have pity on the working man

Nick and I found the perfect bar in Bergen last night - a little place called Legal with the sort of kitsch interior and fuzzy lighting and chillaxed crowd we Meyers Place devotees feel at home with. The best part though was when they played 'Mr. President' by... Mr. Newman. Heart.

Also, the weather is magnificent.

up north; circus

Touristy things I saw in Amsterdam: the Van Gogh museum, Anne Frank House, the floating cat boat, the flower markets. Things I did in Amsterdam which are illegal back home included purchasing and ingesting spacecakes and mushrooms, and riding my bike without a helmet. Culture shock.

A few words on the cat boat. This is a refuge set up in a converted house boat on the canal Singel, where volunteers take in and look after Amsterdam's stray cats. There seemed to be quite a few of them, maybe thirty at first glance, and a bunch in quarantine in a different room. Belyndy and I were patting a grey and white one in a little basket, when a Singaporean man who had been watching us and chuckling said, 'Careful of that one. She's schizophrenic.' Really? 'Yes. One minute nice. Next minute, ssch!' It turned out that this man was a retiree living temporarily in Amsterdam to help out on the boat. We chatted for a while and exchanged email addresses for photo-swapping, and when Belyndy mentioned that she works with costumes, the man hurried into the reception area to fetch a magazine for her to look at. This turned out to be an issue of Vice with an article in it about a woman who creates costumes for cats. He showed us pictures of cats dressed as musketeers, bees, alligators... Looking at the photos on my own camera I realise I've taken lots of pictures of animals. This makes me feel sentimental and silly, but it's good to know that there are people out there who are far more obsessed than I am.

After my Amsterdam sojourn I caught the night train to Copenhagen: the first leg of my long journey to Oslo. For such a short stay, I feel like I have a lot of impressions of Copenhagen. I quickly became fond of a particular cafe on Istedgade, called Bang and Jensen's, where I frittered away both my Danish mornings over coffees that came with tiny chocolate bars. The cafe is candlelit, even at 9 in the morning, and they play an eclectic songlist which kept distracting me from my notebook - the first morning it was something heart-wrenching that reminded me of my first and only experience of fados, and the second morning they played Nancy and Lee. Nothing like a bit of country with your coffee.

I grew obsessed with the oxidised copper detailing on everything, to the point where I'd stop my chunky hired bicycle in the middle of a busy bridge to take a photo of a pale green monument or statue or roof. From the top of the Rundetårn I could document the spires of the entire city.

Christiania provided a haven from the grey roads and grandiose architecture which I'm unfortunately beginning to associate with sweatshop brands and overpriced sandwiches. It was a relief to spend a couple of hours wandering through the Freetown. What a thoroughly hippy place. Every last detail was wrought by artists, from the carved and painted park benches to the spectacularly graffiti-ed walls of the newer buildings and the carefully mosaiced facades of the older ones. Houses were bright. Gardens were mad. Materials were recyclable. I entered a gallery - one small room - decorated with pictures of Tibetan scenes, and put 10 kroner in a tin for Tibet, and for a badge which reads 'Chrisitiania, du har mit'. 'You have my heart,' apparently. Which it did, for an afternoon.

On my last night I saw the Australian company Acrobat performing Smaller Poorer Cheaper. This was interesting in light of my recent experience with the Jim Rose Circus. Acrobat used nudity as a drawcard, but in an entirely different way. For example, one of the three performed a simple disappearing handkerchief trick. He performed it several times, each time discovering the handkerchief in a different item of clothing, and then removing that item - shirt, pants, underpants. Finally, he performed the trick naked, and ended by pulling the handkerchief from his arsehole. How amazing to see this trick performed twice in a matter of weeks! Compare it to the same trick in the Jim Rose Circus: one of Jim's silent showgirls is naked but for a pair of high heels. He instructs her to put some clothes on. Finding a stagehand has removed the black leather number she initially shed, nameless minion sashays to the centre of the stage, turns her back to the audience, dances, then pulls something fuschia from her arsehole. She pulls this rag over her head and it turns out to be a transparent boob tube. Facing the audience, she then pulls a second piece of fuschia material from her vagina, and this tubey skirty thing forms the lower part of her ensemble. The audience of vocal young men goes absolutely ballistic. The cherry on top is Jim Rose roaring into the microphone, 'The only thing she doesn't pull out of her pussy and ass is my cock!'

(For the first time since starting this blog, I'm close to just finishing up this entry with an 'LOL'.)

