Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra - Northcote Social Club

 (I have this poster on my wall now)

On Wednesday Night Laura and I went to see "Amanda Palmer and her Grand Theft Orchestra" (pun tittle! I'm already in love) perform one of the five shows she has going as part of her Northcote Social Club residency. What's that? Amanda Fucking Palmer is doing a residency in Northcote, Melbourne, and tickets are only $10? I must have stumbled into an alternate universe where all my favourite musicians are suddenly living in my home city and putting on shows cheaper than the beer prices at the venues in which they play (although in my alternate universe, beer flows from the taps instead of water. No wait, make that Hendricks Gin). Sadly this is not the case, Amanda Fucking Palmer is just really fucking cool. I have a rant about her being the nicest lady in music here in my post about the Dresden Dolls.


This show was more of a cabaret showcase than a straight up and down gig; we were late and so we missed most of the first act; a tall man with an admirable quiff and who sang like Johnny Cash. I didn't catch his name, but he did a great job as compare.
The second act, Kim Boekbinder AKA the Impossible Girl, came out all bright pink hair and fabulous space themed costume, which turned out to be completely appropriate because her sound was so unique she could have been sent here from some far off sparkly planet. She is also doing a residency, at the Evelyn Hotel in April, which I reckon you should check out if you have an evening to spare. And she's super nice; she was waiting at the same tram stop as us to head back into the city, and Laura went up and got her autograph! Too sweet!
Last, but certainly not least, we were treated to a Geisha/Egyptian burlesque style striptease from Agent Cleave and Jess Daly. It was bizarre to say the least, but bizarre is not always bad, in fact it is almost always good!. The costumes were incredible; I also looked up Jess Daly's blog SHE MADE A COSTUME FOR PEACHES YOU GUYS!!! And it is awesome!

This served as the perfect segue to introduce Amanda; Agent Cleave and Jess Daly entered the crowed, and as the song began to fade, the curtains opened to reveal Amanda standing warrior like at her piano, an enormous silver crown atop her head, poised to slay the audience.
Well, she killed it.

One of the many many things I love about Amanda Palmer as a performer is that you can go along to her show, not knowing any of her songs, and still have an amazing time; this was the case for Laura, who didn't know any of her solo stuff, and to be honest I was in a similar boat because she decided to showcase some new songs, which all sounded phenomenal. The addition of the extremely multitalented backing band gave each song an extra punch and sense of bravado. We laughed a lot, and I even cried.  She did some great covers too, Idioteque by Radiohead, a haunting rendition of Everything's Turning To White by Paul Kelly, and Video Games by Lana Del Rey. She said something about this song that I really liked, about how she hated it, but that she also deeply loved it. I think that's how a lot of people feel about Lana Del Rey, but I would take Amanda's version any day, because of the amount of soul she injected into it. A song like that needs her amount of soul.

Highlights: Missed Me. Of course, because I know that  song inside out, and because with every chorus, everyone in the band would get up and change instruments, like some sort of deranged primary school game. All the new songs!! Especially the ones with the horns, supplied courtesy of Felix from the Cat Empire! (C'mon, seriously? Now you're just taunting me Amanda). They made the upbeat numbers so much fun to dance to! Astronaut, Everything's Turning to White, and Map of Tasmania, because that song is so hilariously good, and it included a nifty rap solo from Kim Boekbinder.

I can't wait for the new album, with the band and the brass and Amanda Fucking Palmer writing some of the best songs of her career. And I'm pretty sure it's being recorded in Melbourne. Must fight the urge to stalk....
I would say QUICKLY GO GET SOME TICKETS FOR THE FINAL SHOW TOMORROW NIGHT, but it's already sold out. Still, I have a feeling there will be plenty more opportunities like this once the album is released! Come along, I'll have a beer and a dance with you, and we can bask in the delicious obscurity that is Amanda Fucking Palmer and her Grand Theft Orchestra.

