. It was like make-up sex, only with a metropolis. I wandered down Sydney Rd, Brunswick and marveled once again at the abundance of fresh, delicious, cheap cuisine of so many ethnicities. Melbourne is one of the gourmet capitals of the world, if not the global food capital. Its actually hard to get a bad meal in inner Melbourne: even the local pubs have menu items like 'pan-fried zucchini flowers' or 'duck wontons with harissa and wild rice'. Before I had left, I had felt the cloudless blue skies and searing heat sapping my energy in the same way they were sucking out any moisture from our scraggy, rock hard lawn. Now I beamed up at the sun (rarely seen during the Pittsburgh winter) and relished the thought of getting a tan. I could even walk into a bar - any old bar - and order a single glass of champagne, my drink of choice, something I had not been able to do at any bar T and I had patronized during our trip through the USA (you could sometimes order a bottle, but that was beyond my capacity, notwithstanding Australians' notorious reputation for alcohol guzzling.)
But most of all, my spirits lifted because I was back with my network of buddies again. As both T and I had never married, nor bred, all our emotional investment over the years had gone into creating ersatz families from our friends. While most of T's friends were in Sydney, mine were in Melbourne. As I started the process of catching up with everyone, I started to feel stronger, more myself again. I found myself sitting on the toilet and staring at Hiroko's motivational notes: "Do not always push the moment away! Do not always push love away!" as well as the household injunctions to be eco-conscious and save precious water: "If its yellow, let it mellow; if its brown, flush it down!" and I wondered, with a pang, if I could find like-minded souls like this in Pittsburgh. Idealists with a sense of humor, eco-activitists who loved to have fun, down to earth visionaries, spiritual trippers with big hearts.
Giant fibroids and rare, analogue synthesizers
As T frantically raced against time sorting through all her remaining possessions, I embarked on a week of nail-biting medical tests. I was prodded and poked up both ends (gastroscopy, colonoscopy), had my boobs squeezed flat (mammogram) and had my uterus zapped by an ultrasound. To my enormous relief, by the time last Friday came around, I had been given the all-clear from cancer again - reprieved again from any threat of imminent demise. But the news was not all good.
I sat opposite my doctor Jeff, a handsome, ridiculously healthy looking man my age, who was progressive by any medical standards (he was also a naturopath) and political standards (I found out during the last Federal election campaign that he was also a member of The Greens and from then on we spent half our consultations discussing my health and the other half whining about ALP and Coalition policy failures). Jeff looked up from the ultrasound report and announced that I had "a giant fibroid". In fact, it was "the biggest fibroid I have ever seen. It takes up your entire uterus".
I stared at him. "What does that mean?" I asked, now suddenly a little short of breath. "I mean, how do I get rid of it?" It was a relief to know that the painful growth I was feeling was benign; but I now felt like Ripley in Alien - there was an intruder in my womb! Jeff shrugged "Well, sometimes hysterectomy."
"HYSTERECTOMY!???" I just about shrieked. There was no way I was having a hysterectomy. "OK, OK!" Jeff leant over to his computer and started typing out a referral to a gynecologist. "Well, we won't send you to any of the old male gynos then. The old guys like doing hysterectomies you know. When did you say you have to return to the States?" When I explained that I needed to be back in Pittsburgh in 5 weeks time, to finish off a film project we had started, Jeff looked grim. "You'd be lucky to see a gynecologist in less than 4 weeks. And as for surgery, well forget about the public hospital system, you'd be waiting for months." But the angels had not entirely scampered off - after several phone calls, we found - incredibly - a female gyno who could see me within a few days.
That afternoon, I wandered back to Clarence St and sat in the lounge room slumped in front of my computer trying to do some paperwork, but full of foreboding. If I had to have urgent elective surgery at a private hospital, that could cost thousands. Kerry and Chris had very kindly sold my car for me a few weeks earlier; so I now had only one possession of any serious value left, and that was a rare, analogue synthesizer from the late '70s - the Roland System 700, which was my pride and joy. I googled it and sure enough, it was worth a pretty penny.
Tanya came in from the studio, leaned against the kitchen counter and tried to cheer me up. I said, putting on a brave face: "You know, if I have to I can always sell my System 700, it would fetch a few grand." Tanya looked at me with surprise and compassion; I suspect she heard the catch in my voice. When I had looked up the machine on the web earlier that afternoon, one entry had really stuck in my mind. A vintage synth site had described the System 700 thus: "This extremely rare machine is quite possibly the best synthesizer ever built." And I knew then I couldn't do it. I felt as loyal to that bunch of modules, circuits and wires as if the System 700 (or Seth as I called him) was my own flesh and blood. Giant fibroid or no giant fibroid, Seth was staying with me.
