Jilted Brides in America

This blog now moved to: www.nicoleskeltys.com/blog

2009-08-10T07:38:00.000-07:00

For everyone following this blog, it can now be found on my website: www.nicoleskeltys.com/blog. You can subscribe there by clicking on the RSS feed. thanks!

Allegheny Cemetery

2009-06-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

Allegheny Cemetery

Here are some lyrics I wrote on the evening (in August 2006) I found out about my mother's death:

Gentle soul
May you lie in the arms of your father who loves you
These few ragged minutes we are apart
I'll wait for you the way you did for me
Every wish that is not for love is vanity
Take my pen and pledge this for me
You are the arc of every story
The only life thats ever been
We all touched what you touched
We all saw what you saw
And all the kindness in your heart
Is why we'll hope for evermore.

You do what you can to get through grief, even when getting through it seems impossible. Musicians, artists, writers grasp onto the implements of expression - thats how we know we are still holding on, by the scratch and rustle, every day leaving marks. 'Now' waits behind the grief stricken like a warm engine, its presence insistent but impersonal. For a long while, nothing seems real.

I have been reminded of grief's journey by the deaths, in the last two weeks, of two elderly men, fathers of people who I know, one in Pittsburgh, the other in Melbourne. The week before these events, my own father appeared strongly in my dreams, an unusual occurrence, and my mother too.

So last week, by the light of the strawberry moon, I went for a walk in Allegheny Cemetery with the intention of doing a little ritual, to give thanks for being alive, ask for help for the grieving, and say hi to Mum and Dad.

Allegheny Cemetery is one of America's oldest and largest cemeteries and surely one of the world's most breathtakingly beautiful tributes to mortality. As far as the eye can see, there are stone monuments flung out amongst the the lush hills and oaks and maples, like a sculpture park. Some display the wealth of Pittsburgh's deceased elite, family surnames like Baum and Vandergrift hammered into soaring columns and white marble pillars. The private mausoleums of great families line many of the cemetery roads, like small Greek temples. Their wrought iron gates appear to have been shut decades ago and never reopened. At the other extreme, there are the hundreds of small grey gravestones of the 19th century poor, so weathered with time that all that is barely legible is the date of death, sometimes not even that. My favorites figures are the angels - soaring in various poses of elevated feeling, eternally caring underneath the grime and oxidisation of age, never forgetting the names of the long gone people they hover over. I wander down the heavily wooded paths of Allegheny Cemetery every day (as does Tanya), and it has become my sacred place, my sanctuary.

My new buddy John accompanied me. He too felt the need to say hello to his mum who died of cancer a few years ago, and to make some wishes for the summer ahead. The cemetery revealed its night beauty: gold headstone inscriptions winking in the moonlight, immense pillars and statues looming even taller than in the day, palely glowing, fireflies sparkling and moving fast through the silhouettes of trees. It felt like walking through a mysterious ancient city.

After we found a nice high spot with views of the city, I laid out my Tibetan prayer rug and a handful of objects of significance, including some things belonging to Mum and Grandma. We said our private prayers, then ended up chatting about far less spiritual matters such as camera lenses (John is a highly gifted photographer around town and also columnist for the local gay mag Out) and also the old favorite, how to scrape together a living from creative projects. I had had several LBIs (Latest Big Ideas) which all stood a chance of making money, but was finding it hard to summon the energy to push them ahead. As we walked back to 45th St under the pulsing moon, I asked whoever was listening, for good measure, for a bit of help on the abundance front.

Death defying adventures

One thing you can say about the thought of death (and its handmaiden, the life-threatening illness) is they can lead you on some adventures. My adventures began in Melbourne only days after the initial breast cancer diagnosis, spinning me round-eyed into the worlds of 'healers' who try to push death away using sometimes the most startling of means.

Jeff was a 'vibrational healer' who also used 'color therapy'. I must have seen Jeff very early on in the cancer diagnosis (January 2007) as he was quick to offer the opinion that I didn't have cancer. Not really. It was some kind of energetic malfunction, but he could help jimmy it all back into place. Our session consisted of my lying down in his comfortable suburban lounge room with many large rocks (crystals) placed on my body. Jeff shook and rattled a variety of Tibetan instruments over my (hopefully steadily recharging) energy field, scaring the bejeebers out of me every now and then when he bonged one of his Tibetan singing bowls. After the session, I felt exactly the same, but Jeff pressed a small patch of purple paper into my hand and told me to wear it on my person for several weeks. That should do the trick. Upon leaving, I admired Jeff's collection of singing bowls, and he told me repeatedly I looked "biologically very young". That remark alone I thought made the $60 fee worthwhile.

I also found myself sitting in what felt like a psychiatrists' office with Carmel, a 'medical intuitive' and healer who dressed more like a successful real estate businesswoman than a shaman. Perhaps it was because we were both (silently) put off by each other's shoes (my pale blue runners, her canary yellow leather pumps) that Carmel's intuition about my condition was less than spot on. She pronounced that surgery would find that cancer had spread to my lymph nodes - but after the operation a few days later, we found, to my enormous relief, that it hadn't. She also glared at me and indicated that I had anger issues which I needed to let go of. I didn't feel that great about handing over dosh to Carmel as I slumped out of her office, more shaken than when I went in.

In mid 2007, I undertook Reiki sessions to help with healing from months of radiotherapy treatments. I was fortunate enough to meet Grant - a particularly gifted practitioner. Grant seemed to have acquired extraordinary powers due to having almost died from testicular cancer. He had strong friends in high places - a couple of weeks before he was given his shock diagnosis, he was paralysed on his way to the lavatory one night by a white light that embraced him and held him close for some time. Then the cancer diagnoses came, with metastases in his lungs, back. At one time he was so weakened by the chemo, he couldn't get out of his hospital bed. He told me he used to try and stay awake as much as possible because he was so afraid that he would not wake up if he fell asleep. But he pulled through. He was glowing with health now, and gratefully credits his cancer experience with having "woken him up" to his soul's destiny. Which was to become a healer, a Reiki master. I found Grant's story all the more remarkable because his day job was as a policeman. When I asked him if his colleagues knew about his double-life, he laughed and said no, they wouldn't understand.

Grant was one of those practitioners who could sense things about your body/ energy field without you saying anything. For example, he would say "your kidneys are hurting today" when all I'd done is just say hello and lay down - and he would be right. He was developing the ability the sense internal organs with his hands. His powerful friends were also on hand to help him out - on a couple of occasions, when Grant took his hands away from one part of my body, and moved onto another part, the sensation of two hands pressing down remained. I had the very strong sense of another presence in the room, that his hands were moving inside the hands of another body - another being. Later, he told me that he often called on Isis to help with healing. I was very grateful she decided to drop in on me.

Grant said to me on a couple of occasions - "Your heart is all in pieces, its completely shattered. I'm trying to put it back together". I reflected that it was not everyday a law enforcement officer offered to put your heart back together....

Back then, I didn't need memento moris to remind me of the shortness of life and the miracle of existence. But now, two and a half years later, on the other side of the world, as my life is in the process of being reconstructed from the ground up, I find myself grateful that Allegheny Cemetery has taken over the roles of both mortality reminder, and healer. In a gentler way. And its free.

The banjo: the "happiest sound in the world"

The short promotional films that Tanya, Scott and I did for CitiParks are now being shown around Pittsburgh's many beautiful parks at their outdoor movie screenings over the next few months (Tanya has put them up on her YouTube channel here). And as spring ripens into summer, I am trying to get basic life infrastructure rebuilt. First and foremost, a car must be purchased, so I am better set up for work opportunities and I can actually acquire and lug musical equipment around again. And the second purchasing priority, I have decided, is a banjo.

According to the Pittsburgh Banjo Club, the banjo is not only "America's Native Instrument" it is also, "the happiest sound in the world". They may well have a point. One of my favorite albums of recent years is William Elliot Whitmore's "Hymns for the Hopeless" all raw banjo-based punk-bluegrass meditations on death. Despite all the lyrics about watching true love get interred in "boxes of pine", and losing the will to live, the album never fails to get me in a toe tapping mood and puts a grin on my face every time I hear it. It must be the banjo. I intend to learn it.

With the beautiful weather, both Tanya and I are itching to hit the road again. Tanya and Scott are hoping to make a few short trips and explore more of south west Pennsylvania. John and I have also started to plan a big road trip for August. An Americana music road trip. The trip will involve going into the heartland of bluegrass territory - the Appalachians, through West Virginia, down through Kentucky, into Tennessee and country music heartland, Nashville, Dollywood!, back up home through the back roads of North Carolina (home of the Moog synthesiser) and Virginia. John will document the musicians and the landscape with photos and video, I'll be the geek with the digital Zoom recorder and the notebook. And just like a line out of 'Oh Suzannah!' written by Stephen Foster, one of Pittsburgh's most famous sons, who is buried Allegheny Cemetery, I fully intend to travel across the South with " a banjo on my knee":-)

Working on the Warrior movie (Part 2)

2009-05-27T04:23:00.000-07:00

by Nicole Skeltys

Week two on the set of the Warrior movie

Last week, I brought down to the set of the Warrior movie a nice fat book called "Pennsylvania Spirituals" by Don Yoder (1961). I was working on Warrior as a full-time extra, my main duties consisting of cheering wildly as part of a large pretend audience to an MMA tournament set in Atlantic City.

My full-time status could have been more accurately described as a "total life elimination" status - an average of 15 hour days, 6 days a week on set - barely enough time left over to get home and get some sleep before the pre-dawn alarm shrieked my brain into consciousness again. This was followed minutes later by a run down Butler St to catch the extras' shuttle which hurtled from the Strip district to the Petersen Events Center, a half hour wait in line to be issued with my payroll slip, then collapsing in the corner of the 'dressing room' (a bit of floor draped with curtains) waiting to be called down to the ring-side for the day's screaming duties. Most of an extra's time consists of just sitting/lying around, waiting for shots to be re-set, so I had ample opportunity to read five books last week, which I counted as a perk of an otherwise totally perkless job.

In between the "spritzing" of fighters (spraying them with water to simulate sweat), fake tattoo touch-ups and lots of rehearsals (to get, for example, the exact right velocity of a mouth guard being spat from the mouth in response to a fist being smashed into said orifice), myself and many other extras quietly read our books.

I started week two with Yoder's book, which began by suggesting Pennsylvania has a much more interesting influence on Americana music history than I suspect even most Americans would realise. Yoder explores his idea that "the Negro Spiritual and the Pennsylvania Spiritual..are twin sisters, developing side by side at first and then only later maturing into distinctive types". Yoder is eager to build on on earlier ethnomusicological research which shows the transfer of the 18th century British evangelical song from New England to the "Southern Uplands" - Kentucky, Tennessee, Western Virginia and then to the "Negro, who made the spiritual, once borrowed, into something expressive of his own soul". He wants to stake out Pennsylvania as having a central place in the early development of this uniquely American and vastly influential musical form.

