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graveyard of DOOM index < | > The Sleepers Salon first birthday gig was on last night. Anna and I toddled along to have a bit of a look-see. The salons run along the same general formula at each of their monthly showings: a couple of live on stage talk-show style interview-cum-discussions between two writers, with a reading/performance in the middle. Last night's guests were Carmel Bird, who read an amazingly poetic section from her new novel, which is about shipwrecks and cults (to be painfully brief and inaccurate); the inimitable Crazy Elf, who silenced the room with his spoken word performance on the topic of Jesus, samurai and ninjas (admittedly not all in the same piece); and a guy called Gideon Haigh, whose main interest is in the world of non-fiction research writing. He told some great research "war stories" about going deep into archives of regional newspapers and tracking down the next-door neighbours of the people whose lives he was investigating. It was all very thrilling. It was obvious from Gideon's intensity as he told these stories that research is his drug. I can relate to that. For the past month I've been working on a research-and-writing job that had me investigating eight different arbitrary subjects that loosely come under the heading "Australian culture". I'm sure I did far more research than was necessary for these short introductory articles, but once you start finding things out about an area of specialisation, it's hard to stop. One of the nicest things that can happen when you're doing this kind of research is to stumble on a piece of information that relates to another area, at the outset seemingly unrelated to the focus of your research. I just love the way that information is inter-related, the way it sometimes just clicks into place like the last jigsaw piece when you weren't even looking for it. So I was beavering away on this one article about Australian composers, having been asked to focus on contemporary composers with a more avant garde approach. I'd emailed Anthony P. about some names to investigate, and he'd mentioned this guy David Chesworth. So I start doing some digging and find a few bios, plus David's own web site for his sound installation projects and his musical ensemble. Somewhere in all of that I find out that he was active in the experimental music scene in Fitzroy in the late seventies and early eighties. He was in a band called Essendon Airport, who were contemporaries of the unpronounceable tch-tch-tch or tsk-tsk-tsk or however you say it (it's written as a series of three groups of two arrows at right angles to each other). He also managed the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre in the early eighties, which was this legendary experimental anarchist performance space. All of which is directly relevant to me personally because I've started doing some preliminary reading about the music scene in Fitzroy at that time so that I can create an accurate backdrop for my next novel, which is going to have a whole series of flashbacks set in that place and time. I do a little bit more digging and ten minutes later I've got the actual address of the CHCMC, a potted history of the scene written by someone who was around at the time, a list of some other books about that scene, and I've even found a couple of mail-order record labels who can furnish me with a bunch of Essendon Airport and tsk-tsk-tsk recordings so I can actually hear the music for itself. All the source material I could have hoped for, all found when I wasn't actually looking for it. Lovely. Then I come out of the darkness of my study and just mention my research windfall in passing to Anna and she says that she worked with Chesworth a couple of times when she was at Handspan Theatre, and she also points out that he works a lot with Chamber Made Opera, where our friend Bec works. Not only that, but there's a Chamber Made gig coming up in Castlemaine in the next month that features a Chesworth score, and we're going to go along and check it out. Kurt Vonnegut's book Cat's Cradle is about a lot of things, but one of its main conceits is the invention of a new kind of ice crystal called ice-nine that converts any water that it comes into contact with into ice-nine. One crystal of ice-nine dropped into a swimming pool turns the whole thing into a solid block of ice-nine. Touch the ice-nine and the water in your own body will solidify in the same way. I always think of ice-nine when stuff like the recent Chesworth revelation happens. One minute your ideas for a story are steam, and the next minute something you accidentally trip over initiates a reverse sublimation and turns them into a chunk of pretty, shiny touch-it-on-your-tongue-ooh-it's-cool-and-sweet ice. The other regular feature at the Sleepers Salons is the post-it note poetry competition. During the mid-show break the Sleepers kids pass out single post-its to willing participants who are asked to write a poem on the topic of the evening on one side only. Last night's topic was "paper", and there was an added condition that the poem had to rhyme. I had a go, but of course didn't win because I never win that sort of thing. Usually I wouldn't bitch and moan about it, but I thought I did pretty good this time (though admittedly the winning entry was better) and I've got a red wine hangover and I'm feeling self-indulgent and this is my blog so I can do what I want, okay, so here for posterity is my losing entry from last night, preserved for all eternity or at least until all the fossil fuel in the world runs out and the Internet crashes spectacularly in a heap and we all have to learn how to write with pencils and use the postal system once again.
Hello? Classical allusion, anyone? That's Prometheus I'm name-dropping there. Yes? Philistines.
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