Review of Amanda Palmer: There will be no intermission. 2020 Adelaide Fringe.

I walked in blind, not knowing, not expecting anything. My partner and I had spent an hour wandering through the garden, admiring the sweet festival atmosphere and sipping espresso cocktails, relaxing for a rare evening without our children. Walking to the venue, I mis-read the banner outside the uni as Miskatonic University, and we chuckle at the thought of tentacles and cosmic horror at an Amanda Palmer show. It's often said that fans tend to look like the artist they admire, in a fashion sense, so in observing the variety in styles, ages and genders, it feels easy to say that Amanda Palmer is not an easy musician to define.

I could say cabaret, but that term feels so vague as to be meaningless.

I could say feminist piano punk, and...maybe that's saying something about her.

But that's just her music, and that is only a part of the story, for the performance is itself a story. So perhaps I should start at the beginning...

*

We like to dress up, my partner and I,

like birds, we preen,

she wears feathers in her hair

I wear one in my cap,

to walk and wander, wondering

at the sunset chimes of a festival

upon the streets.

The venue is an upturned boat, an arc, a magnificent wooden cave, an edifice of stone and timber that is place of worship, it is a lecture hall, a concert hall, a religious experience just to be inside; this is a church whose sanctity seems preserved in the magnitude of it's own beauty. It has a beauty that does not brag, yet is proud, is grand yet somehow homely. The crowd feel at home here on these wooden fold out chairs, staring up at the mist curling from the stage, the purple and blue mist curling as if directed by fate over the grand piano.

I sit very still and quiet amidst the noise and bustle.

Striding up the centre aisle from behind us, she strums her beloved ukulele and beams at all of us. It is easy to feel loved at a Palmer show, she exudes the philosophy of her life, which she will speak on at length and with great eloquence and passion. That philosophy includes Radical Compassion.

I walked in only half blind; I knew this was going to be a four hour show, and that it would be a mixture of talking and music. I did not expect her to tell a story, and I did not know what it would be about. I saw the information stall outside the venue, but I did not guess its importance.

Amanda came to tell us a story that she did not want to tell. It was the story of abortion. Her own experiences, and those of others. She talked about the value of telling the story, of opening herself up to people throughout the experience, and how every time she worried that speaking the truth might burden those she told, she found only the lifting of burdens, the lightening of hearts and the further opening, opening, opening of life around her. Open to the experience of everything and powerfully aware of her own powers and weaknesses.

When she sits and sings and plays the piano, Oh! I love the way she punches for effect, a sort of right cross into the lower octaves. I love her rhythms which build up from their catchy roots and come rushing into the the room as the story of each song survives the storms of its telling. I love her melodies, where a kind of bent classical waltz will reanimate itself into a playful nursery rhyme, or a tumbling wild animal stampede will find sudden yet graceful stillness in a heartbreaking cry from her heart filled voice.

Oh I love her voice. A voice that knows itself so well, inside the body of a woman who knows herself, who challenges herself, who shares herself, who travels back and forth from Hades to Heaven and sings a rhyming poetry, a skipping and lifting verse that makes a long story all the better for being long. She is so clever with language, with turns of phrase and the subtle ways that meaning continues to change in our common tongue. This command of language is an expression of both her wisdom and her wit, she is a storyteller of no small skill, parallel tales just falling out her her in a very smooth, totally comfortable manner. She talks to us like we are sitting together in a lounge room, and we, her very happy guests, sit happy in our silence, or happy to call out or laugh.

Her story is a hard one, and many times I wipe tears from my eyes. The two large bearded men in the row ahead of me also wipe their tears. It is allowed, it is expected, it is shared in the peculiar shadowed privacy of the crowd. She tells us that if the story ever gets too much for us, we can call out Amanda, I'm too sad!, and she would immediately pause and play the opening chords of her very popular and very funny song, Coin operated boy. She did this twice for us, and I for one, was grateful.