Yoder digs with relish through early 1800s accounts of Pennsylvania "camp- meeting" evangelical Methodist services which were attended by dirt poor white rural folk and "Negroes" - who were "free" unlike their Southern cousins. Being free didn't mean you weren't segregated from the whites by partitions or required to sit in designated areas behind the preacher man. But it did mean that you could drown the whites out with ecstatic shouts and chorusing over the service, and keep up the "tide of enthusiasm" after the service had ended, long into the night after the whites had crawled back into their tents and were trying to sleep.

The early American spiritual completely shocked British and European visitors, with its gushing emotionalism, crude folk-song repetitions, spontaneous made-up bits of verse, shouting, convulsions and general "hysteria". A British visitor to the Ebenezer Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1817 noted that both the "African" and white parishioners suffered from the same "extreme degree of fanatical violence in their religious exercises". Despite the rich musical tradition generated by their black and white (Pennsylvania Dutch) "religious folk-song" singing ancestors, official historians from the United Brethren, Evangelical and Church of God had (at least up to the 1960s) completely ignored its legacy. Largely because all those violations of established hymn structures, and ignorance of nicely arranged middle-class organ music (largely the preserve of urban churches), meant the spiritual was identified as the religious outpouring of the poorest of the poor, the illiterate, the barely shod. And it was damned by association.

Its no wonder then that America was the birthplace of that dirty irreverent shaking to music and spirit called rock and roll, and soul.

And how American that the rock and roll spirit (and the entertainment industry that latched onto it) would eventually reverse church history. The spiritual legacy in America has secured the quivering, fire-breathing, shouting and singing teleevangelist his mass appeal, and handed to his corporate religious empire the keys to the New Jerusalem. His rival churches, following more conservative forms of worship, watch as their parishioners (and economic base) slowly die off and are not replaced.

I was really warming to Yoder's history last Wednesday morning and flicking away the yellowed Carnegie library book pages with some enthusiasm when The Devil (in the form of one of the senior production assistants) marched around the ringside and shouted at everyone that all our books were now confiscated - we had to take all our reading material and put it away from set, in our 'dressing rooms' or wherever. Why? Someone said they thought that when viewing one of the rushes yesterday, the director noticed that one of the extras - instead of jumping up and down wildly and passionately imploring Tommy to beat the *** out of his opponent- was still sitting, head buried in a tome.

Whatever the reason, little did they know how this removal of our only perk would encourage many of us to openly rebel, only days later.

The Black Friday Showdown

Books I would have read by now and could write about had they not been confiscated:

. Sheila Rowbothom's "A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States"
."Coal Dust on the Fiddle: Songs and Stories of the Bituminous Industry in Pennsylvania" by George Korson
."The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality" by Brian Greene

But instead, for the rest of Wednesday and all Thursday, myself and all the other extras sat through 14-15 hours worth of boxing takes with nothing to distract us except our cell phones (on silent) and each other. There was even a rumor going around that none of us were allowed to stretch out on the stadium seats anymore for the occasional back-pain relief, as this potentially delayed getting people in position for new audience hysteria scenes. A lot of us, deeply fatigued already although it was only week two of a four week shoot, slumped submissively in our seats and blinked blankly up into the bright stadium lights for hours on end, like cows in a holding pen.

My new buddy Dan, a 50 year old long-haired heavy metal fan, who dropped me home of an evening in his crimson Chevy touring van (complete with stuffed devil doll passengers and a silver skull-head gear stick), showed a spectacular deterioration in motivation over this two week period, ending in the Black Friday Showdown.

On the first day of shooting, Dan was sitting a few seats from me and was taking every opportunity to jump up and run to the ringside and punch his arms in the air, for hours on end. In between takes, he would chat to me and any other woman who would talk to him. He told me repeatedly how much fun he was having.

By day three, he was not jumping up to the front quite as much. But he was still "having fun". By day six, he was not jumping up at all.

The following week, Dan was given a couple of days off by one of the PAs. But by Thursday, he was no longer even concerned about sitting in his usual seat, or wearing the Tap-Out sweatshirt handed out by the costume department. With nothing to do now for hours on end, he took to just finding corners of the stadium and just sitting there, no sign of air punching anymore.

On Friday, part-time extras poured in excitedly to make up extra bulk for wide-shot crowd scenes. Our numbers swelled to 700-800. Glamor-struck part-timers fussed with make-up, giggled with girlfriends and gingerly stepped in stilettos all over the half-sleeping full-timers who were, as usual, passed out all over the floor of the 'dressing room'.

Black Friday commenced at 6.30 am.

By 6.30 pm there was still no sign of a wrap. Agitated murmurings began, particularly from the part-timers who had expected their working day to end after 12 hours. Not a chance.

By 9.30pm, the groaning and complaining in the room was widespread and audible. All the extras had had enough. Some of us craving dinner and a decent sleep tried to escape up the stadium stairs to the exit signs, but we were trapped. Most of us relied on the shuttle to take us back to the Strip district car-park - the PAs glared at us and told us to "get back in there", the shoot was "nowhere near done", the shuttles weren't going anywhere. We retreated back in. A lot of the part-timers were in a state of shock - some of them just ran away, others staggered back in incredulously.

It was almost 11.00pm, and everyone was still in their seats, exhorted to cheer for Tommy, as usual. This was the final straw for Dan. He slouched deeper into his seat, with no intention to punch the air, clap or show any fake excitement whatsoever. One of the PAs noticed him and the following exchange ensued:

PA: Hey, you have to move over here with the rest of the crowd.
Dan: I'm not going anywhere.
PA: You have to do what I say.
Dan: I don't take any f** orders from anyone
PA: Man, you are SACKED.
Dan: You can't sack me COS I ALREADY QUIT!!!

Dan then stormed out of the stadium; but kindly waited for me on the steps of the Petersen Center, to give me a final lift home after the shuttle dropped us off in the Strip district somewhere close to midnight. We cruised home to the overwrought metal strains of Ronnie James Dio reminding men that women always let them down. As I staggered up the back steps to the apartment, my body implored me not to go in the next day (please oh please) or indeed any of the days after that.

Mid-morning Saturday found me horizontal in my bed and not on the floor of the 'dressing room'. Although I knew I was letting Nick down, I just couldn't be a full-time extra on his film anymore, I just didn't have the true grit needed to make the grade. I too could not be sacked because I had quit.

Working on the Warrior movie

2009-05-21T16:57:00.000-07:00

by Nicole Skeltys

My life as an extra on an action movie ( so far)

Although I haven't actually met Nick Nolte yet, or for that matter even clapped eyes on him, I now feel closer to Nick than any other Hollywood actor I've never met. And thats all of them.

I'm working as an extra on Nick's latest movie Warrior. This is apparently Nick Nolte's third movie in Pittsburgh, after Lorenzo's Oil and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

I don't think the latter flick ever made it to Australian cinemas, or maybe it did and I just didn't have the insight two years ago to realize my destiny was one day going to be profoundly bound up with this wonderful town. And thus I may have passed it over in favor of spending another $7.00 on hiring out another tranche of Classic Albums DVDs from the local VideoEzy. This series, which was popular in Australia and the UK, documents the making of no less than 32 "classic" albums from Elvis Presley's Elvis Presley (1956) through to Nirvana's Nevermind (1991). The episodes I have seen in this series have always swept me away, jellyfish-like, into a sea of yearning to produce such an historic artifact myself - a feat I did indeed try to pull off with my Melbourne psychedelic country band Dust's last album Songs (2007). Recorded on no budget in my backyard shed, using scratched up old Neil Young vinyl as audio engineering reference material, the album features great dollops of hopeless nostalgic aspiration wedged into every note. But the sad fact is, the conditions of production - both economic (ie the pop music industry) and cultural (the way people think about and relate to music) - have changed so much since any of the "classic albums" were produced, that the day of the popularly acclaimed '"classic album" is long gone. I'd put Radiohead's landmark Kid A (2000) as the last one to reach out to a respectable sized audience, but really great, passionate, innovative music is simply not allowed out of its niche markets anymore, internet or otherwise, to penetrate the consciousness of the average Jo(eline).

But I digress.

Nolte plays an ex-Vietnam vet. retired mill worker and recovering alcoholic named Paddy, who raised his boys - Tommy (Tom Hardy) and Brendan (Joel Edgerton) as competitive wrestlers. To cut a not very long story even shorter, due to twists of fate and fortune, both sons end up having to fight each other for high stakes ($5m): at Sparta, a 16-man, single-elimination Mixed Marshall Arts (MMA) tournament set in Atlantic City but being staged at the Petersen Events Center in Pittsburgh with real fighters as well as stunt doubles.

The cast also includes Jennifer Morrison ("Star Trek," "House") as Tess, and local pro wrestler Kurt Angle as a Russian named Koba.

I'm a full-time member of 'Sparta Core', which is the 190 strong bunch of extras who turn up to fill up the seats around the ringside each day. I was not chosen to be a 'specialty' extra, which means posing as a security guard, or photographer, or journalist, or paramedic, or part of a fighter posse. I missed out on being special in large part because the only special roles for women at an event like Sparta are as ring-girls (a position apparently nabbed by a Pitt-Greensburg junior who auditioned in a bright orange bikini) and "hot babes" who get to wear the slinkiest of frocks in the front rows and shiver uncontrollably for hours in the stadium air-conditioning.

My role is the humblest of all, that of 'general fan', and my job is simply to sit with other general fans, scream my head off, clap wildly and jump up and down at intervals indicated by one of the many production assistants (PAs) through their megaphones. I am required to perform thus for a minimum of 12 hours each day, 6 days a week. After a week on the job, its become clear that the average working day is in fact 15 hours, and that doesn't include the getting up (often as early as 5.00am) getting there and getting back, which adds another couple of hours.

By the end of the first week, I had figured out that the most useful attributes for an extra were as follows:

no central nervous system
a gold fish-like brain (ie finding the same actions interesting, no matter how often repeated)
no skeletal structure
lots of friends with nothing better to do than be an extra too
a goat-like digestive system (ie can successfully ingest and excrete trash at any hour)

I lacked all of the above. For the first week, I sat for hours on end, watching the same fight scenes set up and re-shot repeatedly, my eyelids constantly dragged shut by the gravity produced by pre-dawn awakenings. Unlike many of my fellow general fans (about a third of whom seemed to be U of Pitt students on summer break), I had no buddies to insult or share drinking stories with. I found myself on more than one occasion placed next to a genuine wannabe champion boxer, one of whom explained to me that he was prepared to suffer brain damage and slurred speech as long as "the money made it worthwhile".