I'm glad Acrobat came along to provide me with a naked circus alternative. They've reaffirmed my belief that if performers want to strip off and pull props and costumes from various orifices, that has the potential to be wildly entertaining. I've been considering this. Acrobat use the image as a punchline at the end of a standard sort of a routine. In Jim Rose, the trick is meant as another shocking freakshow display, which is dull in itself. But the worst thing is that the woman has no agency, no voice. She doesn't own the trick at all. She does what she is intructed to do, in a show which is filled with naked, silent women doing as they're instructed.

And blood! In one amazing sequence, one of the Acrobat crew dons white pants and does a series of climbing and tumbling moves using a vertically suspended red rope. (If anyone knows proper circus terminology for all this stuff, please correct me!) Soon the red from the rope is staining his white pants, and we realise that the rope is soaking wet, and as the act progresses the man's body becomes covered in red, and the floor beneath him is splattered. He finishes with a flailing tumble and comically lands, thud, on the floor, still entwined in the rope, red everywhere. Now, I'd already left by the time one of the Jim Rose women sprayed red paint from her arse, but perhaps someone who saw it (like Amy) could comment?

Finally, I arrived in Norway on a sleek Scandanavian train late on Wednesday night. Oslo has turned on the nicest weather I've seen since Greece. Tonight we leave for Bergen, where we venture through the fjords all weekend. Of course everything in Norway is incredibly expensive. Everything. I keep hopefully looking at pricetags, looking for the one thing, just one small thing, which you can get really, really cheaply. Even if it's something completely useless like grenadine, or a paperweight, or carob. But watching the crowds of new parents on leave, out in the sun on a workday, you soon realise that the only thing you can do relatively cheaply in Oslo is breed.


Next week, Berlin.

still my hero after all these years

and accompanying me through the lush and misty countryside of Norway...


(Just a wee note in acknowledgement of those albums you never get tired of hearing.)

Greenwoods

Food note. If you're ever in Amsterdam, visit Greenwoods at Singel 103. The lattes come in big bowls and the food is tasty, homemade and cheap. Yesterday we spent an entire afternoon there, luxuriating in the rare sunshine while people and bicycles and dogs came and went along the canal. Most perfectist afternoon ever in the world.

theatre barrage

My Edinburgh Fringe experience ended in an overnight bus trip back to London with my favourite travelling companion, Adrian. We reentered London as glutted versions of the Chloe and Adrian who took that happy day train an age ago. We’ve had 10 days and nights of long drinking sessions, interspersed occasionally with some sleep and some theatre (sometimes both at once.) Well, I exaggerate. We also did some very important touristy things like climbing up Arthur’s Seat in the rain, seeing the always-harrowing World Press photo exhibition, and completing at least two levels of the National Scottish Museum, where I literally lost my umbrella with the excitement of seeing a pair of ornate earrings and a brooch which once belonged to Mary Queen of Scots. There were also some perfect travelling moments, like sitting in the Brass Monkey, drinking an enormous pint with Adrian, while they played Stop Making Sense by Talking Heads, in its entirety. (Granted that's not necessarily a travelling moment. It would actually be pretty congruous with our lives in Melbourne. A moment, nonetheless.) Edinburgh felt about ten times colder than London, and it rained a lot. I spent a large part of my time enjoying the company of the glittering Sisters Grimm crew, whose show Mommie and the Minister continues in Edinburgh as I write, for anyone who wants to go along...

Fringe! Shows I saw:

The previously-blogged-of Jim Rose Circus. Fairly traditional misogyny masquerading as gritty post-modern freakshow. Stay at home and watch Jackass.

Nick Mohammed: a fabulous character comedian, who had a reciprocal guest-starring arrangement with his female comedy twin, Zoe Gardner. They were doing pretty much the same thing in each of their shows, but Nick's seemed a little stronger, maybe because Zoe's piece was very self-referential, with its linchpin theme of the struggling artist (not so big on this as a narrative device), whereas Nick's was just a straight series of character sketches. Having said that, I guess Nick's piece didn't really have a theme at all, and was much more disparate. Anyway, both very entertaining shows.

Another comedian we saw was Daniel Kitson, in his piece 66A Church Road. Finally, I make it to a Daniel Kitson show! He's only performed at my place of employment about a hundred times since I started working there. For shame. Anyway, I can see what all the fuss is about. I like his literariness and his rambling, self-deprecating style. (Unfortunately he did ramble on for a little too long, and as this was a tired night for me I started to nod a little towards the end.)

We saw a lot of comedy. In the end I regretted not seeing some more straight or physical theatre, or even some of the experimental cabaret stuff that seemed to be quite pervasive. Plan for next time: book more tickets in advance, so I don't end up falling into a vicious cycle of drinking beer then not bothering with the next show then drinking more beer then not bothering with the next show after that...

