Dragging down

I've had just over a month in Sydney and have been loving it so much that it hurts. In a good way.


I should start this post with the image of live art legend Sari Kivinen and I on Sunday morning on Oxford Street. It was about 1am and we were clad in pink lycra weirdness, no eyebrows, half wigs with Yiorgous's leftover scenery from the Oxford Art Factory draped around us, as we soberly sashayed up a street full of incredulous drunks, asking for photos with us, and the best comment ever "what a fuggin waste of money!" (massive WTF moment since our costumes outlay was less than $10!) Yiorgous's mantle - the heavy silver foil floor linings scraped heavily on the ground. Dragging a sound and a sensibility of strange playful delight. It made me incredibly glad to be who I am, where I am, and to be able to step back into the lives and worlds and possibilities I left behind when I left home four years ago.

The previous week Sari and Richard Gurney/Lori Keat had done a similar post performance stroll as part of the amazing screws loose/freefall project.- to be adulated by some long lost gay clubber, for reminding him of the 'good old days' when Oxford street was full of freaks in drag, or drag queens, or freaks.

Now - Oxford Street is a nastier shadow of Kings X. Full of young drunk str8 kids, and the odd Crystal Meth addict. It's not very queer here - aside from the occasional bar where gaystreaming males still strut their stuff, looking tragically anomalous in what used to be called the gay mile. 

Similar shudders echo down the now Liberal voting Newtown. King Street is almost Chapel Street, a place where Neutral Bay comes to play. Bland blond, boring. It has changed and become a restaurant strip for white backpackers. Am I too harsh? It has become a place I catch a bus through rather than stroll up, because there is nothing here for me now, between Enmore Road and Sydney Uni....

So different from the glory days of being drawn to King street by bus or shanks pony just to promenade, to wander along or through. to have chance encounters, to cruise dykes not pushing prams, or pop my head in at the Newtown, or the Bank, just to see, just if....or to pose provocatively in a cock and a frock for a friends film project, or the time I was half naked running along the tarmac, after dashing out of a friends car jammed in traffic to pop into the chemist to buy more gold body paint for Mardis Gras.

OK. It's not the nineties, but I'm still mourning the faded rainbows, and how gaystream is so very beige and so very unqueer. Newtown girls typifies the quality of this change. the share house is a renovated duplex. Everything is squeaky clean, and contained within recognisable and tres cheesy tropes of butch and mostly femme, with nary a hint of weird scruffy strangeness. the latter is what I consider queer, and what I left the cnutry for. It's bigger, and messier than gaystream, or lesserbeingstream. It's definitely not LOTL and definitely not something that can be done in small country towns, and definitely not by overweight middle aged bookish sapphists, which is the nearest thing to what I present as.

So - this is a circuitous route to how I'm trying to critically envisage drag, my drag and others drag at this very moment. ie the nights before my drag performance with others at Carriageworks
I quickly typed the following: 

Like many freaks, I have appropriated the Judith Butleresque idea that all gender is drag, and we use terms like "corporate drag", "family drag" etc. to describe the different variations on our gender. I was having a non-costumed conversation with Sari Kivinen tonight - along another strip of nostalgia (Enmore Road) concerning our alter egos, and when/what how differing characters are drag or just dressups.... I would have liked to have spent more time considering this difference... and why the pink lycra freak on Sunday night was not drag, but the orange skinned mullet skirt is.....both wore wigs, both are extraordinary dressups, but the first was a performative play with colour and shape and texture and my strangening body shape, and another body shape, and yarn, and flowers and bubbles and a sack - not about identity as such, more of a de-aggregation of identity. I wonder how Richard Gurney feels about his similar wigged performance the week before?

I do like to think of "real drag" as the point where identities can be played with, and not just performed for convenience/habit/necessity...... and where their constructedness can be revealed....

But of course who gets to drag what identities where is a profoundly vexed question to do with power, and social proscriptions of identities and all that stuff....

As I wrote on the FB site for the event: 

Drag is not just about crossing genders (and genders are far more than the old binary model anyway). We can drag ourselves across class, across age, across species and across deities (Race/ethnicity is something so brutally proscribed that it can't be dragged with, at least not by white people). The motel sisters are cross dressing deities, like Raelians, or some other pantheistic divinity. In all this identity crossing 'drag' is the smear, the stain, the residue of that frisson with alterity that reveals the exquisite falsity of it all....

So what is drag? and what is gender crossing? and how do they mix? or can they?

the performers exchanged a flurry of emails this week because I wrote an email after a dear friend of mine raised a big concern about the "audience must come in drag" proviso on the even invite. They weren't the first queer friend expressing extreme discomfort with this, but they were the most articulate.


"they really want to come to the event, however they are concerned about how they will be 'read' within what we assume will be a mixed straight/queer crowd of many genders.

As we ALL know - Drag (as gender transgression) can and often does act to reinforce the binary model of gender (the footy show), and I assume that tonight is more about how drag can open up the possibilities of how gender (and other identities)  is performed and played with in order to destabilise those identities.

I'm worried that "Audience in drag" will mean that everyone will be assumed to be crossing a binary gender divide of M/F, and will be 'read' as either doing Female Drag or Man Drag.

Where/how does a butch dyke fit into this? Does she have to Femme up? will her suit be assumed to be man drag? will that make her feel more or less comfortable in the space we are creating?

What about femmes - and peeps who do various levels of feminine attire in order to be safe in the world..... (I'm imagining some of my babyqueer students at La Trobe) - will they be "read" as female "drag" when they may be gender queer or queer or pre-trans or just trying to work out how to do their genders in a binarised world?

Who will be at the doors "gatekeeping" the levels of drag?

And also - with moderation - how will we deal with transphobic comments?  Especially if we are in character?

Jack Halberstam has written more eloquently on drag and the nuanced negotiations of drag/cross dressing/cross gendering that queer peeps do. As my very eloquent host put it: "For some of us, gender is a source of pain, doing gender is painful, and so being asked to cross binary categories that we don't even fit into in the first place, adds to that pain". Or words to that effect. Their comments reminded me of the writings of my beloved Sir, negotiating strange looks in ladies loos, and being constantly called "mate" and "pal" whenever not in the ghetto.

and this, of course is just the tip of the iceberg. One performer keeps hinting of his desire to discuss doing race drag. He (a non Muslim) performing in a Chadoor. I cringe, and hope Scragg can muster up the courage to throw her baby (doll) at him if he even dares...

And there is also the dilemma of how queers who do performance and creative work as a means of survival (and I mean that in absolute seriousness) negotiate the very mixed publics that are attracted to performance art venues. Those who consume culture as opposed to those who make it. 

I kind of had my nose rubbed in this distinction tonight, at a theory talk, when I asked why the two speakers were *still* evoking a binary model of gender, even while citing the work of trans* identified theorists? They ignored me. I assume it was too hard for them, paid keynotes at a queer theory fest. And I assume I, as an articulate, theory loving queer performer was also too hard for them. these people assume they can speak for people like me, and don't know what to do when we have read more than they have, and know more than they do about our own lives and work.

So, here I am, trying to use my ire to drive me into editing a chapter down to give a conference paper next week. Again - trying to intervene in theory land and academia. this strange foreign world that is my own. and more writing - that tormented labour of gnashing teeth, hair pulling and insomnia, fittingly enough undertaken while my dear friend zoo finely wroughts the emmendations on her own PhD on gender queer performance art.....

Oxymoron red velvet muffins

This is turning into a recipe blog.
Maybe I'm turning into a mummy blogger?
Maybe it's been a long winter, I'm broke, cold, and with too much time on my hands.
We've been munging out on muffins lately.
they are easy to cook, reasonably healthy (better than tim-tams) and cheap.

these ones are Red Velvet Chocolate Muffins.

