Soundtrack

My coffee shop is literally playing the Queer as Folk soundtrack right now. They just went up four levels in my estimation.

In general, businesses of the world, what music is playing in your establishment is a thing I generally both notice and recognize and give out brownie points if it's something I love.

Ok survey question, now that I have two houses, what do I call them? Old house and new house seems unloving to old house, which is what I've been doing, valley and Wooloowin isn't quite how I think about it. House and apartment Jeremy's doing but that doesn't feel quite right either. Apartment and Queenslander maybe. Anne would name them both. Anyway saying I'm going home is becoming a little complicated in my life. Especially because I have a tendency to call wherever I'm staying home, it was sticking even with Mat and Bs house in Sydney this week. It defs happens when I'm home in Gso.

Gogol Bordello

We got there early, before the opening act started, and I started to come up on the music before it even got going. Bharath and I were talking, and I got up front like on the second row right from the start, and stayed there, with a little shifting to and fro, for the whole concert.

The opening act was this jazz funk horn group who had some really great trumpet and trombone solos and could def play their instruments. I enjoyed and started dancing of course, and then we talked more between the acts, and then they came out.

He led with wanderlust king, not the first song but like the third and I remember being really amused that there was like no fear of blowing your wad early, playing your hit such as you have them in the first half, because if any band always knows they can top themselves, it's Gogol Bordello. 

At the end of the concert they were waving and saying goodbye and they played Redemption Song. And I was thinking of the long history of songs of freedom and how Gogol is a part of it. Singing songs of freedom and how the good old days are today and tomorrow as both Gogol Bordello and the Libertines say. And then I was thinking about Marlon James in the brief history of seven killings talking about the murmur of all the sufferahs  around the world lifting up their voice. And about how I went around the world myself and nowhere anywhere do you find someone who doesn't love Marley. The way he plays in Peruvian cars and Cuban clubs. And then I started to cry while the strains of it played.

The lineup of the band was different. Of course it always is, some always going some always coming like the castle of cats. There was a new drummer (both new and old were awesome) the same bassist, who is getting visibly older but still grooving, a new female vocalist who does more real vocals but less ululating and leaping than the big brass drum girl who was there last, the bongos guy was still there, but I think he has really improved since last time I saw him, like developed. The first gig I found him a bit gimmicky or something, but now he's taking some lead vocals off Eugene, doing the bongos, some Peruvian whistling (like the whistle that summons Mailes) to replace the big brass drum girl, and some backup dancing and leaps, it's a more rounded role and I thought he did it better. There was a new lead guitarist, who was a somewhat nondescript young white guy. I admit I judged the book by its cover and dismissed him, but he had an incredible shredding guitar solo and showmanship bit that singlehandedly converted me to his cause. But the only really tragic replacement was that Yuri their accordianist and founding member was replaced by a new accordion player. And it's just not the same, Yuri was a bit the beating heart of the band, full of a certain shy sweetness that balanced the personality of the band well, and also his playing was just very vocal, really using the carrying melodic capacity of the instrument.  But I later found out he's off doing a solo tribute album or something and was a part of the hire of the new guy but still.

Upside of this is that now Sergey the violinist and Eugene Hutz are the only constants kind of left, and one cool thing about this is that it sort of elevates Sergey's status within the band. First he seemed to have his own independent fan base like when he would step up to work the crowd they would have this special cheer almost like for Eugene. And then he was also working the crowd more, he came right out into us next to the barrier and played in the crowds embrace, and was also just generally more up front, expressive, showy, where he had kept to the background a little more. It was nice to see him out of his shell, insofar as any Gogol member is ever in his shell. 

Performance wise more generally, the band was a little less high energy than the last show I saw. Don't get me wrong, these people came into my arms and so I can vouch empirically that they were drenched with sweat, but first they were doing a move where like half the band would be up front going crazy and half would be sort of in the back resting a bit. Plus from Eugene who of course has to carry all this stuff the most a bit more reliance on expansive gesture and expression than straight up leaping. Still a low energy Gogol show is a high energy anyone else show. And he did this cute move where he pretended to read a book, like story time and got from there to vocals.