The shining star of all this comedy was Kristen Schaal (Flight of the Conchords) and Kurt Braunohler's show. Watching their deadpan act, you got that wonderful satisfying feeling that these two performers were completely in tune with each other (I don't think there's a way of saying that without sounding completely spoony). They parodied a whole lot of second-rate American entertainment - performing their version of a daytime melodrama, and projecting an episode of something with a title like 'Penelope Speaks with the Animals' in which the otherwise clueless heroine (Schaal in braids) has the ability to speak with puppet friends: a drunkard bird, a terrorist turtle and an assassin ewe with a sexy Thurmanesque voice. I'm sure comedy really suffers in the retelling. I don't want to hurt the show too much so I'll end my ranting there.

One piece of straight theatre I saw was Enda Walsh's The New Electric Ballroom. It's a simple story about three sisters couped up for too long, two of them traumatised by a long-ago night of lost love at the title ballroom, and one of them twenty years younger and a bit messed up by her sisters' constant game-playing. The fourth character is the local fishmonger who keeps arriving with absurd loads of fish which the sisters empty into a trapdoor in the floor and never eat, and who is tongue-tied by his love for the younger sister. In retrospect nothing about the plot was particularly surprising, but I really enjoyed Walsh's writing. It was the little loops and twirls within the dialogue that really kept me compelled. Funny thing is, I wasn't really enraptured when we left. A paradoxical experience - this play left me wanting more, but without blowing me away.

It's completely sycophantic but I also must mention Ash's I Love You, Bro, which I saw for the first time, in its full Cockney glory. For anyone who hasn't seen Ash, go and see him in something. Whether he's having hard drugs eaten out of his a**hole or breaking his teenage heart over a gullible jock in a chatroom, he's totally marvellous and amazing. I ALSO loved Adam Cass's script. You know you've been thinking too hard about your reasons for liking shows when the first thing that comes to mind is 'well-paced'... but that it was.

In London, pre-fringe, I also managed to see a strange variety of shows. Absolutely best thing ever was Gob Squad's Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good) at the Soho Theatre. It was based on Warhol's films, and lovingly parodied the films themselves and the big 60s revelations surrounding them. Right now I'm desperately tired in Amsterdam and thoroughly sick of blabbing on about theatre, so if you'd like to read about Gob Squad, follow the link on my page to Anna's blog, where she has done a much better job of venerating them. They rock.

I also saw a new piece at the Royal Court called gone too far! by bola agbaje. Ah, high school, anyone? I thought the Royal Court was meant to be a mecca for amazing new writing. But I know at least three young young young Melbourne playwrights who could absolutely wipe the floor with this. Charming and funny it was, but exciting and unpredictable and worth more than the 5 quid I paid for my youth ticket it most definitely was not. Shame on you, Royal Court, with your amazing history of Kanes and Crimps, for pretending that this utterly unpolished 'new theatre' is cutting-edge stuff. BORING.


On that note, I return to real life, and Amsterdam.

My last weekend in London was a blissful mash of old friends and new boots, and lots of beers in various parts of Camden. I also managed to see the British Museum (with Adrian). Biggest loot collection ever! Among the prize possessions: the Rosetta Stone (pretty awesome, really) and - mummies. I feel really strange about the mummies. On the one hand, I know they're really important historical, um, artefacts, and that learning about our history makes us better people. But they're real dead people. It freaks me out. Why are we allowed to put them on display? Is there a point at which a dead person becomes an artefact? (I'll allow that if there is, these people have definitely reached it.) Anyway. I looked. I admired. I got the willies. But I drew the line at taking photos. Wuss? Superstitious? Something like that.

With what I think may be a nascent ear infection I caught the train to Harwich and the ferry to Hook of Holland, and this morning I arrived at my hostel, which is called Inner Amsterdam but which is actually fairly outer. I've been here for almost 8 hours, which means I really should be having hash epiphanies and dining with prostitutes on poffertjes. So far all I've managed to do is get lost in concentric circles and have a coffee and a toasted sandwich. I fully intend to be a better tourist tomorrow.

All Greek

Clearly I don't have the diligence to keep any sense of fluidity in this blog, so again, here's a handful, a mezze platter, a scroggin of bits and pieces from the last few weeks...

LONDON

Deb and I got tickets to the Magnetic Fields gig at Cadogan hall. In my euphoria I even wrote down the set list. Young potato sat happily in her church pew for 2 hours as Stephin Merritt's honey voice sang Too Drunk to Dream, Grand Canyon, Smoke and Mirrors, Papa Was a Rodeo... Bliss, I tells ya.

I confess to partaking in some Shakespearean nerdery. Deb got us tickets to King Lear at the Globe; we were groundlings for the night. Highlights were the stringy bits of Gloucester's eyeballs, and, as always, 'Now gods, stand up for bastards!' Afterwards we drank red wine sooo nonchalantly at the theatre bar, eavesdropping on the actors' conversations.