They are an oxymoronic because red-velvet-chocolate is a sugary fatty indulgent feast, not conducive to low GI, antioxidant heart-healthy cuisine. However these are not terribly high GI as well as being low cholesterol and high fibre, and high in antioxidants.

they are also DELICIOUS

Muffins are basically fat, flour, sugar and eggs, lightly mixed together and baked.
Saturated fat and simple high-GI carbs are not great for reversing pre-diabetes.

However, adding low GI carbs to the mix, offsets some of the damage.
I use sunflower oil (NOT CANOLA and NEVER MARGARINE) instead of butter.
I also add oats and use wholemeal flour to lower the GI.
Cocoa and beetroot are high in antioxidants, and Footscray markets sells unsweetened dried cranberries.

Here goes.

Ideally - you would have baked a whole beetroot the day before, and have it lying around in the fridge.

Step 1: turn oven on to 180 degrees celsius

Step 2: place a mesh sieve over a large bowl and add the following:

3/4 cup plain wholemeal flour
3/4 cup self raising wholemeal flour
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup plain cocoa powder (No-Frills, not drinking chocolate)

Step 3: use a metal spoon to sift/combine all of the following into the glass bowl.

you will notice the wheatgerm from the wholemeal has separated. think about how commercial flour is all milled, and how wheatgerm is re-added to milled white flour in order to make it 'wholemeal'.

Step 4: chuck in the wheatgerm to the mix and add
3/4 cup of oats (the porridge ones)

Step 5: in a separate bowl, lightly whisk
2 eggs
then add:
1 and 1/2 cups of plain yoghurt
and
1/2 cup of sunflower oil
and whisk lightly

Step 6:
Grate 1 whole cooked beetroot and add to the eggy mix, stirring through

Step 7: Stir beetroot through the eggy mix. enjoy the pink colour

Step 8: add the dry ingredients to the pink mix and stir through lightly. the ingredients should just combine, whatever you do, don't use a mixer or you'll end up with rock cakes.

Step 9: use 1/4 cup of sunflower oil to brush the surface of a 12-cup muffin pan. Or use paper liners.

Step 10: spoon the muffin mix into each little mould.

Step 11: press 1 or 2 dried cranberries into each muffin.

Step 12: stick the muffins into the heated oven for 25 minutes

Step 13: when cooked, remove from muffin pan, and place on a cooling rack.

Step 14: EAT! or take in lunchboxes for the next few days....

PS: if you live in rural Australia, where beetroots only come in tins, then use a freshly grated and peeled whole apple, and replace the cocoa with 1 tablespoon of cinnamon powder (or grate 1/2 cinnamon stick). Cinnamon apparently lowers the GI even further....

Chilenismo Espanglish Nostalgia....

Last night we made Porotos Granados at home.
A few people have asked for the recipe, so I'm putting it here.
but a recipe is never complete without a story....

When I left home I could not cook. Not a bit. Not even fried rice. I'd split boiled eggs, and had no idea about anything....
Like any first year uni student, I lived on junk food and goon and lost a lot of weight and got really sick, and that's a really long story, by the start of second year I was down to 58 kilos which is 46 less kilos than what I weigh now. It made me a cheap drunk, but I got picked up and carried through the air by a wind tunnel at UNSW once, so it wasn't fun.

At the start of second year I met El Veijo, who proceeded to feed my up on amazing soul food, made by his hands with recipes taught to him by his mother.
I don't think Chilean cuisine has entered the ranks of gentrified Gourmet, and it's not a bad thing. It remains a wonderful secret of healthy, nourishing fusion of Spanish and Quechua and Mapuche and the proximity to a long coastline full of seafood (at least before the Japanese started using driftnets).

El Veijo was and is a wonderful cook. He could make a lentil stew taste like love and made the best seafood soup I've ever had, and still does here. It's almost worth the trip to Ecuador just to taste it.
We both lived on Austudy for our 4-year marriage, while I slowly realised that I was probably gay, and him growing his hair down to his waist wasn't going to meet my needs, and he realised the tragic fact of genuine asylum meant the return of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from his multiple arrests in Chile....

But we ate well, REALLY well.
I developed a lifelong addiction to Palta con Pan (Avocado on bread) for breakfast, even if I have ditched the Pevre and Salami accompaniment....
El Veijo taught me to cook, by making the same dish every night. It was delicious and nourishing, and called "Allende Soup" because it was a recipe popularised under Salvador Allende - basically a way for poor people to create a nutritious meal out of cheap vegetables and stretch 1 chorizo between a family of 6. It took me 6 weeks of eating "allende soup" every night for me to teach myself to cook. Over 20 years later, I still can't face the thought of eating it again, nor can I find the recipe (yet).

Raised on a standard 1980s country diet of Sara Lee and shrinkwrapped vegetables, I had no idea about seasonal produce and season recipes. El Veijo taught me the poetry of fresh artichokes, available for 3 weeks a year, boiled for 40 minutes and slowly peeled leaf by leaf dripped into a mixture of lemon juice olive oil and salt, until the climax of the heart, salty, sour, acrid, soft all in one.

He also taught me about "Porotos Granados" - which are available fresh a few weeks in the year (Autumn? I can't remember) and which I only realised last year - are called "Borlotti Beans" in Australia.

Ahh! the humble and exquiste Bean! A bean is the perfect lingua franca translation of the term "hermosa". Small, closed, and so many rich discoveries inside. A dried bean or a canned bean has almost nothing in common with a fresh bean. It's like comparing Soymilk with Edame. Same botany, different stuff.

And so, when Porotos Granados are in season and a continental fruit shop has a tray of fresh healthy looking long pink speckled pods, is the time to buy them up and make this wonderful soup. It's vegan and probably gluten free too (unless you decide to use butter or animal stock), and SOOO YUMMY.

Last year I saw Porotos Granados in the Footscray Markets, and had the weird experience of asking the shopkeepers in my strine accent "I don't know the name of these in English" and decided to use the recipe with the Healthy Living group of Latinos in Sunshine. So - once again I rediscovered the joys of Porotos Granados, and the words in my mouth and ears of cooking in Spanish and Espanglish -with a pan-Latino group - where in each country the words for each food traditional to the Americas has a different indigenous name. So the Mayan's Maize, becomes the Quechua Choclo, and I don't know the rest of the Mayan names for potatos, avocados, pumpkin, but only the Quechuanesque terms of patas, paltas, zapallo.....

The markets had fresh Porotos again this weekend, so now is a good time to make it. I've listed the ingredients below in Chilenismo - with English translation, but the recipe itself is in English.

It takes about 30 minutes to do all the shelling, peeling and chopping and needs about an hour or more to cook. Perfect excuse to invite friends over, do the prep together and then watch a trashy video waiting for the soup to cook....

Ingredientes: (for 4-6)

2 kilos de porotos Granados (2 kg fresh Borlotti Beans)

½ kilo de zapallo pelado y picado en cubitos (1/2 kg pumpkin peeled and cubed)

3 choclos medianos  (3 fresh corn cobs)

2 tabletas de caldo de pollo o verduras (2  stock cubes - I prefer these to using the liquid stock because it is too salty and the beans cook more slowly)

1 cebolla mediana picada fina (1 medium onion finely chopped)

2 dientes de ajo machacados (2 cloves of garlic)

1 ají verde o al gusto (1 green chilli or as to taste - I use 1-2 small red chillies)

10 hojas de albahaca (10 basil leaves)

2 cucharada de aceite o manteca (2 tablespoons oil/butter)

1 cuchara de oregano secco (1 tablespoon dried oregano)

½ cucharadita de pimienta (1/2 teaspoon pepper)

sal al gusto (salt to taste)

Shell and wash the beans, drain and set aside.

Peel the pumpkin and cut into 2cm cubes and set aside.

Peel the corn, and cut the kernels off into a bowl, and then blend into a fine paste (using a blender). Set this aside.

