Nuns!

Illustration by Onnie Cleary

 Nuns! I've been banned from writing about my house so this week it’s nuns. I couldn't help but notice the large flock of nuns, in white habits and wimples, chanting on the corner outside my office. At first I thought they were chanting at Ding Dong Dang, the ancient and well-attended karaoke bar that has featured in car ads and one song by Sydney band Psychonanny and The Babyshakers. As I approached from downhill I imagined I heard the nuns singing said band’s Ding Dong Dang, the woeful tale of the disappearance of a girl named Ashley. It soon became clear they were chanting something along the lines of, "Hail Mary full of stuff, Hail Mary you're very tough", and the Ding Dong Dang was coming from my iPod. 

The nuns - and their posse of priests and worshippers - stayed on the corner outside my office for a very long time. They chanted about Mary, God and some other people without pause whilst holding cheap-looking candles. After eliminating the possibility of them being an en masse outdoor karaoke performance, I decided to investigate what it was they were really doing. Through a scientific investigation process involving three listens to the song Ding Dong Dang and a minor hair-on-fire incident, I reached a firm conclusion. The nuns were using the occasion of International Women's Day to protest the existence of a women's clinic. If this is the best idea they had for celebrating women then they suck. Nuns suck.

My friend Leif once told me, in astonishing detail, about a video he saw of nuns sucking - nuns sucking all kinds of things. I was not surprised to discover that he finds the idea of nuns erotic. It just so happens that Leif's housemate is one of the singers from Psychonanny and The Babyshakers, which leads me back to the song and the street corner. This might not be so much about nuns as it is about geography and sound.

Some corners have a smell, like the corner of Pitt and Redfern streets in Redfern, some corners have a revolving temporal relationship with colour, light or shade. The corner outside my office seems to be developing a sense of something else altogether. Let's start with Ding Dong Dang. It was voted Sydney's fourth best karaoke bar by Time Out Sydney. My friend P Street writes for Time Out so it’s not too much of a leap to imagine that it was he who rated the bar, which is important for the following imaginary scenario.

Picture this. P Street is inside Ding Dong Dang singing his heart out to his open notebook, in the very same room Ashley last sang in before disappearing forever. Outside, a large posse of nuns chants over their cheap candles in the direction of the women's clinic while the producers of a car advertisement arrange three models in front of the green and white checkerboard tiles of Ding Dong Dang. Inside the women's clinic the medical staff are hard at work doing medical things and have no idea they’re about to be overrun by nuns. Across the street, I'm working in my office wishing I was at a party at Hibernian House, visible in the near distance over the heads of the nuns. On the opposite corner, the staff of The Australia Council for The Arts are ignoring everything that goes on and taking turns to have bathroom breaks so they can adjust the artful draping of their red plastic bead necklaces. Back in Newtown, Leif farewells his housemate who is off to a soundcheck for a gig at The Excelsior Hotel. The first song on their set list is Ding Dong Dang. Leif finds himself satisfyingly alone, wanders around the flat for a while and then decides that seeing as he is alone, just this once, he might put on the video featuring sucking nuns.


First published on RHUM...

I don't know where this came from but I am now in love with it or This is my new resume

SLAMMATOWN - Hey Roomy

Illustration by Onnie Cleary

I hate sharing my house. I don’t mind sharing with Grizelda, she’s like family, but the idea of a stranger moving into my daily routine is freaking me the fuck out. Sydney’s real estate prices are threatening to rob me of my privacy and dignity. If you saw me first thing in the morning you’d understand about the dignity. 

I’m not very good in the mornings. I tend to walk around in a daze, bumping into walls and trying to remember how to switch the kettle on. For the first hour of the day, for no discernible reason at all, I am largely disabled. Grizelda waits until I have half-drunk my first coffee before attempting to talk to me and I appreciate her tact and understanding because I know it is rare.

When I bought a new desk I spent six months researching desks; going into shops and sitting down behind them, imagining how it would feel to sit there every day, what it would look like brought into my home, where everything from my jar of pens and stack of notebooks to my external hard drive would sit. Now that I am showing people aroundThe Peach to see if they want to move in I get to spend about half an hour with a person before deciding whether or not they get to share my life. This is not ideal.