This afternoon I headed off with Natasha, Robert and his son James to check out the Sydney Road street party and Brunswick Music Festival. Melbournians are addicted to festivals, there is one happening somewhere just about every weekend. This was the big one for Brunswick. We pushed past the dreadlocked men, the veiled women, the overexcited kids, terrible middle-aged punk bands and multi-ethinic world music ensembles. We gnawed on satay and drank middle eastern soup. Tash and I finally ended up at my local pub, The Lomond, nodding and giggling to a ukulele blues band. I'm hitting the sack now, back in my Clarence St studio which Tanya vacated a couple of nights ago, surrounded by piles of boxes, cables and gizmos. And tomorrow I see the 'gyno', after which I guess a new chapter awaits.
Twists of fate
Tanya and I have been back in Australia for just over a week now. And in that short space of time, I have got some news which made me realize that my life over the last 2 years has actually turned into a series of novelistic cliff-hangers. My return to Pittsburgh - which was initially planned to be in 4-5 weeks time - is now uncertain.
Two days before we left for Australia, The Jilted Brides had our debut Pittsburgh gig and CD launch at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. It was a splendid night. Richard Parsakian dressed the band out of his stylish retro clothes collection and we could have been on Top of the Pops in 1969. There was a good crowd, and the band played extremely well. After the show, there was much positive feedback, people bought CDs and even asked us to autograph them. T, Scott and I came back to our Lawrenceville boudoir late that night on a high, cracked champagne and had a mini-party in Tanya's attic bedroom long into the night.
The first twist of fate happened the day after the gig. When I popped the question to our brilliant new backing band ie are we now all ready to move on to even bigger and better gigs? the answer was well, actually, no. Our drummer, guitarist and bassist all emailed me one by one saying they have other creative and professional priorities. That was it - one great performance that will never be repeated! Its always hard keeping a band together, harder than most 'blended families' I imagine...
On Sunday 16 we boarded the first of five flights that would, two days later, deposit us in Melbourne. From Pittsburgh to Denver, Denver to Vancouver, Vancouver to Taipei, Taipei to Sydney, Sydney to Melbourne, my mind circled two preoccupations like a demented vulture - how to make money from music in Pittsburgh, what was the 'Big Idea' that would keep The Jilted Brides going and help us prosper? And, more disturbingly, what was going on with my health - I had been in more or less constant pain for three weeks, there was something wrong with my stomache and it felt suspiciously like there was a growth. At the back of my mind I knew the first two years after a breast cancer diagnosis are the highest risk for metastases (tumors) to appear anywhere in the body.
At Taipei airport, T and I tossed around many business ideas - some whacky, some not so whacky. Suddenly, just as the boarding call came for our flight to Sydney, we hit upon it - we actually hit upon The Idea. The more we talked about it, the more excited we got, we thought 'yes! this might just work, this could combine a lot of objectives, spiritual and material!'. More of the 'Big Idea' in a later post, but it felt good to walk out of the departure lounge onto the China Airlines plane with a vision to pursue, a creative way to perhaps make a living when we got back to the USA.
If I got back.
Make-up sex and Brunswick revisited
As the Qantas plane dropped below the cloudline and began its descent into Melbourne, you could see the thick pall of smoke haze that hung over the city and the surrounding north-east countryside. Less than two weeks earlier, super-hot temperatures (47 degrees celsius/ 116 degrees fahrenheit) had combined with chronic drought conditions (or more precisely, global warming conditions) and galeforce windspeeds (up to 125km an hour) to create a firey holocaust - massive tracts of bush, and entire towns were incinerated within hours. And most horrificly, at least 209 people died, many as they tried to escape in their cars but were engulfed by the racing flames.
Despite this sombre context, we were nevertheless joyful to return. My dear old friend Aaron picked us up from the airport and took us back to our old house in East Brunswick, where he treated us to beer, wine and Indian take-away as we collapsed into the beaten up old sofa onto the front porch. My old flatties Roland and Hiroko welcomed us home, and I met the new couple that had just moved into my old bedroom. I noted with great pride that the little backyard vegie patch I had started all those years ago had, under the loving attentions of Roland and Hiroko, doubled in size over the last 9 months, and even the front yard now had been replaced by a permaculture garden. Pipes from the roof had been extended to the ground to ensure the (increasingly scarce) rainwater reached the plants and trees. Australians are famous for being obsessed with their backyards, and I realized how much I missed that connection to earth, the appreciation of fresh food pulled from your own garden.
Tanya moved back into my former backyard bungalow studio where we had spent the previous summer sweating, swelling and panting in the heat, recording our debut CD 'Larceny of Love' which is what we had launched at the Andy Warhol museum just before we left. I bunked down with one of my dearest, oldest friends Kerry, and her park ranger husband Chris, at their flat not far away in West Brunswick. The plan was for Tanya to spend a week sorting through and getting rid of the rest of her possessions (either selling them, shipping them up to her mother's house in Terrigal - just north of Sydney - or simply giving them away), then she was to head up to see her mum and visit her old pals in Sydney before flying back to Pittsburgh a couple of weeks later. Upon her departure from Melbourne, I was to move back into the studio to work out what to do with my remaining stuff, which mostly consisted of my beloved old synthesizers and recording equipment.