Cut the onion and garlic into tiny cubes, and fry in 2 tablespoons of oil.

when they are golden (clear), add 1 chopped green chilli and 1 chopped red chilli.

Add salt, pepper, and dried oregano.

Then add pumpkin and the beans and some stock powder.

Add enough water to cover the mixture (it should be around 2 litres) and then cover and simmer for 1 hour, or until beans are soft. (you may need to stir occasionally to make sure it doesn't stick to the bottom)

when beans are soft, add the creamed corn, and season to taste. 

Add some of the basil tips, and leave to simmer for another 10 minutes.

Stir and serve into bowls. Tear 2-3 basil leaves and place on top.

alternatively - you can make a "Pevre" - a mixture of finely chopped coriander, onions, garlic and chillis and garnish each bowl with this.

Eat.

Pity Party

John Lennon put it well 


 Maybe I should have called this "Rules of the Game". That's what I'm reading at the moment, in between J.Halberstam's latest "the Queer Art Of Failure", salvaged novels from the book grocer and WAY TOO MANY ESSAYS.


 I'm reading a translation of the first 2 volumes of Michel Leiris' memoirs. It's a conundrum/a queer art of failure in itself, trying to translate what is untranslatable - a collection of jeu du mots in French/punning plays ploys drifting memoirs in the original literary practice of the Derive, making Baudeliare look like Banjo Patterson by comparison. 


 I plug away at 'scratches'.... slowly..... and think of the wider bits, of Bourdieu's "Regle Du Jeu" and my own pathetic attempts at class mobility, at trying to find one little corner of the middle class where maybe the possibility of the occasional interesting conversation outways the inevitable pathetic neurotic boring misanthropic games that middle class people play. 


I don't feel middle class. the middle class feels alien - like, say Paris. Something I want to be a part of, that I like the idea of, that I feel I know about, that I even speak the language of - but it is imperfect, accented, limited. bits of myself are silenced by my lack of language - I'm always skimming the surface, scudding across aporias, and feeling so much like an outsider, an alien, a foreigner.......


 And yet I am not 'working class'. 
Technically, yes. No trust fund, no capital, very few connections, but.....compared with people I grew up with, my life was incredibly privileged. Educated parents! a home full of books, and silence to read them in! Broadsheet newspapers and international magazines. So much cultural capital, and look where it has gotten me? 


 For the past 6 months I have played the game of being a proper aspirational post-doc/early career researcher. I have worked 2 sessional teaching positions on 12 week contracts (at 2 separate campuses). Just like 65% of academic employees (according to my union). 


This has  mainly consisted of tutoring with some guest lectures, and a LOT of marking. Apparently this teaching load is slightly higher than a full time lecturer. 


 In addition, like any conscientious ECR, I have submitted research articles for review in acadeemic journals. One open source, the other not so. I sweated blood over each, and was rejected with less feedback than the illiterate hungover pieces of garbage submitted by my undergrads. All with that nasty passive aggressive grimace of middle class 'niceness'. 


Blind Freddy knows that academic publishing is a JOKE. A nasty nasty profiteering game where overworked underpaid fools do unpaid work for either the massive profits of a conglomerate such as "Elseiver" or for the ego-boost, cultural capital/career aspirations of other unpaid fools who are equally as desperate for.... for what? 


Just like student politics, academic makes me wonder, 'Why so much effort when the stakes are so low?' 


 And in 6 weeks time there will be nothing. I will be unemployed, for 1 month or maybe 6 o until whatever random 12 week contract appears from the sky, and hopping I get selected for Jury duty so the daily allowance may cover some of my living expenses. 


It's not that bad, I have a roof over my head, a home, a wife, food, love, and yet.... I'm middle aged, financially dependent on my partner, about to become unemployed, unable to support myself,and not part of any coterie of sycophants. My ego thinks this is hell. Shut up ego. Life is cute and comfortable otherwise. 


 I'm stupidly, masochistically scrabbling at the bottom edge of academia, browning my nose in every arsehole I can find, and not even successfully. I thought I would want to teach, to write, to create and share knowledge, but absence of connections or luck or WHATEVER renders this impossible. 


 And yet - I wonder what the hell else I can do? My back won't let me return to life modelling or do attendant care. Office work may drive me to suicide and I can't drive, so train driving is out, and.... and.... I still feel like Sylvia Plath at the bottom of the plum tree, unsure what branch to climb. Only now the fruit has ripened and is starting to spot, and I'm still stuck, unsure what the hell I'm meant to do when I grow up. 


 I'll shut up. 
Go and meditate. 
Keep breathing.

And who the hell am I to say thank you, and thank you for what?

This is about memory, and guilt and art, and crying and memory and retracing memory and steps and stuff.

So I'm going to be quoting myself, and words I wrote 5 years ago, about a a work I saw 5 years ago, and then saw re-enacted tonight.

“Memory is bodily sedimentation of tasks accomplished”

am I quoting myself? or quoting myself quoting someone else? it's a drift from Pierre Bourdieu, contemplating habitus and imagination....

And before I drift back into my own old words and spaces of seeing and sensing, maybe I need to start with a story. About today

Today was boganday/invasionday/survivalday/Australiaday/holiday/horrorday/daybyday, today it was, and we had all of it.

A Leisurely brunch singing along to Bogan Love , interrupted by our Nepalese neighbours proffering gifts of dumplings to honour 'our' national day, and Lordy, let me not dwell on the awkwardness or the yumminess, but quickly segue onto Sharing the Spirit in the hope that the numbers were down this year because everyone else was in Canberra at the 40th anniversary of the tent embassy. Some familiar faces, friendly many hued, hippies of every shade, and every shade of sunlit skin and shady green trees and assado and masala chai and so much more civilised than the Queen Vic night markets, on a similar theme..... kinda.

And it got hot, and so we decided to quickly tram it down to St. Kilda for a quick dip, forgetting the bogan conflation of drinking in the sun, bogan-flag wallpapered pale flesh intensity in windsweeping sand in our hair/skin/eyes seaweed strewn waves crashing over my ankles, and no, not pleasant, time to get out, so we got on a tram. A noisy as hell tram crammed with young rowdy boys, been drinking all day and its nearly night and 3 drunken koories who... were...intense. an intense counterpoint to the blond boy bogans, staggering around the tram trying to refill a plastic cup with a goon bladder, and this is where the rub of sand/wind/colonialism.swaying drunken mixed race rowdiness all mixes up and after 45 minutes too long we got back to the city, and the civilised calm of cross cultural PLU (people like us) harmony.....

Bento Box before boarding the Brunswick tram. to POC the mike, a spoken word/dancing/singing feast of POC that's people of colour, and I'm calling it a feast, coz we paid the solidarity price of a pittance and squeezed onto the floor and consumed..... I guess. Many familiar faces, performers and audiences, and I'm flitting happily, smiling, laughing and feeling less lost in this city.

and then someone from the lands I know, north of here, way north of here, is announced. and there' cannot be two queer artists call 'willurei' in Australia, surely not, and so, yes, she has come down from sydney, and this is what I wrote about her piece in 2006.

But I felt that “Peel” was a lot bigger, and more evocative of how a link between place, flesh and memory actually FEELS.

“Peel” consists of a lingering crawl over Willerei’s body, onto which transparencies of topographic maps had been projected. So the colour and space is already a bit weird, and adds to the dreamlike sequences of other splices in the DVD.

There’s a funny voyeuristic tease – but it’s more dreamlike and weird. Bits of rain like viola’s ascension series, a disconnected floating hand, and the close audio thrums bring us deeply into a space where our own body feels in contact with the projected flesh in front of us.

The projection presents a profoundly bodily encounter with flesh, space and territory. With kinaesthetic geographies, how place is embedded on bodies. Willurei's scarred, wrinkled pulled lines of flesh, her pores, and hairs are mingled with the raised ridged contours of the topographic charts. These are based on mapping of magnetic deposits around western NSW, with magnetic lines echoing the striated scars along the flesh beneath.