Most leet moment of the show? Eugene did the thing which I've seen on YouTube videos but never experienced myself, where he put the drum in the crowd, which we all lifted as one, and then climbed atop it still singing, over the barrier into us, and then did a somersault off of it into the crowd to get down again. Even better, I was so up front and center that I was holding the drum aloft with my compatriots.  It is such a high intensity moment the kind of thing you know no one does.

They played Sally (my moment of peak insanity) and start wearing purple and the I'm a little chavo I don't even have a guitar song and thing globally fuck locally and alcohol (always a crowd pleaser). I was as always so impressed by the crowd control, we'd be taken as high as we can go, and then brought back down and then up at will. The violining was so awesome this time.

And at the end of the show the drummer threw his sticks into the crowd and I caught one right out of the air. This is literally the second time I've done this exact move at a Gogol concert. I now have a set of drumsticks from two different drummers collected years apart. It was excellent, and the stick itself had this giant chip out of it from excessive shredding.

Bharath, who I went with, did not know the band at all, but I invited him, and he said yes. I was not a good host, being right up front and leaping as I needed but he entered into it so utterly and awesomely. I would slightly turn to beam beatifically at all those around me in concert ecstasy, and there he would be, drenched with sweat and leaping too. It was a wonderful experience and wonderful to share it with him and wonderful that he shared it with me so fully.

Old me vs New me

If I could make the world as pure and strange as what I see, I'd put you in the mirror I put in front of me.

Old me was a planner, I used to be booked like two weeks in advance from any given date or experience. And if you tried to reach me, there'd be like a 24 hour turn around because I would be doing things until then. Emails phone calls etc would generally not get through. New me lives a deeply unstructured life, like people ask me what I'm doing today and I have no answer to that question. There is generally a bin of things I could do today or some day but which of those eventuates depends on my mood a lot, and I don't really know from one 15 minute interval to the next what my decision will be. It makes a lot more sense to ask me what I have done because I know the past.

Old me was super social and active, out five nights a week fairly reliably. New me goes out maybe once a month? Jeremy is still out twice a week and also those nights I tend to go home on my own instead of home with him. New me does not socially organise, where old me was the social planner of my group. And I'm calling my close friends, people I love or have known a long time, but not the more casual connections I used to socialize with at all. I also for the first time in years do not have any plan or process to bring new people into my life.

This means new me is alone a lot. Old me was alone up to one night a week but new me is alone all day every day and about three nights a week. Aficionados of old me should be impressed at my failure to have a mental breakdown under this stimulus. New me is lonely, but interestingly, not a lot more lonely than old me. I'd say the version of me who saw hundreds of people a day felt intense pangs of loneliness about half to three quarters the amount of time that the version of me who has between one and three in person human relations does.

New me is not engaged in any political activism or volunteerism for now that I think of it the first time in my adult life. And it's getting to be a break that feels longer than a transition.

New me doesn't listen to a lot of music, but is listening on an infinite loop to a lot of podcasts, news stories, editorial kind of thinking about the world in which we live.

New me is quieter. This is a change that's been happening for a long time, influenced by Jeremy, but a thing I think a lot of people close to me have managed not to notice about me, because I do still get loud and sassy and performative when I'm in public or tipsy or happy or excited. But my average is quieter, more serious, less inclined to say everything I think or know and it's a sea change I think people don't notice about me to their own peril.

But speaking of thinking, old me had this mile a minute frission mind, drawing conclusions, having ideas, synthesizing inputs and spewing out patterns theories thoughts conclusions. If you asked me what I was thinking and I said nothing I inevitably meant it's too involved and wordy to be worth explaining, or I don't think you'll be interested, or that's a part of me you don't like, or I don't think you'll understand, or there's four things and I can't sort them out right now, never really nothing. But now if I said nothing, I might really mean nothing, or not much. I don't think a lot of things anymore, and the things I do think are more hesitant, or diffident. Some of this is simple aging, a great gift of growing older is uncertainty.