While T complained about the heat, which she was really feeling after chilly Pittsburgh, I found myself falling in love with Melbourne again in exactly the same way that you see the very best in your former lovers shortly after you've broken up with them. It was like make-up sex, only with a metropolis. I wandered down Sydney Rd, Brunswick and marveled once again at the abundance of fresh, delicious, cheap cuisine of so many ethnicities. Melbourne is one of the gourmet capitals of the world, if not the global food capital. Its actually hard to get a bad meal in inner Melbourne: even the local pubs have menu items like 'pan-fried zucchini flowers' or 'duck wontons with harissa and wild rice'. Before I had left, I had felt the cloudless blue skies and searing heat sapping my energy in the same way they were sucking out any moisture from our scraggy, rock hard lawn. Now I beamed up at the sun (rarely seen during the Pittsburgh winter) and relished the thought of getting a tan. I could even walk into a bar - any old bar - and order a single glass of champagne, my drink of choice, something I had not been able to do at any bar T and I had patronized during our trip through the USA (you could sometimes order a bottle, but that was beyond my capacity, notwithstanding Australians' notorious reputation for alcohol guzzling.)
But most of all, my spirits lifted because I was back with my network of buddies again. As both T and I had never married, nor bred, all our emotional investment over the years had gone into creating ersatz families from our friends. While most of T's friends were in Sydney, mine were in Melbourne. As I started the process of catching up with everyone, I started to feel stronger, more myself again. I found myself sitting on the toilet and staring at Hiroko's motivational notes: "Do not always push the moment away! Do not always push love away!" as well as the household injunctions to be eco-conscious and save precious water: "If its yellow, let it mellow; if its brown, flush it down!" and I wondered, with a pang, if I could find like-minded souls like this in Pittsburgh. Idealists with a sense of humor, eco-activitists who loved to have fun, down to earth visionaries, spiritual trippers with big hearts.
Giant fibroids and rare, analogue synthesizers
As T frantically raced against time sorting through all her remaining possessions, I embarked on a week of nail-biting medical tests. I was prodded and poked up both ends (gastroscopy, colonoscopy), had my boobs squeezed flat (mammogram) and had my uterus zapped by an ultrasound. To my enormous relief, by the time last Friday came around, I had been given the all-clear from cancer again - reprieved again from any threat of imminent demise. But the news was not all good.
I sat opposite my doctor Jeff, a handsome, ridiculously healthy looking man my age, who was progressive by any medical standards (he was also a naturopath) and political standards (I found out during the last Federal election campaign that he was also a member of The Greens and from then on we spent half our consultations discussing my health and the other half whining about ALP and Coalition policy failures). Jeff looked up from the ultrasound report and announced that I had "a giant fibroid". In fact, it was "the biggest fibroid I have ever seen. It takes up your entire uterus".
I stared at him. "What does that mean?" I asked, now suddenly a little short of breath. "I mean, how do I get rid of it?" It was a relief to know that the painful growth I was feeling was benign; but I now felt like Ripley in Alien - there was an intruder in my womb! Jeff shrugged "Well, sometimes hysterectomy."
"HYSTERECTOMY!???" I just about shrieked. There was no way I was having a hysterectomy. "OK, OK!" Jeff leant over to his computer and started typing out a referral to a gynecologist. "Well, we won't send you to any of the old male gynos then. The old guys like doing hysterectomies you know. When did you say you have to return to the States?" When I explained that I needed to be back in Pittsburgh in 5 weeks time, to finish off a film project we had started, Jeff looked grim. "You'd be lucky to see a gynecologist in less than 4 weeks. And as for surgery, well forget about the public hospital system, you'd be waiting for months." But the angels had not entirely scampered off - after several phone calls, we found - incredibly - a female gyno who could see me within a few days.
That afternoon, I wandered back to Clarence St and sat in the lounge room slumped in front of my computer trying to do some paperwork, but full of foreboding. If I had to have urgent elective surgery at a private hospital, that could cost thousands. Kerry and Chris had very kindly sold my car for me a few weeks earlier; so I now had only one possession of any serious value left, and that was a rare, analogue synthesizer from the late '70s - the Roland System 700, which was my pride and joy. I googled it and sure enough, it was worth a pretty penny.
Tanya came in from the studio, leaned against the kitchen counter and tried to cheer me up. I said, putting on a brave face: "You know, if I have to I can always sell my System 700, it would fetch a few grand." Tanya looked at me with surprise and compassion; I suspect she heard the catch in my voice. When I had looked up the machine on the web earlier that afternoon, one entry had really stuck in my mind. A vintage synth site had described the System 700 thus: "This extremely rare machine is quite possibly the best synthesizer ever built." And I knew then I couldn't do it. I felt as loyal to that bunch of modules, circuits and wires as if the System 700 (or Seth as I called him) was my own flesh and blood. Giant fibroid or no giant fibroid, Seth was staying with me.