This use of video projection as installation, something we step inside, transforms the cyclopean disembodiment of the camera into a deeply visceral kinaesthetic eye. The piece is not about representation or decoding –but creating an experience, an affinity and an empathy. Seeing, sensing flesh, the mapping of meaning and place and territory onto flesh. Feeling our own bodies sway and echo projected vibrations within, sensing our own unfamiliarity with space, with place, and our vulnerability, is REALLY RATHER NICE.

I’d recommend people go and have a seat, have a stare, feel your body and have a ponder. Those who prefer disembodied thoughts to wordless ambiguities of visceral affect can think of nice confining categories and explanations; that Willurei's family are Wiradjuri, that her flesh is encoded with connotations of territory and colonial mapping in western NSW, that she’s creating a nice resistive rereading of the terms by which kooris get contained, confined, removed, categorise by place, time, memory and history. But because cultural resistance to genocide and political defeat always seems like such nice remote comfort, I prefer to imagine the trajectory taken by feeling, by association. Even honky white mongrels feel bodily attachment to places. Settler cultures mask our own strange connections to invaded lands beneath the nasty politics of guilt and denial, but maybe, just maybe, allowing some bodily affinities between indigenous and non-indigenous, (and I don’t mean a rootfest) – but a space where connections between land, place, memories and bodies meet….. well, hell, I dunno actually, but I liked the video.

And rereading my own so nicely neatly butterfly flitting words, flitting around the meaning of the work, wondering why I didn't write it. My fluttering words, adding a layer of aestheticisation to the work, that Willurei re-enacted tonight. with her own words, and skin, flesh. Live art, body art, performance art. One of the best I've ever seen. I wish Carolee Schneemann - my favourite patron saint of flesh and words could have seen it.

Getting to the point. she stripped down to her undies, then made black texta drawings over her flesh making marks, thought lines, scar sites. Started with the anniversary; 1788. a cross over her left chest. Moved down to a waterhole on her thigh, and then.... other marks made with the incantations of histories' horrors; the marshall law in Bathurst, lynchings of HER RELATIVES, the first racist taunt at school, the last racist taunt in the street, and need I go on? I don't want to paraphrase her words within my own, when they were so very powerful. so I'll describe what that power felt like.

I fought back an almost uncontrollable urge to sob aloud, and wiped the tears away from my eyes, and couldn't meet hers, because there's a steely reserve performers need to rise above choking grief and speak words of heartbreak.

And what breaks my heart, is knowing the country, Wiradjuri, west of Sydney, where my friend sitting beside me grew up, where my father's mysterious miscegenated ancestors came from and travelled through, oh so very unsettled, unsettling this history of settlement, that refuses to open itself up.

And here I was tonight, seeing the scarring narratives as lines, given words, traced upon a body, speaking the stories of space and time and unspoken wars, and having this before me, before my eyes in real time, that these histories are scars under the flesh of colour, under coloured flesh, flesh coloured by these histories, in a way that I do not and cannot ever know, because my flesh, family ancestry, whatever it is, is otherwise, is of another colour/race... the other side of the frontier as Henry Reynolds put it - but oh, so terribly close to and bound up within it. (which is what he also wrote).

I posted the blurry picture above, snapped from the countrylink bus between Bathurst and Lithgow, by way of contrast. To show my own fleeting flying through connection to that particular country. It is fleeting, 2 centuries a blink of an eyelid/camera shutter/digital snapshot in comparison.

My little pounding heart, humming tummy, footsole thudding, skin crackling sense of Wiradjuri country inside my body comes from the blink of an eye time. minute time for this miniscule embedding of habitus.

and yet 40000 years of cultural ownership, or more, and 200 years of conflict, daily reminded, tormented worn by marked flesh.... cuts, vibrates, hums, sings so much deeper, longer and with a panoply of intensities flitting over flesh, voice, drawings words, lines, images, the scales of her skin.... and maybe here, viewing, I get another glimpse of what habitus really means, how it can be opened up and re-enacted, performed, shared in a shared space, in a room of bodies hoping to create something that is not quite as fucked as the sorry stories we share....

Apartheid without the D

It was an amazing party.
Incredibly silly brain bending stuff - creations of all kind happening everywhere in every possible form.

the room scattered with giant crawl-through vaginas and sphincters as a a turd took a flying leap from a high ladder into a toilet far below.

Lots of bum jokes, wee jokes, a giant elephant and inside out man.

My kind of stuff. completely.

Except, well.... when the 'joke' came. From a 9 foot foam pith helmet caricature of itself.

"What do you call Aparthed without the D?"

"A Partay"

And then the words echoing back on the white bubble in which the party was encased, literally, mirroring back on the mostly beige laughing faces, or the beige silent faces, or on the handful of less beige, more brown faces - whom I knew all by name - literally in this city where I know almost no-one.

And I realised where I was. In another white bubble created against the dark night of this suburb of colour where I live.

Apartheid - without the D - the death, the state sanctioned violence - but a whitey partay none the less.

I bought a drink and stepped outside the white bubble to stare into the dark night. I had felt so happy to find something of a semblance of what I left in Sydney five blocks from my house, and then the nasty shock of who I was and where I was hit me.

The white hot air balloon sheathe encasing a room full of groovey artie pale skinned hipsters, walling off a suburb of refugees from Angola, Burundi, Mozambique and other nations copping the fallout of white South Africa in the 1960s to the 1990s, and walling off the still very much living pain of apartheid, to enforce a metaphorical apartheid - where alternative culture becomes a way that whites do culture, and culture does whites, where to be white here, ensconses us and I mean me into an urban colonisation of culturally and socially mobile whites into cheap popular suburbs of colour.

And I wondered how different is this to the high paling fence separating my Mum and her Ngarabal neighbours, and the border clashes (lost footballs, broken bottles and roaming dogs) she regales me with and the bodily habits in hicktown of being not black, not brown in a racist town. (White people do not walk the streets in the country).

and if this is where I've ended up after 22 years of leaving the country then why bother leaving?

Maybe it was a one off. Maybe I was reading too much into it.

A month later I went to another artyparty 10 blocks from my house, in the heart of cool coloured suburbia. I'd already come down in the morning to stock up on fresh fruit and veggies in my Nanna cart, meat from the "thiem thit" store, lychees from the "Pham" store, weaving between the indochinese elders doing coffee on the street cafes and the African women in dayglo burquas lugging kids, groceries and themselves along the street, and loving food and people and food and life.....

A few hours later, the suburb is transformed, shops are closed, families are at home, streetlife is minimal. I climbed stairs to a white box above the major shopping strip to support my local indie artspace, because this is what I want to do. These are the people I want to meet, to collaborate with, to show/perform with.

Everyone looks eerily like myself - only thinner, and with more facial hair. The women all wore dresses. Not exactly genderqueer, and again, 95% white.

the event is fun, people are friendly. The art is a mixed bag and there is an MC entertaining the supportive community crowd.

and he makes a joke, about the "Local triads" . In the same suburb where 2 blocks away "Footscray By night" reinvented Karaoke as community cultural development and Vienglish detournements of men at work songs IN THIS AMAZING VIDEO which is the best thing I've seen all year and was made right near where I work....

And I want to fall through the floor with shame.

and I don't know where to start challenging these people or these spaces. to insist that there is a different way of doing whiteness in suburbs of colour than in the ghetto model which seems to prevail.

Have I described the street of white picket fences next to where we live? or the 3 suburbs south of the train line where all the white people go? or the goldfish shopfronts of gorgeous gourmet or bespoke designerwear which demarcate the white bodies from the brown bodies in the adjacent restaurants and shops?

I'm sick of whingeing about Helbournia, and whingeing about the white middle class on which I so precariously balance on the edge of, because I'm implicated in it, I'm part of it, and it in me, and I have to own this and work to make whiteness something other than a displacing privilege of bad power relations.

