In the meantime ....

It has been an interesting couple of days.


We took Nikki to the airport on Friday and watched her fly off to Wellington. I hear last night's Phat Grrrl Revolution went swimmingly at Happy down there. Stoked. She's heading to Dunedin on Monday - so watch out for her down there people and say hi from Miriam if you run into that crazy-intense woman from the States who I am so pleased to have had the chance to work with.


That night Murray, Christian and myself performed a set at Galatos as part of the Inhibition Exhibition. Warming up for rock bands this time - which I think may actually be more intimidating than performing in between them. But we did it and we did it good. Was a wicked venue to play, great little stage. Hope to do something else there down the track.



Murray, Me and Christian chill out pre-show.















Murray and Christian














Me doing Supported Accomodation. That shut them up.

***

Almost simultaneously, as Nikki would have been rocking her performance out down in Welly last night, Christian and I were performing with Texture and a bunch of other Auckland Fringe performers as part of Bang Bang Caravel at Cross Street Studios. They had erected a childhood-fort-like tent constructed out of sheets and pieces of fabric, which filled the entire gallery from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, and the whole evening's performances took place in there - the audience gathered around on the floor like people around a camp fire, a small stage and curtain set up at one end, lights and a disco ball.



Texture performing at Bang Bang Caravel.

***

This blog is about something else though. I have just returned from the first ever live Dirty Words Sessions at Thirsty Dog and WOW. It was vastly underattended, because clearly some people take a while to get hooked onto a good thing. And oh my this is a good thing. Shane Hollands, beloved founder of The Literatti, started this one up, an off-shoot of his Fleet Fm show 'Dirty Words with Shane Hollands'. What you have is a two-piece 'house' jazz band, and a couple of booked poets. The band improvises music and the poets run with it in whatever way they see fit.



The coin toss decides who's gonna go first while the musicians warm up.















Christian gets going.









Christian Jensen and Texture were the guest poets. Shane performed. There were also opportunities for open mic, and a bunch of other poets who were there, myself and Mr. Murray Lee included, jumped up and performed with the band as well. Anna Kaye cranked out a really different piece for her, and I loved it - I'm calling it after it's repeated refrain "I'm sick of this shit". A piece from the Kerouac Effect I do believe. And Daniel Larsen performed stunningly, he's really owning his stuff now, I love it. I keep saying that. But good things are happening in our world of words and performance these days.

Texture turns prose into jazz beat poetry on the fly.


















Daniel synchs up with the musicians.








Performing unrehearsed with a live band is exhilerating - both to watch and to do. Something about boundaries is erased and avenues of what to do with the words open up before you. You just have to grab them as they come. No second guessing. It's a series of Yoda moments really. There is no think, only do or do not.

Keep an eye out for Dirty Words Sessions number 2 which is on April 12th I think - it will be a sunday. Make sure not to miss it. An amazing experience to be part of. One day this event is going to be a big part of our poetry scene up here, I'm so excited to have been at the first one. Hopefully I'll get to join Christian as one of the booked poets there oneday soon.

The Phat Grrrl Revolution

Last night was Nikki's first (and last) solo show in Auckland. She's off to Leigh for a performance at the Sawmill Cafe with Ivy Rossiter and The Little Isles Band tonight.

Let me just say, the show's title is well deserved and perfectly chosen, because one of the first words that comes to mind when attempting to describe it is, well, revolutionary. The next one is brave. The next one is empowering and the next one is honest. Brutally so. Beautifully so.

What we got last night was an hour of gutsy song, poetry performance, intimate recital, music and burlesque/strip-tease all perfectly melded together. I've never seen anything quite like what Nikki does before. To be honest I think the vast majority of us would just never have the proverbial balls to get up and be that real or that naked in front of strangers - and definitely not both at the same time.

And then, once the burlesque outfit is on the ground, Nikki reverse-strips, throwing off jewellery and adornment and changing into simple jeans while performing a poem - taken together, the two parts - the disrobing and re-robing - they provide a perfect symmetry.

The show was stunning, meaningful, deep, funny, sad - we were taken through a whole spectrum of emotion - and finished up with certain audience members dancing along to the final piece. Simply put, I had an awesome time and found myself transfixed by this brand new poetess who has entered my life.

If you live around Auckland and you missed this last night - get thyself to Leigh tonight!

This is not to be missed.

