Patience, yeah yeah yeah..

Feeling a strange mix of impatience, excitement, exhaustion and something else tonight...
a bitches or witches brew that's got me feeling somewhat out of it.

Maybe it was just the early morning, maybe it was forgetting to eat, maybe it was watching too many film noir dvd's before bed last night (Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, Laura.. then Battle Royale, I know it's not film noir, it's just awesome)

I trialled (can that really be how you spell trialled? Or trial-ed?) two new songs at The Famous Spiegeltent the other night, Low High and In Tongues.
It felt really good, a bit like an awkward first date that you can sense is going to get better.
The talking too fast, too much, or not enough. The chipping your tooth as you bite down too hard on the fork. The regret of ordering marinara, red blobs of stain inducing fishy-fused sauce flying through space and time onto white napkins and ill-chosen white dresses..

When you're too excited to eat what you ordered anyway.
Kinda like that..

I'm going to have to start meditating again to see me and my lack of patience through till album release time.
Just playing live a little made me realise what a strung out weirdo I can be without it in my life.
Not rehearsing, which I do lots of, but performing. Sharing. That's a vibe I cannot tap anywhere/way else. And I love it.
Comes right after writing the first verse in the hierarchy of my favorite things about being a musician/performer. My friend JoJo Smith, an amazing troubadour blues soul creature who has been at it for years, who still gives electrifying performances every other weekend and is older than my mum..
She calls it the 'Love Light'.
She sings a great jazzy song about it.. (and those two words are usually mutually exclusive for me)

The light that you feel you're under and being bathed in when you're having a good gig.
It's really a privilege when you get it.. that rosey orange glow. That's how I imagine it anyway, it's probably different for everyone. That glossed over look from Bill Withers to Janis to a concert cellist, it's a sign that they're in their 'love light'. Some people get all religious about music (I think I am one of them) probably because of this very feeling and I can't imagine what Gospel singers must feel having real faith AND a good gig? Phewwwweeee,
that'd be out there. Talking Al Green Dalai Lama radiance out there.

That's got to be the title of a Bob Dylan song, surely.
Speaking of God.

Well, I better take these ramblings inside, but in short I am busting to get out there and play my album, which I'm sitting on like some anal retentive bird on an egg, make that cloaca retentive, LiVE.
To sweat and sing and see and saw. Take the stage and the back stage and the no-mans land in between to my bosom and squeeze it. There will always be bad or difficult gigs, but the good ones make them wash out, into mere memories, for a night or two anyway. The good ones give you life long lasting gold flecks in your heart that don't come out.
The only catch is they itch when they have been kept in the dark too long, they tickle and tug at you to put them back in the light of their maker, the rock what they was chipped off, to flare up in salute to the glowing orb of the love light.

Kentridge

Wow,
I just made it to the back of the Autumn edition of Broadsheet and got hit in the face by an ad for a William Kentridge exhibition at amci, 'Five Themes'......

I haven't been very aware of Kentridge as an artist but a quick bit of googling revealed I am familiar with quite a bit of his work. It's absolutely stunning... I am writing this in an actual hurry so I can get back to googling him and his images (moving and still) and make a time to go see this exhibition with my posse.

8th March- 27th May Open daily at acmi, Fed Square
www.acmi.net.au/kentridge

His work looks to be my perfect combination of feeling, meaning, impression and execution. Dreamy yet not so obtuse and abstract that it's a closed door. There's an off kind of humour in there too. It's very, very  much my cup of tea.

I'll see you there.

One of his animated works

Felix in Exile

Random Works

Little Word Bits

Hi all,

if you follow me on Twitter you'll probably know I have a thing for poetry..

Whilst furiously cleaning my room (well, setting it up actually, a good two months after moving in, in an attempt to stave off a horrendous mood) I found a notebook (so many notebooks, there is a little bookshelf dedicated to them, mostly highly embarrassing first drafts of songs) in which were some poems from last summer.

I wrote these on a sunny day off at Mum's house.
I've been getting into Kerouac beat style haiku, these are loosely in that vein...
Enjoy!



Sun burn,
       skin red and sensitized
A gift from Helios,
        the King


                                                          Blue glass hookah
                                                                                    on potbelly stove
                                                                                                      in a small town chinoiserie

        Mother is
        pushing dead things off the roof,
        with a stick


                                                        Guilt,
                                                    the subterranean motivator


Perfect sling shot tree
A giants fork
Missing middle finger


                                                                                Buddah is looking at me
                                                                      through the window of
                                                                                Summer's last days




                                      Sigh. Sigh.
                                   Harrumph.
                               I wait around for love.
                           Again.