This is still not my home, yet in making it my home, in settling here, I'm doing my best to be an unsettling presence. To break the bodily habits of how whiteys do whiteness here, but it is uncharted territory, so strange and so hard sometimes.

Space is the Place

I could have stuck up a photo of my appendectomy scar, but decided this little sketch from our recent trip down the coast, might be a bit less abject.
It's hard to know how far I could/should take my exhibitionist tendencies (nothing exceeds like excess)

Anyway - for the record I inadvertently took my Deleuze and Guattari fixation a little too far and had an organ removed last Sunday. I've been on a synthetic morphine substitute for over a week, slowly but surely reducing my daily doses, and surprised how underwhelming it is.

This is always a hard and sad time of year for me. And I'd planned to spend the past week in Bathurst remembering Steve the best way possible: by painting, pompomming and hanging out with his partner in his increasingly dusty but still wonderful studio.

hell. instead of been at home. inadvertently extending Renaissance girl's school vacation at week - while she's stayed at home and nursed me.

the weather has been astonishingly beautiful, and I've spend much of the week lying around under the pergola gazing at our green garden. admiring the fernery, watching the cats frolic and Renaisssance wife do her corrections. (I guess I should call her 'sir' while she's in professional mode - even if it is under the fernery in thongs and shorts....)

And today I cooked a meal for the first time in... well - since the fish curry I made before I got sick.

And sitting together, eating calmly and smiling and chatting - I had a sudden flash of calm - as only intensely anxious and neruotic people on high levels of pain medication can.....

and I realised the flavour of happiness that I get to savour here. that we both do.

Our home is a place that is shared - where our differing posessions and territories move into and aroudn each other and dance together in something that is more like a weaving than a patchwork. not the cut and paste of a collaged union but the continuous weaving of different beings sharing spaces and lives together.

We have spaces in the house where our individual identities are concentrated - our 'rooms' - and then the shared spaces where books, art, toys, things.objects, shoes, fabric, pictures meet and mingle....

this patterning moves through the house and out into the garden areas. The pergola - where I paint and draw, where she potters and gardens and works, while the cat frolic through... the rooms where we meditate together, or nap, or go online, or chat.... and then the food.

Since being with Renaissance Girl - i've created a world of recipes that I've only cooked with her. I haven't deliberately changed my diet - as had the space to explore and enjoy cooking. I guess this has been the space of not living with a genius chef like el Veijo (who is the caterer at a Spanish for tourists holiday resort in Ecuador) or someone carrying the cultural weight of Le Cuisine du Papa-Maman into every meal.

also - since I haven't been oil-painting - that urge to make 'pates' - divine spaces of colour, texture and flavour - where love, dreams and other things emerge in the alchemy of handling has been channelled into the kitchen. Frustrated painters always - make good chefs I guess.

What it does suggest to me, though -is that I am able to live and create here, now, with her, as part of this thing called 'us'. the past four years have been so slow and hard and sad for so many reasons, that I have to remind myself of the good parts, and the magic spaces where life can and does flourish.

hmmm - morphia writing.... ghfljhjgrn tfnfgnmfmfmfmfmffmfmnmnfnnmnmnn zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

and

And then there

Feeding time....

My brain is a bit schermuzzled lately, due to rigours of wjerking life and other stuff.
I've seen a bit of A R T - most notably Sarah Fields show (sigh) at Gallery Smith - not to mention Adam Norton's ghostly reminders of non-lieus past and present. I'm tempted to digress on a tangent of pataphsyics and nostalgia, but want to hold back, just a bit.
Recent delights included visiting the White Elephant Gallery garage sale and scoring a BAT SUIT! The perfect outfit for watching TV on the beanbag during a full moon! not to mention running around at night in. Once I work out how to cycle in it - BELIEVE ME I'LL BE UNSTOPPABLE!!!
And on a brief foray to my northern home, i had the joy of discovering PLUMP GALLERY, an artists' run space full of incredible delights. I saw the work of the running artist, Willurei Kirkbright Burney in 2006, and wrote about it here. So I was pretty delighted to see her running an entire space.

and oh! the divinity of sugar wax crystal dripping, chocolate doll music box turning, with freaky ninja dudes in background, multiply performative, hair in my cake, extreme delight was intoxicating and a perfect way to end my thirties.

Back in Melbourne I had the delight of attending the Peril launch at Hares and Hyenas. I wandered in just as Benjamin Laird started his poetry performance. I've linked to the printed version of the poems here, but I'm not sure how it conveys the richness of the words, shimmering and his voice's cadences and pauses actually worked to expand the spaces between the words, where meaning emerged and expanded beyond itself into other possibilities. My dear friends, this is the space of poetry, and probably the first time I've ever witnessed it being performed so eloquently.

Despite the lack of Schappylle Scragg stage birthing, this launch was mercifully free of pompous black skivvied white male poets driveeling stylised conceptualist xenophobic prattles. However there was a slightly similar beige shadow of cringe, passing over Rosemary's John's reading. I don't think I'm particularly enlightened on the racial front, but I'm regularly astonished by the continued exoticisation/eroticisation orientalist twang of other white writers. Is Edward Said really that obscure? or, you know, Belle Hooks? When pale hands type what blue eyes see about the bodies and spaces occupied by those with differently pigmented skin, surely it's not too much to expect just a little critical reflexivity? huh?

Funnily enough Lia Incognita's performed parts of her publish essay in a manner which did include a lot of critical reflexivity and aside from my ethnophenomenological gushings, made me wonder why it is that this attentniveness to positionality and the nuances of identity, and of self and others - only comes from those observers and writers whose position in the world is made so blatantly uncomfortable.


And Thuy Lich Nguyen's piece got me thinking about where I'm living and what I'm doing here. I wonder a lot about the Footscray whitewash, as I stroll scowling past the new wine bar on the corner - which looks like a weird apartheid fishbowl of white only clients, in a street full of south asian eateries, crammed with bodies of multiple hues and sizes....And as much as I like to laugh at the juxtaposition of Braybrook trailor trash and Yarraville gay boys rubbing shoulders at the central west plaza, or about the time I heard Parisian tourists in Braybrook Aldi, I look at my own pale skin, consider my own status and that of my professional partner in the home that we own, and I wonder about our own implication in the changes that are taking place here. hmmmm, but that is perhaps a story for another space.

Back to whingeing, I've witness a few celebrations of some of my Melbourne friends and aquaintances and connections; weddings, baby showers etc. significant emotional formal times - where biological and chosen families congregate to mark traditional moments in non traditional ways. And I wonder about this need for novelty, to break away from traditional ways of doing things, the ways parents or grandparents would have done them..... within contexts and social groupings that are entirely homogenous in class, sexual orientation and cultural/ethnic background. Renaissance wife were trying to discern the vomit factor in looking at the pictures of a straight white couple in a quasi Hindu Bollywood outfits for their straight white wedding. Not to mention the invocation of Hawaiian chants and singing among a circle of young white urban hetties - for god only knows what purpose. I didn't get to ask if any of them wanted to hold the party at Smorgys or in a Tiki Bar or some more established (and aesthetic) setting for white appropriate of Polynesian culture. and then I was totally bamboozled by THREE or FOUR references to gifts of African Beads as a way of honouring a woman's 'earthiness'.... Because, you know, I was in Australia at the time, with no Africans or clear reference to Africa or Africans that were evident, axcept for my random speculation that the referees thought Africans are dirt or dirty perhaps?

So - as my 2 year posting as a visual ethnographer among Culturally and Lingistically Diverse communities comes to an end, I'm still curious about how and where and why I am in the world as I am, and what kinds of connections I am/could be/want to be fostering, when so much racist inequality still exists and thrives.

