Let's

Let's stop saying 'let's'. 

It's a Cameronism that is way past it's sell-by date, along with 'going forward' (instead of 'in future').

Woman Who Repairs Clothes In Drycleaners

 

Lord Tailfeathers, Cristal Palace Gardens, Porto

 

Palmolive at The Dublin Castle, Camden

It was so boiling yesterday that it was tempting to stay home in the cool of the kitchen but Palmolive had asked me if I was going, and because I will be interviewing her at Rebellion on Thursday evening, I thought it would be a really good idea to go along.

Within seconds, she'd dismissed her interviewer, and talked us through just some of her many escapades as a young punk rocker. She's an excellent raconteur, and I realised that I will not have to interview her on Thursday, just top and tail the event. Climbing up high to graffiti inaccessible places, a hilarious interaction with Soo Catwoman, in and out of her relationship with Joe Strummer, she was as tough as young boots. 

All of the iterations of The Raincoats were there, plus Tessa from The Slits, and Shanne from the Nips. I said hello to Chris Plummer. At the end of the talk, the Powerpoint of photos inspired a memory-fest of bygone times for the London punk women, and I slipped away to think about it all. Roll on Rebellion, where I'll not only be interviewing Palmolive but also Paul Eccentric and Pauline Murray. All the 'P's, P-tee-P. I'll be meeting up with Herman de Tollinare and catching up with another few chums. I'm not playing this year, although they have asked me to bring a guitar in case anyone drops out at the Acoustic Stage. Shame it's been too damn hot to learn any of my new songs properly, but another time.

Families and Bereavement

Last night, for a reason that shall remain private, I was thinking about how it feels when, as an adult, your parents die.

Both of my (our) parents died at fairly ripe old ages, but it's not possible to anticipate how you'll feel when you have lost this layer of family: not at all. What I found most profoundly shocking was the physical feeling of loss that I felt when our Dad died. You'd probably expect this to happen with a mother, because for nine months your were as one, sharing the same body. But no: this physical feeling of something torn from my being happened when Dad died.

It was as if I had assumed that I was a tree rooted in family genetic and empirical history, only to discover that instead, I was a branch ripped from the strength of the tree and its roots, cut adrift from the sense of belonging and validation that I'd had before.

I sat in a chair and looked out of the window for a whole day. I saw nothing. I was having to be strong for many other reasons too, and as grief poured out of my body and I wept, I could feel the beginning of a recalibration that would grow slowly as years passed.

Making sure our Mother was OK became a project. Informally, we took it in turns to visit and later, support her. She became gravely ill quite suddenly, and I got news about her death when I was heading back home from a visit to the hospice in Scotland, and just about to do a talk at a cinema about punk. 

A quick call to my daughters to pack a bag for me, and I turned straight round and went back to help to organise things. This time, there were a lot of practicalities that helped with the process of grieving.

But yet again, a link to the complicated idea of our family had been broken. You realise that your personality consists of a lot of construction of a past made of stories about you and your siblings- told by other people. Do your own memories and sense of self tally with these accounts of family history? Often, they don't, and you realise that your siblings had entirely different experiences of being parented than yours. 'The past' begins to look rather wobbly, and your identity wavers. How can you exist if the underpinning roots of yourself are cast in doubt by the chief storytellers no longer telling their stories?

It's back to that idea of validation, of people rooting for you through thick and thin. Exposed, you start to consider the times you might have been wrong despite being loved and accepted by an older generation. Worse, you consider the times when they might have been wrong. You realise that they were far from perfect, and that they too were rooted on shaky ground.

Gradually, you peel yourself away from the past and start to understand who you are. No longer the subject of projections and guilt, your sense of self consolidates. You're not clothed in the costumes of the past, but constructing your own garments so you can wear your selfhood as you progress through the rest of life.

There is a combination of fear, confidence, relief and wisdom that can never take the place of the parents who brought you into the world, but adds to an understanding of what it means to be a human being: unexceptional yet unique, frail yet resilient, impermanent. Not a rooted tree, not even a branch: just an idea of what it means to exist in a nanosecond of the planet's life.

The Puppets Have Strings

 

Man Clearing A Pond In Porto

 

Weird Vacuum

I'm in a state of weird vacuum after sending off the album tracks yesterday. They have winged their way to Valencia in Spain, which I understand is incredibly and unbearably hot; here, it's cool and rainy. Hooray, say the plants in the back yard. 

I feel like I've forgotten how to socialise, but it's only about ten days ago when hyper-social KISMIF happened. I've temporarily logged out of life: I keep seeing wonderful events being advertised that I have just missed by the skin of my teeth. But I've also been grounded for two weeks by the builder installing a new kitchen in the house, which was creatively designed on a computer that neglected to say that the kitchen would be the size of the standard cupboard door measurements, and not the size indicated by the picture on its screen. Never mind. The old doors were falling off and the white plastic laminate was ballooning off some of them too. 

