Thursday, August 28, 2008

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!?")

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

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)

Monday, August 11, 2008

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.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

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....