San Fran Pre-burn

You get the most beautiful view of San Francisco as you fly in over an endless Pacific on a clear day. Didn't know there were so many mountains. Just before we banked right to prep for final approach, there poking through the mist and low cloud, the red towers and part of the suspension girders of that bridge. Funny, for something I've never seen with my own eyes, it's amazing how well I know the graceful span, and how much I'm looking forward to a face-to-face 'reunion' with it.

Cloudless and about 80 degrees or 26C by the time we landed, hot and hazy on the runways as we taxied to the terminal. Shiny corridors, travel-ators and slow slow customs queues. Fingerprint scans, a dodgy no-sleep-in-24hours mug shot and then find your way to the confusing, easy-to-follow instructions of the BART rail system ticket machine...

Powell and Market was a heaving mass of buskers,beggars and shoppers galore.
Canyoned avenues of flagship stores, a smart, well dressed, cashed up crowd, and for the most part not that overweight.

A stupidly sexy cop standing guard buy some store with a perfect handle bar mo, black uniform stretched across a big fit frame. Are you kidding me with that look? I haven't slept in half a world away, but do you really expect me to dig out the digi and start snapping, cliched magnificence notwithstanding?

Check in at the hostel equals a rank smelling entrance and no room at the room of the inn to swing a cat but who cares when the bed is a bed and me and the posse are in the God damn US of A.
OK, it's only taken me 43 years to get here.

Don't try to sleep. Readjust your body clock by mixing it with every soul in town who knows this is a uniquely rare and sublime late-August, San Francisco day. Set the dial on your wobbly jet-lagged legs to Steep Hills and get out there for god's sake.

transamercia pyramid
the piers
fishermans warf
Pier 39 and huge crowds of uppety sea lions and tourists eye balling each other
lombard the crookedest street
broadway
china town
noodles followed by darkness
Oh I get it now, the hostel is on the corner of Nightclub and Exotic Ladyland
then three weary souls clamber over the piles of bags and hit their bunk beds
call me old for a travelling manic curist but ear plugs rock

As for today, woke up legs last.
Did you know that the one deemed to be best dressed each day on the playa at the burn can vie for the title of Sparkle Pony
Clearly sparkle ponies need sparkle and the best of desert bling is to be found up hill, many of them actually and down tail over in the Lower Haight.

But first the SFMOMA, and the AVEDON, O'keefe and Ansell Adams exhibitions... OMG, no really, OMFG


Then it kicked in...
A long long street of colour and mayhem
And the shops were full of soon to be burners, itching for the right bit of desert bling
Portable neon for the body or bike
More cheap-arse plastic battery operated sparkle than you could poke a very big stick at
But it all kicked in...

It was the night before christmas
It was the last shopping moments before the mardi gras parade
It was exciting
It is exciting

This city is immense and beautiful and as changeable as the tempestuous weather
Walk away from the shiny shops on Market and it all changes with every step; rents, incomes, the appearance of happiness and apparent trappings of success leach out of the place. Keep walking turn right and you get the city buildings with commanding avenues, parks and a gilded dome, lying on the grass of the surrounds on a chilly overcast day are many folks being given lunch by community support staff and charity workers. Keep walking past the concert hall and ballet centre and it all changes again. Ornate houses, street after hilly street of them, in mostly very well kept states of repair.

Get lost, ask for directions, receive ambiguity, finally get found and end up under the biggest rainbow flag ever right beside Harvey Milk Plaza. Maybe it was the jet lag but a street full of ubiquetos rainbow culture and rainbow peeps set off a massive set of fashion insecurities for the BF and I... I mean we just hit the street for the time ever and memories of Harvey, Tales of the City and all the doccos and the movies of the city and the Castro come flooding back at the exact same time as we pass a gaggle of queens....
"Oh but I only way 175 pounds honey. Well girl I'm down to 168 now.
Really.... A quick burito and a corona and we were outa there!

So that was days one and two...

Other best bits...

The homeless guy begging on Haight, silver hair and beard, his jingle, "A couple of coins so I can get my life started."

The muso playing in the hostel mess hall... "If anyone here knows Tim Burton personally, come see after the show, this next song has sooo got to be in one of his movies."

Day three, Oakland and Wal Mart

Hello, we aren't in the land of charming anymore...

Decisions and feedback

If James were writing this blog and not Tawdry, he would probably say...