This afternoon I headed off with Natasha, Robert and his son James to check out the Sydney Road street party and Brunswick Music Festival. Melbournians are addicted to festivals, there is one happening somewhere just about every weekend. This was the big one for Brunswick. We pushed past the dreadlocked men, the veiled women, the overexcited kids, terrible middle-aged punk bands and multi-ethinic world music ensembles. We gnawed on satay and drank middle eastern soup. Tash and I finally ended up at my local pub, The Lomond, nodding and giggling to a ukulele blues band. I'm hitting the sack now, back in my Clarence St studio which Tanya vacated a couple of nights ago, surrounded by piles of boxes, cables and gizmos. And tomorrow I see the 'gyno', after which I guess a new chapter awaits.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Pittsburgh (Part 3): Waiting for the net
by Nicole Skeltys
There is a Zen saying: "Leap and the net will appear".
That was the spiritual justification T and I used to sell most of our worldly possessions in early 2008 and take off to the US with a tiny budget, almost no US contacts and (in my case) uncertain health. The hope and expectation that if we just followed our instincts and put our faith in strangers in a strange land, our lives - which had reached personal and artistic deadends in Australia - would turn around. Now, 10 months after touching down in Vancouver and embarking on our North American adventures, there is no doubt that is exactly what has happened. And the spate of good fortune (or spiritual cuddles, depending on your point of view) that followed us on the road has, since we reached Pittsburgh in October last year, developed into the kind of spectacularly lucky streak that would get you thrown out of a casino in Vegas.
As I write this, The Jilted Brides are preparing for our debut Pittsburgh gig and CD launch on 13 February (Valentine's Day weekend). Thanks to the generosity and flamboyant vision of Richard Parsakian - one of Pittsburgh's arts community movers and shakers - our launch is taking place at The Andy Warhol Museum, one of the most spectacular venues in town, as part of an AIDS Task Force benefit. And thanks to the generosity and enthusiasm of Charlie Humphrey, another formidable force in the Pittsburgh arts scene, we actually have a CD to launch - courtesy of his little label, Uh Oh Music. Our new band - Al Vish (drums), David Wallace (guitar), Ryan McMasters (bass) - are extraordinarily talented musicians and lovely people to boot. We rehearse in Al's studio which just happens to be down the road from where Tanya and I live in Lawrenceville. As we step up rehearsals and media promotion in the lead up to the gig, I reflect upon where I was 12 months ago and I have to say, things are looking up.
Our first (and only) gig in Australia was in April 2008 at Melbourne's Glitch club and cinema, only a couple of weeks before we took off to play at one of Canada's biggest festivals in Vancouver. On the whole, I think its fair to say, the gig "went bung" (an endearing Australian expression meaning something screwed up). The mix wasn't great and our nerves mercilessly attacked our vocal chords in a quivering battle that lasted all night. Nevertheless, one audience member enthused later that Tanya reminded her of Janis Joplin, and someone else pointed at my keyboard and said Pink Floyd. At each subsequent performance in the States our sound has improved and our new band now has such a powerful psychedelic sound, we are expecting our Pittsburgh debut will be our best gig yet.
At the end of the Melbourne gig, we played one of the hymns from 'Larceny of Love' called Darkness/Light, while Tanya's tripped out montage of space flight and planet footage filled the screen behind us. I wrote an incantation which we read over the deep electronic drones and angelic voices of the track. I reproduce it here, as it reveals the state of mind I was in just before I left Australia.
Incantation to Darkness/Light
If I do not make it to the other side of today
I was glad to meet you anyway
Though I was more alone when we parted ways
I was glad to meet you anyway
I don’t know my future, I just know I cannot stay
This is a prayer for the highway
I am telling you this because
I am the Broadcast
I hear the voices singing across time
Even those voices that rang in ancient times
I can still hear them
Listen to me because I am stronger than what you see around you
It is because each night I wander back
Marvel without end at how I can be
I tell you turn your mind to wonder
Be a stranger to Existence
And you will see what I see
I tell you every thought and action creates every hour
And every heart opened is a question answered
My feelings, you see
They are like the finest lace ever woven
And my mind, you see
Is the finest hourglass ever fashioned
Truly, you can see the whole of history gleaming there
If you lean close enough
I can pull away from this flypaper without any effort
I fly up and float around and around the room
Elated with release
Peacefully spiralling upwards and upwards
I fly straight to the window and crawl all around it
Trying to sense the opening, the crack
Because You are outside
And I can feel Your breeze
A great murmuring filled our ears
Of wind in meadows and ocean breeze
The purring sands
And the fire on leaves
And we ask forgiveness from all we see
And the rivers and mountains and sea
Thank us endlessly
So we bless and thank you for this:
That you’ve shared with us a night of bliss
We bless each marriage of Darkness and Light
And God speed every Jilted Bride.