[On a personal note: I have a digression which it pleases me to tell, though it may distract from the flow of my story. The intermission reaching its end, Amanda once again entered the hall from behind us, this time on the left, strumming her cherished four stringed friend. As my partner and I were seated on that edge, Amanda saw the long brown pheasant feathers adorning my partner's hair. Amanda paused to say I like your head. To which my partner replied, Thank you, I like yours too. Now, back to the concert...]

She told us one particular story that I will try to relate.

Having written a song telling an abortion and date rape story, she had been criticised by the press for making light of the topic. Her critics claimed that the song was basically a rape joke. Amanda fussed and fretted, describing to us her early attempts to defend herself, but concluding that she felt she did not succeed. She could not find the right words at the time to explain herself. Later, she concluded, she found her answer.

It is her job to turn the dark into light.

She is an artist.

She wished that she had said to her critics: Let me do my job.

We get it. We're her crowd. We understand the black humour of this modern poet, this forward thinking woman of the new century. In so many ways she speaks for us, expressing our own experiences in a manner so compelling as to inspire a sense of personal attachment. Each of us feels lucky to be in her company, we feel invited into her, into the vulnerable parts of her own life which she narrates to us with the courage to make jokes about even the darkest aspects, yet she never stoops to disrespect, not towards herself, or others. Even her critics.

I cannot in good faith conclude my story, without telling you about the stage lighting.

It were as if lightning struck the stage to ignite her words.

...as if the smoke and shadows were her sorceress familiars

and she,

the summoner,

the conjurer,

wreathed in the magic

of light beams stark and calamitous

or

coloured blooms of liquid luminance

or the portending red glow of doom

leading to darkness

all at the touch of her hand

...the stage lighting at this show was exquisite, in its timing, in its execution, in its trickery and play and subtle moods shifting with the state of the story being told, or the song being sung. The lighting made the stage a location of enhanced reality, emphasising the presence of this grand speaker and her grand piano into a drama of powerful music, and transformative storytelling.

Amanda Palmer made light in the darkness.

I know of no other magic as powerful as this.

*

Review by Morgan Taubert.

Www.zebulonstoryteller.bandcamp.com

www.praiseliving.blogspot.com

www.letterstocicero.blogspot.com

Youtube: Zebulon Storyteller

Review of The Champagne Smile, by Inez Marrasso.

When you pick up a book with a pretty girl on the cover, you might make certain assumptions about its content, you might weigh the pages in you hands and read the snappy blurb and think that a prose poetry novel about an ageing stripper might be just the sort of titillating entertainment that would lift the clouds of an empty weekend.

The Champagne smile is a heavy book. It is not a cloud breaker, it is a rain maker. I found myself reading slower and slower with each chapter, feeling myself being dragged unwillingly into the torture chamber of this poet's mind. I cannot say how much of this book is autobiographical, but there are too many venomous wounds held open by her ink stained fingers for me to believe that this is a work of pure, imaginative fiction. I could only compare Marrasso's book to Dorothy Porter's verse novel 'The Monkey's Mask', or even Charles Bukowski, as poets describing the ever widening downward spirals of alcoholism and degradation, and those comparisons are intended as a compliment. Inez Marrasso writes about a life behind the curtain and on the stage, but the lighting is not flattering and the curtains are stained with cum and beer and the thick chemical smoke of the strip club is enough to make you choke.

I remember the first time I ever went to a strip club, on Hindley Street, perhaps even the club described by Marrasso. I was about nineteen or twenty. A girl caught my eye, I had a couple drinks and ordered a lap dance. As she sat on the edge of my table, waiting for the next song to come on, I asked her how she got into stripping. She told me that she was a mother, studying at uni, stripping to pay the bills. It might have been a line, a throwaway lie with enough truth in it to satisfy the casual customer, but it had enough truth also, to be true. I bring this up because in remembering this event, I realise that it immediately humanised the woman before me. She was not a naked prop to support my young and eager fantasies, she was a woman, working in a job.

This book is about a working woman, Jagger, and sometimes the job is dangerous, sometimes delightful, but the big picture is that the work is a quest in darkness for a sense of self and real identity that could not be found in married life, nor in corporate professional employment. Neitzche declared he would not believe in a god who did not dance, and Marrasso mirrors the sentiment:

Show me a God who dances, I say.

