“You’ll start believing you’re immune to gravity and stuff…”

Posted by Maladjusted on 13/01/2011 · 4 Comments 

The night before last, I had the extraordinary pleasure of seeing the divine Ms. Amanda Palmer playing a not-quite-impromptu, and not-quite-secret gig at the Brunswick Hotel with the amazing, soulful, and almost offensively talented Melbourne duo “The Jane Austen Argument.”

The fact that someone of my congenital uncoolness managed to be present at something like this is due to a combination of the underlying contingency of the universe plus a bit of old fashioned divine intervention. Specifically, I attribute it to 1) cosmic rays and 2) the graces of the shiny new gods of social media to whom, I’ve been known, of late, to sacrifice more than the requisite number of goats.

The story — and I can tell that you’re interested by the way you’ve opened another window and are now watching “Onion” videos in the background – goes like this:

At about 10.30 on the night, I glanced lazily at my Twitter feed for no real reason, (does anyone ever go on twitter with clear intentions?) and saw that a younger, more stylish, and very musically-savvy acquaintance of mine, was talking about how she was standing in a crowded sweat-pit of a pub in Brunswick anticipating….something. Given the “I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-an-actual-sauna!” levels of humidity in Melbourne over the past few days, and the fact that I retain at least a vague awareness of humanity’s inveterate fondness for the products of fermentation, I didn’t deem this sufficiently shocking to interrupt my sedulous practicing for the World Procrastination Finals (which I’m told are coming up Some-Time-in-the-so-called-“Future”-that-seems-a-long-way-off).

But then, my friend mentioned that she was somehow in the presence of Amanda Palmer. I carried on blithely doing the equivalent of typing google into google. An ice age or two went by while my synapses fired, all the time slow-clapped by the sarcastic part of my super-ego. Then I froze. What? I quickly tweeted a demand for an explanation using entirely arbitrary punctuation, and received for my request, an instant photo of AFP taken with an i-phone from down the road.

15 minutes later, I was inside the Brunswick hotel, sweating like I was being interrogated in a steam-bath by the STASI, and generally bringing to the room some much needed nerdy-chic by a) being my usual unprepossessing self and b) awkwardly carrying an umbrella, stuffed into a jacket so that I could add robotically stiff arms to my ineluctably unshakable booty.

But within 5 minutes, I was too exultant to be self-conscious; too carried away by the good humour of the crowd and the sense of being a witness to something miraculous: the kind of thing that would have made a Greek sculptor (say Phidias) erect a monument and then say some very Greek things on it, doubtless involving the flavouring particle ‘ge’.

The gig, as it turns out, was a fund-raiser for “The Jane Austen Argument.”

I’d seen these guys play support for AFP last year at the Forum, at a staggering, exuberant, scarily energetic firework of a show, that left me incapable of using consonants for several hours and grinning at the moon and the stars, like a super-villain who’s just realised that all her evil plans to CONQUER THE WORLD have borne fruit. And that she’s won the lottery.

Now, the curious thing is that I did retain a dim memory from that night of having being touched by the J.A.A.’s wistful, clever, beautiful, songs . But for some reason, it was only on Tuesday night, at the first notes sung by Tom Dickins in his haunting, surprisingly powerful voice that I realised that I’d at once had the J.A.A.’s music tattooed across my soul, and at the same time completely forgotten them. This was not, let me assure you, because the Jane Austen Argument are in the least bit forgettable, but rather because the rest of that gig, (during which AFP played a ukulele from the rooftop, sang “Winter Coat” with Paul Kelly, got “Bad Seed”Mick Harvey on stage and somehow taught a Cabaret band whose name I’ve forgotten, but whose lead singer had a mellifluous baritone and a perpetually roguish smirk, to play “Leeds United” in 2 minutes and also sang a hilarious new song about Vegemite) was so earth-shattering that its beginning (and much of the rest of it) was pushed into the depths of my unconscious mind, awaiting a Madeline to dip in my tea, or a cracked footpath that would flood my mind again with what had been, at the time, too overwhelming for short-term memory.

Nonetheless, as soon as the J.A.A. started to sing I remembered. And I haven’t been able to shake the memory since. In particular, I can’t get the duo’s in some ways “signature” song: “Bad wine and lemon cake” (which is going to appear on Amanda Palmer’s new album) out of my head.

But, why write about this on ze blog?

After all there are now several things on the inter-web explaining what went on. (There was an auction, a blistering encore of “Girl Anachronism”, duets, ukuleles, the universe died in fire and rose from the ashes, y’know…)

But the main reason, is that it made me think about music and the sacred or rather music, as the sacred.

I’m using “sacred” in Durkehim’s sense where the term is always connected to that which binds people together (as in the popular, but disputed etymology of religion, re-ligare, to rebind) or gives them awareness of their connection to each other, as well as to that which, by dissolving all (social) bonds, has the potential to create new ones.

omewhere in Truth and Method, Gadamer gives the etymology of ‘theoria’ as coming from ‘theoros’, – herald. He then says that the Greeks didn’t really distinguish between ‘spectator’ and ‘actor’ (the latter two words have Latin rather than Greek roots, but you get the idea) or more accurately, that they didn’t really see the two in as strict an opposition as we do.

So, ‘theoroi” were sent from each of the Greek city states to the Olympic games, but as such, they weren’t just there to watch, but to participate in what was going on by bearing witness to it. In other words, the activity and its observation were inextricably caught up in each other, in the way that we feel that it is at a concert. The notion of being a witness (‘martyr’ in Greek) is connected to a thought that both the spectators and performers, are all, up to a point, equally caught up in something that happens between them, and that through this en tangling what takes place is a revelation of the common( ta koina) of everything that is shared between human beings (from language, to desire, to hope, to love), despite the fact that this ‘shared’ aspect of our existence is mostly obscured in a daily life obsessed with distinctions.