Upstairs, I've mixed and mixed the album tracks, finished the puppets for the cover, mistress-minded the design, read three crime novels, done loads of drawing, and tidied up a tiny bit. I also spent last Sunday transporting Offsprog One and a whole load of her books and helping to stash them in the loft. 

I think (and hope) the kitchen will be finished tomorrow, and then I'll have to put everything back in the cupboards. After getting rid of three bin-bag-loads of stuff I didn't need, there might be room for microphones and other tech-y things in the new cupboards, because of course the kitchen is also a recording studio. There is no kitchen sink at the moment, so there is no drama. Life is not bland, however. There will be plenty going on next week at Rebellion.

Cut War Not Healthcare

 

Mixes and Covers

I have literally spent days twiddling with the mixes, sorting glitches, dodging around Logic Audio's attempts to scupper tracks by losing sections of them during export, etc etc. 

The final mixes are going to be sent off to Tiny Global tonight. I haven't got enough broadband to be able to send them from here, so they are en route to my friend's dad's house in the north-west of England to wing their way from there (all my other pals with broad-broadband are busy today). I had a last-minute go at three of the tracks this morning, and I honestly don't think I can do any better.

So now on to the LP sleeve. I've spent ages folding tiny paper ruffs for these guys today, although they can't wear them until their photo session, because if they lie flat they'll squash them. The jump rings arrived this morning so I was able to attach their limbs, and now I have to find something suitable for their strings. I've chose a font for the titles, asked the guest musicians for self-portraits, and am thinking about what information needs to be on the back of it.

Maybe now I can stop mixing music in my sleep!

Hampstead Heath

 

Temple of Ideas is an event run on Saturday afternoons on Hampstead Heath by Meg Lee Chin, and it's basically an open mic for over-55 aged poets, comedians and songwriters. I love playing in the open air, and I said 'yes' to this as soon as Meg invited me about a month ago. It starts at about 3 p.m. and we were treated to some quite sombre poetry from two poets, and some lovely music and comedy too. My favourite act was a Czech comedian who pitched her material just right: she flipped British people's racist assumptions right on their heads in an almost affectionate way, which worked really well. My guitar broke (!) and I had to borrow a Takamine from Ben, the other musician, which was very kind of him. Compared to the electric guitars that I normally play it was a difficult proposition, but it helped me to keep my set within the allotted time, which the following poet had a problem or two with. Open mics help to keep your feet on the ground, because you have to develop patience while other artists are playing, and stick to your time slot. You simply can't feel that you are more important than other performers: everyone is equal. I didn't envy Meg having to get him to stop, but she did so very politely. There was a dedicated audience of about 15 people draped on the grass and rickety camping chairs, one or two in the greenery out of the sun, and some wanderer-uppers, including a dog or two. I loved the informality of it all; it was a great antidote to the heavy-duty editing I've been doing fo the album in the past week. I just have to find a way to upload the tracks to send off, because my home Broadband is too weedy to cope!

Woman Gardener with Rake and Hen, Cristal Palace Gardens, Porto

 

Puppet Progress

A builder is downstairs, building. 

I am upstairs, painting puppets for the sleeve of my forthcoming album. I have averted disasters: not putting a screw-eye in the tops of their heads for strings (I did it very gently even though they are dry now), and losing the indigo paper (found it under some pillows).

I'm just waiting for jewellers jump-rings in the post, to join their heads and limbs to their bodies. I'll varnish them before that to fix the paint, then I'll make their stage.

Margaux is remarkably jealous. I thought she'd be delighted to have playmates.

I was going to finish the editing and mixing today but I woke up too early and have tinnitis. That can be tomorrow's job.

The KISMIF Conference, Porto

KISMIF ('Keep It Simple, Make It Fast') is a hybrid conference of DIY theory and practice that celebrated its tenth birthday this year. Behind it is a team led by Paula Guerra, a woman whose vision and persuasive powers pull in (this year) academics and practitioners from seventy different countries to share their knowledge and enthusiasms in a series of workshops, panels, seminars, sessions, gigs, conversations and late-night bar conversations that means everyone leaves having gained not only a huge amount of knowledge but also a huge amount of new friendships.

I'd been before, to present a paper, to show rushes of our She-Punks film, to appear on a panel talking about my book on women and music technology. If there was one academic conference that I would really want to attend despite my academic career being at an end, it was this one. Two years out of the scrum my research has not been refreshed, but my music is alive and kicking so I proposed a collaborative political songwriting session for the Summer School part of the conference and was also asked to chair a panel that included Palmolive who I had never met before, which was really exciting.