Old ghosts or Why I missed Tom Cho's Midsumma reading

Since posting my kitten video, I've decided that cutesy animal videos are the way to start blog rants.

For some reason youtube videos are harder to embed in blog posts - but hopefully any readers have already clicked on it and seen the birdy dancing to it's reflection- which kind of sums up my life right now....

Anyway - I've been provoked by recent things I've read (in LobOTL of all things) and seen on Facebook - and of course - having a moment to reflect on recent life events.

So I'll start with a story about last wednesday.

It was bogan day. We were at home hibernating from the bogan hords. doing a kind of weird passive mourning thing. Feeling too lazy to go to the invasion day concert and feeling too confused by the apparent disputed land claims around western Melbourne to put up our plaque acknowledging that we are on Wurundjeri land.

I think I was tidying my room for some guests to visit. Renaissance wife was catching up on some quality - end of the school holidays - snooze time, before our planned venture out to Kaye Sera's Bizarre.

Of course - we were vague and flakey and I faffed and Renaissance wife snoozed till 5.30 or 6 or something and then we were in a mad dash - driving across town at the last minute instead of having some kind of leisurely wholesome cycle along, across and around the Bay...Renaissance wife drove across the westgate while I texted to our friend to hold the tickets, or leave them at the door, or something,

We made it across town in 15 minutes flat, and cruised past the venue, counting the building numbers along St. Kilda Road while sussing out the nearest carspace.... I was in serious squinty myopia, and missed the screaming yellow alarm bells, but Renaissance wife didn't. We turned a corner and she pulled into a parking spot.

"that's _______'s car. shit. I just saw it, parked out the front."

"Oh shit! are you sure?"

"We can go past again, I saw the number plates. It's definitely her car."

"Shit" So I texted my friend an apology as Renaissance wife shook.

"Listen, I just can't be in an enclosed space with her right now. You can go in if you like"

"What? and leave you here?"

"Well, I know you really wanted to hear Tom Cho..."

I showed her my text:

Shit shit shit! We've had to abort. Renaissance wife (OK I wrote her real name in the text)'s psycho stalker wife-beating ex's car is parked outside. We've got an AVO out against her. If you see some ugly old white skank from hell drop a turd on her from us.

"Now babe, is this factually correct?" I asked.

"YEah" she said, chuckling, "but maybe you could still go in, it's just me that has the problem"

"Okay, but let's reverse the situation: I see some evil psycho stalking bashing ex's car outside a venue and don't want to go in. Would you let me go off and freak out alone while you go in along and sit there, looking at some monster, knowing that your lover is alone and upset outside?"

"No!"

"Exactly".

So then we went and watched the sunset from that funny mound between St Kilda and Elsternwick. And even though I hate Melbourne a hell of a lot less than before, and watching a perfect sunset over the water with a view over the bay is divine, I still don't agree with Paul Kelly that it beats Sydney Harbour, but that's another point.

There were young white topless youf blaring triplejay's whitest 100 from their radios, so we scowled on the edge of the hill with some Indian families, feeling grateful we weren't in Boganborough at least. And then we drove back to footscray and had dinner, delighting in the refreshing absence of bogan flags on flesh, raiments or edifices.

Now the point of this posting is not to make me look like some sapphic snag (or SNAD), holding and healing my poor recovering wife away from the horrors of her ugly vile ex. Not at all.

I just want to make a mention of how Domestic Violence does happen within queer relationships, and how it has massive impacts YEARS later. Renaissance wife's psycho stalker wife-beating ex is also known as Nurse Ratshit. They broke up 4 years ago after 6 years of hell, and Nurse Ratshit was still randomly turning up to Renaissance girls house 3 years later. That's why we got the AVO. Long suffering readers of this blog will know that I don't suffer stalkers easily.

So four years later - we still can't go out and enjoy ourselves without steeling our guts against some anticipated yuck factor from a freak with no boundaries. Queer social spaces are so few and far between - that it IS harder to completely breakaway and avoid an ex without moving cities.

Long suffering readers of this blog will know that I spent quite a few years battling my own demons in the ex department. Next month will be 5 years since we broke up. Woohoo! Bits of it still hurt though. Abusive relationships have a way of digging themselves into social worlds, that make digging ourselves out of them a hell of a lot harder.

A few things provoked my recollection of this, recently.

ONe was reading an ad in LBOTL for the inner city legal centre's Same Sex Abuse campaign.The ad shows two femmes wearing what look like castoffs from Raewyn Connell's wardrobe (but who am I to judge the fashions of young sapphists?) with the following bunny boiler narrative:

One Our first date she was funny.
On Valentines day she was sweet.
At Easter she told me I couldn't see my friends anymore.
On Mother's day she screamed at me and kicked my cat.
On my birthday she took my credit cards and didn't pay me back.
At Sleaze Ball she had sex with other girls and said it was my fault

Now this is a bit of a hyperbolic condensation of all the types of abuse that are neatly described in the ICLC resource on Same Sex Abuse. Renaissance wife said that seeing one of their posters at a queer event finally made the penny drop for her and make her see that Nurse Ratshit was a girls own Bluebeard that had to be escaped from. So she did it. Yay.

If only things were always so clear. When I think of my own story, there are many nasty feelings of yuck and discomfort and squirminess - about my own behaviour as well as hers.

So here is my Oprah Winfrey moment where I publicly confess that I was physically violent to my ex. The ex. The big fat married ex. I was physically violent on two occasions. One was in public at a Squatspace opening - where I grabbed her by the clothing and ripped a button off her overalls. The second time was in private - when I threw a punch at her. She defended herself in the latter case, but grabbing my wrist and telling me that she would leave straight away if I ever tried anything like that again. More kudos to her. She was completely pissed and staggering around, but was lucid enough to protect herself

Now I'm not even going to try to defend or excuse my behaviour. In both cases it was an unconsented, unrequested, totally unexpected, shocking angry outburst that completely distressed the other party. the victim. who was half my size, and financially dependent on me.

Even though the physical impact was minimal (mainly due to my incompetence)- these were physical acts of rage that were intended to control or subdue another person - no safe words, no happy slaps, none of the niceness that distinguishes a push of a grab made in anger from the loving fist of consenting kink.

Much therapy and anger management therapy later, I can say that I've learned to manage this monstrous part of myself, but it is still there. I manage it by not staying in situations that make me so enraged, that I do lash out. This part is hard. REally hard.

Part of that involves acknowledging that the previous relationships was really really bad and abusive, and that it shouldn't have continued as long as it did. Blind Freddy can see that. But a big part of this for me, has been about learning to acknowledge my own needs - in a relationship - and then learning how to articulate them to the other person, early on, and trust that they will be respected, or trust that I can state how I feel when they aren't and things will get better.

It's really really hard for any ex-catholic to acknowledge that we are entitled to anything. But I realise now that I need to insist on certain 'bottom lines' if I want to be in a trusting relationship with someone. Like that they aren't self destructive. that they don't get completely shitfaced. That they don't drink alone in our home. that we don't have sex while drunk. That neither of us put pressure on the other one to have sex - even if that means months of no pussy action. That they don't crack onto my friends, or end up in sexually unsafe/sleazy situations where their own boundaries come unstuck.

The other crazy crap that occurred in previous marriages like drunk driving, threatening to jump out high windows, running off in the middle of the night, yelling abuse at me - well - that is painfully obvious even to me - that it is not what I want. I just wish I'd walked away the first time it happened....

I've been looking back at old CD's of photos of us both and realised how often Abel recoiled while I was kissing her, and I wonder how I could have been so blind. So many brilliant words uttered in so many languages cannot disguise the fact that there wasn't a physical connection, there wasn't trust on my part or desire on hers. and that was nearly 8 years of my life. bugger.

