Entries Tagged 'Personal' ↓

Although the Woodford Folk Festival officially began the day after, we went up on Boxing Day. This clever strategy would enable us to enjoy not only the festivities starting bright and early on Saturday morning, but also some of the performances on the Friday evening which were not listed in the festival programme.¹.

Woodford is about 80km NNW of Brisbane. The plan was to catch a train to Caboolture, then a bus straight to the festival. Nice and simple. Of course, the completely unannounced trackworks at Petrie (which is between Brisbane and Caboolture) occasioned a trip to the station office to find out what was going on, followed by an impressive (if I do say so myself) sprint up and down stairs to get back on the right platform before the train left, and then a transfer to an extra bus (which was, naturally, filled with cranky people who didn't want to have to catch an extra bus). I amused myself by playing "Guess which people on the bus are going to Woodford" and looking at things out of the window, which included:

• A sign saying "HORSE POO $3".
• A place named Burpengary. (Australian place names are so awesome.)
• A town that looked like the area full of shopping malls that I went to in Buffalo, NY to get my PowerBook's power cable replaced.

Eventually, we got to Woodford. Much queueing ensued, followed by an introduction to our home away from home for the next week, in Tent City. There's a lot to be said for paying to stay in a tent that someone else puts up and takes down, with access to facilities including free drinking water² and the aforementioned showers in trucks. Especially when one does not actually own a tent. I didn't take a picture of the tent, which was remiss of me, but I did hang some elephants outside it.

My first impression of the festival site itself was of stalls. Lots and lots of stalls. Most of them sold clothes and accessories (especially hats), although there were also several stalls selling amazing musical instruments and, of course, an abundance of food vendors. Thanks to the expected density of the hippie population there was an abundance of vegetarian options, albeit with surprisingly slim pickings for vegans.

But I wasn't there to spend money and get more stuff. I was there to see bands! And to take pictures of them, although that was for my own record and enjoyment rather than artistic or technical merit (as will quickly become apparent) and I certainly didn't bother about getting up to the front of the stage to do it.

The first band of the festival for me was The Barons of Tang, who describe themselves as sounding like "gypsy deathcore & dirt fever in a dirty bar on the wrong side of town drinking Shlivovitz at 2am discussing the difference between grindcore and techcore." I would probably describe them as Martin Martini and the Bone Palace Orchestra, if Martin Martini led a bunch of young punks who would rather howl and grimace than pretend to any kind of sophistication, however twisted. Two drummers/percussionists, tuba and double bass, accordion, reeds and the occasional fiddle played by the guitarist all contributed to an exuberant cacophony that got the crowd dancing (and even my staid foot tapping). A rollicking good time was had by all!

Matt Kelly and the Keepers were supposed to be next, but apparently Matt Kelly had spontaneously combusted or something as they were a no-show. Not too heartbreaking, as I was only planning to see them in the absence of anything more enticing. Much more disappointing was the actual appearance of Hawksley Workman some time later.

This guy made a bad impression on me as soon as he walked on stage, with his ironically hip flat cap, untied tie, waistcoat and smugness. Actually, that's not quite true: he made a bad impression on me when his bio somewhere called him "one of the hardest-working musicians" in something something, and his festival bio said that "averaging two albums a year, he traverses genres fearlessly". Reading that, I suspected that he had delusions of awesomeness while actually being very generic and derivative, and I fled his stage after a couple of songs that sounded like he thought he was Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen and three other similarly iconic artists all rolled into one and some horribly pretentious waffle³. I honestly just could not sit through any more of it.

There was a silver lining, though: I ended up at a different stage where a group called Melodics were playing. I hadn't planned to see them at the festival, as nothing I read about them interested me much, but they put on a good show. Australian hip-hop with synths and saxophone and enough originality and verve to distance them completely from the sort of hip-hop made by urban white kids in Australia who want to be gangstas. I was especially impressed by the saxophone solos and the vocals, with a special mention of the clever fellow who played sax and synths simultaneously.

The final act of the night was Newfoundland's Hey Rosetta!, who I thought were very endearing as well as being really rather good. They were all young and indie-beardy apart from the frontman who was young and unbeardy (their female violinist was absent, having missed a flight), so that I initially thought he was a roadie because he didn't match. Hee hee.. They also had a rather tall guitarist.

Combining fairly standard pop-rock instrumentation (guitars, bass, drums, vocals, occasional keys) with strings (cello, and the missing violin), Hey Rosetta! deliver a punchy, dense sound that is vaguely reminiscent of early Travis⁴ , Coldplay and Muse (I would have been really, really into this band in the late nineties) while still being original and complex enough for me to make an exception to my rule about bands with exclamation marks in their names. Their live performance was superb, and I will not be surprised if I hear a lot more about them in the future.

On Day Zero I also had one of my favourite Woodford moments: looking across the pond at the big circus tent, all lit up for night-time, and listening to the frogs.