Word Wednesday Thursday: Dragon

Hullo! I'm sorry Word Wednesday is a little late (although it's still Wednesday in some parts of the world), I know you don't want to hear about how awfully busy I've been and so on, so I'll just get to it shall I?

Today I will be posting an excerpt from a short story I've just finished. It doesn't have a proper title yet, the working title is 'Dragon', after the Tori Amos song that it was inspired by. I'm going to have to come up with something better than that! All suggestions welcome!

"My throat is as raw as if I had swallowed gallons of salt water, but I know it’s from all the smoke, and my nervous swallowing. Muscles contracting with anxiety ripples, holding the nausea in place.
The club had been dark, with low ceilings, walls padded with white leather that reflected blue, green, red light. Those lights even shone through the water, looking down from above and weakly filtered.
There was glitter everywhere, clinging to broad shoulders, shaved forearms, straining biceps. It rested on beds of eyelashes, fingertips, in the crooks of elbows, on the rims of glasses. I felt the little squares stuck to the inside of my throat, the corners cutting in.
 As soon as I arrived I had bought a drink and took my seat next to the aquarium that had been set into the length of the left wall, jewel coloured turquoise water pulsing with the music. Little fishes the colours of floating flowers quivered to keep themselves afloat, fins vibrating on a different wavelength to the pulse of music. Fluorescent orange clown fish, kissing and pearl gourami, powder blue pindani, red zebra. I watched them swim, sucking on the end of my straw like the catfish that I was, surrounded by so many of these exotic creatures.

Someone had poured a vile of purple glitter into the water, and it floated down to towards my end in waves; a violet snow storm. Some of it stuck to the eyes of a large Neon Rainbowfish, and he had to continue to swim blinded, unblinking. A kissing gourami sucked a square into his mouth, and spat it out silver.
Glitter is an ostentatious parasite, stealing all the shine from the stars,"
 

Hopefully I will find a home for it in the interwebs (or even in print if I'm feeling particularly ambitious) so I can show you the rest.

Slow Club - The Workers Club

So this is a very special post, because not only is it about one of my most favourite bands, whose song 'Because We're Dead' is also the namesake of this here blog, but it's also my 200th post! How fitting for it to be about a Slow Club gig! Hooray for happy coincidences! Although my readership is very small, I would like to thank each and every one of you lovely people who have taken the time to peruse through my ramblings, and I hope you have taken away something positive from the whole experience.

Anyway, to Slow Club. I was very much looking forward to this gig, because as I'm sure I've already mentioned, I really do love this band. This was also the first gig that me and Lovely ever went to together, back before I could even call him Lovely. Needless to say, there are lots of happy memories tied to this band, and if we ever break up I don't think I'll be able to listen to them ever again (there's an insurance policy for you, dear!).

There is something completely infectious about Slow Club's music, and of course I mean this in a good, non cholera type way. Songs like 'Because We're Dead', 'It Doesn't Always Have to Be Beautiful' and 'Our Most Brilliant Friends' are the ones I think of when I want some bone shaking dance party flailing numbers, but it's the slower, more melancholy songs with their subtle bitter sweetness, that are going to crawl beneath your skin and stay with you for hours. Songs like 'Gold Mountain', 'Never Look Back' 'Sorry About the Doom' and 'Horses Jumping'. These songs creep up on me and break into my thoughts so easily, until I find myself thinking about them for hours. And really, how often do you really think about songs? I don't mean having the words or the melody just running through your head, actually thinking about the songs themselves, what they mean and what you see in your head when you hear them.
I think this is because their lyrics are sharp and clever, yet they are also sincere and heartfelt, which is often very difficult to achieve (it is in poetry anyway). And I just adore boy/girl harmonies, so each song just feels just so exquisite to me.

The gig itself was a lot of fun; Lovely and I ended up running into a couple of friends of ours, who were also, coincidently, Slow Club fans. The first support was, well, we didn't stick around to catch their name or many of their songs, which I think says enough about them.
The second support, however, was more than a pleasant surprise! The Harpoons consisted three guys and one girl, playing very catchy tunes and haunting love ballad/ laments that could have been written sixty or so years ago. What I loved about them was that every single person in the band sang in almost every song, and their harmonies were really great (yay more boy/girl harmonies!). The girl's voice was exceptionally powerful, you could feel it commanding everyone’s attention, which I suppose is the main challenge of any support act. We liked them so much that Lovely bought their EP on the way out, and I am very much looking forward to listening to it.