But some of it is like I'm listening, hard for the voice of god. And it's told me things but they're not the kind of terribly well structured or relevant things. But I am listening to a lot of voices right now. I'm reading a lot, and I'm listening to a lot of podcasts, and I'm walking a lot, and I'm alone a lot, and I'm not talking a lot. So one thing I heard and this took a couple months could largely be summed up by that stuff I wrote about Brisbane last year, the specialness of my town and that part of my life.

And there's another thing which I don't know fully what it is yet, but is about Marlon James, and Toni Morrison, and the war between the sides of you and how you can be a slave in your heart or kill them all but neither of those things is you and the part that's you is more like the part that will jump off the cliff and fly. And then that thread is also connected to Marley and the redemption song thing and how everyone around the world loves Marley and the ecstasy of punk rock and the bands where the love is the music and sufferahs lifting up their voice and places where you can't write the ugliness because you make it too beautiful. There's a war on and it's inside you.

And there's a third thing that I know what it is even less that comes from sort of the Cuban People, which feels like it should have those capitals and salsa is life and it is everyone's responsibility to be sexy and how if you were here you would never know that you weren't good enough because there would never have been an industry of people tasked with telling you that you weren't good enough so you just wouldn't know that you were too old and too fat and not in the right clothes and not when you get right down to it very good at this there would just be do you salsa yes/no salsa. And that's related to but not the same as the way that there's just this absence a bit like stepping on a stair that isn't there of people in Africa hating your whiteness. It's a jolt but it's wrapped up in this thing where no one has time to question or undermine good things that come up cause you're not vouchsafed an oversurfeit of them or something the stuff in Africa is not right but there's something there something with the difference between a politeness culture and a friendliness culture and something about the layering of identity and language Lara/Congolese/African or Jesus I forget/Tanzanian/Swahili and the smell of the border between gentle tranquility and sudden violence and the ability to contain really diverse things in a place that is also in another way all one thing.

And there's a fourth thing I just said to Bharath yesterday about how you want to fight the real battles but there's all this petty shit and egos and factions and people stopping you. And I know I know in my heart that the solution cannot be to take these people out so then you can do what you want because it's this Hatfield McCoy thing where those people somehow keep multiplying and who even knows who started it and who's defending themselves, and then there's the other solution where you just stand there fighting the good fight and lose every time which is not fun but maybe worth it if it's valuable but then again maybe it isn't valuable. And then there's quitting which is what I'm doing right now but also does not feel like a real solution, and then there's Toney's solution, quitting institutions but not goodness and you know, acting locally, individual giving, helping your neighbors and all that stuff which does demonstrable good but then my mind and body rebels against it because it doesn't solve the Cambodia thing, the Yemeni thing, the Sudanese thing even the fucking Malawi thing hell even the Glenwood thing that we live in a walled garden where everyone with any kind of power and resources is carefully separated from people with any need so a disaster in New Orleans will raise ten times the caring and resources than the same one in Pakistan because we just will not understand that geography does not make us more and less human than each other. Ok so so none of that is a solution right but there's gotta be somewhere where people are pulling an oar and they're probably not even that hard to find but I'm not ready yet and the whole scene has something to do with power too dogs tearing at the one bone of power but I don't know how yet.

Ok so none of these make very good answers to questions like what are you doing with your life and what do you do all day and what are your plans and how long do you think it's ok for Jeremy to support you. Which are the questions I get from the world and for which I have no answers, no more answer than I did a year ago. Except maybe the answer that I'm listening, listening to god and I think he'll tell me when he's ready. But I'm not sure of that.

Nor do I think these insights are necessarily more profound than the ones I used to have when I was working full time and volunteering part time and had a full social life on the side but they're what I've got.

New me is also moved to tears super easily. I've been reading more poetry and also books and also YouTube videos. Not really sorrow tears but like moved, love and beauty and loss stuff but even where it's a really silly context anything with that sentimental feelscape and I'm there, tender and full. I don't know what that means at all yet.

Also I'm pretty sure I'm happy and content but I'm not totally sure.