(As Heraclitus says, even though discourse (logos) is common, everyone acts as if it belongs to them alone.)

In our time, there’re not many things that bring about this revelation. I mean, certainly you could mention sport, religion and aspects of politics, but, these days, all three of these appear in forms in which their potentially universalistic, and utopian dimensions are in danger of being swallowed by elements of aggressive identity-assertion. (“Thank god, we belong to this group, and not to this other, whom we declare apostates and enemies!”).

Sure, music has its own problems. Popular music, is as everyone knows, a multi-billion dollar industry, which can sometimes look like an operation for trapping and channeling desire in the name of capturing the restlessness and perpetual dissatisfaction needed to drive a consumer economy.

But, at the same time, as Tuesday night reminded me: the experience of music, especially the shared experience also has the opposite potential: to reveal what is illusory in all our strivings, and pretensions, in all our assiduous cultivation of difference. It can reveal, in a sense, that (at the risk of sounding like Agamben) that we, in reality, and despite, our everyday sense of this, lack nothing, i.e.,that the difference between redemption and its absence is a minor change, a temporary lift of our collective mood, a sudden gust of air into the cave, that makes all the prisoners look up and feel the sun on their faces. This is not, of course to trivialise, real suffering: there’s war and horror and in the world. Instead, I just want to suggest that the perpetuation of these, and the perpetuation of a feeling of starvation in the midst of plenitude are related to each other.

One of the fundamental human needs is the need to congregate, not simply in the sense of hanging out with our friends, but in the sense of being with people who we don’t know, and might not even invite ’round to dinner, i.e. being with strangers in such a way that the bonds between all of us can be at once assumed and created by our coming together.

But there is a danger in this need, as there is in all needs, namely, that the more people feel isolated from others, the more they feel the lack of ‘community’ or fellowship, the more the intensity of their desire can be used as a basis for atavistic communal forms predicated on the exclusion or even hatred of others, the kind of forms that Benjamin calls ‘mythic’.

As the power of religion has waxed and waned over the last few hundred years, music is, arguably, the closest we have come to finding something worthy of congregating for. In its capacity to bridge rather than maintain the spaces between us, it offers an adumbration of human relations stripped of aggression, and suspicion. It’s the least mythic, and most hopeful, way we have found of feeling a sense of the sacred, that doesn’t require a kind of dissolution of the mind or a sacrifice of the individual to some monstrous Fuehrer figure, nor an orgy of hatred against an imaginary enemy.

And when we’re talking about someone like AFP, whose work is so generous, so interested in what other people are doing (from 17 year old pianists she’s met on the streets, to Melbourne ukulele players with whom she’s chatted during tram-rides), so progressive, without ever becoming didactic (she should be a feminist icon, as well as a gay and lesbian icon), or self-important, it’s easy to see that reactionary movements and commercial dross don’t have to have the monopoly on making people feel condemned to being members of hostile tribes.

To just return to the topic of her feminism – Palmer’s music, from the way she attacks the piano as if it were about to start yielding up diamonds, to the deep throaty roar of her singing that occasionally climbs to a soprano-height only to dive down into a husky Lotte Lenya-ish abyss in which you expect her to say something about “the next Viskey Bars” or join Tom Waits in a duet; to the playful, poignant, frequently ribald, but also perpetually witty lyrics exude an unmistakably female power that nonetheless never collapses into manufactured Spice girls/Sex in the City style, ‘nothing empowers a girl like a handbag’ vapidity.

Whereas the above-mentioned horrors identify women’s power with a consumer-imperative (a woman can be powerful if she’s a gorgeous model, mother, and pole-dancing CEO, who can afford to treat herself, through judicious use of a credit card (c.f. my review of Nina Power’s book on this blog) Palmer’s music exudes a joy in life and womanhood per se, without making any demands that anyone ‘do better’, or compete with each other in order to feel this joy. To use just one of a host of possible examples, her new single “map of Tasmania” is an ode to pubic hair in an age where younger and younger women are encouraged to feel that there couldn’t possibly be anything beautiful “down under” unless it’s been shaved, surgically tightened and maybe (to use a word, I only heard last year to my undying horror) ‘vajazzled’.

In addition, while AFP’s burlesque, Weimar Republik cabaret-style sexiness is much commented on (and indeed unmistakable), it’s a sensuality that’s very rare in pop, for having almost nothing to do with any studied attempt to please the masculine viewer: there’s no suggestion of the strip-tease/porn aesthetic of ‘this is what you like and thus I shall give it to you’. On the contrary, it’s a sexiness that comes from a kind of defiant will-to-self-expression, that is not confessional because of its Brecthian-self-awareness, playfulness, and from a constant suggestion — in her voice, and in her sassy, amazingly self-confident attitude, a wicked playfulness that seems as if it would go on in the absence of any audience — of a feminine desire, that is not only voracious and polymorphous, but autonomous and, in a way, auto-poietic (i.e. self-creating)

(When I read Anwyn Crawford’s typically evocative remarks on Lady Gaga last year – the latter of whom I confess to still not entirely understanding — I was definitely thinking of a certain dark-haired pianist who may or may not add the name Gaiman to her own.)

P.S. I got CARDED at the Brunswick Hotel, even ‘though I am incredibly old (30+) and have great swathes of white in my hair. Bastards. -

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Filed under The League Against Tedium (Pop Culture), Today's cereal was unduly soggy (personal/blog updates) · Tagged with amanda palmer, feminism, music, sacred