Nude Rain

Sitting with my chipped, chubby yellow cup, full of the black sweet.. 
I remember that time that Nude Rain came to the Violet Town market. 
It used to be that way, that people would come.
Cool people.
Happening people.
People you could look up to.

Nude Rain were these loose and hairy wild women who sang a capella in a fresh, hip way. With hoots, whistles and amazingly bad ass complex harmonies. It was unpretentious and not at all daggy, which a capella can sometimes be. 
They were kind of a big deal to a girl like me in the 90's and they had a bit of a moment there. 
They sounded cool and they looked cool, had little tattoos, nose piercing's, wore petticoats, didn't shave their legs and had extremely long -or short- hair.. They were at all sorts of folk festivals, jazz festivals, happenings and what not.. and, the Violet Town Market, once.

My friends and I, I think we were 11-12 at the time, all stood round  slack jawed, and soaked them and their 'coolness' up. 
We listened to them sing their crazy brand of humanist sound.. 
And we aspired.

They made an impression.

Who goes now to the market and inspires the young girls, in real time? And would they even respond to a group of cool hairy wild women the same way that we did then? (With reverence, aspiration and years later emulation..?) Would there BE an appreciation of such fun, outside the cookie cutter role models now?  

Anyway, I think this train of thought left the platform last night and arrived in my conscious this morn due to some late night Google wandering in which I was enjoying the output of Aluka, another voice - only outfit from Melbourne.

Check them out on fb, here
http://www.facebook.com/alukamusic 

Beautiful stuff.

I wonder if they feel like doing any trips up to a little country market I know.....


Xx

LETTER TO MY CREATIVITY

Dear creativity,

Muse, magic, whatever name and shape you take, you know who you are.

We’ve had glory days and God I’m tempted to rhyme that with whorey days, but lets just say- days where we’d both have rather been somewhere else..

I thought I’d write you this letter re. Yearning as you two are intrinsically linked for me. I know you both so well, but I probably don’t stay in touch with you like I should. And that’s not a true reflection of my deep feelings for you both.

Yearning, was my first love, where he were taking me I didn’t know, but he swept me off my earthly feet and upstream into wild, rampant imaginings with him.

And, he was sweet enough to set me up with my next big love, you, Creativity.

You came on strong and rocked my boat. Capsized it.

 I fell completely. In my carefree teens I pretty much worshipped you.

But though I’ve held you in such high esteem, I’ve neglected you too. Let you become an ‘outer circle friend’, and That, for one who identifies, albeit humbly, as an artist- is no good.

When I think about us in the old days, I see you so buoyant, sitting on the lawn in the isolated terrain of our youth,

head strong. Defiant.

You were cheerfully uninhibited and also very green, but you had a lot of chutzpah. You led me boldly into sing-a-longs at parties, then first bands and folk festival jam sessions,

into art class debates with teacher and also into experiments in bad teenage poetry. Thanks for that.

And though your range was very limited, they were great and prolific times for you and I.

We really cut our teeth. 

All crooked and craggy as they were.

Though I later got braces when I could afford it.

An analogy, perhaps?

Maybe it’s because of your initial buoyancy that I slipped into the habit of taking you for granted.

Maybe too it’s because you were so celebrated, We were celebrated, for what we assumed to be just a Fraction of our future reveal, we didn’t exactly sweat the process in the years that followed.

So soon enough when I was both busy and lazy being young, and supposedly care free, structures sprung up around you.

Boxes were built for you, rigid and inflexible, against your grain and against your nature.

I signed you up for things I’m not sure you were ready for, I bound you to partnerships, I signed you to record companies. I listened to the loud voices of others as opposed to yours. Sometimes you howled and sometimes you whispered, but I guess you just weren’t loud enough to take the lead vocal yet.. and plus, you didn’t even speak the languages that were thrust upon you.

All of a sudden at a tender age you were a commercial entity. And thus began our complications..

In my distraction, full of glitter and noise, I didn’t fully appreciate you or what made you tick.

I didn’t feed you and yet expected you to grow.

So, understandably, you took your sabbaticals, and though they left me nervous and panicked, feeling a loss of identity, I would change nothing to the set up in your absence.

But, my old friend, Creativity, I’m finally getting older and maybe Even wiser.

Saturn Returns, our Brutal councilor, has enlightened me with much new information on what it is that You need, ‘what you really want’, and certainly what you don’t!