Like the frail elderly confined to nursing homes, the only bodily pleasure I had to look forward to each day was food break ( 'breakfast' at 7.00, 'lunch' at 3.00, dinner non-existent). But what was on offer was largely junk food, and by day three the periodic dietary assault of snack bars, white bread sandwiches, chips, cookies and popcorn produced an immense gridlock in my innards which by late afternoon left me prone on the backrows of the stadium seating, like a beached pufferfish. This would occasionally attract the disapproval of the production assistants (PAs) who would eventually notice me and urge me to get up, get jiggy with it, and show my enthusiasm for the champs on set.

I must note for the record though, that the whole vibe of the shoot is very friendly and the PAs are doing an incredible job. They are at the shoot before the extras turn up and they are there after we leave, thus providing them with probably no more than four hours sleep a night. How they manage to keep concentrating and being polite I don't know, I would be as friendly as a wounded bull if I was them.

There are upsides to this job though. In less than a week, in the waiting around that comprises most of an extra's day, I have mowed my way through the following books:

a fat biography of Einstein by Walter Isaacson (lovely, recommended)
a history of Pennsylvanian music written in the '30s (dull)
a history of bluegrass music in New York and Eastern Pennsylvania (the bits about the banjo were good)
The Road, a post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy - converted to a movie, some of which was shot in Pittsburgh, due for release in October (depressing)
Panic - edited by Michael Lewis, a collection of essays about the last 20 years of periodic hysteria in financial markets, starting with Black October (1987) and ending with the sub-prime mortgage global wipe-out. If you ever suspected Wall St and dependent financial markets to be no more rational or socially useful than teens on crack then this book will make you feel vindicated. No less for the fact that most of its contributors are either trader insiders, internationally respected economics policy advisors, or long-standing financial rag/ NY times journalists. Not just highly recommended, I'd say put this book in the 'compulsory reading if you want to know what the *** is going on with your economy and lets face it, your own future livelihood' category.

I took today off to arm-wrestle with the Department of Social Security (6 months since I first applied, but still no sign of that magic SS number so I can actually get paid), to work with Tanya and Scott finishing off our drafts of the Grandview Scenic Byway Park's promotional films (due for screening at all the outdoor cinemas in Pittsburgh's parks throughout summer), and to cook up three days worth of fresh vegetable based dishes to take with me to the Warrior shoot. I have realised that by simply bringing my own food and avoiding everything on offer except apples and peanuts, my quality of life on this movie shoot is greatly improved. I am even starting to get used to it and even enjoy it - a meditative-like state of zonked can be achieved for days on end without having to pay expensive retreat fees to stay at a Western version of a Tibetan gompa.

And my latest book to read, in amongst all the testosterone charged grunts, thumps and whumps and constant exhortations to reverential cheering? Sheila Rowbothom's A Century of Women: A History of Women in Britain and the United States. Somehow, I don't see this tome being made into an action -packed genre movie anytime soon:-)

Pittsburgh - The Hawaii of the Mid-Atlantic

2009-05-01T09:51:00.000-07:00

by Nicole Skeltys

Hot tubs and city parks

After only three days back in Pittsburgh, I found myself sitting in an frothy outdoor hot-tub on Mt Washington, framed by stunning views of the city. Bedecked with lurid plastic leis, with a handsome young gentleman by my side, I quaffed a strawberry daiquiri and cracked jokes to camera about how Pittsburgh was internationally famous as the Hawaii of the Mid-Atlantic. You would not normally find this activity listed in a job description. Unless, of course, you wrote that job description yourself. In November last year, Tanya and I were commissioned to write and shoot a short series of films for the Mt Washington Community Development Corporation promoting their new regional park - the Grandview Scenic Byway Park. I managed to include a hot-tub scene in the storyboard, which goes to show anything is possible when you put your mind to it.

While the journey from Melbourne to Pittsburgh was an aerial marathon that left my body clock thoroughly mangled, it was nevertheless a relief to get back to the USA and put my antipodean hospital holiday behind me. MOFO (the giant uterine fibroid that took me medical hostage when I got to Australia) seems to be finally giving up its civil war on my nether regions. And Pittsburgh now looks glorious in full spring mode, worthy of a Shakespearean sonnet - complete with waving daffodils, courting red robins (one of whom has made a nest on our kitchen door) and streets splashed with blossoming pear trees and redbuds.

Tanya and I are now working hard to finish off these films in time for our deadline of 1 June: they will be screened at the outdoor cinema events held throughout summer in the city's parks. Scott has also joined us to help with shooting and animations, and we now even have a (working) name for our little multimedia team: Cheek Productions.

PeduTube

The week after I got back, I decided to get involved with local politics and try and make a civic contribution to my adopted home. I had spent years involved with the Green Party in Australia, and felt the need to get involved with environmental and social justice campaigning again. I volunteered to help out with the Peduto primaries campaign and, later in the year, do what I can to help his reelection to Council. Quite apart from being a 100% nice guy, Bill has an impressive track record on local green issues, a completely sensible approach to cleaning up local government finances and rorts, and an impeccable record on helping disadvantaged constituents.

Last weekend, I found myself stuffing envelopes in the Peduto headquarters in Shadyside, a mail-out for a fundraising night at the Center for the Arts. Thus began my education in local American politics, Pennsylvania style. I learnt, for example, that voters are almost drowned with democratic options - here you can vote directly for a mess of positions that in Australia are neatly taken care of by bureaucratic and political appointments: Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, Coronor, School Director, District Judge, to name but a few (but not dog-catcher - I checked). Apparently voter turn out for these elections is "dismal". I have a long way to go to figure out how this town ticks politically, but at least I have made a start.

Peduto, on the other hand, running for the position of Councilman for City Council District 8, has so much popular support that his one Democrat rival for the position recently dropped out of the primaries race. The campaign is now about voter eduction and empowerment, or "building the base" as Bill calls it.

After envelope stuffing, I continued to further the cause of base building by heading down to Cappys, a bar on Walnut St, Shadyside, where once a month Bill hosts a night of VJing where he plays people's favorite YouTube clips for a $5 donation. All proceeds go to a changing range of worthy community groups. Last Saturday, Friends of the Urban Forest were the beneficiaries. This group encourages the planting and protection of Pittsburgh's city trees. I got chatting to some of the members while Cappys filled up and images of giant Cookie Monsters with death metal voices and two year old evangelical preachers flickered over the big screens. To my delight, at one point someone requested an old Parliament-Funkadelic clip, and I got to revel again in seeing an aging Garry "Starchild" Shider prance around stage wearing nothing but diapers.

As midnight came and went, the urban foresters decided to drop into Lawrenceville's once a year 'Art All Night' celebration and I tagged along - particularly pleased to get a lift back to my suburb given I had otherwise no idea how I was going to get home. 'Art All Night' proved impressive - hundreds of artworks by local established and amateur artists arranged in large warehouse spaces not far from the riverside. Despite the wee hours, the event was still packed and garage bands thrashed away. At one of the community tables, I noticed a considerable number of brochures for local neighborhood community and arts groups (such as Construction Junction which recyles old refrigerators by encouraging artists to decorate them then turn them into arthouse kegs!) The diversity indicated Pittsburgh's capacity for healthy grassroots innovation, albeit mostly at the single issue and small scale art enterprise level.

After about an hour, I left the still milling art crowd and started to make my way home down Butler St. As I shuffled along I ruminated on something one of the urban foresters had told me, that "there wasn't much eco-raver or hippy culture in Pittsburgh", which I was disappointed (although not really surprised) to hear. My Melbourne group household would often refer to ourselves as 'hippies', despite the fact I don't think any of us actually own a tie-dyed T-shirt (although Roland did look really good in a large fluffy pink top hat I once found in an op shop). The term 'hippy' functioned as a kind of shorthand for our identification with greenie/ collectivist values and lifestyles (not to mention old school techno parties in forest settings).

But just when I was having my "I miss hippies" moment of sadness, a bike wobbled up beside me, and I caught a flash of rainbow tie-dyed T-shirt, sandles, long hair and scraggy beard. "Hey, Thunderbirds is a great bar! Why don't you come inside and let me buy you a drink?". I found myself staring at what looked to me like a bonafide aging alternative lifestyler sporting a big grin, so I said "Sure" and we headed into the bar. As Ed introduced himself and bought me a screwdriver, I fairly quickly realised that looks can be deceptive: Ed quickly explained he had been "drinking all day", happily lived off "hamburgers, they're the best food you could possibly want" and, despite my probing, seemed to have no idea about local organic farms or ecology groups. Nevertheless it was fun to chew the (factory farmed) fat for a while. However, Ed eventually brought the conversation around to how "hot" Australian women were and that I was no exception. That was my cue to thank Ed for his generosity and continue my shuffle down home to 45th St under the milky warm night sky.

My future role in a martial arts action flick

Once my jetlag wore off, I started to apply my newly cleared mind in earnest to the fairly substantial problem of how I was going to survive for the duration of my three year artists' work visa in America. My nights were now (once again) punctuated with brainstorming sessions with Tanya, exploring ideas for creative enterprises that might bring us in some cash.

Late one restless night late last week, I had a Eureka moment and hatched an idea for a music project that might - just might - attract the interest of a few local sponsors. It was a project I would feel completely passionate about and had the potential to bring a lot of joy to people involved with it, myself included. It was my Latest Big Idea. I hastily scribbled out the proposal, crunched the numbers and nervously sent a draft off to Charlie for comment.

A couple of days later I fired off an email applying for the job of an extra in a Nick Nolte martial arts action movie called Warrior which is about to commence shooting in Pittsburgh. Within minutes, the phone rang and one of the casting crew was putting my name down on the full-time extras list, requiring my presence on set for 5-6 days a week for 4 weeks starting 11 May. While the pay is minimal and the hours long, nevertheless its an income, and the opportunity to see how a medium budget (by American standards) mainstream film is slammed together.

And who knows - maybe I will be 'discovered' and I will find myself playing character female bit parts in future B-grade movies (chain-smoking school canteen mom, hot roller derby coach, love-lorn ferris wheel assistant at a Pennsylvania county fair) or best of all, both Tanya and I could star as The Jilted Brides, a faded glamor girl duo playing dim old Southern saloons in a cool remake of Easy Rider from a girl's perspective directed by Gillian Armstrong and starring the ghost of Heath Ledger.

