ah, the longing

long distance romance involves a lot of longing, and waiting
like this:



now i just wish it came with the costumes


(charleston, everybody, charleston!)

Dreams do come true (it could happen to you)

Everybody, meet Kylie.
Kylie, meet everybody.

*sigh*

i dream

...of mobility facilitated by the latest in style. Or should I say the most retro of styles?
First a passionate love for:
(think minus dorky drink-holder, and additions of spokey-dokes and handlebar streamers)



and now, due to the richness of its blood, a new love:

Try crossing fingers and toes.
And chanting "I DO believe in fairies"...

All together now!

language makes the heart grow fonder

It seems unlikely that anyone has failed to notice that my posts seem to have been coming in spurts, usually related to visual imagery - video clips, to be precise.

And that's probably appropriate, because it seems like my head has been working in video clips - shakin' the blues, zipping, and longings for the new and the old / vintage.

I could choose at this point to wax lyrical about longings for the pre-linguistic (particularly appropriate since discourse analysis as methodology is the current bane of my research existence), or the relative appropriateness of visual representations of emotional / affective response. But perhaps this sums it up best:

publishment

So I didn't want to talk about it till i had a hard copy in my hot little hands, but it is in fact true... Traffic contains an article in it from yours truly. Truly, truly. It's scrumptious.

At the risk of making this blog be more about my favourite visual stimuli, and less about my random musings...

This is love to me:



its how i love, and how i want to be loved.
Double or nothing.

life has been a little monochrome lately

So recently, my secret sin has been black and white movies.
The classics, of course.
And I keep falling in love again and again.

Ah, the bliss of the sheer talentless beauty of Eva Gardner as the statue of Venus come to life.
The toe-tapping intensity of Eleanor Powell in one of those blistering routines she makes look so effortless.
The starry-eyed crooning of yet another square-jawed singer.
The dreamy intensity of Ms Frances Gumm's baby-faced earlier efforts.

You see what I mean?





Musicals as utopic, Mr Richard Dyer? Yes, please.

keep it Rosemary

oh yes





*giggle*

Now go do what the nice lady says!

CRUSH!

got two of 'em
two kinds of ladies.

one on-going:


and one retrospective:



see the similarities!?
i do.
*sigh*

drag it up, drag me down...

Upcoming in Traffic: 'The Past Rewritten - A Future Imagined'



Drag King - Camp Acts, Queer Bodies, Desiring Audiences


The motivations for, and intentions of, the performances of any given Drag King are various as Drag Kings themselves. The boundaries tested by the Drag King are reached through his performances, with the participation or refusals of his audience - as an embodied queering of play across gender. The Camp and Drag traditions from which his performances draw facilitate this, and draw out erotics - an essential performance of the Drag King - articulated through varied methods of access to the incoherently gendered or re-gendered body. Working through the piece as a desiring audience, these acts are examined and explored in the light of this desire.

The Contact of Roller Derby: Hospitality, community and conflict

Regularly referred to as the fastest growing sport in the world, Roller Derby brings together conjunctions of contact and conflict, and the contact of hospitality and community that global movement brings. This presentation takes my own embedded and physical experience of Victorian (Australian) Roller Derby in the Victorian Roller Derby League (VRDL), and examines it in this light.

Roller Derby’s most recent incarnation has subcultural leanings towards and roots in rockabilly, punk and skate culture. Its main support base draws from these groups – be they skaters, referees, trainers or audiences and advocates. It takes a D.I.Y. aesthetic from the community that is the only force to keep it in motion – from the use of open access online resources between leagues; the adaptation of the traditional banked track to the flat track (which has more appeal to the under-resourced); the acknowledged variances of rules across leagues and place.

Starting at the ‘mythology’ surrounding its revivification, through its portrayal in the documentary Hell on Wheels (2007) and then to encounter with one of the rollergirls from the original Austin, Texas league, Roller Derby is examined for the ways in which the tensions between contact and conflict have shaped the formation of its community.

The conjunctions of contact, conflict and community and hospitality in Roller Derby come together best perhaps in established expectations of care and welcome for any rollergirl in a ‘strange’ city with an established league - from a bed for a night, to friends and derby ‘wives’ for a lifetime, or trainers and rivals. The women who play roller derby know bodily how contact and conflict sit in tension – better to ‘block’ a Derby friend than an enemy.

trite

be still my beating heart

oh the depths to which we sink
for trite
crap.

pieces break apart

no more clips, at least for this moment here.



shut the doors.
turn out the lights.
close eyes.
keep out the glow.
it has no warmth outside of me
and eeks away when you look at me

filmic girl she said
sometimes people are mirrors
that reflect pieces of you
back to yourself.
i have learned to like myself more.

even as more pieces
steal
away.

aside

So a part of my recently revived inner veg militant totally adores this:



"Meat is Murder"

anyone else want to go on a stamping rampage!?
I'm taking it to parties with me! ("Yes, yes, I agree, the shocking stratification of modernist society requires urgent intervention... um... what do you mean my forehead says 'Meat is Murder'? You mean yours doesn't!?")

flashback time... *wibble wibble wibble*

A slightly different version of this goes with a Gurlesque performance that still goes down as my favourite naked performance of all time.