And then there's the other nasty icky mudstick stuff that occurs still. Stupid old patterns of sociality that were built into how I did coupledom. Despite moving cities, leaving the commune that was my home for 10 years and breaking off contact with whole worlds of mutual friends and circles - I still have people that reinforce/trigger the way things were with Abel. The way I was. Friends who keep wanting to talk about her. Saying "oh... yeah, she was so bad you know.... you're much better off". Hmmm - bringing up my rage and humiliation about being with someone who didn't give a shit about me. Great stuff. Or people who want to get completely shitfaced in my home - with my partner - even though I've been pretty transparent about the trauma that living with an Alcoholic partner has caused me.

So - slowly, slowly, I'm learning how to set some boundaries - to ask for what I need. To be clear and straightforward with edge players rather than just running away from them.

With Renaissance wife - this has been a hard, challenging and yet healing time for us both. But we're slowly working on what it means to be together and build sustainable bonds of trust. The genuine support of our friends; the ones who aspire for similr things in their own relationships: straight/gay/whatever really helps too.

Feeding the hand that bites me?

I've come to a rather banal epiphany. Possibly.

I'm going to shamelessly confess that I was one of those PhD students in love with Academia. Academia was my dream - being part of the ivory/sandstone tower of intelligentsia - discussing obscure things and sharing them in a kindly way with colleagues and hungry young minds was the dream that sustained me through all of the life disasters, writing blocks and sleepless nights of the TOME.

Now I'm finally out the other end of it, sitting in my not quite secure but not as precarious as most academic posting I'm coming to realise thatyes! surprise surprise -that Academia is not all it's cracked up to be.... I mean, it's even less of a space for contestation and intellectual challenge and engagement than I had thought.

I'm not dissing it entirely - and Sarah Ahmed's facebook updates about teaching AMAZING courses on phenomenology and identity at goldsmiths and how like hell I wish I was there doing something with or like or around that - are totally and incredibly inspiring... but....but.....

Maybe it was Tom Ellard's post that did it.

Maybe it was the 2 days spent by myself and another research fellow - printing, photocopying tidying, filing, arranging the research centre while our esteemed admin colleagues sat around at their desks doing whatever they do - or interrupting us to gossip about their daily lives that did it. Maybe it was the visit of the Provost, resembling just a bit too much the tour of Catherine the Great to the Russian Peasantry and her dissmissive comments about the research centre where I work - stressing quite rightly that the only thing that mattered were research outputs.

Maybe it is the agonising frustration of trying to generate any research outcomes in an institution that has a journal subscription level of a 3rd rate wester suburbs state highschool, the most unnavigable Website of an institution I've ever come across (try an find your's truly's name on the institutions website! I've been working there as a researcher for 18 months!), maybe it is the supercilious empire building approach of the vast majority of ancilliary - and yes - I am going to describe resource/HR/admin/management/PR colleagues in an institution ostensibly dedicated to teaching and research as ancilliary staff - where they treat academic work as a sideline activity, and academic staff and students as annoying obstacles to their corporatised dream world.....

Maybe.

Maybe it's the numerous stories of friends in Academia of the depressing, cut throat bitchy competitiveness of institutional departmental wrangling. Maybe it's the lack of smiles.

It's definitely the lack of time and energy I have to read, to write, to think about anything more substantial than a gant chart.

I don't regret my PhD. I don't regret allowing myself to expand and make it the unwieldy immense, interdisciplinary, unmarketable wrangling erudite 100,000 word and 6 year beast that it was. Six years is a DECENT amount of time to spend immersed in a PhD, and I'm so proud I did it in an immersive, process oriented, mind blowing way - and didn't get sucked into the absurd product oriented 3 year post-doc fishing research report model that we all have to dissimulate to anyway.

So glad.

And - now - I'm not going to jump on the ECR train. I'm going to look for quality of life in my own life, and return to pursuing oppen ended engaging practices - not a research 'career'. Not any 'career', just a life that may continue to be rich and rewarding.

Maybe the art-market versus art practice dichotomy is a more productive way of thinking about the 'tension' between genuine research and academia. Just as the 'art-market' forces the creative play of the studio into a goal oriented production that is NOT creative, so too finally and bluntly, academia can be described as something that does actively thwart research.

And hasn't it always been thus? I mean surely even in the good old days of free education and whatnot - the majority of lecturers (if not students) were white/middle class/straight/male, and the resulting epistemologies and knoweldges were prfoundly biased and narrow?

Intellectual creation is always contested and precarious. I'm glad as hell to see and support students of colour, women students, queers, working class people and ratbags have access to the learning. I'm still intending to do what I can to make the walls of the institution as porous as possible.

but I don't dream that this is where I can pursue my life's work or love work either. I don't want to lose my centre and chase a career dream anymore. I want to be present and ethical, but free enough to be genuinely creative somewhere.

Banality of Grief

This is brief.
It's sunny, heating up to 32 degrees.

I'm indoors, skulking.

Mucus clogs my lungs, my nose, my head
is fuzzy
throat dry
eyes bleary and thick

Is this what happens when I forget to cry?

sitting slowly
stupidly
wrapping up precious nothings in tissue and bubble wrap

coughing

stacking my archives
the professional library
years of typing, reading, rereading,
squinting at enlightenment on photocopied A4
No, I don't want to forget

my mind is fuzzy
I don't want to make or dance or sing
just slowly breathe through the changes all around me

Day of The Dead

Today I'm back in Boganborough and it's cloudy and I'm tired and I feel like I'm coming down with a cold, but I've had such an amazing weekend.

Renaissance Wife and I travelled north again to the NSW north coast for the "Love Day" of two dear friends. Because life is crazy we had a wonderful time hanging out with about 30 people from Melbourne who also travelled north for the same event.

I gave Renaissance wife a verbal tour of the beefy hinterland along the rivers where 5 generations of my mothers ancestors cut down forests and raised dairy cattle before heading up the hills to New England to get degrees and raise beef cattle. She was a bit freaked out by the parade of unpeopled roadside homesteads along the McLeay and Bellinger rivers, and the ghosting horror of Kinchela where stolen Aboriginal children were acculturated and abused for nearly a century. I persuaded her to detour over to South West Rocks and picks up some shells as a memento of where my grandparents honeymooned in the 1930's, and brought them as tokens of longevity to our marrying friends.

They called it a love day. Our dear friends waded into ankle-deep water where many of us stood in the afternoon sun and people's children did their best impersonation of putti frolicking in the sunlit shallows and it was so beautiful and heartfelt and momentous that we all cried. And then everyone swam and then as the sun set we drank, and ate and danced until midnight - to a local band who covered Astor Piazzola and finished with a Kolo and how incredible was that?

And yesterday we had a brunch of seeds, oysters, tofu and other leftovers by the water and a swim in the sun.

On the way back to the airport, Renaissance wife drove me to my brother's grave - after we got lost finding the cemetery - as I do each time I try to visit. I bought flowers and junkfood from woollies and sat in his grave hanging out with his headstone and my memories of him. Flowers were symbolic: poppies for... well, you know, Daisies aka Margaritas for me. Red Gerberas for the passion of grief, yellow Geberas for the joy of hope, and orchids coz they last for ages.

I felt so lucky to have been able to visit his grave so close to his deathversary. So lucky to have a place with sun, and seabreeze and ocean views and trees where I could sit and remember my brother and what he was to me.

Finally I felt so lucky to remember that the terrible pall of grief and pain that amputated me when he died, has finally changed into something warm and loving and tender, and that I've lived through all of this and gained so much wisdom and life force as a result.

Eulogy

Heyall,

I decided to post this up for all the peeps who wish they could have been with us on Tuesday.

Steve Kirby was born in Somerset, England in 1956, the only son of a young woman living with her parents and sister Jan, with whom he was raised.
He died last week in Bathurst in the house he shared and help create with his partner, in the company of three of the many people who loved him dearly: his partner, his daughter, and myself.

In between those two events is a history not only of Steve’s life, but of all of the lives he touched in so many places across the globe and in so many inspiring, transforming ways.