As for Slow Club, well, let's just say that the expectations I had gathered from seeing them at the Empress two or so years ago (a venue about a quarter of the size of the Workers Club, mind you), were blown out from the get go. For one thing there was not just one but two drum kits, one full one and to the side for Rebecca, and two extra members had be added to the band.
The lights went down and Charles came out, followed closely by Rebecca, who was wearing a long South American style poncho (I'm always a fan of her outfit choices), and they preceded to open with an acoustic cover of 'Disco 2000' by Pulp. They then launched into "Where I'm Waking', one of those bone-shaking songs I was talking about earlier. They ripped it apart, but instead of the blood and the guts of the song falling out all over the stage, I like to imagine there being explosions of confetti, because that's how it made me feel. The fast songs were big and loud and passionate, without being obnoxious or over the top, and the slow songs would swell to be big and loud and passionate too, in a way that made your heart want to break, rather than jump out your chest onto the stage.

There was such a good vibe running throughout the whole band, everyone looked like they were having so much fun, especially Charles and Rebecca. An example of this would that after the saxophone solo during Hackney Marsh, Rebecca announced that it was in fact said saxophone players birthday; they then broke out of the song to sing him Happy Birthday, and presented him with a cake and candles to blow out. When this was done they had to go back into Hackney Marsh, which is not one of the upbeat songs, and poor Rebecca was overcome by fits of giggles for the rest of it. This happened to her a couple of times towards the end, but it was so freaking adorable I don't think anyone could care. At this point I would like to add that Rebecca is SUCH a babe, and although I don't like using the word lady-boner, because it throws up all kinds of weird visuals, it seems most appropriate in this case.

Highlights: GOLD MOUNTAIN! As the first song of the encore, they came out and sang it completely acoustic and unplugged, no mics, no band, just them. It was such a beautiful moment.
Two Cousins, Giving Up on Love, Where I'm Waking, Hackney Marsh, Horses Jumping, Our Most Brilliant Friends, and whatever the second of the two new songs they played was called. Sadly, there weren't too many of their songs from Yeah, So? on the set list, so no Because We're Dead, or Christmas TV, but I can't really complain because I still left the Workers Club feeling like someone had dosed me up on a heap of caffeine and I was never, ever going to come down.

Word Wednesday: Word Wars

So this is a little phenomenon was introduced to me by some dear writer friends of mine whom I met during a writing class run by Francesca Lia Block (a class I highly reccommend taking if you are either a fan, a writer or both, seeing as it has almost completely changed my life!). I haven't been part of a word war for quite a while, we've all been rather busy with work and life and an exciting new project which I can't say too much about right now. Nothing like a little healty mystery to get the curiosity cogs a-turning.

For me the exercise of Word Wars has been indespensible in unplugging writers block and pulling me out of countless plot slumps/cliche character dialogue dilemmas, and you don't even need a group of people to do it (although it does make it a bit more fun!)

But how does it work?

Well first you set your time limit; I suggest a small one to get warmed up, say 7 mins.
And then you write. You write for 7 minutes with no pauses, no coffee breaks, no deleting or editing. You just write until that time goes off, and then step back and have a look what you've created! It may be a little messy or rambling, there may be a lot of spelling mistakes. But I am almost certain that you will unearth from that 7 minutes of unobstructed creatvitiy the perfect sentence, an idea that breaths real life into your story, or that vital plot twist that has eluded you for so long.