Imagine commencing with a 'straight' strip: all 'stripper heels', bodices, extended 'stripper' paraphernalia including undies over g-string, and swirls and twirls. Aka hail mistress of 'the art of doing nothing', as one of my (former) friends once so well put it. Strip done. Naked stripper ahoy - no bodily hair, long tresses, fake boobs, boy-hips, and only the heels haven't hit that neat and insufferably sensible pile of costuming in the corner.
*snore*
Then, a cheeky grin. Lady sits down ceremoniously, little velvet bag in hand that appears to have materialised out of nowhere. Lies back. Lifts legs in air, and digs hands into aforementioned bag. This may be promising, but dare we hope...? The strains of music creep in, and her legs part like a stage curtain, revealing her hands... with muppets Bert and Ernie upon them. Mnaa Mnaa... they dive in unison between her thighs, and fight and claw one another to go down on her. Finally, the finale: they settle their differences, and dive in together, eating her out happily in unison.
Jim Henson eat your heart out.

The Muppets will never quite be the same again for me.

*love*

and...

youtube deluge

so i start looking...

someone at a party once
(a rollergirl afterparty, yes yes yes)
...mentioned the Mills Brothers, and i finally remembered them at an appropriate time and started looking

hence the latest obsession:



go on, be melancholy while listening to that!
dare you to try it...



does anyone else find something immensely endearing about the combo of goofiness and sheer tuneful enthusiasm of the blonde sister (read that: Patty Andrews)?


...and then the puppini sisters speed it up to tongue-tying velocity
and make me warm momentarily to unnecessary covers of already wonderfully well-done songs:



(of course you should perhaps strategically ignore everything else they've ever done to sustain that magic)

i have many moods
and variations
some of them
are social
and some are not so

but you are welcome

i don't always know how to show you the entry point
though i would like you to find it

rant music rant

Surrounded by music geeks as I have been for many years, it becomes easy to get complacent. There are always gigs and albums I have to listen to. There is always something I have to hear. People hand me things and steer me towards sounds that they love. Or that they think that I will love.

And I always seem to get some degree of interrogation about my 'complacent' attitude towards music. That I rarely hunt out specific albums or music. That the gigs and music I take in are not done in a deliberate "oh wow, so-and-so meant this to this genre / era and so i must see them" way.

So I talk in a waffley way about my 'kinetic' response to music, and how the different moods and genres make my body and my life move. And people tell me that that is somehow pre-intellectual. That I have an embodied response to sounds and music somehow transcends or buries below the connectivities and histories that populate their world of music.

And I want to start a whole new rant about the artificiality of the mind/body dichotomy and mentally start a po-mo feminist analysis of their own use of that construct to deconstruct me. But then I pause.

Because I think it has less to do with all of those things, and more to do with my love of the seemingly accidental. The random and miraculous moments of sound and audio swimmings that I bathe in when people hand me a CD that they believe I should have.

Especially what it says about what each person cares about, what our relationship is, and what they think of me.

The new directions that my body finds and the delicious and all-too-convenient coincidences of serendipity

The moments that it can create - like being plugged in to Japanese noise music in the Guggenheim exhibition that was here, to escape the crowds, and pausing in front of an enormous Lichtenstein as the droning hit a particular pitch of intensity, and the child in someone's arms next to me simultaneously making one of those noises of pure glee and pleasure that only people below a certain age can find inside themselves. Bliss.

Or like the doco on Wanda Jackson I found in Melbourne just days after a Cambridge-dweller gave me her music in London. And the extraordinary political nature of the words to that song that hit the top of the charts in Japan so many years ago, and what they must have meant then as compared to what they still mean now.

Or my head popping up and my heart all but stopping as I closed at Ray, and amongst the classic songs of lost love that Billie Holiday was crooning, slides in almost imperceptibly that immensely tortured and understated that her lazy vocals made even more striking and poignant than Nina Simone's version.

And I've just handed my player to a friend who's continuing this run, and adding more music to my life. And more serendipity.
I might go and collect it now.
Can't wait.

rollin' with my homies

Rollergirls make me *swoon*

London travels were fruitful... 70's disco roller scoregirl ahoy!
...and i even managed to get me a mention
here
and
here


up-coming... 'Roller Derby', the conference paper.
'Contact', conflict, hospitality and global spread....

My Endless Love

i did it.
and i meant every word.
now look.

...and i may do it again

yes. unashamed.

nothing says "i love you" like...

obsession:

naming

It is this hunger for flesh and for tears, our appetite for living, that, at the tip of forsaken fingers, makes a pencil grow.
- Helene Cixous