In preparing this Eulogy I was wondering how I could represent the immensity of lives that are connected to Steve Kirby’s ‘story’. There is of course, his CV, available on the website of Watters Gallery, and there are the oral narratives from his families in England and Australia, or from a range of friends in Australia, who listened avidly to Steve’s anecdotes and insights from his rich life.

In the past few weeks, I’ve shared some of those stories with people who knew Steve, such as his family, friends in Bathurst, and friends from Art School such as Sharon, Anna, Heli, Elyss, Mignon, Kim, Mel, Jason, Ted, Doug, and others.

It has felt like piecework – a slow patching together of small, sacred fragments of memory that each of us have of Steve.

There are so many parts of Steve that many of us here today remember and treasure, and I cannot hope to fully represent who Steve was to so many of you, or how you will remember him into the future.

So what I hope to do, is bring some elements together in order to create a mosaic of fragments – much like the mosaic sculptures that Steve exhibited in 2003 and 2004. These were composed of small exquisite elements selected from larger experimental works of painting, drilling, gouging, staining, pushing, moulding and carving a myriad of coloured and pigmented forms: wood, canvas, board, ink, paint, clay etc. Steve would select small tile like elements from these larger works and then spend hours, weeks and months in his studio laying each fragment next to another, and another, and another…..

And Steve used to say that this mosaic piecework – of making a connection between two random shapes – that for some reason, be it intuitive or compositional or whimsical – just worked – he said that this work of cutting, moving and connecting was about relationships –about creating relationships – somewhere between choice and chance – that two elements would connect, coalesce and create another series of visual and imaginative relationships and possibilities.

So I’m hoping that in the words offered in this Eulogy, in the recollections of Steve’s English family, in the words offered by his daughter, in the words and image fragments assembled in the booklet created by his partner, in the poetry and music we are sharing with you today, that parts of your personal sacred fragment of Steve can create a connection and relationship with someone else’s that will help sustain us all during this time of grieving.

For now, I want to talk briefly of my relationship with Steve, who has been a dear friend, ever since we met at NAS in 1997. At the time, Steve had already lived in Australia for 10 years with his wife and two small children.

Steve said he was interested in sculpture, and had studied with Tom Bass, but wanted to explore the expressivity of hard materials. He described how visiting the Art Brut museum in Switzerland changed his life, and how he’d spent years walking around the UK and Europe collecting small fragments, carving on stones, creating shapes with clay, and how in Bathurst he ran sculpture workshops with kids with disabilities – allowing them to explore how ordinary materials such as newspaper, clay, sand and string could extend their bodies and sensations of being in the world.

After sweating it in foundation year formalism of casting carving and construction, both of us ended up doing majors in painting. I made a deliberate and strategic decision that I would probably learn more from being a student in the same classes as Steve Kirby than picking any particular discipline or teacher. And in fact, Steve was a great teacher and mentor to many of us at art school. Teaching us how to live with ourselves, our frustrations and our materials, and the unending maddening processes of making something new with a level of intelligence and integrity. Steve’s intellect was like oxygen to me – pure, clear and calm – and his capacity to link deep thought to the wordless mess of making to an emotional intelligence and integrity has been one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received.

Steve used to bring in books – he introduced me to Scott McLoud and to James Elkins. I’ll never forget Steve standing in my Studio reading the following description from Elkins’s book “What Painting Is”.

“It is important never to forget how crazy painting is… Painting is born in a smelly studio, where the painter works in isolation for hours and even years on end…. Painters have to work in a morass of stubborn substances.
For those reasons, the act of painting is a kind of insanity… even the most commercially minded artist has to wrestle with raw materials, and get filthy in the process.”

James Elkins, What Painting is: p147.


I think it is important to acknowledge that last Tuesday, Bathurst lost an incredible artist and philosopher.

After studying painting, I studied art history and eventually completed a PhD. As part of this I travelled the world, visiting art schools in the UK, New York and Paris, and meeting many of the famous international writers Steve and I used to read and discuss in art school. And I want to tell you, that even now, after all of the reading and talking and listening I’ve been lucky enough to have, that Steve Kirby continued to be an inspiring source of enlightenment, reflection and consideration. He could make this incredible links between creativity, philosophy and the daily business of making and breathing and feeling life. I have been so lucky to know Steve, to have so many conversations about life, art, love and ideas for years now. Steve was best man at both weddings, and best friend when I was heartbroken, answering the phone to my sobs at 3am on a number of occasions, and reading my theses, introducing me to trashy TV, and guiding me by SMS through his home city of Bristol.

Steve’s generosity extended not only to how he lived, but to how he died. I don’t ever want to romanticise death, which is a horrible, agonising tragedy. However, the way in which Steve faced his illness, the pain, the tragic implications for those who loved him, and the final terrible awfulness of his passing, was special and sacred, and ultimately profoundly generous.

Steve was curious about the world, and curious and critical about his daily life. We often discussed his illness in phenomenological terms, and the implications of reducing parts of ourselves and yet not shrinking away from the experience of life. Steve also discussed the nature of suffering with a number of friends. Tracey and Helen recalled the time he referred to the word Thole, an old Saxon word that was used during his youth in England about suffering. However, whereas we’re used to considering suffering as an affliction that we are passively subjected to, thole describes suffering as a type of conscious bearing, a deliberate, patient endurance.

Steve used to discuss the work of suffering, both in the pain he was experiencing in his illness, and that of his loved ones in witnessing his suffering and fearing his death. Steve spoke of thole as offering a way of considering the agency that we can have in the way we can experience suffering, to make it an experience, and to be able to live suffering well.

Steve criticised the common contemporary attitude to suffering as one of shock, as if we are entitled to never suffer, and a life well lived is without pain.

He said that People do not know how to suffer well.
To plumb the depths of suffering and taste it with all it’s senses.
To be in that space and not try to paint it a different colour.

Tholes implies a level of agency, it doesn’t mean putting aside our daily existence. It is about applying all of our resources, everything about our daily life in order to undertake the work of bearing suffering as part of the richness of our life.
We draw upon our daily lives and our resources in order to do the work of suffering.
Tholes is about a profound presence, and having all of our sense in the moment of suffering.
Steve said how this is a process not unlike the work of painting – in fact very much akin to the creative process itself.
This is not a simple analogy, but touches at the heart of the integrity that Steve brought to his life and his life’s work and creativity.
This means, being attentive and being present to ourselves, to others and to the sensations of the worlds in which we live.

In the past few days I’ve been numb, because I cannot imagine a world without Steve. The silent timbre of his voice, his words, so many words, have been part of the pulse of the way I am in the world.

We have another friend Heli who we knew at art school, and who returned to Finland in 2001. Steve and Heli haven’t seen each other for nearly a decade but they maintained constant SMS contact – especially during the crazy late night studio hours. Heli wrote an email back to me the other day, where she said:

“I started to think whether my silent conversation with Steve continues, as it has continued over these years, and you know Margaret I believe it does. The way he and his work inspires me is something like that cannot disappear. He is in all little things. Everywhere i look.”

I hope that the gift of Steve’s life and generosity continues in all our lives for a very long time.

Finally I’d like to end with a quote from the Nigerian English writer, Ben Okri:

“Don’t let grief kill you. You are not born yet. You haven’t painted enough. … you owe it to what you’re suffering now to make sure you survive. You owe it to us, your people. The Greeks have a saying that the Skylarks buried its father in its head. Bury this grief in your heart, in your art. Live, live with unquenchable fire. Let everything you’re suffering now give you every reason in the world to master your life and your art. Live deeply, fully. Be fearless. Be like the tortoise – grow a hard shell to protect your strong heart. Be like the eagle – soar above your paint and carry the banner and the wonder of our lives to the farthest corners of the world. Build your strength. Destiny is difficult.” Okri, Dangerous Love, p379.