Seriously.

Nikki Patin's impressions - Just remember ...

the difference between outside and inside is a matter of perspective.

windows are not screened, doors are thrown wide and wanton like legs tired of constantly being crossed.

the wind sings through clothes, bringing katy dids and cicadas buzzing against walls while millions of spiders make their plans, watching warily from corners of impossibly high ceilings.

auckland is a sly grin of a city. the folks here are cool, like real cool, like real real cool, like cooler than any other group of people i've ever met. people smile and ask questions. they look folks in the eye and they call everything sweet. but when they hit the road, aucklanders press pedals to floors and zoom around mountain curves with a confidence that feels dangerous. then you notice how none of the cars are dented and how you never see an accident.

my time here has been sacred. maybe it's because i'm new to this place, maybe it's because i'm on a sort-of vacation, maybe it's because i am an anamoly in the world, but i feel so loved here. i feel connected. i feel free, in a lot of ways...not so defined by the past of my country or my life. not so boxed in. not told every second how angry i am about things that i should be angry about but should never show that i'm angry about them because that intimidates everyone. no one is intimidated by me here.

and there are tears now because it feels so good not to be treated like every word out of my mouth is already chosen, therefore nothing i have to say could possibly be of any importance.

it does no good to play the comparison game, though. america would lose HARD. chicago would lose even harder.

people enjoy words here, and each other. people acknowledge the heavy weight that is ego and do their best to get out of the way. no one here wants to be famous and celebrity is considered ridiculous and vacuous. no one is packaged like meat here. there is no abundance of designer labels, no collective focus on "making it." it's refreshing.

there is pain here and sadness. there are secrets and the tensions that always exist between people.

there are words like maori and pakeha. always black and white. brown and white. whatever and white. indigenous and colonialist. settler cultures. but they talk about it. they talk a LOT. they keep talking. no one lets the rope slip that connects people. fingers are bleeding, but still they are clutching at what binds, at what is sacred.

i have found new best friends, people who i will talk to for the rest of my life. there is miriam, whose comment, whose touching of the thread is what brought me here. we are parallel versions of each other. both clumsy and jewish by blood, rather than belief. both touched wrongly and told to stay quiet. both fierce under hot lights and not taking anybody's no for know, or prayer for show. we spent nine months creating across time and ocean. we never even spoke before i got off the plane. some things can't be explained or divined. some things just are.

there is sabrina, who is a walking poem. sabs, as i call her in my mind, could easily coast on what she studied in college, could define herself narrowly through career and upcoming nuptials. she quietly refuses and that refusal is brilliant in its rarity and intention. she writes poems about what she sees and what she'd like to see. she smiles at me and cares about me when i don't eat enough. she is what poetry doesn't expect.

murray cares. he looks after folks. he makes sure people are well and he means it. he doesn't act out of obligation, which is rare. he takes his time on stage, which is rarer. he calls adaptors rockets and calls his girlfriend gorgeous when he picks up the phone. he reaches for the positive, the good and becomes a conduit for what is kind and right.

christian lives in a castle with erin. they have a feijoa tree in their back yard, which feels like the beginning and the end of the world. his poems try to bring order out of the confusion of humanity and color. he navigates between countries, languages and idealogies. he demands hope from the audience and he gets it. he gets it.

penny is the woman kind and generous enough to give me a place to stay at her home. it is magical. there is a lovely garden, exploding with colors and old bits of things. sunlight lays itself across her bed, wind rushes from front door to back and no matter where you are, you can see trees and the tops of things. penny frets about whether or not i'm eating enough and leaves the light on when i come back late, which has been every night. she is a writer, too, and a traveler. her capacity to do and to think and to be is the physical example of a life well-lived. she tells me to make myself at home. she gives me toast and fruit and avocado and coffee. she shows me how the details of caring are what underscore comfort. she is as magical as her house.

those are only a few people, though. so many more have been kind, welcoming, encouraging. dan, miriam's fiance, gives me books on nikola tesla to read and tells me about the best food. he shows my lover his garden and walks in the street to make cabs uncomfortable. shane has the only spoken word radio show in auckland called "dirty words." indirectly, his love for spoken word and poetry are what brought me here. thanks, man.

