Vivid Virgens

STOP THE VIRGENS

I saw something last night, and I am still not sure what it was.    



The opening scene of Stop the Virgens

 Described as a Psycho Opera exploring psychedelic myths, it was always going to be challenging. We walked into a theatre adorned with virgins, bedecked in white and whispering sibilant, creepy nonsense in our ears as we made our way to our seats.  The setting was a futuristic matriarchal Queendom where Karen O controlled the moods the bodies of a host of vestal virgins by weilding a giant horned microphone.  It's probably best not to try and explore the symbology too much.  The scene where Karen had a giant lobster hand marked a turning point in my cognitive effort to follow the storyline and I tried to just enjoy the experience. This production eschewed narrative for emotion.  The costumes were otherworldly, and Karen O's voice is truly remarkable, quavering with vulnerability but capable of potent harmony and ecstatic yelps and shrieks, backed by a band of extremely talented musicians and the disturbing chorus of virgins.


Lights on the facade



Imbibing a few post show frothies while taking in the Vivid light show at play on the buildings around the Opera House, Jak and I pondered the spectacle we had just seen.  The best we could come up with was that the opera was an emotional exploration of the involuntary loss of physical innocence brought on by the onset of the menstrual cycle, the pain of loss and the darker side of female love.  I thought Kirsty would have loved it, and it would have been good to have a female perspective in our debrief. Basically we thought it was some kind of secret women's business that looked and sounded amazing.  We both agreed the blood on the virgins white robes and their sexy gyrating dancing at the finale, when they seemed to be singing something about the sweetness of the seed was confronting stuff. Though they finally looked like they were enjoying themselves, not writhing in agony. It's a lot to take in.

Palmer & Co

Earlier, we visited the recently opened speakeasy Palmer & Co for some pre-virgen Martinis.  The joint used to be a taxidermist space, and is now decked out with a 1920's theme, which works well as a casual drinking vibe with a conspiratorial air.  They are serving some great snacky food, like a macaroni cheese and a boast an impressive cocktail and champagne list.  The menu and decor feature prohibition propaganda, and the photos and imagery seem ludicrous until you realised it actually happened.  They really tried to make drinking booze illegal.  Which kind of leads you to thinking about current drug laws and the debate around decriminalisation and the utter defeat by conservatives in the War on Drugs. The argument proposed by the just say no'ers about the disincentive that illegality contributes to choice is no longer valid given the prevalence of recreational drugs in our community and their fully functioning subscribers. 

I see many lights.

Batman City - Cultural Learnings

After a year of procrastination it was time to leave the cultural Metropolis of Melbourne and head North by Northeast to Sincity and it's beachy neon glow. For the past decade I had been incrementally moving further south. North Melbourne to Clifton Hill, Fitzroy to Richmond and onto St Kilda. I had lived this fair city in squalor and in luxury. It had shown me its seedy underbelly and its polished crown and every manner of hippy misfit, hipster bogan, violent blissed-out creature along the way.

The bars, the clubs, the sports and galleries and all the fun and many beards and tatts and sun in March and endless parks and, well, just the vibe of it. It is a fond farewell and not a total departure. Sydney beckoned.

In the final weeks of my life in Melbourne I felt as though I was experiencing the city as a tourist. My sententious cousin says "you never see the place you live until a friend comes to visit", so I hosted myself on a cultural tour of Melbourne. I didn't want to wander lonely as a cloud, so to entice companionship I had to spice up my cultural meanderings with comestibles at the finest restaurants. 

Thus, my brother L-Bot and I found ourselves dining sumptuously at Cumulus Inc before experiencing the grimness of past city life at the Old Melbourne Gaol. When you digest a slow cooked lamb shoulder and the fortunes of a murderous Italian deserter in the confines of a sandstone prison, you know you're getting a cultural experience, right in the gulliver.

 

The gaol was morbidly fascinating. Anecdotes from the wayward lives of the inmates were displayed in the actual cells in which they spent their final days.  Big Ned's armour is there, and the trapdoor and platform from which he swung:  Australia's first antihero!  Enough has been said about this man in finer words than I could muster, but it is befitting that his skull continues to elude the authorities and has absconded the confinement of the prison cemetery. Such is death.

 

Another great Melbourne antihero who features in the museum is the city founder, John Batman.  Batman signed the famous treaty which was used as a pretence to purloin the lands from the Kulin Nations people.