Better to be thirty eight years old, living bold than sliding

towards a finale of board games.

But this book is not a divinity tale, not a straight line morality fable tale of a woman falling into the hole she digs for herself. It is the tragic story of the men and women living in the same darkness, like Frank, the soldier sent off to Afghanistan who is as human as the protagonist and his lonely striving to become worthy of love are as important to the narrative as wine is to the drinker.

Frank gives me his army dog-tag, places it around my neck

'It would turn me on if you wore it against your skin.'

He lingers, 'Please, Jagger, just one kiss?'

It is all I have one as the cold metal dangles over my nipples.

This chain should make me bulletproof, but it sends stiff chills,

is as breathless as a noose.

He says, 'I wanna taste life from your lips, no gift would be

greater than this.'

Frank looks deep in some memory he hasn't had,

mouth gapes wide like a venus fly trap.

I could've been anyone

*

The Scarlet Lounge unlocks itself to thousands of men like

Frank,

who share their wounds with girls but don't care what they

think.

As long as the drinks are cold, they tell a truth from lies they

dare not speak to naked nuns with open legs and closed

mouths,

through vows to silent sins held in the silhouette of time

*

This book is filled and spills over with the stories of the men she dances for, of their hopeless hope and naïve romantic notions of her virtue, when for her Every day dignity changes shape. This book however is not a sappy tear stained moan about lost young men, this book does not linger for long over such romantic notions. It runs head first through the gauntlet of jackal faced liars who come hunting with fistfuls of money and promises like honey, while their fingers, uninvited, probe assholes and cunts and grab flesh as if they owned it, as if every stripper were a whore, as if whore were another word for slave, as if slave were another word for meat.

I used to date a girl who worked as an escort. A client bit one of her nipples off, and that was just the part of the story she was comfortable telling me. There were worse violations that left invisible scars, and the money she earned was hardly enough recompense for the kinds of rape that police consider unworthy of prosecution. Her champagne smile could be no better described than by a book such as this, a difficult book, a hard book, a rain maker and a heart breaker.

A book like this is beautiful in its ugliness. I believe in rough cut diamonds. I believe in the dignity to be found in hard work, and I think that sex work of any kind is some of the hardest to be found on this planet. This novel, for that is what it, reminds us of the common humanity and desperate loneliness found in both men and women. In the suicides it describes, in the mutilations, in love and friendship and sisterly solidarity, this story, like its protagonist, is unashamed, it is a hard-won trophy, and its author has worked hard to carve truth from illusion and make her poetry both sensual to read, and surreal to experience. Each poem, two pages in length, is as dense as the chapter of a book, the language and rhythms and rhymes falling into and out of syncopation. It makes me want to drink, and makes me glad that I have stopped all that in my life. I am thankful for my sobriety, yet sympathetic with the struggles of this character, which though extreme, are also common, in her quest 'to reconcile the two halves of a whole life', 'And a black unicorn stands by her side, ready for the ride.'

It's not an easy read, but the truth very rarely is.

*

Inez Marrasso's book, The Champagne Smile, can be purchased through her website

https://www.inezmarrasso.com.au

*

Dorothy Porter - Monkey's Mask

https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9780330362429

Charles Bukowski

https://bukowski.net/

Review of the book launch 'Forever Again', by Adelaide Poet, Peach Klimkiewicz

The late summer storm brings welcome relief to the inevitable exhaustion of searing heat waves. The humidity rising gradually over days becoming intolerable but carrying with it an electricity that enlivens the mind and senses while it weakens the body. Then the skies turn black and thunder precedes only the first few drops of rain before the deluge blinds the horizon and with a sudden explosion of energy the world become possible again. The rusted cracked soil drinks a mouthful, then fills its throat, then overflows with the wine of Zeus.