"The Phat Grrrl Diaries" is on its first shelf in a store. that store is the Women's Bookshop in Auckland. i asked a women's bookstore in Chicago if they wanted to sell my book. they never responded. from thousands of miles away, that just seems silly.

i feel like i've gotten out of quicksand and onto actual earth. maybe i needed to travel all along. maybe chicago's just not the place for me.

i don't miss it, actually. i miss my love, my family and a couple friends. that's it. the rest of it? the backbiting, the political bullshit that invades supposedly underground art, the ass-kissing, the lack of cultural analysis and artistic critique and how much is taken for granted? i don't miss any of that. and it doesn't appear like i'm missed in chicago, except by my love, my family and a couple friends. i'm homesick, but i keep realizing that i don't actually have a home in a city that treats me like i'm a stranger. i feel more loved in auckland than i ever have in america. what's that about?

in 10 days, i've done 10 interviews, 5 rehearsals and 2 shows. i'm living the life i've always wanted and it feels really good. the other life that i had before i came here, filled with tears and hurt and hard work that never seemed to amount to much, is gone. i'm not going back to that.

auckland has shown me what it means to be human, to have a mirror to my face, instead of a funhouse mirror being peddled as an everyday looking glass. auckland has shown me myself when i am not warped by manipulated history and uninformed opinions.

auckland has taught me what i've been aching to learn...what it means to be a poet.

just remember...

(This was written and posted by Nikki Patin on Facebook this morning, and she was pleased to share it with you all via the blog - we will never forget, Nikki!)

And then it happened.

Growl. We did it.

The set:

The performances:

It was a good show.

More details later. Late. Tired. Happy. Satisfied.

Thank you Gravity Coffee & First Scene. Thank you musicians - Fiona Holding, Craig Humphries, Bobby Goetsche, Jamie Karl, The Purple Duck & Mark McGill-Smith. Thank you sound technician - Sam Ralston. Thank you stage hand - Jason Morales. And every one else too, you know who you are.

Final Days

We had our last rehearsal yesterday. We went pretty easy on ourselves and only ran through the entire show once. Fiona was there too, which was wicked. First time we got to do the whole thing as it will be on the night. And we got all excited about it again, even through the haze of exhaustion.

Today we kept it pretty low key. Christian and Nikki hung out here and we practiced a bit, but to be honest we spent most of the day lounging around watching Lost episodes back-to-back.

At 7:00 pm we all descended on Te Karanga for our first of three Inhibition Exhibition gigs - but this one we get to do with Nikki. We did a really quick sound check, had some food (highly recommend mango curry by the way), rocked down to the New Zealand's Greatest Idiot exhibition and then went back to our own gig.

We did two 15-minute sets in between rock bands. Poetry. In between rock bands. And this was our first ever public performance together. Between rock bands. But it was choice. The audience dug it. We performed really well. Few glitches with the sound set-up. But aside from that it was Orsum with a capital Oh!

It was a good night. We did feed Nikki to the local hippies though, but they liked her so much, who were we to interrupt?

Actually I dug Hey Pinky, I think she called me the salt of the earth. Or salt something anyway. Whatever, the tone was positive. I think we won the whole crowd over in the end, people were trying to predict lines, laughing in all the right places. Loved it. Here's Murray and Sabrina watching the band whilst being blinded by my flash.

We'll be around chalking on Queen St while Nikki performs at the Market Stage tomorrow at midday. Then off to London Bar to set up our stage and do our wonderful thang.

See you there.

Tuesday & Wednesday

Okay, so I haven't had time to write this blog for the last two days. But we have been BUSY. And the word has earned those capital letters. Really, really earned them.

Tuesday saw Nikki heading off for two radio interviews - one on Shane Hollands' Dirty Words show on Fleet FM with Christian, and one on George FM. I spent the vast majority of Tuesday getting the GROWL programme ready for printing, typesetting and what-not. Then I did a bit of work on the website and got the multimedia page a little bit fixed up. There's links to a bunch of video and heaps of images from our last show up there now. And I have figured out how to make them actually viewable too. No small feat. Like I said previously, I am not technologically gifted.

Then Nikki and Sabrina headed on over to my pad and we rehearsed Bullet Hole Riddle together for about an hour before cruising on down to Poetry Live at Thirsty Dog...

where Nikki seriously owned the open mic...

Christian was MCing that night. Here he is with Erin Gaffney - the hugely talented photographer who took all our promo shots and made us look good - and Jason Morales our stage hand.