If John had lent his name to the town he bought with trinkets and an air of menace we could have such institutions as the Batman Police Squad and the Batman International Film Festival (BIFF).

However he did not, and can consider ourselves fortunate, as the insight into Batman's disposition in The Roving Party by Rohan Wilson is a harrowing revelation. Wilson has based his book on historical research and he gruesomely depicts our founding father as the murderous man he apparently was, rising to prominence on a ride tide of a career drenched in violence.

Set in Tasmania in 1829, the book details an early chapter of Batman's life and reads as an homage to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. The novel paints a bleak picture of early Australian settlement in shades of red and grey. Our Batman was no super hero, nor mantle on which to hang a colony.

Boulia

Boo-YA!

What a town!

It's got Min Min lights, an emphatic name, a great pub and crater on Mars named after it.

Something about the place resonates with me. I find myself conscious of  all the people and all of the interactions going on around me - and they all seemed pretty happy.  I have had earnest and involved conversations every day and night; with the publican, the gym receptionist, the mayor, the servo owner, bar girls and all the backpackers that work in town.  The work here is great; we have walked under skies hung fat with cumulus puffs, driven roads without end and covered over 3000 km in a week. 

A fair bit of the profundity of the conversations I have had could be put down to the amount of time spent at the bar in the Australian Hotel, and also to my fascination with the phenomenon of the Min Min lights. As a bonus, the town has a $3,000,000 gym and pool complex for its 300 inhabitants, and it costs $2.70 to have a dip.

I ask everyone I meet if they have seen the Min Min. Cheryl from the Desert Sands Motel tells me of her encounter while working with her husband on a station in the Northern Territory, about 200 km west of Boulia.

"We saw a huge glowing ball off in the distance, ooh, about 5 k away. We knew there was nothing else out there, the nearest station was 30 k's in the other direction.  We instantly knew it was Min Min lights"! 

I asked her what she did; "first we checked how many bottles were open - it was only a couple!" she laughed, then grew serious "the experience left us feeling a bit strange, and we didn't talk about it too much".

Tracey from the gym had seen the lights when she worked out Winton way, to the east, but they didn't seem to have phased her. However Tracey has just bought a new puppy and is more interested in its antics than my questions about the numinous luminescence.  According to the Min Min museum, two out of 11 Eggheads reckon the lights are shiny bugs, "the result of insects swarming that have taken on bioluminescent characteristics after being contaminated by naturally occurring agents found in local fungi, or of species of owl with their own naturally occurring source of bioluminescence". Glowing owls seem a little far fetched, unless the indiviual in question has been self-contaminated by naturally occuring fungi. . . which leads to the other 4 out of 11 boffins who subscribe to 'Geophysical lights',  the hypothesis that the lights are the result of known geophysical phenomena, such as piezoelectrics (of course!). A fair few folk round here reckoned the phosphate and potassium mines in the vicinty may have something to do with the lights, which seems plausible.

A third hypothesis is that the lights are the result of an optical illusion known as a Fata Morgana, or a nocturnal mirage, which causes remote lights or objects to appear closer, and in a less recognizable form. I like the name and the concept; it sounds appropriately exotic. Others reckon aliens, or hallucinations. Who knows?  I've seen some crazy stuff in my time, and it is hard to explain it to others, whatever the cause.

On the eve of ANZAC Day the bar of the Australian Hotel is busy, with all stools taken.  A dishevelled Aboriginal man stands at the bar, his barefeet broad and cracked on the edges like a dried claypan.  He orders a case of XXXX Gold as I walk in. Trevor, the publican, sits in his usual seat, his stocky frame and round head alert to all of the goings on, his full lips looked poised to issue orders to the two Irish brunettes running the bar.  Trevor's high pitched voice, replete with whistling lisp and delicate  enunciation, belie his brawn and his ability to settle any argument within these walls.

The night before Trev strode into the beer garden and dispersed the last remaining clump of us with a few assertive words and a menacing gaze. He saves his most ascerbic wit for the girls behind the bar. On all the nights I am there I only ever hear him offer jokes about women, and occasionaly Aboriginals. But it's a blokey place and a place where political correctness means voting against Anna Bligh.  It's the wild west of Queensland, and Trevor does have a redeeming sense of humour. At one stage he regails the bar with a joke about the dissatisfaction of KFC: when the juicy thighs and tender breasts are gone, all that's left is a greasy box. I laugh, order another beer and keep an ear to conversations around me.