Friday, December 04, 2009
Day 1292 - Creative money-making schemes.
Hey there. Thing have started happening on this website again, welcome back! I've uploaded a bunch of new pages, I've started working on old ones and I'm filling in blanks such as missing sound recordings etc. I'm going to help you to navigate on this page so that you won't have to search through the whole travelogue for changes... Here's what's new:
The next thing I'll do is sort out the map on the right and then I'll write the Alice Springs page. There are still no new photos and the so-called image gallery is still as crap. It's just not high enough on my list of priorities. I'll let you know in the list above about other changes I make before I leave Melbourne in a few days. There probably won't be any more updates between December 10th and January 21st - I'm going to make the most of my precious time in NZ.
_______
Yes, time flies. Can't believe I'm leaving Melbourne in less than a week. Feels a bit unreal, I've settled so nicely here.
Tina is becoming a real friend. She's one of these in-between people that I seem to attract / be attracted to. She's been brought up by very strict Taiwanese parents but has lived in Australia most of her life and considers herself to be Australian. But her parents have a hold on her still, it's a tight grip that she struggles to escape. Of course, "escape" is the easy way out (in the short-term, anyway), a confrontation is what is needed. As she finds it hard to talk to them, writing seems to be the best way to express things clearly. But her Chinese writing isn't good enough for that, and it is the same with their English! A translator could be one way out... I can, to a certain extent, relate. Her brother died a couple of years ago, now she is the only one left to take the full force of her parents' expectations and pressurising.
She does research at the optometry department of Melbourne University. Most of the time she sits in the dark all day long torturing rats. As I humourously put it when I want to piss her off. She tries to tell me that her rats are happy to have things screwed through their skulls and bolted onto their brains and having lights flashed in their eyes. It's some kind of research to do with vision.
Tina often wears black and has a fascination for big organs, vampires and all things German. She has a German boyfriend and she is going to live in Germany one day. Yup, as I'm trying to tell you, she's seriously loopy. What I probably like the most about her is that she's readable like an open book. We don't bother trying to hide anything from each other.
I've been over to her place a few times. Once her chef-friend Kevin turned up and made us (Tina, her German flatmate Ramona and me) the most delicious chicken curry, just melting in your mouth. I don't know what chefs do to meat to make it so tender. Everybody should have a chef as a friend. Forget hotsinglegirls4u.com - just imagine befriendachef.com! I'd sign up straight away... Kevin's stories from various Melbourne kitchens amuse the mind just as much as his food amuses the palate. He's had knives thrown at him by head-chefs. He's seen a cook putting his foot in boiling oil. He doesn't fall for the standard put-a-pan-of-oil-in-the-oven-and-ask-an-apprentice-to-remove-it-trick anymore. When you open the door to the oven the added oxygen makes the oil catch fire and spews it out in the poor sod's direction.
My frisbee-skills are getting better. I can run, I can catch. Now I just need to learn how to throw the god damned thing. My last game before NZ will sadly be on Sunday.
Creative money-making schemes.
I still don't have a job. However, I've got more money in my pocket right now than when Dr. Play left a month ago. (Of course, not including my rent or my NZ plane tickets.) How is that possible?
Scheme 1 - I've already told you all about my mouth harp busking. I can make a fair amount in Brunswick Street on Fridays and Saturday nights. Especially around 2-3am. I can make about 50 dollars on a Friday or Saturday night if I'm really motivated and lucky.
Scheme 2 - Having my eyeballs poked at by researchers at the optometry department at Melbourne University. Thanks to Tina, of course. Incidentally, a couple of the frisbee guys are based here as well. I've participated in a couple of studies, at least one of them about something to do with how migraine affects your vision. No, I don't have migraine, I'm in the migraine-free sample. An optometrist checked the pressure in my eyeballs by poking at them with a scary machine, after giving me anasthetic eye drops that made my eyes feel very odd. Then I sat in front of a computer screen for about four or five hours watching flashing dots and pressing buttons until I thought I was in a hidden-camera remake of A Clockwork Orange. If I didn't have a migraine before I certainly had a headache after. But that's a small price to pay for 60 dollars!!