Well, at least I can dream:-)

Melbourne (Part 3): Tales from two hospitals

2009-04-04T13:49:00.000-07:00

by Nicole Skeltys

The Bliss Button

A friend of mine who worked in the drug addiction field told me ages ago about a very simple series of medical research experiments where rats (rattus norvegicus strain) were given two buttons to push with two distinct outcomes: one button gave them food, the other gave them doses of cocaine. If the survival instinct is as hard-wired as popular versions of Darwinism would have us all believe, then you'd think that the rats, way back in the traffic jam on the evolutionary turnpike, would prefer to chow down on some rodent nutrients. This would enable them to bulk up and continue to cane it past other muroids, and even eventually give the bird to homo sapiens, against which they apparently currently hold the number two spot in the 'most successful mammal' race.

But no. Faced with a choice between life and bliss, the rodents chose bliss. Over and over again, they jabbed their snouts against the cocaine button and forgot all about dinner. And breakfast. And lunch. Eventually, they moved on to that rat disco in the sky.

I related strongly to those lab rats when I was wheeled back into my hospital room after the uterine fibroid embolisation operation. This is whats called a 'day procedure' which starts with a 90 minute suite of pelvic pokings and manoeveurs under local anaesthetic, and ends with wobbling patients trying to follow the 'exit' signs, 24 hours later.

Wheeled into my hospital room after the procedure, I was shown a device which looked a bit like a TV remote only it was hooked up to a drip. I was told that if I hit the green button, I would be given doses of morphine. But not to worry, they were controlled transmissions so I couldn't overdose, no matter how many times I hit 'play'. The local anaesthetic was wearing off fast. Even before the nurse had left the room, I started to jab at the 'morphine play' button.

For the rest of the afternoon and all that night, I lay semi-conscious with no more mobility or motivation than a potato. My only foray out of my heavily doped reverie was courtesy of the pre-programmed blood pressure machine, which mechanically tightened its velcro grip on my arm and squeezed me out into some kind of hospital gown awareness at hourly intervals. I had (perhaps recklessly) agreed to be part of a pain control research project, so when my eyes slit open as my upper arm lost feeling, I would then behold a lady research assistant with a quiet lisp leaning over, handing me a pen and asking me gently to rate my pain on a graph. I remember looking very hard at the paper, trying to understand what was going on, then looking pathetically at the assistant as her hand hovered anxiously over the long black line. "There'" I said, gesturing as much with my snout as my hand. She reached over and obligingly did a smart cross right about where 'eight' was in relation to 'ten'.

I kept snouting to 'eight' for what seemed like a long time. I hit 'play' for hours with total abandon. I got as high as a kite. At one point, I remember my surgeon and his team swimming into my field of vision, asking me questions, and I more or less just grinned. When the pain eventually started to lessen after several hours, I pointed to the camera next to my bed and asked one of the nurses to take a photo of me toasting the bliss button with my medicine cup. When she looked startled, I explained "I'm supposed to be on holidays, so I better take some happy snaps of my adventures."

By the time I was due for discharge from The Alfred the next day, I had not eaten for 48 hours and I had successfully self-medicated myself into a glowing, spongy blob. But I realised then no matter how high I got, the tracks of the operation still throbbed away with varying intensity. The morphine certainly dulled the pain, but only up to a point; after that, all it did was separate the thinking and the feeling parts of me. As Kerry came, gripped my arm, guided me towards the elevators, then down to her utility truck in the carpark, I said "This is what its like to be a junkie!". She laughed, but I was serious. As we slowly nosed through Punt Rd traffic on our way to my favorite Vietnamese eaterie in Richmond, I looked up at the pale blue Melbourne sky and thought this is how the world can be so beautiful and serene in its touch, while in the distance you can always feel the wounds.

Emergency roadside assistance

My GP prescribed some opiate based painkillers to help me through the next few days, a brand I remembered fondly from the last time I was recovering from an operation to remove an alien growth - my breast cancer tumor of 2 years ago. The tablets gave an optimistic shine to everything, so much so that in a couple of days, I felt well enough to contact Graeme and Eugenie - who have acted towards me over the years with the support and kindness of adopted parents - and said I was finally going to make it up to Canberra to see them. As luck would have it (or synchronicity again), their son Alex was in Melbourne and was driving up that Tuesday, a week after my operation, and I could get a lift with him.

As we pulled up outside Graeme and Eugenie's two storey townhouse that night, I felt a knot of apprehension form in my stomache. I knew that Graeme was still very disabled from his massive stroke five months ago, was confined to a wheelchair and needed 24 hour assistance with all personal care and living tasks, which was provided largely by Eugenie - who was now as much a nurse as a wife. When Alex and I bustled into the loungeroom with our baggage and Thai take-away, I saw a figure with thinning grey hair stooped over in a wheelchair and my heart missed a beat. I bent down and gave him a hug and kiss. To my relief, Graeme looked pretty much the way he had always looked, a man with a sturdy frame and kindly, intelligent eyes. The big difference was, though, his arm hung lifeless in a sling, and when he saw me, he didn't smile.

Later, Eugenie explained that one of the many side-effects of a right brain stroke was that you lost the ability to register facial expressions, and your ability to express your own emotions with facial movement and rising and falling vocal inflections was also lost. This was one of the many things that Graeme was having to learn all over again. Over the next few days, I also realised that my old dear friend could indeed return to his former animated and witty self, but that these periods were often cut short by the chronic fatigue that accompanied the stroke. Graeme would suddenly become very quiet and then start to nod off in his chair, or sometimes he'd gently ask Eugenie to help him back into bed.

After a few days of hanging out in the loungeroom, broken only by trips to physiotherapy and medical appointments, I think all of us felt a heaviness building in the air. At one point Graeme looked at me over the dining room table and said in a voice that carried the shadows of many nights waking up and lying still for hours "If I thought I was never going to improve beyond how I am now, I'd rather die."

I just nodded and glanced over at Eugenie. We understood. Graeme may be on powerful anti-depressants, but the prospect of a life where you can't even get yourself out of bed in the morning, where even the most basic of independent living tasks was beyond you, a life of infant-like dependency on another human being - who wouldn't feel betrayed by their mortal coil, who wouldn't want to shake it off? I understood, but my heart grew so very heavy with that understanding.

We decided to break the routine by making a trip to Mt Darragh, a beautiful part of the Snowy Mountains range where Graeme and Eugenie had bought a plot of land several years ago. They had almost finished building their dream home there, what was to be their retirement house, when Graeme suddenly collapsed to the floor one night in early October and for the next five months, the center of their lives was dramatically relocated to the wards and rehabilitation units of Canberra hospital. Somehow, through all of this, Eugenie had had the presence of mind and fortitude to take over the remote supervision of the final stages of building, and the house had finally been completed. Graeme had been there once since his release from hospital, and they both found the beauty and deep quiet of the land spiritually healing. It was a two and a half hour drive to the property, but we were all keen to go.

The trip down was uneventful, and Graeme chatted amiably all the way down, his spirits already lifted at the prospect of seeing their gorgeous patch of nature again. However, when we finally got there and helped Graeme into the bare loungeroom to look at the view, he quickly grew quiet - even more quiet than usual. After a while he said weakly "I don't feel well. I need to lie down." Both Eugenie and I felt alarm - there was no furniture in the house, nowhere to lie down except in the car. We took Graeme back out to the Subaru, Eugenie all the time probing for symptoms, asking Graeme if we should take him to the local hospital about 20k away. He just kept repeating that he wanted to lie down, and after Eugenie had placed him back in the front seat and tilted it back, Graeme quickly fell asleep. We wandered slowly back to the house.

Eugenie and I ate our sandwiches on the front patio and stared out over the silent eucalyptus covered ranges, undulating from deep green to misty blue in the distance. As we talked, we were both acutely aware that Graeme was missing out on the very healing wilderness experience he craved. The situation felt hopeless. I felt a sense of crisis in the air.

Suddenly a sound came from the car. It was the mobile phone, which Eugenie had left in the car - we were both startled as reception was so patchy out here. Eugenie ran over to the car and reached inside to grab the phone. As she walked back to the house, I could hear her puzzled conversation: "Roadside emergency assistance?? No, I didn't place a call for help- who is this? RACQ? I'm sorry, but you have the wrong number, I'm not even in Queensland, this is a Victorian number!" She hung up and looked up at me with surprise - "That is so odd - why would the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland think I called for help? And I can see by the missed calls that they've tried at least 3 times to reach me!"

At that moment, I got goosebumps and chills down my spine. On the drive down, I had thought about my deceased parents, as I often did. How I had always felt that they had something to do with Graeme and Eugenie reaching out to me like I was family, given they were no longer around on earth to provide that kind of protection anymore themselves; and I wondered vaguely what they would think now, when my adopted family was struggling to keep going. Mum and Dad had lived in Queensland, I grew up there. The fact that the bizarre offer of emergency roadside assistance came from Queensland, when Graeme was so unwell in our car, struck me like a call from heaven. No doubt I was still under the sway of the synchronicity book I had recently finished reading, and all the other coincidences I had been experiencing over the last 3 weeks, and no doubt I very much wanted to believe in guidance from the beyond, but the call filled me with a strong sense that help was on its way.

When Graeme woke up, he felt much better, and even started to apologise for "mucking up the afternoon". We shushed him, enormously relieved that he was ok. and bundled the wheelchair and commode back into the car. The drive back to Canberra into the fading light of the afternoon was spectacular - the sunsets in the high country of Australia are amazing, a fresco of saturated gold, pink and purple clouds swirling across ultramarine - the acid trip skies make up for the parched monochrome of the scrub and pastures that crawl underneath them. Graeme and Eugenie chatted all the way home, and I realised with another small chill, that I had dreamt this scene earlier, I had seen this sunset in a vivid dream a week ago.

The journey to Mt Darragh felt like a turning point. For the remainder of my trip, Graeme's mood seemed, on the whole, to have improved. On the last day before I had to leave, Graeme and I spent the afternoon absorbed in doing Tarot spreads, a passion we both shared. That evening over dinner, I asked Eugenie if she'd like her cards read but she said no, she only liked to consult the cards "When I am feeling optimistic. I'm afraid I am not feeling so optimistic right now." Graeme turned to her then and urged: "Now love. We have to push on. Make the best of the situation. Onwards and upwards, right?"

Wisdom McNuggets

A couple of days after the fibroid operation, I had decided that I was going to be alright. MOFO would surely shrink and stop frigging around with my innards. Surely I could go back to the States and not worry about needing any further medical attention. I hopped onto the internet, found an amazingly cheap flight to LAX on 15 April, booked it; booked another getting me to Pittsburgh, arriving early hours 16th. There. Done. No going back now. I eagerly emailed Tanya with the news. T wrote back excitedly, enormously relieved to hear I was indeed coming back and that I felt confident I would be fighting fit again soon.