1. Thanks to my protracted attempt to navigate the (awful) section of the website where one could attempt to create a schedule, I had discovered secret performances of some bands I wanted to see. Then I used iCal to actually create a schedule in a non-insane manner. Take that, terrible website! [↩]
2. The only way to get drinking water on the festival site was to pay for it. [↩]
3. Quoted verbatim from my notebook: oh god seriously a story about going to the desert and going off all chemicals and something about a coyote oh god oh god [↩]
4. This may only be because vocalist Tim Baker sounds strangely like Fran Healy [↩]

I'm back from an amazing seven days at Woodford, through which I breathed and sweated and had a wonderful time, and somehow it's 2009. Well, well.

I spent less time taking pictures than I expected to, and still ended up with just under five hundred to sort through upon my (triumphant) return. I discovered lots of amazing new bands (and several that were not so amazing), as well as rediscovering my folkier inclinations. I bought a tin whistle and turned up to a "Lean to play tin whistle" workshop, only to discover that I could have given a better "Learn to play tin whistle" workshop and I was better off learning tunes and twiddles myself; I also went to two workshops where various feel-good strategies and hippie nonsense¹ got people out of their shells and singing, in the process partially overcoming whatever ridiculous block was causing me to bleat timidly rather than sing in the presence of others.

I didn't go to any "Radiance Workshops" or indulge in any of the other hippie nonsense² on offer, or attend much in the way of spoken word and film events. Instead, I spent almost the entire time marching around in the dust from one sweltering tent to the next, then squiggling illegible things in my little notebook about whatever exciting discovery was on stage this time. There was festival food, and getting scorched out of the tent by eight in the morning, and two thunderstorms, and wearing an awesome hat, and drinking five litres of water a day. It was great.

Miscellaneous highlights included:

• Showers and toilets in a truck!
• Having my reliance on intuition vindicated yet again, chiefly by the Barons of Tang, David Hyams and the Miles To Go Band, and Rosie Burgess.
• A surprising abundance of cellos, saxophones, and Scottish accents.
• The Great Band Competition, in which complete strangers were flung together to form bands in under 24 hours.
• The ilovemushrooms stall.
• New hippie pants (which fit! and are long enough! Miracle of miracles!) and a T-shirt that looks like a band T-shirt but secretly has an environmental slogan on it.
• The overheard exclamation of a shocked hipster girl: "No-one wears makeup here!"
• Enjoying and appreciating genres of music that I wouldn't usually come across, let alone sit and listen to for forty minutes.
• Wah pedals combined with acoustic guitars and electric violins.
• The best vibe of any festival - or, come to that, any place with lots of people - I've been to.

Lowlights were few and far between, but included:

• Pompous know-it-alls (especially the ones who were actually completely wrong).
• People who clap along OUT OF TIME.
• Terrible, terrible sound engineering at one of the biggest stages.
• Pretentious people who dance half-heartedly while looking sidelong at everyone else who's dancing, because it's all about looking cool and not about actually wanting to dance.³
• A lack of awesome breakfast food.
• Sitting in plastic chairs for a week.
• Band fatigue,⁴ which started to set in on the last day.

Coming back to the real world has been strange, although the time out from my daily routine has helped to solidify my resolve, in a way. No New Year's Resolutions for me this year; instead, a focus on pursuing and cultivating the things I value, and on leaving the path of least resistance. It always happens that a change of environment and time spent doing things on my own bring my ideals closer, where I can actually see them. The challenge, I suppose, is in keeping hold of that along with the regular everyday demands of regular everyday existence.

Some Tales of Woodford, complete with photos, will appear over the next little while, but I intend to take my time about it.

1. The good kind. [↩]
2. The bad kind. [↩]
3. Give me dancing hippies over dancing hipsters any day. [↩]
4. Oh look, it's yet another band that uses the word "gypsy" in describing itself. Oh look, it's yet another band who grew up listening to You Am I. [↩]

Prescript: I have been tossing up whether to discuss the songs I have chosen for my soundtrack-to-this-year pretend mix CD that doesn't come on a physical disc. A lack of time has decided for me, so without further ado: My soundtrack-to-this-year pretend mix CD that doesn't come on a physical disc is yours to download here (63.3MB, complete with a sad monkey pretending to be the cover art). Offered without comment, because encouraging people to make their own wildly inaccurate interpretations and extrapolations is much more fun for everybody.

So, 2008. What a year.

It started with all the momentum of the extraordinary December that preceded it - still on a roll from arriving back home to find that I suddenly appreciated an Australian summer, then lucking into a job and a place to live with perplexing rapidity, all while coming to terms with the fact that an entirely unlooked-for relationship had shown up and looked to be making itself at home. January saw me making a silly amount of money by doing simple things well, going to see live music¹, even joining a band again. Everything was coming up me.