In a world where people did not go insane over property Grizelda and I would be able to afford The Peach all by ourselves, just the two of us. And the cat. Last week I was reading a budgeting guide for the modern man, printed in 1960. It suggested that spending more than ten percent of your income on a mortgage was stupid. If I lived in The Peach by myself, rent would account for one hundred and ten percent of my income. I used a calculator and that’s what it said, don’t doubt my maths. Real estate junkies have now officially inflated prices past the point of stupid. Well done.

Five times I have given someone a tour of The Peach, answering their questions about my temperament and living style politely. On the inside of me head I’m screaming, "It is none of your fucking business, stupid stranger bastard!". I’m losing myself in translation from inside to out. They all say I seem very calm and easygoing but I am not calm. And I am not easygoing. I am going to hate you if you fuck with my shit. And I don’t even know what constitutes fucking with my shit. It could be as simple as using my pink teapot without asking, misaligning my shampoo bottles on their rack or leaving your dirty cup on the coffee table. It might not be anything like that at all. It might be interrupting a sentence forming silently in my head, or talking to my friends, or not talking to my friends... These things are harder than expected to predict.

First published on RHUM...

SLAMMATOWN - Slamtopia

Sydney has divided itself into four big, terracotta-roofed slabs we call North, South, East and West. So far as I can tell, all these suburban areas of Sydney are terrible. Everyone knows the north side is filled wall-to-wall with moneyed arses caring more about which ‘display’ books they range on their coffee table than about any real human issues. The east is something similar to north. I spent a large portion of my younger years rolling around the north-western rim of the Sydney basin - swimming in rivers, staring right up at the mountains no more than five kilometres from my front door and occasionally looking down at they city from the top of one, fervently wishing I could teleport myself there.

 

South I knew almost nothing about until last weekend, when I was lucky enough to spend three whole days in a beach house with friends. They all grew up south of Sydney in a place known as The Shire. And I have to tell you it sounds almost entirely fucked. There are the usual suburban consolations of wide spaces, easy access to bushland and riding around on your bmx with friends but that sums up the good points.

The Shire, like every other cardinal point spinning out from the city, is fucked. A large proportion of the residents sound narrow-minded, racist and aggressively ‘normal’. So aggressively normal that it is almost impossible to live happily as anything other than a nuclear family with a neutral-toned lounge room without being subjected to a truckload of shit. If the same can be said for all points from North swinging round to West then we have a problem here. 

How is it possible that out of the whole huge sprawled guts of Sydney the only place I can live without fear of clashing with locals simply by making art and having ideas is the Inner West? I propose we make a new area, a new suburban area east of Sydney. By east I mean properly east, out past the headlands of the harbour on the bean-green ocean.

We have all kinds of technology now - like ships, bulldozers and helicopters. We could solidify some human waste, build a large floating land mass, map out wide house blocks and gently winding streets, plant trees, vegetables, herbs and flowers. We could build houses that are proper habitats for humans, encourage the birds and bats to fly and visit. We could have picnic lunches at each other's houses and talk rationally and interestingly about our differences and how we each widen the scope of the others’ understanding of the world. Or I suppose I could just get jets and blow some of the existing suburbs up. Raze them to the ground, grow a moustache, throw all racist, bigoted and narrow-minded people out into the desert to die in the sun. 

I’d be happy with one or both of the above plans. Either way I’m going to need helicopters. Big ones.

First published on RHUM...

A prayer for me as a gownless woman

I pray you might provide me with a dressing gown that is mighty. A dressing gown that is made of silk, has a wonderful excess of room in the armhole area and crosses easily over the bust. A dressing gown that is possibly ocean blue or ocean green and struck through with minor embroidered embellishments that are not at all itchy or inconveniently placed when sitting. I pray this dressing gown appears in my cupboard within the next ten seconds so that I may leave my bedroom modestly covered in order  to scrub the balsamic vinegar out of the blue dress I bought on Sunday for $9.00 in the coastal town of Milton. Thanks.