How could I not go back, when I knew there were so many good people egging me on? Scott told me that he and T had done a little candlelight ritual and prayer the night before the operation. I was extremely touched. His parents and Granny, devout Christians who lived in Butler, just north of Pittsburgh, were also praying for me. Our 45th St neighbors, Tim and Jim, sent healing energy my way (Tim is a reiki practitioner). Americans I don't know sent kind responses to the last blog post. Charlie called on the morning of the procedure to wish me well. While I will miss my friends in Australia terribly, the tug to go back to the US, to Pittsburgh in particular is still strong. Made so much stronger by the empathy and support of Tanya, who has kept the faith that "opportunities will present themselves, we'll be ok!" - and our small, but growing, circle of warm-hearted American buddies.

A couple of days ago, my faith that MOFO would eventually cease to engage in lower abdominal delinquency got its first boost. The MRI showed the fibroid - creepily, by far the biggest object in my lower body - completely sapped of blood, upon which it had been feeding and growing, vampire like, for goodness knows how long. My handsomely bearded interventional radiologist looked up from the lurid 3D image on his MacBook that we had both been craning over, and announced that the operation had been "perfect". He leaned back in his office chair and explained that I could expect to get symptom relief from organ pressures in about 4 weeks, and after that there was every likelihood that MOFO would continue to slowly wither for up to a year. He stood up, and we shook hands: "Good luck in Pittsburgh" he smiled, and then added in an accent more suggestive of a bloke from the bush than a well-heeled 4th Avenue specialist "Cheerio then!"

That night I started cleaning up my backyard studio, getting ready to vacate again, this time for good. I peeled off all the wall posters, most of them advertising events I had played at, or CDs I had released over the years. I stared at my old analogue synthesisers, all stacked up in a pile now, getting ready for their transfer to live with their uncle Byron, a super-nice guy with whom I had written TV and other scores over the years. Byron would give them the love and attention they deserved. Still, I felt a wave of sadness and nostalgia. All the intense times we had shared, how closely their circuit boards had listened to my yearnings and channeled them mysteriously into unique sounds. And this room had borne witness to the hatching of so many creative projects over the last seven years, the last, and perhaps the craziest, The Jilted Brides album and subsequent adventures.

On one part of the wall near my workstation, I had pinned up various motivational images and texts, something I had done shortly after I had received my cancer diagnosis two years earlier. One of those was a photocopy of the summary pages from "The Secret", a 'positive thinking' book that was then just starting to explode in popularity around the world, and which several friends had urged me to read. As I peeled off the pages, I now cringed at some of the New Age exhortations - reduced to statements so simple and often so fantastical that they were very hard to take seriously "You attract what you think about." "See the good things in people and you will get more of them." "The mind can heal the body". But at the time, I didn't want philosophical treatises or a full, balanced meal of cognitive therapy mixed with oncology research statistics. I wanted wisdom McNuggets, easily digested globs of hope, deep fried in magic. Something that would convince my brain that everything was going to be ok as quickly as non-complex carbohydrates would convert into a sugar rush.

Back at Mt Darragh, I had shared a wisdom McNugget with Graeme. He grew more and more quiet as we stared out at the property he could see but was currently unable to walk around. I instinctively kissed him on the head and grabbed his hand. "Everything is going to be ok" I had said, with some force. "Things unfold at their own pace, often not at the pace we would like, but at the right pace. I know it will take a long time, but you will pull through this." Graeme squeezed my hand. "I know" he said, but with an expression I found hard to read. "I know everything will be ok".

Melbourne (Part 2): Synchronicities

2009-03-16T18:40:00.000-07:00

by Nicole Skeltys

Cosmic saloons and dangerous strangers

The last fairly hastily posted blog was about T and I returning to Melbourne, to sell or stow our few remaining possessions, catch up with loved ones, then return to Pittsburgh to quickly resume our film work there and other commitments. As I write this, T has safely flown back to Pittsburgh - after a whirlwind trip featuring her brief stay in my studio/ storage space, frantically turfing out her stuff like a crab hurling sand balls out of its beach hole, then racing up to see her Mum and buddies in Sydney, then back on the impossibly long flight to America. But I am delayed here in Melbourne - the discovery of a giant growth in in my womb which has been causing me an increasing number of ailments has pinned me here like a specimen in a medical display case, my life suddenly frozen.

The fibroid feels to me like "The Monster from the Id!'"- the unforgettable cry from Dr Morbius from '50s sci-fi classic film 'Forbidden Planet'. Towards the end of the film, Dr Morbius finally named the malevolent psycho-sexual force that was destroying the hope of his new planetary utopia, which otherwise had been looking very promising with his lovely daughter floating around silvery new blinking machines and Robby the Robot wrestling happily with bakelite knobs. Similarly, the giant fibroid (the size of a 5 month fetus) - or MOFO to call it by its emotionally correct name - has been the unexpected twist that has thrown into doubt my return date to Pittsburgh.

Before I posted the last blurb, I edited out a few phrases which I felt were a little too grandiose to leave in: one of those was feeling that I was in someone else's plot, that my life (or indeed, any individual's life) was being scribbled from 'the beyond', part of a cosmic soap opera complete with cliffhangers, created for The Great Whatever's own amusement.

This was no intellectual speculation, or poetic metaphor, but a feeling that first kicked open the saloon doors of my consciousness about a decade ago and occupied it for days, holding my gaze with the confidence of a dangerous stranger who knew more about me than I did. I spent days radically adrift from my 'normal' sense of self, experiencing my thoughts as part of a greater, infinitely mysterious, consciousness which was being broadcast as 'my experience'. A little while later, I tried to capture some of this 'cosmic saloon' encounter in some lyrics for an early country truckin' song for my band Dust called '111.0':

"Am I once forgotten, now remembered?
Am I something found then cast away?
All I know is the moment I am driving through
A frequency that soon will fade away..".

I posted the last blog very late at night, and the next morning I started sorting out my book collection, deciding which books I would give to my friend Paul who was starting up a second hand bookshop in Northcote, hoping of course I would still be eventually leaving Australia again. One of the first books that emerged from the pile was by a Californian psychotherapist Robert H. Hopcke which sported the title "There Are No Accidents!: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives". It was a present for my brother Kim, who had leant it back to me to read, but I had put it aside and forgotten all about it in the rush to leave for America in May last year. I opened it up and read the following words:

"What if I - or you - were a character in a story?... What if what we experience as our life was indeed a work of fiction? How would we know? How could we know?...Synchronistic events - meaningful coincidences - make us acknowledge that there may well be more to our story than we think, and that everything, even things that may seem frightening or bad...is part of the narrative structure of our lives."

I closed it and held in my hands for quite a while, as I turned and looked out the glass patio doors that separated our lounge room from the leafy, lazily dappled sidewalks of Clarence Street. I decided it was probably a very good time for me to read this book.

Everyday magic

There's no doubt that Tanya and I regularly look for signs and magic in our everyday lives, trying to work out the meaning of why this happened versus that, what we are 'meant' to bring to someone's life, what they are 'meant' to bring to us. "Am I following the spiritual clues correctly, am I on the right path?"

We are not alone, a lot of our friends think this way too - and as I have made my way through story after story in Hopcke's book over the last week or so, its pretty clear that this 'magical thinking' is not the preserve of New Age crystal gazers or Calvinist determinists, but something close to a basic human instinct - a version of the 'religious' impulse that William James so rigorously described and defended in his brave psycho-philosophical treatise 'The Varieties of Religious Experience'. Synchronicities - defined as 'meaningful coincidences' - hold powerful sway over our hearts and minds precisely because they suggest there is more out there than is dreamt of in Western survivalist/ rationalist philosophy. And we need to believe that: well, at least T and I do for sure.

For example when T and I first decided our destinies were intertwined, and we finished off our Jilted Brides album in a frenzied few weeks in January 2008 as a kind of offering to the cosmos, something that might act as a passport to a better future, I found (through coincidence of course) a highly gifted artist - Kuba Fiedorowicz - to create the artwork for the CD we had produced. Neither Tanya nor I had met Kuba until well after 'Larceny of Love' had been finished. Kuba listened to the music, looked at photos of us, then told us he had an image we 'might be interested in'. Several months earlier, he had painted a picture, a semi-medieval, mystical face of a full lipped, beautiful blonde bride. Then for some reason, a few weeks after that, he had added a second bride, a thinner faced woman with long reddish hair. T and I looked at the painting and we gasped: it was us. It seemed Kuba had seen our images and painted us as brides before we had met him, even before we had thought of ourselves as brides; even before we had got together as a musical/ creative duo. Kuba's dual bride image is now stamped on our CD, its our icon.

Now that I am once again facing an unexpected health challenge and my soul once again feels like a bunny in the headlights, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that in the last two weeks an awful lot of 'coincidences' have occurred, starting with my accidently picking up of Hopcke's book and reading my own phrases there. As they say in Pittsburgh (in another context altogether) "Here we go....!"

Synchronicity Central

A day after I got the MOFO confirmation, I was sitting on the couch of one of my oldest friends Kerry with whom I was staying; Kerry and I are very close, like the sister I never had. She slammed the front door, and walked into the lounge, having just visited the doctors to see what the mysterious pains in her pelvis were that had started around the same time as mine (ie a few weeks ago). She told me that she too had fibroids; not a single super-sized womb eater like mine, but a malevolent swarm: "dozens of them - Its a jungle in there!". I stood up and we hugged each other. I'd had a feeling that she was (freakily) suffering from exactly the same problem as me. We laughed ruefully in disbelief. "Well, " I said. "At least that means we can help each other through this journey together."

"Yes possum", she sighed. Then with her usual great sense of humor and resilience added. "Its FTF mate: Fight The Fibroid. We've got our own club!"

One of Hopcke's descriptions of synchronicities is when one unrelated event after another seems to reinforce a message or theme: the fact that I now had a buddy to share the research and medical system navigation was the first sign that dealing with a serious health problem was not going to be as traumatic as it could have been. The second signs were the ease and swiftness with which I was able to get tests and see specialists for advice - to the astonishment of my doctor, Jeff, who was sure I would be waiting weeks to see anyone at all, let alone get any treatment. It was Jeff's certainty, based on the experience of other patients, that I'd be stuck in Australia for months unless I could afford treatment in the private hospital system that got me feeling like Job: a petulant God was asking me to sacrifice my greatest object of value, my first-born - my vintage Roland System 700 synthesizer - to pay for my health and ticket back to America!

Ten days ago, however, it became clear that Old Testament testing and judgement was not to be visited upon me just yet. A gynecologist was quickly found and visited (her receptionist cried: "You've got the same birthday as me - what a coincidence!").