I like to think these two jilted brides have been sped along the highway by 'The Great Whatever' and much of the net is starting to become visible. T is now teaching in the film faculty at Point Park University, developing video projections for Squonk Opera (an innovative multimedia troupe based in Pittsburgh) and together we are working on a series of promotional films for one of Pittsburgh's great regional parks - The Grandview Scenic Byway Park on Mt Washington - which is enormous fun. I was recently granted a 3 year artist's working visa - not easy to get, but I was apparently able to convince US immigration I was an "extraordinary alien" despite having no experience with inserting anal probes into earthlings or creating crop circles using lasers from spaceships hovering several miles in the air.
But still, I feel the whistling of air around my ears, I am still in a kind of freefall. There is currently not enough income coming in to survive and just as much uncertainty as ever as to how that situation can be turned around. Starting again in a new town - even one as absurdly friendly, supportive and beautiful as Pittsburgh - is tough, with no friends to call up, hang out with. Faith, optimism and the benevolence of the Great Whatever will continue to be required to pull through the next few months.
Forty eight hours after our Warhol performance, T and I board the plane back to Australia for a few weeks to wind up our affairs and get our various bodily parts medically examined courtesy of our excellent universal healthcare system - I am in particular overdue for an oncology check-up and mammogram. And I am also most anxious to spend time with my dear friends and adopted parents Graeme and Eugenie - Graeme's condition after his massive stroke has hardly improved. It will certainly be a moving experience to go back home after so much as happened, and then to say good-bye again.
But between now and then there is much to do - costumes to select from Richard's Eon shop in Shadyside, hair-dos and false eyelashes to discuss with our make-up artist, more invitations to send out, and many more hours rehearsing under the fairylights and '60s swirly wall carpets of Al's studio. We are certainly anxious to sound and look as good as we possibly can, make a good impression in our adopted home. Hopefully the audience will be in a particularly good mood thanks to the Steeler's superbowl win on Sunday (you could have been forgiven for thinking world war two had just ended, such was the hysterical jubilation in the streets all night!). And of course, we will be playing on Valentines day weekend - our heart-ache ballads will make happy lovers relieved that all those woes are now behind them (at least for the time being) and for the single and lonely there is always the hope, of course, that a jilted bride or groom might catch their eye and the greatest safety net of all - the net of love - might magically appear by the end of the night.
There is a Zen saying: "Leap and the net will appear".
That was the spiritual justification T and I used to sell most of our worldly possessions in early 2008 and take off to the US with a tiny budget, almost no US contacts and (in my case) uncertain health. The hope and expectation that if we just followed our instincts and put our faith in strangers in a strange land, our lives - which had reached personal and artistic deadends in Australia - would turn around. Now, 10 months after touching down in Vancouver and embarking on our North American adventures, there is no doubt that is exactly what has happened. And the spate of good fortune (or spiritual cuddles, depending on your point of view) that followed us on the road has, since we reached Pittsburgh in October last year, developed into the kind of spectacularly lucky streak that would get you thrown out of a casino in Vegas.
As I write this, The Jilted Brides are preparing for our debut Pittsburgh gig and CD launch on 13 February (Valentine's Day weekend). Thanks to the generosity and flamboyant vision of Richard Parsakian - one of Pittsburgh's arts community movers and shakers - our launch is taking place at The Andy Warhol Museum, one of the most spectacular venues in town, as part of an AIDS Task Force benefit. And thanks to the generosity and enthusiasm of Charlie Humphrey, another formidable force in the Pittsburgh arts scene, we actually have a CD to launch - courtesy of his little label, Uh Oh Music. Our new band - Al Vish (drums), David Wallace (guitar), Ryan McMasters (bass) - are extraordinarily talented musicians and lovely people to boot. We rehearse in Al's studio which just happens to be down the road from where Tanya and I live in Lawrenceville. As we step up rehearsals and media promotion in the lead up to the gig, I reflect upon where I was 12 months ago and I have to say, things are looking up.
Our first (and only) gig in Australia was in April 2008 at Melbourne's Glitch club and cinema, only a couple of weeks before we took off to play at one of Canada's biggest festivals in Vancouver. On the whole, I think its fair to say, the gig "went bung" (an endearing Australian expression meaning something screwed up). The mix wasn't great and our nerves mercilessly attacked our vocal chords in a quivering battle that lasted all night. Nevertheless, one audience member enthused later that Tanya reminded her of Janis Joplin, and someone else pointed at my keyboard and said Pink Floyd. At each subsequent performance in the States our sound has improved and our new band now has such a powerful psychedelic sound, we are expecting our Pittsburgh debut will be our best gig yet.
At the end of the Melbourne gig, we played one of the hymns from 'Larceny of Love' called Darkness/Light, while Tanya's tripped out montage of space flight and planet footage filled the screen behind us. I wrote an incantation which we read over the deep electronic drones and angelic voices of the track. I reproduce it here, as it reveals the state of mind I was in just before I left Australia.