SLAMMATOWN - Slamma Swap

Illustration by Onnie Cleary

I’ve been watching a television show called Wife Swap, not as a guilty pleasure but as a kind of science. Thinking about my own home, The Peach, and the role I play within it’s starting to become clear that I have become Un Slamma Terrible.

At The Peach my housemate Grizelda is a good lantern, she puts up with just about anything I can think of doing though she does tell me, quite often, that can’t possibly be another person on the planet as uniquely annoying as me. 

On Wife Swap the first thing the wives do is write a manual for their home outlining the general vibe of the home, the rules, schedules and a detailed setting out of who does what and when. I’ve been imagining writing a manual for The Peach and I have to tell you that on paper I’m not sounding so good.

I prefer to wake up at a different time every day. I hate doing things the same two days in a row. I hate washing dishes so every time I do it I do it with hate. I have been known to run up and down the hallway drinking rum from a bottle just for the hell of it. I listen to loud music as often as possible. I set my drum kit up in the middle of the library. I hate cooking and will yell about being hungry rather than go shopping. I hate boring people and people with bad hair cuts. I won’t talk to people I don’t like. I will invite people over for dinner and then not cook anything. I go out to see bands and come home plastered at five in the morning. I shoot the television with a water pistol when I don’t like the show I’m watching. I won’t let anyone else use my teapots, toothpaste or milk but if I find a hidden stash of chocolate I’m going to eat it. If I was a man I’m quite sure I’d leave the toilet seat up on purpose.

My next door neighbour is more settled and domestic than I am which is saying something because he just happens to be the former tour manager for The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead. He is about a thousand years old, has hands weighed down with skull rings and has lived just about as wild and hard as a man can live. But even he manages to get up at the same time early each morning, make a cup of tea, ponder a little and then get on his day in an orderly fashion.

I’m beginning to think Grizelda deserves some kind of medal for living with me. Speaking of which, we’ve got a vacancy at The Peach. Anyone want to move in?

First published on RHUM...

I'll tell you what's not interesting, it's the ongoing saga of finding a happy third person to inhabit The Peach. Our newest Peachette is leaving to go study full-time, which is nice, if you like that kind of thing but it leaves us once again with a vacancy and if there's one thing I hate more than not getting along with a housemate is finding a new one.

It's hard to explain just what kind of person I'm looking for. It's easier for Grizelda because she's more easygoing than me, she's holds grudges just about as long as a goldfish does, if she ever gets cranky it's over and done with inside of an hour and then forgotten so completely it's like it never happened at all. I'm a more complicated kettle of fish when it comes it my home.  If someone is going to do something bad, and I mean really fucked then I am going to hate you for it, probably for the rest of your life. My good opinion once lost is lost forever, Mr Darcy taught me how do that.

There is a prospective Peachette coming to The Peach tonight to check out the room and to meet Grizelda. I've met her before but that's no guarantee of anything, as Spencer likes to point out, I know a lot of scumbags. I'm fairly certain this woman is not a scumbag but here's the flip side, I might be too much of a scumbag for her. You see she's kind of amazing. She's a racing car driver on the weekends and a corporate superwoman during the week. She is tall, tidy, has waist-length red hair and is related to some kind of secret service combat machine man who might just kill me dead if I do wrong by her. I'm hoping this meeting goes along swimmingly, so swimmingly that nobody calls anybody else a scumbag or winds up dead. Wish me luck.

SLAMMATOWN: Talking 'bout last night

Illustration by Onnie Cleary

He ran across the square yelling, ‘I fucked her face! I fucked her face!’*. Try watching a man do that then tell me how you feel.

Earlier in the night, before the face-fuck yelling, I was at a show reviewing three bands I had no interest in, none at all. I went outside for a little sit down when my left foot became mildly itchy. A small itch can be happily ignored but I scratched anyway. A stranger sitting beside me leant over, pushed my hand away and started scratching my foot with his own fingernails. My foot, his hand, you get the picture.