By last Tuesday I was sitting in the office of the head interventional radiologist at The Alfred, one of our best public hospitals. I'd called on the Friday to get advice and here I was three days later being assessed. He convinced me that a procedure called uterine fibroid embolisation was definitely worth trying, because it would probably alleviate my symptoms by shrinking MOFO to a less megalithic shape, and it was a "low intervention" procedure: in and out of hospital in 24 hours, about 10 days recovery. The alternative was major surgery - hysterectomy or myectomy. "You don't want to go there unless you absolutely have to, they are serious procedures of last resort." After asking me with some surprise "Why do you have to rush back to Pittsburgh?", he finally picked up the phone and said "Well, let's see what we can do. What about doing the procedure next week?". My heart leapt - so soon!! And in the public hospital (i.e. free healthcare) system! As we left the office, he grinned at me through his handsome salt and pepper beard with easy Australian humor: "I hope next Tuesday is soon enough for ya?". It certainly was!

The last few days have been a coincidence pandemic.

On Wednesday I am driving down to meet my old pal Tim Patterson for lunch - Tim ( a film editor) and I last worked together when I did some remixes for 'The Secret': the production team for this international 'power of attraction' movement is based in Melbourne, and Rhonda Byrne, its guru, is an Aussie chick, with a background in TV advertising. On my way to lunch, in a kind of daze, I suddenly thought: 'Hey, I should be alert to synchronicities'. No sooner had I thought this, than I looked up and saw a truck in front of me sporting a sticker with the company name of "Patterson". When I got to the restaurant, I waited for a long time but Tim did not show. I sipped my wine and went into a reverie again: I started to think about whether I should talk about Tanya having some precognitive dreams in the next blog. No sooner had this thought entered my mind, than a young woman at the table next to me started to tell her dining companion about a psychic lady a mutual friend of theirs had seen last year: "She made all these predictions about her having a baby, the size of it, hair color, and everything, and she wasn't even pregnant! But you know, within a year, it all came true!"

I got up (Tim did not show), drove back to the studio and started writing a piece about mental illness and bi-polar in particular. The last book I read before I left Pittsburgh was a memoir called 'Scattershot' by David Lovelace who was not only bi-polar himself but who came from a family where everyone (except his sister) had turned out to be bi-polar too. In his at once absorbing, horrifying and exhilarating account of life as a 'manic depressive', he briefly sites statistics that 'about 1% of the population' is clinically bi-polar. That statistic jumped out at me as implausabile, as I count amongst my current and former close friends, about half a dozen people so diagnosed. I started to jot down some notes about that, and also how some mental illness bleeds in and out of psychic phenonema and mystical experience. Then I hopped on a tram going down Lygon St into the city, and met a former work colleague for dinner. After I rattled off my two minute pot-boiler digest of my American adventures to date, we turned to her situation. She started by explaining that her holiday house investment had gone pear-shaped recently due to the fact that her husband's brother, one of their coinvestors, was bi-polar, and he had gone off his medication and was starting to turn their lives upside down with a prolonged manic episode...

Finally last night, holed up in my studio/bedroom, I was frantically trying to finish off some music for the Grandview Scenic Byway Park films that Tanya and I were working on in Pittsburgh. For one section, I pillaged some of my back catalogue, an old funky acid track called 'Authority Over the Fish' which I had not thought of, let alone listened to, for years: but it seemed to fit a particular action sequence very well. After I had finished editing it, I saw my Gmail blinking. I had been sent a message via Facebook. A friend of Tanya's who I didn't know, had befriended me, and part of his introductory message was a fond reminiscence of '90s Australian techno-acid favorites, including a track he'd heard on the radio a few times and taped it because it had this wicked psycho-acid bass line, brass stabs and funny sample about someone having authority over the fish....

Tomorrow I go in for a procedure that may or may not help me get better, and get me back to America. One of the most frequent ways I seek consolation and guidance is by laying out Tarot spreads, or flipping over other kinds of divination cards - most often alone in my room, intensely wanting some kind of conversation with my destiny, with the Great Whatever. T makes me feel good by flattering me on my knack with the cards; certainly since the three years that I have began studying and consulting them seriously, and periodically recording results, I have managed to give myself (and others) goosebumps with the seeming accuracy of what falls in front of me - and not just 'wishful thinking' at all, but warning messages which eerily come to pass. So tonight, as a way to finish this blog on synchronicity, what could be more appropriate than my asking the Tarot about the outcome of my operation? So, once again, here we go...

'Page of Wands'; Meanings: new beginnings on a creative level, ideas still forming but with much potential; a message of a new things to come; great promise and hope...

*phew*

Melbourne (Part1): Twists of fate

2009-03-01T04:23:00.000-08:00

by Nicole Skeltys

Twists of fate

Tanya and I have been back in Australia for just over a week now. And in that short space of time, I have got some news which made me realize that my life over the last 2 years has actually turned into a series of novelistic cliff-hangers. My return to Pittsburgh - which was initially planned to be in 4-5 weeks time - is now uncertain.

Two days before we left for Australia, The Jilted Brides had our debut Pittsburgh gig and CD launch at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. It was a splendid night. Richard Parsakian dressed the band out of his stylish retro clothes collection and we could have been on Top of the Pops in 1969. There was a good crowd, and the band played extremely well. After the show, there was much positive feedback, people bought CDs and even asked us to autograph them. T, Scott and I came back to our Lawrenceville boudoir late that night on a high, cracked champagne and had a mini-party in Tanya's attic bedroom long into the night.

The first twist of fate happened the day after the gig. When I popped the question to our brilliant new backing band ie are we now all ready to move on to even bigger and better gigs? the answer was well, actually, no. Our drummer, guitarist and bassist all emailed me one by one saying they have other creative and professional priorities. That was it - one great performance that will never be repeated! Its always hard keeping a band together, harder than most 'blended families' I imagine...

On Sunday 16 we boarded the first of five flights that would, two days later, deposit us in Melbourne. From Pittsburgh to Denver, Denver to Vancouver, Vancouver to Taipei, Taipei to Sydney, Sydney to Melbourne, my mind circled two preoccupations like a demented vulture - how to make money from music in Pittsburgh, what was the 'Big Idea' that would keep The Jilted Brides going and help us prosper? And, more disturbingly, what was going on with my health - I had been in more or less constant pain for three weeks, there was something wrong with my stomache and it felt suspiciously like there was a growth. At the back of my mind I knew the first two years after a breast cancer diagnosis are the highest risk for metastases (tumors) to appear anywhere in the body.

At Taipei airport, T and I tossed around many business ideas - some whacky, some not so whacky. Suddenly, just as the boarding call came for our flight to Sydney, we hit upon it - we actually hit upon The Idea. The more we talked about it, the more excited we got, we thought 'yes! this might just work, this could combine a lot of objectives, spiritual and material!'. More of the 'Big Idea' in a later post, but it felt good to walk out of the departure lounge onto the China Airlines plane with a vision to pursue, a creative way to perhaps make a living when we got back to the USA.

If I got back.

Make-up sex and Brunswick revisited

As the Qantas plane dropped below the cloudline and began its descent into Melbourne, you could see the thick pall of smoke haze that hung over the city and the surrounding north-east countryside. Less than two weeks earlier, super-hot temperatures (47 degrees celsius/ 116 degrees fahrenheit) had combined with chronic drought conditions (or more precisely, global warming conditions) and galeforce windspeeds (up to 125km an hour) to create a firey holocaust - massive tracts of bush, and entire towns were incinerated within hours. And most horrificly, at least 209 people died, many as they tried to escape in their cars but were engulfed by the racing flames.

Despite this sombre context, we were nevertheless joyful to return. My dear old friend Aaron picked us up from the airport and took us back to our old house in East Brunswick, where he treated us to beer, wine and Indian take-away as we collapsed into the beaten up old sofa onto the front porch. My old flatties Roland and Hiroko welcomed us home, and I met the new couple that had just moved into my old bedroom. I noted with great pride that the little backyard vegie patch I had started all those years ago had, under the loving attentions of Roland and Hiroko, doubled in size over the last 9 months, and even the front yard now had been replaced by a permaculture garden. Pipes from the roof had been extended to the ground to ensure the (increasingly scarce) rainwater reached the plants and trees. Australians are famous for being obsessed with their backyards, and I realized how much I missed that connection to earth, the appreciation of fresh food pulled from your own garden.

Tanya moved back into my former backyard bungalow studio where we had spent the previous summer sweating, swelling and panting in the heat, recording our debut CD 'Larceny of Love' which is what we had launched at the Andy Warhol museum just before we left. I bunked down with one of my dearest, oldest friends Kerry, and her park ranger husband Chris, at their flat not far away in West Brunswick. The plan was for Tanya to spend a week sorting through and getting rid of the rest of her possessions (either selling them, shipping them up to her mother's house in Terrigal - just north of Sydney - or simply giving them away), then she was to head up to see her mum and visit her old pals in Sydney before flying back to Pittsburgh a couple of weeks later. Upon her departure from Melbourne, I was to move back into the studio to work out what to do with my remaining stuff, which mostly consisted of my beloved old synthesizers and recording equipment.

While T complained about the heat, which she was really feeling after chilly Pittsburgh, I found myself falling in love with Melbourne again in exactly the same way that you see the very best in your former lovers shortly after you've broken up with them. It was like make-up sex, only with a metropolis. I wandered down Sydney Rd, Brunswick and marveled once again at the abundance of fresh, delicious, cheap cuisine of so many ethnicities. Melbourne is one of the gourmet capitals of the world, if not the global food capital. Its actually hard to get a bad meal in inner Melbourne: even the local pubs have menu items like 'pan-fried zucchini flowers' or 'duck wontons with harissa and wild rice'. Before I had left, I had felt the cloudless blue skies and searing heat sapping my energy in the same way they were sucking out any moisture from our scraggy, rock hard lawn. Now I beamed up at the sun (rarely seen during the Pittsburgh winter) and relished the thought of getting a tan. I could even walk into a bar - any old bar - and order a single glass of champagne, my drink of choice, something I had not been able to do at any bar T and I had patronized during our trip through the USA (you could sometimes order a bottle, but that was beyond my capacity, notwithstanding Australians' notorious reputation for alcohol guzzling.)

But most of all, my spirits lifted because I was back with my network of buddies again. As both T and I had never married, nor bred, all our emotional investment over the years had gone into creating ersatz families from our friends. While most of T's friends were in Sydney, mine were in Melbourne. As I started the process of catching up with everyone, I started to feel stronger, more myself again. I found myself sitting on the toilet and staring at Hiroko's motivational notes: "Do not always push the moment away! Do not always push love away!" as well as the household injunctions to be eco-conscious and save precious water: "If its yellow, let it mellow; if its brown, flush it down!" and I wondered, with a pang, if I could find like-minded souls like this in Pittsburgh. Idealists with a sense of humor, eco-activitists who loved to have fun, down to earth visionaries, spiritual trippers with big hearts.