Incantation to Darkness/Light
If I do not make it to the other side of today
I was glad to meet you anyway
Though I was more alone when we parted ways
I was glad to meet you anyway
I don’t know my future, I just know I cannot stay
This is a prayer for the highway
I am telling you this because
I am the Broadcast
I hear the voices singing across time
Even those voices that rang in ancient times
I can still hear them
Listen to me because I am stronger than what you see around you
It is because each night I wander back
Marvel without end at how I can be
I tell you turn your mind to wonder
Be a stranger to Existence
And you will see what I see
I tell you every thought and action creates every hour
And every heart opened is a question answered
My feelings, you see
They are like the finest lace ever woven
And my mind, you see
Is the finest hourglass ever fashioned
Truly, you can see the whole of history gleaming there
If you lean close enough
I can pull away from this flypaper without any effort
I fly up and float around and around the room
Elated with release
Peacefully spiralling upwards and upwards
I fly straight to the window and crawl all around it
Trying to sense the opening, the crack
Because You are outside
And I can feel Your breeze
A great murmuring filled our ears
Of wind in meadows and ocean breeze
The purring sands
And the fire on leaves
And we ask forgiveness from all we see
And the rivers and mountains and sea
Thank us endlessly
So we bless and thank you for this:
That you’ve shared with us a night of bliss
We bless each marriage of Darkness and Light
And God speed every Jilted Bride.
I like to think these two jilted brides have been sped along the highway by 'The Great Whatever' and much of the net is starting to become visible. T is now teaching in the film faculty at Point Park University, developing video projections for Squonk Opera (an innovative multimedia troupe based in Pittsburgh) and together we are working on a series of promotional films for one of Pittsburgh's great regional parks - The Grandview Scenic Byway Park on Mt Washington - which is enormous fun. I was recently granted a 3 year artist's working visa - not easy to get, but I was apparently able to convince US immigration I was an "extraordinary alien" despite having no experience with inserting anal probes into earthlings or creating crop circles using lasers from spaceships hovering several miles in the air.
But still, I feel the whistling of air around my ears, I am still in a kind of freefall. There is currently not enough income coming in to survive and just as much uncertainty as ever as to how that situation can be turned around. Starting again in a new town - even one as absurdly friendly, supportive and beautiful as Pittsburgh - is tough, with no friends to call up, hang out with. Faith, optimism and the benevolence of the Great Whatever will continue to be required to pull through the next few months.
Forty eight hours after our Warhol performance, T and I board the plane back to Australia for a few weeks to wind up our affairs and get our various bodily parts medically examined courtesy of our excellent universal healthcare system - I am in particular overdue for an oncology check-up and mammogram. And I am also most anxious to spend time with my dear friends and adopted parents Graeme and Eugenie - Graeme's condition after his massive stroke has hardly improved. It will certainly be a moving experience to go back home after so much as happened, and then to say good-bye again.
But between now and then there is much to do - costumes to select from Richard's Eon shop in Shadyside, hair-dos and false eyelashes to discuss with our make-up artist, more invitations to send out, and many more hours rehearsing under the fairylights and '60s swirly wall carpets of Al's studio. We are certainly anxious to sound and look as good as we possibly can, make a good impression in our adopted home. Hopefully the audience will be in a particularly good mood thanks to the Steeler's superbowl win on Sunday (you could have been forgiven for thinking world war two had just ended, such was the hysterical jubilation in the streets all night!). And of course, we will be playing on Valentines day weekend - our heart-ache ballads will make happy lovers relieved that all those woes are now behind them (at least for the time being) and for the single and lonely there is always the hope, of course, that a jilted bride or groom might catch their eye and the greatest safety net of all - the net of love - might magically appear by the end of the night.
Monday, January 5, 2009
More Montana recollections - country music lyrics
by Nicole Skeltys
Truck and cow songs
Here are some songs heard on local Montana radio, when T and I were staying at the Montana Artists Refuge in Basin in June last year:
"America Moves By Truck" - (sung with semi-religious enthusiasm over an anthemic driving country rock arrangement):
(chorus)
"America moves by truck
America moves by truck
America moves
BY TRUCK!!!"
That one from Gearjammin' Gold, an internet radio station from Great Falls in the north of the State.
Heres another great lyric line:
"There ain't a cow in Texas if I don't love you"
This latter gem from the only local ‘terrestrial’ radio station that Basin picks up - the "low power emergency" station broadcasting from Boulder, 9 miles away. It played continuous old style country music and syrupy 60s and '70s ‘easy listening’ ballads.
T and I listened to the emergency station whenever we were in the kitchen, which was often.
Late every morning, we would find ourselves staring into the fridge deciding what to do about lunch and dinner. Given the nearest grocery store was over 20 miles away, and we had no car, we approached this daily ritual of meal planning with the seriousness of survivalists. Other times I’d come and stand by the window sill, T would look up from her editing work and we’d talk about ideas. Given the kitchen was also where we washed our clothes by hand in the sink, that was another reason for me to be there rather than working in my studio. But one of the most frequent reasons for my restless journeys from the studio to the kitchen to was to reach into the fridge and fetch myself another Moose Drool, Missoula’s finest brew - to aid the creative process, or block out sucking life uncertainty, or both. All the while, semi-forgotten country hits streamed out of the very old, grease streaked boombox which sat on the counter by the sink.