I love word warring with other people, and yet as much as I would love to be sitting in a room with all these wonderful women writing on candy coloured vintage typewriters, me living in the opposite hemisphere means we have to word war by facebook chat. But group writing is great because  you can compare word counts to see who the "winner" is, share your final sentences, and there's always an endless amount of good vibes and encouragement.
However, it also feels good to war with yourself,especially if you're feeling like you're in a bit of a writer's funk, to throw up some ideas without the left side of your brain getting in the way. You can even set yourself word limit goals, and then aim to beat them.

Here's one I prepared earlier! And when I say earlier, I literally mean about 15 mins earlier

Word War #1
Word Count: 255

I don’t know where to start; I thought I did, but when you’re given an infinite amount of possibilities the ideas come and then they go like stars; you reach out to grab a hold of one, but then you realise that it died a long long time ago. I want to talk with someone who knows a lot about astronomy, who can teach me how to read the stars, how to see the future in them. Does the fact that I can see the big dipper even when the sky is laden with smog mean that my life will always be exciting? Or that it will just go up and down and soon I won’t be able to handle it, I’ll just wish for some mundane day to wash my hair paint my toenails and take out the garbage. I might even go down to the post office, send a letter to my grandmother who I was supposed to visit this weekend but I can’t because I  have to wash my hair and paint my toenails and take out the garbage. I’ll go and see her next week though, if I’m not too busy.
The nebulas look the old women’s hair, pale pink and pastel purple spun fairyfloss; young girls want these colours now, they want old clothes too, or clothes in old styles stiched only weeks ago by children who work like old women, children without childhoods, only needles and thread and a dream that they could one day wear a dress without sweat stains.

It's far from perfect, but theres some stuff in there I can work with, maybe even the bud of a new story! Go on. I dare you to give it a go.

Happy Word Wednesday everyone!

National Geographic Scans

I love National Geographic Magazines. I love reading about far off places I have never visited, about their history, about what might happen to them and all the organisms that live there in the future. But most of all I love looking at the photographs. These photographs were scanned from a bunch of National Geographic's published in the eighties and ninties, that I bought from an op shop for 50 cents a piece. Looking at them now I wish I had written down the places and the issues they were from, silly me. 

Another thing I like to do with my old National Geographic is cut up the pictures (after I've scanned them into my computer), and make collages out of them. I've only done two so far, but I'd like to make more, once I've got some more issues.

Word Wednesdays: Diatom

So I liked the idea of posting a piece of writing every week, but I've run out "Letter's From South America". So I decided that instead, I'm going to start a new project called Word Wednesday's, and post a poem, a prose exceprt, or a piece of flash fiction, whichever tickles my fancy! 

Here's my first entry, hot off the press! Enjoy! 

Diatom

I am a microscopic organism
with glass bones
I am all splintered slivers, symmetrically embedded
smaller than the crystalline ice that
clings to the world
as the morning breaks over the mountains
shatters the darkness
with the dawn 

They found me, swimming in the mouth
of a drowned socialite
I clung to the lipstick smudged
bleeding at the edges
such a bright slash, such a pretty
colour, for me to wear
for my debut beneath
the microscope
It was I who caught the killer, the lover
pickled in cheap whisky and even cheaper
jealousy
my sisters hiding underneath his fingernails

I am the design your architects
strive for
pure, unobstructed symmetry
a body so unique, it transcends the rules
of beauty
my structure is my own, my optimum
functionality
needs not compassion, meets no human expectations
and feels no need to
the weight of humanity cannot break
these thin glass bones


If I were to up and leave this planet
(and the way you’re treating it, I’m thinking I might have to)
you would not breathe, you would not live
or love again
because I make one quarter of
the whole world’s oxygen
but to you it one of your countless clichés
words as hollow as my silica skeleton
I will love you until the end of time
Please
you won’t live to see the end of time
but I will

Photo Quest: Melanie Kristy

So my friend Melanie has started this brilliant series called Photo Quest. It's about the fun of a good old fashioned scavenger hunt, getting out and taking photos in the real world, and living in the moment.

Here's my first entry :)

Something blue 

Something to represent February

Some sort of living plant/greeness

A guilty pleasure

A fire hydrant 

Head over to her blog if you would like to check it out!