Giant fibroids and rare, analogue synthesizers

As T frantically raced against time sorting through all her remaining possessions, I embarked on a week of nail-biting medical tests. I was prodded and poked up both ends (gastroscopy, colonoscopy), had my boobs squeezed flat (mammogram) and had my uterus zapped by an ultrasound. To my enormous relief, by the time last Friday came around, I had been given the all-clear from cancer again - reprieved again from any threat of imminent demise. But the news was not all good.

I sat opposite my doctor Jeff, a handsome, ridiculously healthy looking man my age, who was progressive by any medical standards (he was also a naturopath) and political standards (I found out during the last Federal election campaign that he was also a member of The Greens and from then on we spent half our consultations discussing my health and the other half whining about ALP and Coalition policy failures). Jeff looked up from the ultrasound report and announced that I had "a giant fibroid". In fact, it was "the biggest fibroid I have ever seen. It takes up your entire uterus".

I stared at him. "What does that mean?" I asked, now suddenly a little short of breath. "I mean, how do I get rid of it?" It was a relief to know that the painful growth I was feeling was benign; but I now felt like Ripley in Alien - there was an intruder in my womb! Jeff shrugged "Well, sometimes hysterectomy."

"HYSTERECTOMY!???" I just about shrieked. There was no way I was having a hysterectomy. "OK, OK!" Jeff leant over to his computer and started typing out a referral to a gynecologist. "Well, we won't send you to any of the old male gynos then. The old guys like doing hysterectomies you know. When did you say you have to return to the States?" When I explained that I needed to be back in Pittsburgh in 5 weeks time, to finish off a film project we had started, Jeff looked grim. "You'd be lucky to see a gynecologist in less than 4 weeks. And as for surgery, well forget about the public hospital system, you'd be waiting for months." But the angels had not entirely scampered off - after several phone calls, we found - incredibly - a female gyno who could see me within a few days.

That afternoon, I wandered back to Clarence St and sat in the lounge room slumped in front of my computer trying to do some paperwork, but full of foreboding. If I had to have urgent elective surgery at a private hospital, that could cost thousands. Kerry and Chris had very kindly sold my car for me a few weeks earlier; so I now had only one possession of any serious value left, and that was a rare, analogue synthesizer from the late '70s - the Roland System 700, which was my pride and joy. I googled it and sure enough, it was worth a pretty penny.

Tanya came in from the studio, leaned against the kitchen counter and tried to cheer me up. I said, putting on a brave face: "You know, if I have to I can always sell my System 700, it would fetch a few grand." Tanya looked at me with surprise and compassion; I suspect she heard the catch in my voice. When I had looked up the machine on the web earlier that afternoon, one entry had really stuck in my mind. A vintage synth site had described the System 700 thus: "This extremely rare machine is quite possibly the best synthesizer ever built." And I knew then I couldn't do it. I felt as loyal to that bunch of modules, circuits and wires as if the System 700 (or Seth as I called him) was my own flesh and blood. Giant fibroid or no giant fibroid, Seth was staying with me.

This afternoon I headed off with Natasha, Robert and his son James to check out the Sydney Road street party and Brunswick Music Festival. Melbournians are addicted to festivals, there is one happening somewhere just about every weekend. This was the big one for Brunswick. We pushed past the dreadlocked men, the veiled women, the overexcited kids, terrible middle-aged punk bands and multi-ethinic world music ensembles. We gnawed on satay and drank middle eastern soup. Tash and I finally ended up at my local pub, The Lomond, nodding and giggling to a ukulele blues band. I'm hitting the sack now, back in my Clarence St studio which Tanya vacated a couple of nights ago, surrounded by piles of boxes, cables and gizmos. And tomorrow I see the 'gyno', after which I guess a new chapter awaits.

Pittsburgh (Part 3): Waiting for the net

2009-02-03T09:01:00.000-08:00

by Nicole Skeltys

There is a Zen saying: "Leap and the net will appear".

That was the spiritual justification T and I used to sell most of our worldly possessions in early 2008 and take off to the US with a tiny budget, almost no US contacts and (in my case) uncertain health. The hope and expectation that if we just followed our instincts and put our faith in strangers in a strange land, our lives - which had reached personal and artistic deadends in Australia - would turn around. Now, 10 months after touching down in Vancouver and embarking on our North American adventures, there is no doubt that is exactly what has happened. And the spate of good fortune (or spiritual cuddles, depending on your point of view) that followed us on the road has, since we reached Pittsburgh in October last year, developed into the kind of spectacularly lucky streak that would get you thrown out of a casino in Vegas.

As I write this, The Jilted Brides are preparing for our debut Pittsburgh gig and CD launch on 13 February (Valentine's Day weekend). Thanks to the generosity and flamboyant vision of Richard Parsakian - one of Pittsburgh's arts community movers and shakers - our launch is taking place at The Andy Warhol Museum, one of the most spectacular venues in town, as part of an AIDS Task Force benefit. And thanks to the generosity and enthusiasm of Charlie Humphrey, another formidable force in the Pittsburgh arts scene, we actually have a CD to launch - courtesy of his little label, Uh Oh Music. Our new band - Al Vish (drums), David Wallace (guitar), Ryan McMasters (bass) - are extraordinarily talented musicians and lovely people to boot. We rehearse in Al's studio which just happens to be down the road from where Tanya and I live in Lawrenceville. As we step up rehearsals and media promotion in the lead up to the gig, I reflect upon where I was 12 months ago and I have to say, things are looking up.

Our first (and only) gig in Australia was in April 2008 at Melbourne's Glitch club and cinema, only a couple of weeks before we took off to play at one of Canada's biggest festivals in Vancouver. On the whole, I think its fair to say, the gig "went bung" (an endearing Australian expression meaning something screwed up). The mix wasn't great and our nerves mercilessly attacked our vocal chords in a quivering battle that lasted all night. Nevertheless, one audience member enthused later that Tanya reminded her of Janis Joplin, and someone else pointed at my keyboard and said Pink Floyd. At each subsequent performance in the States our sound has improved and our new band now has such a powerful psychedelic sound, we are expecting our Pittsburgh debut will be our best gig yet.

At the end of the Melbourne gig, we played one of the hymns from 'Larceny of Love' called Darkness/Light, while Tanya's tripped out montage of space flight and planet footage filled the screen behind us. I wrote an incantation which we read over the deep electronic drones and angelic voices of the track. I reproduce it here, as it reveals the state of mind I was in just before I left Australia.

Incantation to Darkness/Light

If I do not make it to the other side of today
I was glad to meet you anyway
Though I was more alone when we parted ways
I was glad to meet you anyway
I don’t know my future, I just know I cannot stay
This is a prayer for the highway

I am telling you this because
I am the Broadcast
I hear the voices singing across time
Even those voices that rang in ancient times
I can still hear them
Listen to me because I am stronger than what you see around you
It is because each night I wander back
Marvel without end at how I can be

I tell you turn your mind to wonder
Be a stranger to Existence
And you will see what I see
I tell you every thought and action creates every hour
And every heart opened is a question answered

My feelings, you see
They are like the finest lace ever woven
And my mind, you see
Is the finest hourglass ever fashioned
Truly, you can see the whole of history gleaming there
If you lean close enough

I can pull away from this flypaper without any effort
I fly up and float around and around the room
Elated with release
Peacefully spiralling upwards and upwards
I fly straight to the window and crawl all around it
Trying to sense the opening, the crack
Because You are outside
And I can feel Your breeze

A great murmuring filled our ears
Of wind in meadows and ocean breeze
The purring sands
And the fire on leaves
And we ask forgiveness from all we see
And the rivers and mountains and sea
Thank us endlessly

So we bless and thank you for this:
That you’ve shared with us a night of bliss
We bless each marriage of Darkness and Light
And God speed every Jilted Bride.

I like to think these two jilted brides have been sped along the highway by 'The Great Whatever' and much of the net is starting to become visible. T is now teaching in the film faculty at Point Park University, developing video projections for Squonk Opera (an innovative multimedia troupe based in Pittsburgh) and together we are working on a series of promotional films for one of Pittsburgh's great regional parks - The Grandview Scenic Byway Park on Mt Washington - which is enormous fun. I was recently granted a 3 year artist's working visa - not easy to get, but I was apparently able to convince US immigration I was an "extraordinary alien" despite having no experience with inserting anal probes into earthlings or creating crop circles using lasers from spaceships hovering several miles in the air.

But still, I feel the whistling of air around my ears, I am still in a kind of freefall. There is currently not enough income coming in to survive and just as much uncertainty as ever as to how that situation can be turned around. Starting again in a new town - even one as absurdly friendly, supportive and beautiful as Pittsburgh - is tough, with no friends to call up, hang out with. Faith, optimism and the benevolence of the Great Whatever will continue to be required to pull through the next few months.

Forty eight hours after our Warhol performance, T and I board the plane back to Australia for a few weeks to wind up our affairs and get our various bodily parts medically examined courtesy of our excellent universal healthcare system - I am in particular overdue for an oncology check-up and mammogram. And I am also most anxious to spend time with my dear friends and adopted parents Graeme and Eugenie - Graeme's condition after his massive stroke has hardly improved. It will certainly be a moving experience to go back home after so much as happened, and then to say good-bye again.

But between now and then there is much to do - costumes to select from Richard's Eon shop in Shadyside, hair-dos and false eyelashes to discuss with our make-up artist, more invitations to send out, and many more hours rehearsing under the fairylights and '60s swirly wall carpets of Al's studio. We are certainly anxious to sound and look as good as we possibly can, make a good impression in our adopted home. Hopefully the audience will be in a particularly good mood thanks to the Steeler's superbowl win on Sunday (you could have been forgiven for thinking world war two had just ended, such was the hysterical jubilation in the streets all night!). And of course, we will be playing on Valentines day weekend - our heart-ache ballads will make happy lovers relieved that all those woes are now behind them (at least for the time being) and for the single and lonely there is always the hope, of course, that a jilted bride or groom might catch their eye and the greatest safety net of all - the net of love - might magically appear by the end of the night.

More Montana recollections - country music lyrics

2009-01-05T21:53:00.000-08:00

by Nicole Skeltys

Truck and cow songs

Here are some songs heard on local Montana radio, when T and I were staying at the Montana Artists Refuge in Basin in June last year:

"America Moves By Truck" - (sung with semi-religious enthusiasm over an anthemic driving country rock arrangement):

(chorus)

"America moves by truck
America moves by truck
America moves
BY TRUCK!!!"