And then I got sick.

Weeks and months of 2008 blurred into an indistinct mess of exhaustion and waiting. Work, fitness, social life, creative pursuits, in fact almost everything I valued fell victim to the sudden collapse of my physical and mental capacities. Never before had I been forced to confront such limitations; all of my previous failures can, in the end, be attributed to apathy and weakness of will. Now, though, pushing myself meant being practically bedridden for days at a time. Various doctors ordered various tests, ruled out a handful of possibilities, and then handballed the case onto someone else, often necessitating several weeks of impotent waiting. Friendships suffered, inevitably;² isolation set in. It was not a good time.

However: I came to truly appreciate a dimension of friendship that transcends having shared history or emotional parallels or thinking the same things are stupid, a dimension that tends to be invisible until hardship strikes. There are a few people who stood by me in my uselessness this year, keeping the lines of communication open despite the cantankerous alignment of the planets, for which I am more grateful than I can say. It wasn't always the people I would have picked out of a line-up, and I suspect that some of those who kept the suckage at bearable levels weren't even aware of the good they were doing.

Mid-year, with little improvement in sight health-wise, I moved out of the share house I was in and then up to Brisbane. My communication with people in general had pretty much shrivelled up and dropped off by this point, so not only did my departure appear abrupt, I didn't even feel comfortable explaining it to those who asked. Not my finest moment, and in some ways I was vindictively happy to be leaving the city that I felt had let me down so badly,³ although there were pangs every time somebody said they would miss me (and every time some bodies didn't say it).

There followed some new challenges: adjusting to new living arrangements in a new city, while too unwell to get out there and stamp my stamp on this new life; reconciling homesickness with the desire to start afresh; getting better. That last, at least, is a struggle I am winning - looking back, the second half of the year looks like a long, slow climb upward, with the only serious dip being the entire month I lost to the aftermath of moving house again at the end of October. While I'm still not going to be capable of walking from Berlin to Postdam⁴ again any time soon, and it takes me hours to hack together a long piece of writing, things are looking up.

For all that it was miserable and pointless, it was impossible to come through this year without learning a lot. When all you can manage is introspection, for days on end, you discover how much time there is in a day, and how much it's possible to introspect without running out of navel to gaze at. I realised how many basic things I had always taken for granted, how little I missed some things that I had thought essential, how much I missed some other things that had always seemed fairly inconsequential. I guess you could say that I had no choice but to spend a lot of time nose to nose with myself, and there are no distractions or excuses in the world that can withstand such prolonged scrutiny. I'm really onto myself now (a mixed blessing, and no mistake).

A visit to Melbourne at the start of December was a wonderful chance to reconnect with people and places, and reminded me that for all its faults Melbourne still feels like home. Seeing the Mountain Goats for the first time⁵ was the highlight that really pulled everything together for me, though, and I returned to Brisbane newly energised and determined. On a mission from God, as Elwood Blues would have it.

I will not take good fortune for granted, ever again. And I am no longer prepared to sit around spinning my wheels, idly thinking about the wonderful things I want to do instead of freaking doing them. Heck, no. I am going to crack the bones of life and suck out the marrow. And if I don't? I'll have only myself to blame. I'm cool with that.

1. Including The National twice in two days, and getting to thank Matt Berninger personally after the second show. What a weekend that was. [↩]
2. I had sown the seeds of my own doom, never knowing it at the time. [↩]
3. It's easy to blame circumstances on anything but themselves. [↩]
4. Or Hampton to North Coburg. Ah, memories. [↩]
5. Or, to be more accurate, encountering John Darnielle in person for the first time. [↩]

When I was eight or nine years old we moved to a new house in a new suburb. Some time between then and when I moved out of the room¹ I was given a packet of glow-in-the-dark stars, which I stuck all over the walls and ceiling and wardrobe doors.

When I come to visit, I'm surrounded by all my old made-up constellations as I wait to fall asleep.

1. A thing about my family that remained fairly constant over the years is the periodic switching of bedrooms. Perhaps my frequent furniture-rearranging impulses have this at their root. [↩]

I have so many things that I would like to write about, but thanks to my health dipping downward again it has been difficult to focus on a train of thought for long enough to commit it properly to paper¹.

What I've been doing:

• Watching Battlestar Galactica (and being both intrigued and infuriated by it).
• Suddenly wanting some books about 20th century history to read (hello, library card).
• Having ideas that are easy to have when you aren't in a position to implement them. (Will they last until I get my mojo back?)
• Playing UnAngband (a surprisingly awesome hybrid of Nethack and Angband).
• Letting several posts simmer quietly on various back burners.
• Observing the gradual disappearance of my willingness to make pointless noise.
• Hatching plots.

I've been doing other things as well, of course, but you get the idea.

1. There just aren't elegant electronic equivalents for a lot of phrases, are there. [↩]