Over the course of the next twenty minutes, Foot Scratching Man photographed me against my will, made inappropriately familiar conversation, offered me terrible student-style cheap cigarettes he was too old to be smoking, declared he would pine when I decided to walk away and was generally quite strange. He was sitting with a woman who seemed like his girlfriend.

He wasn’t flirting, not by any normal definition of the word, but there was something odd going on there. I wouldn’t have minded too much if this was the only thing that happened last night but shit just went down a weird hill after that. One man pulled at my shirt to peer at my breasts and another poured his drink over my feet to help by anointing me with spirits.

The sense of relief after leaving a venue packed full of stupid men was profound. Later on I was sitting peacefully on the ground drinking longnecks with Spencer and friends when Fuck Face Yelling Man walked right up to us and asked to join us. I said he could if he told me a good story.**

He swayed drunkenly but steadied himself into a low crouch by hanging on to my shoulders. His story was this; he shagged a woman, took photographs of her, sent them to all his friends and then denied it to her face. All the while he was pushing his face right up into mine, wrapping his arms around me, crawling on his knees to get closer to me. If Spencer hadn’t jumped to his feet and demanded that this horrible man unhand me at once I don’t know what I would have done.***

Spencer looked serious as a heart attack standing there all tall and commanding telling him to take his hands off me and leave. Fuck Face Yelling Man leapt to his feet and started to run away yelling this: “I photographed her and I lied! I fucked her face! I grabbed her ears and fucked her face! I fucked her face!”

Might be there’s something in the water, or the power of my fuckwit magnet spontaneously tripled. Either way things are not coming up roses. There is something wrong the men of the Inner West. Please send me some new and better men, so I don’t end up murdering somebody.

* He was not talking about my face. He did not fuck my face.

** Spencer told him no, as I was saying yes. For the record Spencer was right and I was terribly, horribly wrong.

*** I was planning unmitigated violence, not helpless surrender.

First published on RHUM


Also on RHUM today my review of The Antlers and Bear in Heaven with Sherlock's Daughter but  I wouldn't bother reading that if I was you.

SLAMMATOWN - Just floating

At The Peach it is so hot, I feel like each breath is drawn through a thick mist of polluted saltwater. The temperature gauge says it's thirty degrees but numbers have never been very good at conveying emotion. Even the equation for an explosion of custard looks like a dull chain of kindergarten charts disarranged.

Last night I could take the heat no longer and begged Grizelda to drive me to the water for a swim. Happily, Grizelda is not opposed to piloting Peachette night-swimming missions in the ocean. I admit swimming in the ocean after dark may not be as safe as swimming in the day, but it has its rewards.  

I was floating face up in the ocean watching scarce clouds, unable to dim the stars, meander aimlessly above. The ocean covered over my ears and buoyed my back as though it had decided it would hold me and deafen me so I could think unhindered by heat or sound for just a little while. I bobbed in the black and gentle swell thinking of something I read in Delia Falconer’s book ‘Sydney’. She says, “Sydney... is overflowing with dreams… haunted by loss like some strange plasmal marine creature. Even the northern beaches Gaimariagal clan, according to descendant Dennis Foley, spoke rarely and with sadness of the Gidgingal, people from the east whose dreaming was under the water, swallowed by the prehistoric seas.”

Dreaming, in all of its guises, might be more important here than I suspected. The first known recorded dream in Australia, according to Falconer, occurred on the 31st of January 1788. Lieutenant Ralph Clark, who had just disembarked from the First Fleet, was in the habit of dreaming about his wife and his best friend Kempster. He dreamt that his wife and Kempster were having it off and was filled with desire to ‘run Kempster through’ for this breach of friendship.

It seems dreams, here in old Sydney town, have always been marked by loss, separation, betrayal and death. Not a very good start, really. As the dark ocean held me firmly afloat in its small swell I thought about people I know who have held each other. I know only one couple that has made a success of being with each other. Everyone else I know is plagued with betrayal, intrigues and the general inability to make anything other than a momentary success of romance. I’m beginning to wonder if something was set in place even before the first building went up; if there isn’t some vital piece of information we are missing that we could use to shape our new dreams in or out of the water.

First published on RHUM.