Sheme 3 - For this you need a mask and preferably a snorkel, a bag that can hold coins but let water out, a warm summer night and a fountain full of coins. Preferably a fountain with no signs saying "swimming illegal" or "the coins in this fountain will be donated to charity x". There are no such signs around the fountain outside the National Gallery of Victoria. The coins in it are covered in a little layer of mud and are just rusting away. If it's not such a warm summer night it really helps to have a friend living neaby with a hot shower. A friend who can also hold the bag in one hand, a light in the other and who can be on the lookout for police - Tina! She lives a two-minute walk from the NGV. It's also good to choose a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday night, there will be fewer people out and about. I waited for a week or two for the weather to get a bit warmer. Tina and I looked at the weather forecast and decided on Wednesday this week. We had a couple of glasses of sparkling in her flat and at 4am we walked over to the fountain. I braved the "recycled water" sign and the cold water and dove in. The water reached up to my waist, a few inches too deep to float on my front, breathe through the snorkel and just collect coins. Instead I had to "dive" to get at the coins, which made it much more complicated. Should have had a weight belt!! Also, the visibility went down to about 10cm after I'd kicked up the dirt. I'd only spent about two minutes in there a collected maybe three or four handfuls of coins when a voice shouted at me to "get out". Guards were rushing out of the NGV, they'd probably spotted us on the cameras. I put the last handful in the bag and told Tina to run along to save what we'd made... and my camera! I had to walk around a wall to get out of the pool and they would have caught me if they'd really wanted to. Instead they strolled over, happy to let me escape. Of course, I wouldn't have let private security guards intimidated me to hang around and wait for the police, they have no right to put a finger on you. Also, as far as I knew I hadn't actually done anything wrong. Back in Tina's flat I had a shower and then we counted the money - 9.35 dollars in discoloured coins and five foreign coins. Not bad for two minutes but totally not worth staying up a whole night for! Anyway, interesting experiment...
It's of course ethically questionable, this third scheme. I considered it and came to the conclusion that in this particular case it's ok, for me. The money "donated" to the fountain doesn't seem to go to any good causes, the coins are simply left to rust. So I am just doing a bit of recycling. Secondly, am I not interfering with someone's wish? Presumably people make a wish when they toss a coin into a fountain. But my actions, later, do not interfere with someone's experience of making a wish. And are we really so materialistic to think that a wish is tied up in a coin? No, I believe wishes work on a different level. And if I had tossed a coin into a fountain to make a wish, and I knew that the coin would later help someone else, I'd presumably be even happier to do so. And thirdly, I am supporting the capitalist machinery. It is, as you may be aware, illegal to burn notes. So I think it should be equally illegal to throw away coins. Such actions can upset the capitalist system, it means that the central bank will have to use more resources to make more money and inflation can rise as a result. So what I really am doing is giving something back to society. The next time you're surprised to find that the price of milk has only gone up by ten cents, you should fall to your knees and say out loud, "thank you, Martin, you're such a great guy".
_____
Having written the words above, I ran out and into a Friday night in Melbourne exactly as random, eclectic and wonderful as only Friday nights in Melbourne can be. I arrived at the tram stop about ten seconds before the tram did, jumped on and was greeted by a guy I'd met the other day and his friend who'd been to Smith Street to buy a very swanky "Quantum 2" toaster. I told them all about the night in the fountain. It gives you such a fuzzy feeling when you begin to meet people you know on the tram, it really means that you're getting to know a place.
Outside the Melbourne Town Hall in Swanston Street I hooked up with Tina and her friend from the Gold Coast where she grew up, Nicole. Tina had got free tickets for a show which includes her favourite instrument - the largest organ on the southern hemisphere, to be found in Melbourne Town Hall - and invited me along. A piece "for voice, organ and didgeridoo" by Phillip Glass was being performed and I'm a big fan of his film music. It was written to celebrate the refurbishment of the organ in 2002 and is for some unknown reason repeated now.
An organ and a didge? Even I was doubtful as to how well they would mix. But I was wrong. It was incredible. Indigenous Australians in Melbourne have either disappeared completely or have been watered out and absorbed into the Anglo-Saxon population. Only in Smith Street is there a small band of black fellows hanging around. Elsewhere, you are as likely to run into an obviously indigenous-looking person on the street as an apache. There is little or no obvious sense of a surviving aboriginal culture down here.
