Sunday, August 19, 2007

through this town

i've been cranky and crabby and Not Fun to be around, so little posting. but now i am on holidays and much calmer. well, "on holidays", really.

mia dyson! i saw mia dyson! it was a fabulon gig, so good. i'd forgotten how good her music is when it's up so loud you can feel vibrate up your sternum. it was at this tiny little club, but it was packed out. the crowd was composed almost entirely of lesbians and ex-pats, so i was right at home, and i got a seat right up the very very front, so i could see her fingers moving on the strings.

she played lots of stuff from "parking lots" and a handful of songs from the new cd. very cool. but she didn't have any copies of the new cd. boooo! and she did a few from "cold water" including "though this town", which is on the slide guitar in her lap (i don't know the proper word for it). her stage presence is much more relaxed since last time i saw her (eighteen months ago, at the spanish club) and she told lots of good little stories. the town in "though this town" is daylesford, which is very exciting. i didn't yell out "i've been there!" wasn't that restrained? oh, i was going to try and embed a vid of that song, but i can't find one. but if you go here you can listen to it.

it all made me frightfully homesick and i cried a lot on the bus home. the end.

i got chatting to the guy whose table i was sharing (he was a nice POM) and he introduced me to kate reid, who's a local artist (she's the one playing in the photo of the dyke march). that was cool except it made me do the sad fan thing . she said "hi, i'm kate" and i said "i know! i like your song about the co-op gurlz!" if you go to her myspace page you can hear said song. it's very entertaining.

apart from that i've been going to lots of goodbye parties, cos ALL MY FRIENDS ARE LEAVING TOWN. sigh. and i've been hanging out with all the ppl who aren't leaving town, and i took chicory for a long walk yesterday and picked lots and lots of blackberries. yum. today i'm going to hang out with miriam and the two year old twins she nannies. they're small and pink and symmetrical. it's very entertaining. i read them picturebooks and try and decipher their speech which is, unfortunately for boring old monolingual aunty kant, a mixture of french and english, with toddler elocution. have i written about how many people speak french here? half a dozen of my friends are bilingual, and i've met quite a few bilingual babies. plus all the packaging for food and whatever is in french and english. (see the maple syrup in my last entry) yesterday i was buried deep in some blackberry bushes, with chicory waiting on the footpath, and heard this gush of enthusiastic french behind me, so i stuck my head out and said hi and the walker immediately said "oh, your dog! look at those ears!" so now i can recognise "what a great dog!" in french.

i think my favourite goodbye party, apart from the one on the beach, was wednesday night's, which was held on the top of m+j's building, smack bang in the middle of downtown. i leave you with a (blurry) view of the city and the mountains from the 19th floor:
(the grass on top of the building was all flat. very weird.)

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

remember we saw her first at PFFF!

heard about a TV show "the eagle' (on SBS, so haven't seen it) where all the characters from around EUrope speak in their own languages. Someone will ask a question in Swedish and someone will answer it in Icelandic, and so on, - has German, Italian, Danish - all the European languages in one show.

well done on getting all in - Master Beveridge!

xg

It is all subtitled in plain old English for us sadsack monoglots.

Anonymous said...

Did you know your blog could speak German. It's telling me `,,Hinterlassen Sie Ihren Kommentar´´ and apparently anonymous hat gesagt remember we saw her first...

Anyhooo, congrats on all them essays.

I had to prepare an exam for my Secondary Preparation Program students, and because I was a little satellite program I got away, in general, with ignoring most schoolwide deadlines for things like exams. So I finished writing the exam the night before, and photocopied it on the day. I didn't realise that I had managed to copy one page twice, and insert another upside down. Minutes before the exam, I was sitting on the floor of my office stapling pages together. One of my students was watching me from her art lesson. On her end of course feedback forms, she suggested that I should prepare the examination ahead of time. :0) (PS to all the shocked teachers out there, it was my first teaching job and I was a department of my own.)

Oh, BTW, my Nutzername is Tuchfrau, though I have now realised that a Kopftuch is a hijab scarf, so I might think of another name.
Küss und Grüß.
TF

Anonymous said...

Aren#t the 2010 Olympics in London?
TF

gumtreefid farmer said...

grotty,

yes! you're so cool and hip!

oo, sounds good. i wish i were tri-lingual.

not all in yet, but nearly. ta!

gumtreefid farmer said...

hi tuchfrau,

what fun! you're all german n stuff! not a sadsack monoglot. . .

ooooo, good story. very entertaining. i think you've challenged itchy's lead. or was it JTs? competition runs high!

these are the winter olympics, i think, though no-one calls them that. i don't know, it's all very confusing. i am just a wee foreigner.

love

ps. good to hear from you!

Anonymous said...

wanna skype?
TF

Anonymous said...

tf,
lessson preparation the night before or day of is the only way to go - any earlier speaks of overachievement and only leads to greater disappointment when the students are too dumb/disinterested/traumatised to appreciate your effort

do i sound burnt out?

xg

Anonymous said...

Mia D has matured her sound, from her earlier efforts at the afore mentioned PFFF. However, some elocution lessons, so that there might be something approaching better enunciation wouldn't go astray, although as I have been reminded Tom Yorke gets away with almost complete indistinction in his singing, and he's done okay.

BBB

gumtreefid farmer said...

*pats grotty soothingly on the head*

gumtreefid farmer said...

bbb,

i think her elocution is fabulous! you just have to listen to the songs a lot, like radiohead. and sometimes her rhymes are a bit dodge, so it's better not to know exactly what you're singing along to. . .

from what i've heard her new stuff is more rocky, less bluesy. i don't know how i feel about taht.

love

Anonymous said...

Okay, will listen harder.

BBB