The gathering took place in a disused metal frame barn, with a roof that had been replaced once, but a long time ago, and walls half built, or half torn out. The roof leaked, dripping tricklets into buckets of various shapes amidst the chairs and cushions and the crowd of busy talking pretty young things of all ages. A lucky old dog conversed with everyone, and as I watch the always amusing tech issues unfolding and solving, I sip my beer and nibble grapes. What more could I expect from a book launch from Peach, but to be amidst the fruits of the world, and to savour every moment. To listen to the eager conversations and delight in the youthful enthusiasm of an evening devoted to poetry.

The stage, warmed by old carpets and made homely by the broken grandfather clock, clustered itself around an old book case raised on milk crates, a guitar leaning against a stool, and the exquisite and somehow timeless pools of yellow light from old lamps. A lounge room built within the walls of a half-ruined, peak roofed work shed. A shed which had aged so beautifully that even now, surrounded by the suburban homes that had grown and aged around it, it remains a beautiful and useful space.

The evening begins with a story perhaps with roots as old as story-telling. Liam, the teller of tales, recounts the myth of Orpheus and Euridice. It is a tragedy so dire that he tells it at first as a sort of comedy, luring us into his gentle tone and remarkably erudite language. We laugh just long enough to be pulled still bubbling into the heart of the myth. Like Orpheus himself, Liam lures us into the hypnotic truths of the story. The heart of which continues beating long after the tale is told, like the song being sung by Orpheus' decapitated head as it floated downstream...

Don't look back.

I cannot separate the sound of rain from the sound of clapping. It is as if the whole evening is being applauded by the heavens. A blessing. A blessing. We are blessed to hear such stories told, and we offer up our warm cheers and storm of applause in thanks to the storyteller, and in like manner we welcome the singer.

The singer - A woman named Nico who lifts the guitar and dedicates her set to her dead friend. Dead last week. She asks us to hug our friends, to work on the small stuff, to treasure every moment, because, you never know. She sings us songs of falling in love while the world is on fire, she strums us a melody so sweet, so sad, and her voice is like the faint white line above the horizon, separating above from below. It is neither delicate, nor blunt, it is, rather, essential. It is her own voice. A true voice.

Our appetite grows and Peach does not hesitate. With the fading cheers for the singer, he takes the mic and expresses his thanks to us in a hundred different ways. With Ciceronian perfection, he delivers his poems from memory, making each word important, each sentence a valuable statement to be considered and savoured, and, bakes this whole poetic dish of words and sounds and phrases into a philosophy of love that is deeply considered and compelling. He plays games with us, we stand and hug each other at his request, declaring that love is real, we look into each other's eyes and we shout to the sky, lifting our voices in an exaltation that surprises me, rushing up with a liberty of spirit and filling the whole crowd with an immediacy of experience.

We are all here to hear Peach speak, to let his ideas dissolve in us.

Where is God?

I don't know.

But at times, there's a certain stillness

and silence,

within which

such a question appears the wrong one to be asking,

and what the right one might be

seems best left

to god.

Peach has religion without being religious. He had God without being a preacher. He is a raise-the-roof kinda guy on stage, unaffected by pretensions or nervousness. He stands and delivers and good lord if it ain't magnificent to see a poet shoot from the hip, all the words there on the tip of his tongue, shooting arrows into our minds and hearts and bodies. Over and over I hear people sigh, or moan at a moment's pause when Peach lets us sink into his message. But it is not hand delivered, it hand held, heart held. He seems as complete a man as I have ever seen, he is in the fullness of self awareness, self love, self drive and passion and happiness and sadness and deeply ponderous consideration of the world. His poetry is an expression of that knowledge, which is not assuming, not arrogant, but simply, and beautifully, true.

It came like a song in thunder.

It came like cadence in storm.

It came for it's always been coming

from when it was brought into form.

It came like a bolt of lightning

upon the peaks of the heart.

I'd not witnessed they reached so high

till I witnessed the wilderness part.

It came like a shot of presence

through the vicious roars of the age.

Love rained down its immortal blaze

to lighten up centre stage.

*

Peach's new book, Forever Again, can be purchased from him directly.

peach12345zz@gmail.com

His writing can also be found at www.poemsontherun.com