That's not all. I went all out and took a day trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, to see the birthplace of the bard himself. I imagined myself travelling serenely across the English countryside and being welcomed by an authentic posse of minstrels at the other end. As it turned out, Stratford that weekend was the launching point for an enormous dance music festival, and the train was soon filled with backpacks and tents and doof doof music and people using the toilet in pairs. At the Stratford-upon-Avon train station there were hoards of police officers in reflective vests, conducting everyone through a winding metal barrier. They had a sniffer dog. And once past this obstacle, there were people selling dance party wares at the roadside - glo sticks, fluffy pink cowgirl hats, various fluorescent items.

Eventually I made it into the township and spent a pleasant afternoon tip-toeing over the warped and wonky floorboards of rebuilt seventeenth century houses with tenuous connections to Shakespeare. I saw his grave (if it really IS his grave) at the church, and took a few photos BUT was then completely distracted by a first edition King James bible on display in a glass case. Wow!

Another weekend was spent in Cornwall, at a tiny music festival by the sea. We trouped down on Friday evening and arrived in complete darkness, putting up our tents by the light of the car headlights while the wind wreaked havoc with our rain ponchos. Hysteria. When we woke in the morning the rain had stopped and we found we were perched on a cliff top with spectacular views of wheat fields and the sea. We drove to the local township, St. Agnes, which was ludicrously quaint, with tiny winding streets and bright flags hung over the road. Back at the festival site that afternoon, we drank and drank and the sun moved in a heavy arc over the ocean, burning us all up. I had rolled up my jeans; the next day I was wearing red socks.

Getting home on Sunday was surreal. We stopped to rest our poor hungover bones on the beach at St. Ives, which is an incredibly pretty town with a creepy undercurrent. (I've just looked up filming locations for The Witches and it turns out Cornwall was one of them.) Most terrifying are the enormous (football-sized) gulls on the beach. They're menacing. A girl in our group had some hot chips in a polystyrene container which she opened with a snap; suddenly twenty of these beasts were shrieking and tearing at each other in the air above our heads. As if that wasn't too much for us to bear in our delicate state, a dad in swimming trunks appeared, swinging at the gulls with an oar until they scattered. Then he turned to us, brandishing the oar, and growled, 'Ye've gotta have a weapon.'

The rest of London was a haze of cafes and restaurants and shows (Soho Theatre good, Royal Court bad); books read on the tube; overwhelming clothing stores where I made token purchases: tights, nail polish. During my last week I took another acting course - the Physical Theatre summer school at East 15. I was happy to find myself in another group of disparate and enthusiastic people, with another fabulous teacher, and another bunch of exercises and ideas to go off and think about...

At some point in the middle of all this Londoning, Deb and I got on a plane and went to GREECE. Her lovely family adopted me for a week and we cruised through the islands. Greece brimmed with tourists; I found it very beautiful but feel like I only really got to see the parts of it appropriate to a cruise ship audience. At each disembarkation we wandered picturesque streets, admired crumbled walls and shining marzipan houses, and took photos of hundreds of other tourists taking photos. Our best day was at Rhodes, where we hired a car and drove to a remote and peaceful part of the island. The beach was called Archangelos, and the water was so salty that we just buoyed along, saying, 'This is so nice, this is just so nice.'

Onboard, cruise ship entertainment was everything I could possibly have wished for. Night 1 was Latin Fever Night. It was all feathers and sequins and glassy smiles. Inevitably, there was audience participation, and I had the honour to be pulled up onstage by a waifish Ukranian dancer in blue leather pants. He found he couldn't spin me (my jandals stuck to the floor) and solved this problem by marching me tango-style to the edge of the stage, instructing 'jump', and flinging me into the air, much to the delight of the audience of mid-Western American retirees. We did this walk-fling manoeuvre a few times, until, evidently finding me flingable, my partner ended our pas de deux by sort of passing me around his body like a basketball. Oh how a cruise ship audience loves to see a woman flung. I was recognised in the corridor later, for my efforts.


Now I'm reunited with Melbourne friends in EDINBURGH. I arrived yesterday with Adrian, caught up with Amy, met Buck Angel at a small private screening of a documentary about the rights of sex workers in Europe, then had the terrible misfortune to sit through half of the Jim Rose Circus (which apparently used to be edgy, but which was really so puerile and dull that our crew left for the beer garden halfway - not something I've ever done before). So, eventful thus far.

Again, I find myself wandering the streets of Edinburgh saying, 'this is so nice', and squealing and pointing a lot. I love the stacks of turrets and steeples. I might just want to go back to my Scottish roots here. For now, off to a show.