Emergency country radio
The music on the emergency station was also continuous, pre-recorded, only interrupted every hour to inform listeners in a slow drawl that this is the FM frequency to tune to when you are in Jefferson County for advice on what to do in case of "an emergency".
Every now and then I found myself wondering about what kind of emergency would they have out here - has there ever been one around these parts? There are no nuclear power stations in Montana, so presumably no need to issue evacuation procedures in case of local nuclear melt-down.
So, I could only think of a national disaster, something so big it would shut down the TV stations, and maybe cut off the phone lines, and, lord forbid, even the internet. This little station then would be people's only access to the outside world. I imagined frightened families huddling round the crackling kitchen boombox, waiting to hear the fate of the nation while ancient country classics clocked one into the other, filling the room with swaying sounds of faded loves, chaffing small town morals and heartache.
I was introduced to some great music thanks to Jefferson County emergency radio. Traditional country music speaks about some of the deepest hurts you can get dealt in life, but with a kind of sincerity and unselfconscious humor that seems largely absent from the cool, modern ‘alt’ stuff.
Dark country lyrics
For example, emergency radio introduced me to Bobby Dare. Bobby Dares 1969 hit "Margies at the Lincoln Park Inn" was one of the tracks on rotation, worming into my ears at least once a day. Lincoln Park Inn has an instantly appealing and familiar melody, like your Mom might have hummed it around the house when you were a kid. But the image of desire trapped by conformity and conscience packs a wallop because it is so simply told:
"My name's in the paper where I took the boy scouts to hike
My hands're all dirty from working on my little boy's bike
The preacher came by and I talked for a minute with him
My wife's in the kitchen and Margie's at the Lincoln Park Inn
And I know why she's there I've been there before
But I made her a promise that I wouldn't cheat anymore
I tried to ignore it but I know she's in there my friend
My mind's on a number and Margie's at the Lincoln Park Inn
Next Sunday it's my turn to speak to the young people's class
They expect answers to all of the questions they ask
What would they say if I spoke of the modern day sins
And all of the Margies at all of the Lincoln Park Inns
The bike is all fixed and my little boy's in bed asleep
His little old puppy is curled in a ball at my feet
My wife's baking cookies to feed to the Bridge Club again
I'm almost out of cigarettes and Margie's at the Lincoln Park Inn
And I know why she's there"
Well how you can best that, lyric-wise? You just can’t. But real country music could get a hell of a lot darker - Porter Wagoner’s monologues, for example, included men going mad inside “rubber rooms’ and little boys being burnt to death at home while their parents whooped it up at the local dance.
Late one night as I lay on my tough little futon mattress on the wooden floor in the corner of our shared room, my consciousness changed down gears into sleep. It was passing trucking songs, dark Porter Wagoner ballads, the physical discomfort I felt from my recent ailments and emotional losses. Suddenly a deliciously provocative title for a country/gospel/trucking song popped like a jack in the box into my desultory mood. I chuckled out loud – it was a wink from the Lord I knew, daring me to record this track one day if ever got to Nashville. Here it is:
"God Kills Someone Everyday"
'I've got a hole in my gut, a scar on my breast,
A rip in my heart, a flat in my tire
Lord, what did I do to disrespect you?
Make you so mad, bring down your ire?
Well my friends they all say
You got it good, you got it good
So what if you hurt?
So you should, oh so you should
Ain't nothing so perfect, it can't be swept away
Don't you know God kills someone everyday?
Well he put us down, and he helps us walk
Puts food in our mouths and hears how we talk
All the praising and pleading, hears the screeching u-turns
The kicking at bottles that roll down the curb
The cussing and bleeding and drunk before noon
Hey, no-one can say our times come too soon
Then I felt His hand come down on my shoulder
I knew, yes I knew I was old and getting older
Theres creatures to whom I must give way
Pull over, take the exit off the cosmic highway
I still take it personal, though I hear the angels say
Don't you know God kills someone everyday?'
I can only hope I live long enough to hear that tune one day rise out of threadbare AM frequencies, float along on rusty pedal steel twangs, fill the air of a lonely Montana saloon like smoke out of a Winchester and make a trucker tap their toes:-)
Truck and cow songs
Here are some songs heard on local Montana radio, when T and I were staying at the Montana Artists Refuge in Basin in June last year:
"America Moves By Truck" - (sung with semi-religious enthusiasm over an anthemic driving country rock arrangement):
(chorus)
"America moves by truck
America moves by truck
America moves
BY TRUCK!!!"
That one from Gearjammin' Gold, an internet radio station from Great Falls in the north of the State.
Heres another great lyric line:
"There ain't a cow in Texas if I don't love you"
This latter gem from the only local ‘terrestrial’ radio station that Basin picks up - the "low power emergency" station broadcasting from Boulder, 9 miles away. It played continuous old style country music and syrupy 60s and '70s ‘easy listening’ ballads.