Also here's another thing I'm not sure about, if the subtle avoidance in my own mind of the parts of my life and heart I cannot face and fear will hurt me are making it impossible for me to progress or be reborn. My whole process is about the connectivity of the subconscious and conscious mind so you just know what you need because you know who you are like the way magic works. But if you want to block off and hide from stuff that you are you lose access to a lot of other stuff like when I went sane and so couldn't go to my land anymore. That's possible but also possibly irrelevant and also by engaging with some of this stuff you can make it worse or just be ridiculous and I am at the core of me, ridiculous. Like prufrock right?

Ok thank you, for listening.

The Libertines

This is probably my favourite band that I have never seen in concert. It was a strange experience, intense and tense, wild and unexpected. My biggest feeling was of being out of control. I got that feeling that is what rock concerts are for of an ecstatic loss of identity but it also felt strange and dangerous this time, like no one knew what they were doing here, like you could get hurt.

So Pete Doherty comes out and starts the gig by throwing his mike stand into the crowd. Starts the gig.  I mean this is a big end of the show trash the stage finishing move, but he starts like this, just so you know what kind of gig it's going to be.

I didn't get there crazy early, and I'm kinda too old to push to the front, so I was in the back of the initial press, which was a great spot, people were still jumping up and down and having a great time, but there was like maybe a foot of space between us.  I was centered right in front of the central microphone, which was awesome for me because that was in front of Carl Barat's mic, who is my favourite member of the band.

The Libertine's music is a mix of really intense, fast paced punk rock and thoughtful alt ballads, and they used this contrast masterfully to ratchet up and down the pressure of the crowd. Like right when we were about to riot, they would take it down a notch, and when we caught our breath, they'd take it up a notch. 

It was a long set, well a regular length main set and then their encore set was like six songs long instead of one or two which made it feel like a whole second act.

And the crowd, including me of course, knew nearly all words to nearly all songs, so it was an energy that could be brought to a boil really easily.

So I'm rocking back there and they're playing some songs definitely not on my favourites list, but still great and I'm jumping and singing. A mosh pit starts up and I stay behind it a bit but decide to mosh.

A few words about mosh pits. So they've got this reputation as an out of control street brawl, where people get punched in the face and stuff.  And maybe some of them are, but this has been my experience. Generally speaking there's like a bunch of giant burly shaved head neo Nazi looking people you'd find really threatening anywhere else, and they kind of form a protective ring. And then you've got a middle section where a bunch of people, from like 3-100 including some other muscley guys and some kind of wiry punks that got stuff started and you'd all be launching yourselves at each other off balance and crazy.  And the big people on the rim sort of shove the people who launch/ fall into them back into the centre and the wiry punks launch themselves all crazy and airbourne. Yes it's a largely male environs, but I'm there and you also get some little punk rock girls who ping pong ball themselves around this.

So injury is a possibility of course. I have been elbowed in the face before, I've lost a shoe, done the rest of the mosh pit hopping, and then couldn't find it after the gig. I've never gone down but I've come really close and had to be lifted up bodily. Jem's come out with a boot print on his face before. It's a chaotic scene, you are physically out of control, and a lot of times you launch yourself or are shoved so that you would fall down if you didn't fall into someone else, and that's kind of the whole point. The mosh pit is a community experience, and while it's a violent kind of cuddle, it feels like a hug. And like when someone falls, air opens up around them right away and someone pulls them up fast fast because that's dangerous, there's a lot of boots down there. And the biggest burliest guys, the ones who could really take you out, they're kind of the den mothers of the scene, they keep a kind of line between the pit and the people just standing around it, and pick up people who are falling and don't get hurt when people launch into them. And people are a little gentler shoving a smaller less muscley person than a bigger one.

And I have heard other people talk about the kind of pits where like it's just a fist fight and you want to fuck people up but it's ok, like a fight club orgy or something, but I've never been in one like that, never seen one, or anybody doing anything like that. I have almost passed out before in crowd press more than once, but like when I half fainted on this other girl she looked around for a sec like what's up with you drunko and then when she realised I was in strife, helped get me out of the press where I'd be safe.