Porto was misty and rainy, but still really beautiful. When I arrived on Monday, I made a quick visit to the Crystal Palace Gardens to see the cockerels, the hens and the pheasants, and then turned in for the night.

'How many people will be at the workshop?', I asked the facilitator. 'Oh, about forty', was the reply. Yikes! In reality, there were probably just over thirty people, and we got started straight away. Mary Fogarty was there (hooray!). Between all the group members, we soon filled huge sheets of paper with short phrases that might form a song. A guitar turned up (double hooray!), and 45 minutes later we had a group song. Some participants particularly enjoyed it, because they are not allowed to express personal political beliefs in their own countries. That alone made it worth doing, but it was a remarkably positive experience anyway. I hope to carry on doing this now, maybe with trade unions or other political or campaign organisations. It works, and each song is unique: instigated, formed and developed by a group of people who have a stake in the creativity rather than copyright and personal ownership.

We watched Mary's film of queer dancers that was simultaneously a parody of the dance element of the Olympics, and a celebration of freedom of expression, and then Federica Manfredi's workshop on artistic responses to vulva pain. Simon Zagorski-Thomas was there with a music installation which I never managed to find because the conference was spread over venues all over the central part of the city.

The final experience of the morning was an online presentation on Democracy, Wellbeing and the Environment, about Brazilian indigenous women, by Giovana Mandulao. She is from the Brazilian Ministry of Health, with a focus on indigenous health. It was very interesting.

I went back to the gardens for some peace with the chickens, and then spent the rest of the day with a Vera novel from a charity shop, winding down from all the excitement and social contact.

Next morning, there was a panel with Will Straw talking about queer disco dancing at the end of contemporary films, and Professor Silva, who did a wonderful paper about the Portugese revolution and artistic responses to it. I'd spent half an hour walking round an incredible graveyard with tombs so huge that some of them even seemed to have their own rubbish bins, and I felt steeped in Portugese history by the end of the morning.

I took some time out to research background information for the panel the next day, and then had a walk to the Sao Bento station to look at the beautiful tiling. Porto is up hills and down hills, round corners and up and down stairs... and there was the Puppet Museum, small and perfectly formed in a street that I'd walked past several times. It took an hour to find it, and afterwards the sun came out and I went back to hang out with the real live birds.

It was positively foggy on Thursday morning; the panel with Paloma, Laura Way and Amina Boubia was at a cinema next to an incredibly beautiful tiled building (adjacent photograph) that was almost a ruin; in some ways that made it all the more beautiful. 

The beginning of the session was hectic, with some technical issues that included a tech man being on his phone halfway through one of the papers, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we was audible to the whole audience. I tried to kill him with a look, but my looks don't kill and eventually he ended the call. Laura's paper was on defiant older women punks, Amina's was on free music festivals in Morocco, and Paloma's was on her early life in Spain and her journey through to London and the Slits. I learned so much from all three; by then we were running an hour late because of the technical problems. At one point I said 'Shall we just write a song?', and straight away Christine Feldman-Barrett responded with the title 'There Is No Power In Powerpoint'. Now there's a title for a room full of academics!

Lucy Robinson, Matt Worley and Simon Strange were all at that session, and probably lots of other people that I knew, but something about the panel had bonded the four of us and our quick cup of coffee afterwards turned into several hours of hanging out; later, I showed Paloma the gardens, and we all met up in the evening with Christine and Angels Bronsoms to eat together. I think they are all still hanging out together even though I came back yesterday, and Christine left for Lisbon. It was such fun to learn about what everyone is doing. Christine has an album coming out of archive stuff from her riot grrrl band, and those of us with daughters talked about that, and we talked about our research and our music and so many things. Six women: American living in Australia, Spanish living in America, Moroccan, British. What a lot there was to talk about! 

I came home feeling energised, loving Porto more than ever, feeling grateful for my life and remembering yet again that (despite the shitty parts of it) it is full of new experiences and interactions that make it endlessly interesting and stimulating. Three cheers for Porto, three cheers for Paula and KISMIF and all who sail in her, three cheers for the song writing group, three cheers for the chickens and peacocks!

And a big, big shout out to Paula and Andy. I cannot begin to imagine the energy and dedication that it takes to co-ordinate this fantastic conference. This was the tenth anniversary! We are still talking about it now; there is absolutely nothing like it. The intensity of information, the community of activists and academics from 70 different countries. As with nearly every conference, it's the conversations around the edges that mean as much as the formal papers. I learned so much, and life is so much richer when you're learning. Roll on next year! I hope they'll have me back.

Back!

I've been in Porto, running a songwriting session at the KISMIF Summer school and later, chairing a fascinating panel. More tomorrow.