twisted paths

At the tender and impressionable age of twelve, I read a sanitised hagiography of ballerina Anna Pavlova, a febrile yet sanctimonious tract that communicated enough of that great artist’s vision and passion for me to refer to it for some time after as my bible. But what if, instead, I had like Meryl Tankard been given the biography of Olga Spessivtseva, a greater artist it’s claimed though not so entrepreneurial a star, whose glory and glamour ended in madness and obscurity?

Or what if, even better, someone had had the foresight and compassion to give me the candid, witty, uproarious, racy yet elegantly discreet memoirs of stage and screen star Tallulah Bankhead, which I have just read, ah, too many decades later? What if?

whew

I just had the first really real conversation with my darling grandmother in years. She rang when I was stoned and happily sorting through a sackful of her gloves. She wanted to be sure the next time I came up didn’t clash with my uncle, who’s visiting before flying off to Bangladesh, which fills Granny, 88, with trepidation. She just almost lost her daughter to cancer, now her son is disappearing into troubled parts.

I grabbed the chance to book my next visit, having only 2 days left this month. I told her how my flatmate and her boyfriend had both nabbed some of her gloves, and that I’d kept several pairs myself. She asked how I was doing so I told her about the gigs this month. She seemed pleased but I could feel her immense distance from the pace of life in an artsy, ambitious 21C Redfern sharehouse. I said I wish I could see her more often, she said it’d be nice but I’d get bored. I said not at all, I’d have her here with me if I could, but that this is no place for the… frail. She agreed – with, I think, something between envy and a shudder.

We talked about gloves, and about my next visit, and got back to the departing uncle. “I just wish no-one would go anywhere for a while,” she said intently, her voice beginning to wobble. “We should all just let things settle down for a bit.”

“If only that were possible,” I said gently, and she echoed me.

Maybe I’ll change my tune in the unlikely event that I reach my grandparents’ age, but right now, I swear, I don’t want to live that long. That is, I don’t want my life prolonged by a ceaseless supply of drugs and surgery and ‘first-rate medical care’ into an extended and often painful leisure-and-anxiety-filled vegetation.

Which is probably just as well, because it’s looking increasingly unlikely that I’ll be able to afford anything like it. Plenty of middle class baby boomers, older than me, will be kept alive long enough to tut over the escalation to global warfare and environmental destruction on the evening news. I figure I’ll probably fall in the front lines. I kind of hope so.

mystical encounters

Last night I was waiting for the train home, a little after nine, and this dude came up to me. Pretty good-looking for a middle-aged suit – tall, big grey eyes, good jaw, slightly shaggy hair. American, I realised, when he spoke, complimenting my hair. Now this happens several times a week on average – strangers asking about my hair – so thus far nothing out of the ordinary. But we kept talking, idly on my part but he was skilled in the management of it: not too keen, never dull. I’m writing it down now because I want to remember what he said.

He said the people that change the world are not unusually brilliant or powerful, just unusually focused and persistent. He said he knew this both intellectually and in his heart, but he was still struggling to effect change. He said he was a teacher of finance, and that it was a simple subject that I was obviously capable of mastering, and that it’s always a case of one step at a time. Learn one riff, he suggested, because by then he knew I was a singer, learn one riff and when you’re strong on it add another, and then more, one step at a time. And that’s how the world changes, of course. I gave him my card so he could look up the details of my current gigs. He never even told me his name.

post gig post

After a small but highly satisfactory opening (as they say), we are tweakin’. Following the brilliant suggestion of one of our chat participants, the absence of a confirmed special guest next week shall be resolved as now listed in the entry below. And following the equally inspired judgment of my broadly esteemed guitarist Eug, the chat will come first.

Those who really want to say something and refrain until the very end of the night will be roundly chastised.