Also I'd say because I came up in the mid-late 90's, it was kind of past the true era of crowd surfing. It was big in the Nirvana era, and some people got dropped on their heads, there were maybe even a couple of deaths, but suffice it to say that it got big and then around my teenage years there was a real crackdown, like people would be ejected from the venue if they did it. So people still did, and I was at one gig where the guy was trying to surf away from security so they didn't eject him like the world's cutest road chase. People still did it, but it would be like one or two times during a concert, not a big thing.

So this gig, the mosh pit was really weird and out of control. Not the orderly caring pod with roles and rules, but like an every man for himself kind of thrash dance crash. Like there was no barrier, that's the first thing, which did a lot to make it really chaotic because it was hard to tell if anyone in the pit wanted to be there, which is important when you're smashing into someone, and also it would move all over the place, be more intense in one section and then another. And there was no rhythm, because everyone was just crashing and thrash dancing in their own way so to stay up I would just grab onto a couple of rando dudes and ride them like a sail.  And like giant muscley dudes were ping ponging around like little girls and like crashing into people much smaller than them. It was chaos, like intense and a little scary, you had no idea what was going to happen.  I saw like four people lose their shoes and a guy go down and get back up again.  I lost track at some points of who I was and where I was and like for I Get Along (My second favourite song and played in their encore set, and like their most moshable crazy fast punk number) I wound up exiting the mosh pit to the side so I could watch the band because I could kind of not see or even hear them anymore over the madness. Straight up crazy.


And like people were crowd surfing continuously and wildly and everyone helping them up and then crashing them away. And the screams man my eardrums got blasted as much by the crowd as the speakers and you know they're not amplified.


Ok back to the Libertines themselves. They had a really mobile band presence, Carl would walk from the drums to his mike a lot, both would face away and towards the crowd at intervals, and they would go over to each other's mikes, a lot of movement from both Pete and Carl especially Carl, and you saw a bit why Pete was seen as more the front man because he was definitely better at intense mic faces and spent much less time with his back to the crowd.

They split lead vocalist a lot, but I don't think I realised how much. They trade off every song, every line, and it's a really shared effort, maybe more than any band I've ever seen. And they do this thing which is pretty famous, where they share a mic and are also sharing vocals, singing together or trading off, and they get so close, so close and whisper things to each other between songs, it's like they're making out. With the mic, with each other.

What you have to remember is that the Libertines are a love band, like the White Stripes, or Sonic Youth. What the band is really about, more than any one of them, more even than the music, is their love for each other.  I saw this album cover on a billboard in London in 2004 and was so drawn to it I bought it, and it still says everything you need to know about the band.

Their intimacy, their self destruction, their tenderness, their intensity. They are lovers and friends, and bandmates, and co writers and co singers and all those things are the same thing. (Btw there's no reason to believe that Pete Doherty and Carl Barat actually slept together but the irrelevance of that is part of the point.) They are darkly sexual and innocently tender at the same time. They share everything, even their tattoos.

So then also remember that this band being back together is like playing with your exes. Pete was a junkie and blew a lot of gigs, tours, relationships. He got kicked out of the band, but neither of them was as good apart. There is a spark missing from both Babyshambles and Dirty Pretty Things albums (a spark not missing from either Graham Coxon or Gorrilas albums because Blur was about something different) and that spark is their love. Their love, more than either of them, drove this music.

So now they're back together making out with microphones and group hugging with the whole four band and a roadie who I guess has been there from the start as well. And it's good, don't get me wrong it's good, but my guess is it's not what it was, because they used to be 20 year old men who were in love and now they're 40 year old men who get along. It's different.  But they still have something.

And about halfway through the first set, in the mosh pit and beyond I reached that feeling, that rock show feeling where you have a loss of personal identity, you stop the selfish and self involved posturing which low level buzzes tediously through our lives and you are in the music and in each other. And paired with that is this transcendant ecstasy. 

My top moment of the gig?  They played my favourite song as the closing of the first set The Good Old Days, and I lost my shit completely of course, it was sweet enough even live and then those crashing guitars which only reach their zenith live.

I got a souvenir, they were handing out set lists and I got a shredded scrap of one, kind of representative of this crazy chaotic, maybe a little broken show. Rock on Albion.