There's a sticker on my Smith Street front door acknowledging the Wurundjeri tribe as the traditional owners of the particular land this building is standing on. At the Town Hall, for the first time since the Northern Territory, did I hear an official ceremony starting with an acknowledgement of the traditional owners of the land.
An indigenous narrator attempted to poetically do justice to an indigenous sense of identity and, perhaps, its most prominent feature - their connection to the land, interspersed with blasts of a didge. Then the organ, bigger than a house, came to life in the first of the four movements, split up by more narration, always accompanied by a didge. It was quite obvious how Phillip Glass had taken a leaf out of Vivaldi's book and created a programmatic piece in which elements of nature, such as soil, lightning, rain, water, can be unmistakenly recognised in the music, like a painting - and appropriately so, given the subject matter!
Which is what you can hear in this recording. Because of the reverberations caused by a very large space it's difficult hear what the narrator is saying but when the music kicks in you'll know that she must have spoken about a summer storm, not entirely dissimilar to the one in Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
It wasn't the sonic qualities of two such different instruments that stopped them from mixing well. If anything, it was all in the playing style. A didge is in many ways a percussion instrument and, as such, a good didge player is always going to have a great sense of rhythm built into him. An organ player seems be incapable of feeling the groove in the same way, unfortunately. Perhaps he was nervous.
After the interval, continuing the theme of mixing cultures, we were treated to a melange of folk-opera from Catholic, Jewish and Arabic traditions, the way it could have been in Spain at a certain moment in history. Here's a little sound bite.
I said goodbye to the girls and dashed off to Edinburgh Gardens at the very northern end of Smith Street to catch up with the throat singer and a bunch of randoms for, and I quote, some "harmonic resonance energy amplification meditation techniques". And further, "feel free to bring an instrument for a bit of a sound jam after the meditation".
I unfortunately missed the harmonic resonance energy amplification meditation technique, but I kind of know what he's talking about. It's stupidly simple but very, very effective. Waves, of any kind, can amplify each other when a peak hits a peak or a trough hits a trough. It's a simple phenomenon from the world of physics called "interference". Sound waves of the same or mathematically relevant frequencies added together can create very resonant effects, a resonance which not only extends outwards in terms of audible sound but vibrations that can be picked up by energy centres in the body. That's a wild guess, by the way, but it seems to make sense.
Instead, a few of the guys were left hanging around in the park, they offered me some wine... and there was no looking back. More random people walked past, we called them and their guitars and ukuleles over and suddenly there was a soundscape that, for me, somehow sums up Melbourne. There was a guitar, a uke, a mouth harp, a harmonica, a throat singer, chatting, laughing, story-telling, poetry, all mixed up in a rich fabric of sound. Not "good" but exactly what it was - a night out in the park, and, somehow, unmistakably Melburnian in its randomness. It is also a study of awesome accents, most of the people there are native Melburnians except a Kiwi (that is, a guy from New Zealand) with a very strong accent. Can you make him out? The easiest element to pick out is the mixing up of the "ih" and the "eh" sounds so that "six" sounds like "sex" and "seven" sounds like "sivin".
Take with a pinch of salt, here are a bunch of recordings, all of them, I had difficultites choosing. And, my webhotel has increased the storage space available so I don't care so much anymore... (Listen to number 2 or 6 if you're only going to listen to one.)
Park1 - 2m25s - A bit of a chat, many disorganised instruments, a bit of "chanting".
Park2 - 6m25s - The Kiwi telling a story about Norse mythology. It's a free-flowing story, part fact part fiction, it's borderline poetry accompanied by some disorganised music. Fade to mouth harp / singer "harmonically resonating", back to another story. You can hear how my mouth harp will break quite soon, there are quite a few "mishits". Towards the end of the recording you can just about make out me singing through the mouth harp, a technique I'm still working on.
Park3 - 2m11s - The end of a song with singing / guitar / harmonica. Me playing a harmonica-piece with singing. A chat.
Park4 - 4m53s - Guitar / song + mouth harp. And unfortunately a drum played badly and overloading my recorder. Then the random singer-songwriter girl with the guitar plays a rather good drinking song that she's written herself.
Park5 - The Kiwi, who can't play the guitar for his life, plays and sings a song.
Park6 - A rather "good" recording, if I may say so. Two poems with music, then a song by the same girl. A random guy, unaware that he is being recorded, exclaims at the end how much he appreciates all the music and poetry.