So, I get ideas

Lots usually

In the past I didn't always recognize their value

In the past I found it hard to follow many of those ideas through



But now I try to honour each of them

Regardless

Where ever possible



Tawdry Heartburns Manic Cures has been for me a lot about honouring ideas

Despite fear, reservation, cost or potential disaster

Just shut up

Put up

And do it...



So I had an application to take the collection of ideas that make up this show to a

national arena that could potentially have spin off internationally

An application to get invited at least, let's not get carried away here

An application to be considered for a performing arts trade market

I put it off and put it off and got 'busy' and distracted and blah blah blah

At almost deadline I went to bed to watch episode after episode of a fave show

I spent almost an entire day procrastinating and worried sick about it

Not enjoying the show

Not enjoying me

Not enjoying time slipping and slipping and f*****g slipping

Finally, I had to stop watching the crap I was pretending to be interested in

And ask myself a simple question.

Actually, there was an observation first

James I said, you are scared and in hiding

Do you want to turn your back on your ideas yet again because you are scared?

Actually, there was another observation and another question

It feels almost painful this hiding and procrastination

You could just turn give in to it and walk away again, the ideas will come again and

You can turn away again

Do you want to do that?

Do you want to be that person James, decide now?



I don't know why but it takes a lot of 'pain' to sometimes overcome fear or at least

Knock sense into myself

I want to be someone who talks about it and does it

Not someone who just talks about it



I decided that again despite the relative fear and pain

I can work with those parts of myself more than I can work

With the acknowledgement that I am someone who chooses not to follow through on

Inspiration however profound or otherwise I might imagine it to be


Around the time that this was all going down I had some very honest feedback about

Tawdry's week long gig at PICA in Perth a few weeks ago.

Some good stuff but also some very clear and straightforward stuff about what hasn't

Worked, about where attention should be paid to move the work forward

Stuff about opportunities missed and preformative moments not delivered well or

Handled to the best effect for the work

I don't find it hard to hear honest appraisals about my ideas based work, because it's

The only way to make the stuff that really matters to me better. But more than just

Hearing it, it re-energized my approach to the work, distilled some of it in my head

and made the procrastination easier to work through too

Not a magic remedy but a clear pathway forward, not confusing, not scary just work

That will help make those ideas of mine sharper, clearer, easier for peeps to

Interact with

Armed with objective insight, the decision to do can be all the more productive, and

low and behold, enjoyable

Who knew???

Golden Bilby Award

At last year's Putting On An Act, the performance manager at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), renowned local choreographer Chrissie Parrot instigated an award for the best / most innovative act of the week long contemporary performance season.

Somehow, a bronze of a bilby (a small endangered Australian marsupial) was procured from somewhere and stuck on a small plinth. One was given to the recipient last year, another was engraved as a perpetual trophy and this year, after the show last Saturday night, I was given one too! I was pretty shocked and actually in the middle of doing the nails of a Taiwanese sound artist who is here in Perth on a residency. So ducked around the corner of the PICA library where I had set up my week long interactive instillation doing nails and walked into the PICA bar to get the gong.

Funny, nobody in the rest of the world knows or cares about a tiny homespun thing like this but here in Perth WA, for me it meant a lot. No, I didn't have an Oscar moment although I did manage to forget to thank my support network my tech support Jude and my partner Jamie. Doah. Sorry you guys. But I did get to see that beyond the typed notes, hand-written secrets, and the yelled-out audience confessionals (in the live report on stage) that people got it.

It makes it all worth while when an audient get it. Apologies grammarians because I don't know the singular of audience. It is awesome when loads of people dig your work but even if only one does it still makes a difference. Yes the more the merrier and it would seem that a bunch of people saw the ideas in the Manic Cures Project, and yes it may be in the most isolated city in the world and completely unimportant for everybody else not here, but that's not the point. It's not my point.

My point is that if you show up and put it out there, no matter where you are, no matter what the cost there is always the chance that someone is gonna see it and embrace it. That makes it worth while. Sure, I got a few negative responses, peeps not digging it so much. I grateful for those too. But people were moved to respond; people embraced the concept and the content and responded appropriate to the level of their comfort with the project. Some where moved to reject it others were moved by it. I felt tangible interaction with a wide variety of people over the course of the week and that is a pretty amazing thing to experience I have to say. I am inspired and fascinated by the variety and generosity of responses that this project has received.I feel a debt of gratitude and hope that the manicures I give in some way make recompense to the people who share their confidences (anonymously) with the project.

My thanks to all the Putting On An Act punters who stopped by and to PICA for their support and encouragement too.

See you next gig...

Tawds