And Sabrina finished off the open mic with her piece about Kerouac.

It was a good night. Poetry Live did us proud. Our community is wicked.

Wednesday morning Christian and Nikki rock on down to the Bfm studio for an interview with Mikey Havoc. Then they turned up at my place and we went to print our programmes. It might have taken 6 hours, but between the three of us we got 60 limited edition, hand-bound, colour-cover programmes for our gig made up - they'll be on sale at the door for $5, which I think is a bloody good bargain considering the work that went into stitching them.

Pretty much as soon as that was finished it was time for rehearsal and we all congregated at Murray's flat. Luckily he made us all coffee before we got started.

And I took a picture. Because it was Gravity coffee, and they are our sponsors after all, and we do actually drink their coffee, and here's proof:

This was our second to last rehearsal before the big day. We worked on the pieces that have cello with Fiona, then we ran through the entire show from start to finish for the first time since Nikki arrived. This was a mammoth effort because we are all starting to get tired, but we did it, and we did it good. General consensus amongst us all is that our show is wicked, varying, never boring, and that it flows. Which is what I was going for when I designed it. I'm stoked that all our pieces fit together so well. We may all be totally different, but we seem to deal with very similar themes a lot of the time. Growl really growls. But in a hopeful way. In a way that asks for something positive, so it's not gonna be a downer buzz. The Literatti are finally getting the hang of this whole singing in unison thing too. We didn't leave Murray's until nearly 11.

And really, after two days of that much work I couldn't do anything but watch Lost episodes last night. I reckon I earned it. I've spent all morning putting together the stage-hand's schedule for the event, so they know when to place extra mics on stage and all that jazz.

Then I found out that Alt TV went off air yesterday at 5pm, which means our two interviews are not going to be happening now. It's a bit of a shock. The station is there one day and then the next it is gone. Just like that. poof.

We have one more rehearsal together now, and that's tonight. I can't believe we've actually managed to get all these pieces together memorised and choreographed in less than a week. Tomorrow night we are going to test some of them out at the Inhibition Exhibition at Te Karanga gallery on K Rd (koha entry if you wanna come along). Then we'll be hitting The London Bar mid-arvo on Saturday to get our set ready. Our set is awesome by the way. Christian scored these 'brick walls' from the Silo theatre that weren't needed anymore and we painted them up at our workshop weekend. We've also got a whole lot of other things lined up with First Scene, who sponsor us by giving us free access to their gear. Nice. I can't wait.

5 More Sleeps To Go

Today was pretty relaxed. In relative terms. Nikki rocked round at about 2 and we did some work on our duet, which is developing nicely methinks. Christian turned up at 3 and the two of us worked out our new duet - an adaptation of WINZ poem. I love just working with one other person for a short burst like that, get so much figured out, and there's space to get your vibe happening.


Then we sat down and tried to suss out our website. Not only did Christian have to figure out how to fix the damn thing, he also had to show me how to work it all. Did a pretty nice job teaching me too. And my brain didn't even fall out or anything! We got the homepage and the show page sussed. But I loaded waaaay too massive photos onto the multimedia page when we tried to do that one. Was just being lazy - I could have made them smaller in photoshop as I went, but.... so we'll get to that one soon. But still, it's nice to have made some more headway on it.


Then we headed off on over to Sabrina's choice little flat in Mt Eden and had one of the best rehearsals ever! We're trying to work out a song - where we sing with Nikki in one of her songs. This is a scary step for someone like me. Is so much fun practicing it though, so we sort of had a rehearsal party, if anything like that can exist. Nikki managed to reach paper-free stage on Right, our 5-person piece (Sabrina wrote it), which is no mean feat after only 2 proper rehearsals. Christian and Murray did an awesome performance of Triangle Poem which has come a loooong way since One Foot Forward. And the new Bullet Hole Riddle is sounding just beautiful. Not that I'm biased or anythgin. I love getting to have other people performing my words with me. There was just a wicked vibe tonight. Yay.

Here's us after rehearsal
















This is Murray with Omni-Bot.















Omni-Bot is famous, he has become the Unitech's In Unison magazine news mascot. Omni-Bot first became famous in Word of Mouth as the Robots Eat Pizza Too robot - pictured, logically, eating pizza and projected on a giant cyc screen at the back of the stage. Just a bit of trivia.


:o)


Miriam