So, I wanted to send this letter to you now, and tell you you’ve been on my mind and heart, to let you know I love and respect you and that I yearn for our glory days. Our fruiting season.

And you know I’ve yearned for a lot of things, I’m a grade A yearner (it Was my first love after all..)

I’ve yearned high and wide and hard since I could grasp the concept of ‘other’, pulling this ‘other-ness’ to myself with all sorts of emotional telekinesis. And often I get what it is I yearn for. But it’s you, and your return to a place at the core of me, that I yearn for now, and I wanted to tell you I’ve made some preparations..

An outer circle friend or mere ‘work mate’ no more, I can now offer you a protected and respected place of respite, a new studio workshop in my soul.. Pride of place once more on the altar of my life.

I’ve un-entangled us from contractual obligations, I’ve cut down 40- 60 % on people with loud voices pleasing, I’ve given the routines that you found so stifling a shake up.. I’ve increased your variety of outlets and made sure some of them have Nothing at all to do with boxes, or platforms, and can be completely private if you like. As I know you once felt over exposed and then were shy in the wake of it.

 I might even start doing regular yoga.. which would keep the place clean for you and free of the stress-mess that used to clutter up some of your endeavors.

It’s been at times a tough and dramatic developmental phase, dear Creativity, and maybe I had to do this bit alone, but an upside is that all the off-cuts from the recent renovations around  here should give you Quite a bit of material to work with when you move into your new studio.

So, how about it? A renewal of the lease agreement? A renewal of our teenage vows?

The hasty happy rose-coloured ones replaced by a firm thought out commitment, though deep and passionate as ever,

now focused on process and enjoyment, not results, or the expectations and projections of others..?

I’ll await your reply, my old friend.

By the way, how is your sweet side kick Freedom doing?

Some say he’s just your imaginary friend, a ‘concept’

But when you’re around, and we’re in fine form together, I can see him quite clearly, sitting there, winking at me..

Women Of Letters

I was recently asked to come speak, or rather read, at one of the excellent 'Women Of Letters' events, the last of 2012 in fact.
These curated open letter reading afternoons are an ode to the lost or dying art of letter writing, created and hosted by the wonderful and inspiring Marieke Hardy and Michaela McGuire. I was absolutely chuffed to be asked to come and contribute my letter with November's theme being- 'A letter to that which I yearn for'..  What a topic!

I was quite overwhelmed as it's such an open and complex question.
What DO I yearn for, what DON'T I yearn for? What IS yearning anyway?
Is it like longing, or different?
(my own personal theory was that yearning was more about something you crave which you haven't yet had, and longing is more the missing and desiring of something that you have had and have lost.. Webster's dictionary informs me they are pretty much one and the same.
Okay, glad we got that cleared up)

With a bamboozling array of 'things I yearn for' on my mind, I did my best to sift through the dross and get to the meat of it. I toyed with going for more humorous, contained or light angles, like the perfect dress/song/recipe etc. but found I couldn't tease them out into full blown heart felt missives. I guess I thought, here is an opportunity to investigate and share what's really going on in my head and heart of late, the changes I've been through and revelations I've had in the shadowy, sticky, sometimes tricky realm of yearning.

Posted in the next post is what I came up with... A letter to my creativity. And it's freedom.
It's a bit of an emotional spiel. I honestly didn't give myself enough time to refine it much, so it's not my finest piece of writing or even orating as I was for some reason nervous as hell on the day.. bizarre considering I do things akin to this for a living.
Patting a duck before hand helped calm me down though (Women Of Letters raises money for Edgar's Mission, an animal welfare charity. The lovely calming, charming duck came along as a representative)

Huge thanks to Marieke, Michaela and my fellow women of letters- Linda Bull, Nelly Thomas, Dani Valent and Alex Schepsi. All women and letters were amazing. I felt honored to be sandwiched among them.
There was both laughter (Nelly, with the hilarious verbal paying out of her crap-tastic first boss 'Dwayne', 20 years after the fact) and tears (Linda, a love letter to her father, all that he represents and her desire to be more like him. Just mention the word 'father' or 'dad' to a room full of women and we all seemed to start welling up, for our own varying reasons)

It was a great experience and it gave me a chance to explore and publicly re-commit to an old friend of mine.