That's the sound of Melbourne for you...
_____
There's definitely something special about Edinburgh Gardens. On Sunday I went over to play ultimate frisbee one last time before going to NZ, before the sound of music attracted me to a daytime party-in-the-park full of typical Melbourne-weirdoes, dancing, hoola-hoops and jugglers, and I bumped into some of my ex-squatmates.
I had to rush home to welcome my dinner guests. Sunday December 6th was my rebirthday and I was going to celebrate by making dinner - of course my calorie-bomb creamy cheesy pasta - for Tina and her friend Nicole. I was the head chef, they were my onion-choppers and dishwashers. We ate in candle-light in the backyard and I told them the story of what happened one year ago.
Happy rebirthday to me. I am now one year old. You may remember that my life changed forever on December 6th 2008. It was a beautiful night on a beautiful beach with a beautiful girl but so much more than just that. It was the realisation of many truths. Truths that continue to haunt my life. Knowledge without which my life would be easier. But I can't turn my back on it. And I won't. December 6th was also celebrated somewhere in Spain. The same mantra was sung in Melbourne and in Cordoba.
More on this in New Zealand. This is indeed a big part of the reason why I am going there.
_________
Here are the directions to the Rainbow World Gathering in New Zealand from December 16th to January 15th, copied from some internet forum, in case anybody is interested. This is all I have to go on too; I'll be sticking my thumb out hoping to find it according to these instructions only:
"The site is very easy to find. If you are driving south on the Haast Highway
(Highway No. 6) the site is about 40 or 50 kms south of Fox Glacier. After
going through Bruce Bay you will aventually get to a bridge called the
Doughboy Bridge/Creek. Park vehicles on the north side of this bridge and
then walk over to the southern side. After bridge you will see a four wheel
track on the right. This is the entrance to the site. We will either be
camped somewhere along this track or up at the main clearing. Just follow
the track and you'll find us. If you're driving or hitching from the south
just stick it in reverse. Last place you'll see coming from the south is
Lake Paringa, then just wait for the Doughboy Bridge/Creek."
Update 14/12: The above site has flooded and a new location will be found shortly, possibly Golden Bay at the top of South Island. A mini-gathering near Arthur's Pass will take place on Tuesday to decide and the gathering should commence on Wednesday. Somewhere on South Island. Get all the info you need from this yahoo group. I'm still in Christchurch... but not for long.
_______
The weirdest thing that's happened in the last couple of days is my random meeting with an Iranian girl in Smith Street. I mean a real Iranian who lives in Tehran, she's here to learn English but she hasn't learnt much yet... She's obviously feeling a bit lost and overwhelmed. When she stopped me in the street and asked for directions and I answered her in Farsi she was so gobsmacked that she started exclaiming something about me being sent from god and now I receive big hugs every time our paths cross, which, bizarrely, has been twice in two days.
And guess who will be my guest on my last night in Melbourne? Rhys' ex-wife Wilnellia! Out of the blue, just like that. I have no idea why or what for but it will be lovely to see her again...
We will probably attend the last barbecue in my backyard, which will be a great way to say goodbye to Smith Street. Talking of which, here's a great atmospheric recording of a barbecue from a couple of weeks ago, in honour of the South American gang. There are many elements here - Fab, who runs Cafe Beelzebub across the road, has fallen asleep and is snoring. A jazz piece is playing on the stereo, it's in the middle of the quirky double bass solo when the recording starts. A couple of guys are chatting in Spanish in the background. Marcello and I think Leo are playing a football game on the Playstation or whatever, that's where the exclamation of "gooooooaaal" comes from. There's loud chatter and laughing. And there's me desperately trying to stop myself from cracking up but having a very hard time, I can't quite contain myself because of the too-good-to-be-true soundscape all around.
Now I have to run to the laundry, drop off stuff with Tina, visit my Iraqi barbershop in Smith Street (last shave for the next six weeks), go to town to buy a notebook and a couple of video tapes, and generally try to arrange things in Christchurch through the internet with couchsurfers and my Kiwi friend from London, Emily... I guess I'll be away from the internet and phones until late January.
New Zealand, here I come.
<< Previous Next >>
|
|
Friday, March 24, 2006 |
Friday, December 04, 2009 |
|