T and I listened to the emergency station whenever we were in the kitchen, which was often.
Late every morning, we would find ourselves staring into the fridge deciding what to do about lunch and dinner. Given the nearest grocery store was over 20 miles away, and we had no car, we approached this daily ritual of meal planning with the seriousness of survivalists. Other times I’d come and stand by the window sill, T would look up from her editing work and we’d talk about ideas. Given the kitchen was also where we washed our clothes by hand in the sink, that was another reason for me to be there rather than working in my studio. But one of the most frequent reasons for my restless journeys from the studio to the kitchen to was to reach into the fridge and fetch myself another Moose Drool, Missoula’s finest brew - to aid the creative process, or block out sucking life uncertainty, or both. All the while, semi-forgotten country hits streamed out of the very old, grease streaked boombox which sat on the counter by the sink.
Emergency country radio
The music on the emergency station was also continuous, pre-recorded, only interrupted every hour to inform listeners in a slow drawl that this is the FM frequency to tune to when you are in Jefferson County for advice on what to do in case of "an emergency".
Every now and then I found myself wondering about what kind of emergency would they have out here - has there ever been one around these parts? There are no nuclear power stations in Montana, so presumably no need to issue evacuation procedures in case of local nuclear melt-down.
So, I could only think of a national disaster, something so big it would shut down the TV stations, and maybe cut off the phone lines, and, lord forbid, even the internet. This little station then would be people's only access to the outside world. I imagined frightened families huddling round the crackling kitchen boombox, waiting to hear the fate of the nation while ancient country classics clocked one into the other, filling the room with swaying sounds of faded loves, chaffing small town morals and heartache.
I was introduced to some great music thanks to Jefferson County emergency radio. Traditional country music speaks about some of the deepest hurts you can get dealt in life, but with a kind of sincerity and unselfconscious humor that seems largely absent from the cool, modern ‘alt’ stuff.
Dark country lyrics
For example, emergency radio introduced me to Bobby Dare. Bobby Dares 1969 hit "Margies at the Lincoln Park Inn" was one of the tracks on rotation, worming into my ears at least once a day. Lincoln Park Inn has an instantly appealing and familiar melody, like your Mom might have hummed it around the house when you were a kid. But the image of desire trapped by conformity and conscience packs a wallop because it is so simply told:
"My name's in the paper where I took the boy scouts to hike
My hands're all dirty from working on my little boy's bike
The preacher came by and I talked for a minute with him
My wife's in the kitchen and Margie's at the Lincoln Park Inn
And I know why she's there I've been there before
But I made her a promise that I wouldn't cheat anymore
I tried to ignore it but I know she's in there my friend
My mind's on a number and Margie's at the Lincoln Park Inn
Next Sunday it's my turn to speak to the young people's class
They expect answers to all of the questions they ask
What would they say if I spoke of the modern day sins
And all of the Margies at all of the Lincoln Park Inns
The bike is all fixed and my little boy's in bed asleep
His little old puppy is curled in a ball at my feet
My wife's baking cookies to feed to the Bridge Club again
I'm almost out of cigarettes and Margie's at the Lincoln Park Inn
And I know why she's there"
Well how you can best that, lyric-wise? You just can’t. But real country music could get a hell of a lot darker - Porter Wagoner’s monologues, for example, included men going mad inside “rubber rooms’ and little boys being burnt to death at home while their parents whooped it up at the local dance.
Late one night as I lay on my tough little futon mattress on the wooden floor in the corner of our shared room, my consciousness changed down gears into sleep. It was passing trucking songs, dark Porter Wagoner ballads, the physical discomfort I felt from my recent ailments and emotional losses. Suddenly a deliciously provocative title for a country/gospel/trucking song popped like a jack in the box into my desultory mood. I chuckled out loud – it was a wink from the Lord I knew, daring me to record this track one day if ever got to Nashville. Here it is:
"God Kills Someone Everyday"
'I've got a hole in my gut, a scar on my breast,
A rip in my heart, a flat in my tire
Lord, what did I do to disrespect you?
Make you so mad, bring down your ire?
Well my friends they all say
You got it good, you got it good
So what if you hurt?
So you should, oh so you should
Ain't nothing so perfect, it can't be swept away
Don't you know God kills someone everyday?
Well he put us down, and he helps us walk
Puts food in our mouths and hears how we talk
All the praising and pleading, hears the screeching u-turns
The kicking at bottles that roll down the curb
The cussing and bleeding and drunk before noon
Hey, no-one can say our times come too soon
Then I felt His hand come down on my shoulder
I knew, yes I knew I was old and getting older
Theres creatures to whom I must give way
Pull over, take the exit off the cosmic highway
I still take it personal, though I hear the angels say
Don't you know God kills someone everyday?'
I can only hope I live long enough to hear that tune one day rise out of threadbare AM frequencies, float along on rusty pedal steel twangs, fill the air of a lonely Montana saloon like smoke out of a Winchester and make a trucker tap their toes:-)
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