That one from Gearjammin' Gold, an internet radio station from Great Falls in the north of the State.

Heres another great lyric line:

"There ain't a cow in Texas if I don't love you"

This latter gem from the only local ‘terrestrial’ radio station that Basin picks up - the "low power emergency" station broadcasting from Boulder, 9 miles away. It played continuous old style country music and syrupy 60s and '70s ‘easy listening’ ballads.

T and I listened to the emergency station whenever we were in the kitchen, which was often.

Late every morning, we would find ourselves staring into the fridge deciding what to do about lunch and dinner. Given the nearest grocery store was over 20 miles away, and we had no car, we approached this daily ritual of meal planning with the seriousness of survivalists. Other times I’d come and stand by the window sill, T would look up from her editing work and we’d talk about ideas. Given the kitchen was also where we washed our clothes by hand in the sink, that was another reason for me to be there rather than working in my studio. But one of the most frequent reasons for my restless journeys from the studio to the kitchen to was to reach into the fridge and fetch myself another Moose Drool, Missoula’s finest brew - to aid the creative process, or block out sucking life uncertainty, or both. All the while, semi-forgotten country hits streamed out of the very old, grease streaked boombox which sat on the counter by the sink.

Emergency country radio

The music on the emergency station was also continuous, pre-recorded, only interrupted every hour to inform listeners in a slow drawl that this is the FM frequency to tune to when you are in Jefferson County for advice on what to do in case of "an emergency".

Every now and then I found myself wondering about what kind of emergency would they have out here - has there ever been one around these parts? There are no nuclear power stations in Montana, so presumably no need to issue evacuation procedures in case of local nuclear melt-down.

So, I could only think of a national disaster, something so big it would shut down the TV stations, and maybe cut off the phone lines, and, lord forbid, even the internet. This little station then would be people's only access to the outside world. I imagined frightened families huddling round the crackling kitchen boombox, waiting to hear the fate of the nation while ancient country classics clocked one into the other, filling the room with swaying sounds of faded loves, chaffing small town morals and heartache.

I was introduced to some great music thanks to Jefferson County emergency radio. Traditional country music speaks about some of the deepest hurts you can get dealt in life, but with a kind of sincerity and unselfconscious humor that seems largely absent from the cool, modern ‘alt’ stuff.

Dark country lyrics

For example, emergency radio introduced me to Bobby Dare. Bobby Dares 1969 hit "Margies at the Lincoln Park Inn" was one of the tracks on rotation, worming into my ears at least once a day. Lincoln Park Inn has an instantly appealing and familiar melody, like your Mom might have hummed it around the house when you were a kid. But the image of desire trapped by conformity and conscience packs a wallop because it is so simply told:

"My name's in the paper where I took the boy scouts to hike
My hands're all dirty from working on my little boy's bike
The preacher came by and I talked for a minute with him
My wife's in the kitchen and Margie's at the Lincoln Park Inn
And I know why she's there I've been there before
But I made her a promise that I wouldn't cheat anymore
I tried to ignore it but I know she's in there my friend
My mind's on a number and Margie's at the Lincoln Park Inn
Next Sunday it's my turn to speak to the young people's class
They expect answers to all of the questions they ask
What would they say if I spoke of the modern day sins
And all of the Margies at all of the Lincoln Park Inns
The bike is all fixed and my little boy's in bed asleep
His little old puppy is curled in a ball at my feet
My wife's baking cookies to feed to the Bridge Club again
I'm almost out of cigarettes and Margie's at the Lincoln Park Inn
And I know why she's there"

Well how you can best that, lyric-wise? You just can’t. But real country music could get a hell of a lot darker - Porter Wagoner’s monologues, for example, included men going mad inside “rubber rooms’ and little boys being burnt to death at home while their parents whooped it up at the local dance.

Late one night as I lay on my tough little futon mattress on the wooden floor in the corner of our shared room, my consciousness changed down gears into sleep. It was passing trucking songs, dark Porter Wagoner ballads, the physical discomfort I felt from my recent ailments and emotional losses. Suddenly a deliciously provocative title for a country/gospel/trucking song popped like a jack in the box into my desultory mood. I chuckled out loud – it was a wink from the Lord I knew, daring me to record this track one day if ever got to Nashville. Here it is:

"God Kills Someone Everyday"

'I've got a hole in my gut, a scar on my breast,
A rip in my heart, a flat in my tire
Lord, what did I do to disrespect you?
Make you so mad, bring down your ire?

Well my friends they all say
You got it good, you got it good
So what if you hurt?
So you should, oh so you should
Ain't nothing so perfect, it can't be swept away
Don't you know God kills someone everyday?

Well he put us down, and he helps us walk
Puts food in our mouths and hears how we talk
All the praising and pleading, hears the screeching u-turns
The kicking at bottles that roll down the curb
The cussing and bleeding and drunk before noon
Hey, no-one can say our times come too soon

Then I felt His hand come down on my shoulder
I knew, yes I knew I was old and getting older
Theres creatures to whom I must give way
Pull over, take the exit off the cosmic highway
I still take it personal, though I hear the angels say
Don't you know God kills someone everyday?'

I can only hope I live long enough to hear that tune one day rise out of threadbare AM frequencies, float along on rusty pedal steel twangs, fill the air of a lonely Montana saloon like smoke out of a Winchester and make a trucker tap their toes:-)

Teenagers Revisited

2008-12-16T07:55:00.000-08:00

by Nicole Skeltys

On Friday night, Tanya was bouncing around in front of the bathroom mirror in her new slinky black stovepipes, rock and roll stud belt, black skivvy and red neckerchief. She was getting ready to go out and see a concert with Scott and was sparkling with happiness. As she tossed her dazzling blonde mane over to one side and blasted it with the hairdryer she yelled "Hey, I feel like a teenager again!" After she snapped it off, she bounced out into the loungeroom looking for her handbag, then chuckled gleefully with a wink: "A baad teenager!"

Tanyas remark about feeling like a teenager again reminded me of Montana, where we both started to have "teenager revisited" experiences. Given I started this blog in New York in September, which was almost at the end of our epic road trip that began in May, perhaps now is a good time to get some 'back story' in and recount some of our neo-juvenile adventures in Montana in June.

Escape from paradise

Life in an artists refuge shows just how contrary human desire is.

Tanya and I had finally arrived at an idyllic retreat. The Montana Artists Refuge was a cluster of historic Wild West buildings in a tiny former gold rush town called Basin (pop. 250). Basin was nestled in a tiny high plains valley framed by soaring mountains and forests, many miles away from anywhere that could be called a serious town. The Refuge was run by a bunch of women artists who had discovered Basin in the '70s and settled there. They were pioneering women of enormous courage and hardiness, who had the vision and conviction to pool what little money they eventually saved to buy some of the tiny town's historic buildings and turn it over to the use of other artists. They joked with us that in the early days of '70s counter-culture lifestyle experiments, bemused locals would muse that "there will surely be a war between the hippy bikers and the arty lesbians". But in fact, everyone got on just fine, and the women run artists' refuge was now just as much a part of the region's proud history as the disused gold mines and the cowboys.

Our residence was the top floor of a former 19th century bank, all old exposed beams, high ceilings and buttery mountain light through enormous windows. The faded wooden floors creaked like a ship at sea every time I walked from the kitchen through the bedroom/ living area to the large open studio where I had set up my work station. I tapped away at my computer each day in front of a panoramic view of Basin's main street (where a 3 legged dog limping down the middle of the road was the most exciting thing that ever happened) and I could gaze for hours at the nearby mountains which were still snow capped in early June. Tanya set up her laptop in the kitchen, where she could look down on the backyard and domiciles of our fellow artist residents, one of whom was a handsome young poet from Pittsburgh called Scott.

Here we were finally getting longed for rest at last - after all the weeks of stress getting ready to leave Australia for an extended period of time - possibly for good. Then the nerve wracking build up to our second only ever gig at Vancouver's biggest New Music festival. Followed by our back-breaking stint as volunteer organic farm workers on Galiano Island, one of Canada's Gulf Islands, off the coast of Vancouver. Then the long, intense cross-examination by US customs officers as we tried to cross the Canada/US border in an overstuffed SUV with a Taiwanese driver, courtesy of a rideshare lift we'd found on Craigslist. But finally we had made it. Here we were in the promised land - America! And nowhere looked more like God's own country than western Montana; the drive from Seattle to Basin had been the most spectacular of my life - verdant mountains, serene valleys, glassy green rivers gushing everywhere, diamond clear lakes, and the famous Big Sky - the eggshell blue of the earth's outer atmosphere was so close here, you could see the curve stretching forever.

But after two weeks of splendid isolation in this astonishing environment, we got bored.

When Saturday morning rolled around again, the sun dazzling in through all the windows, I sat down at my computer to work, but then I immediately got up and creaked all the way down from my studio to the kitchen. T was fixing some kind of breakfast, a "cowboy meal" as we called them, because so much of our diet for the last 2 weeks had been based on beans and leftovers as there was nowhere to buy fresh food in Basin. I said "I can't stand it anymore, I feel like I'm trapped in a nunnery, I have to get out of here". T agreed. She was going stir crazy too. She was easily persuaded that we had to check out Butte - a town about 20 miles away that apparently had great bars and was full of slightly unhinged but friendly people.

A couple of hours later, we were scrambling over some barbed wire fencing on the outskirts of Basin, making our way to a verge on Interstate 15. We held up a hand scrawled sign saying 'Butte'. And we waited.

We took turns holding up the sign and tried out our friendliest Australian smiles. Neither of us had hitch-hiked since we were teenagers, and we were a tad nervous. Cars whizzed past, many of them not even bothering to glance at us. There were frequent pauses in traffic: it was not a busy interstate, and besides, it was not a busy State - there were less than 1 million people in the whole of Montana. Half an hour passed. Then finally a red 4WD screeched to a halt up ahead of us, and with a mixture of relief and trepidation we ran up - quickly glanced at the guy - he looked small and non-threatening - and jumped in.

A few minutes down the road, the scenery went from serene to sublime. Out in front of us in the distance, a ring of gigantic snow capped mountains suddenly jumped out from a curve in the highway against the intense blue sky. I gasped out loud. Our small, bearded, driver, who wore paint stained overalls and gripped the steering wheel intently with his calloused, grease stained hands, had said almost nothing since we hopped in the car. But finally he volunteered: "Thats the Rockies. Don't know their names. Just the Rockies".

As we got to the outskirts of Butte, our driver opened up a bit more. He launched into a favorite topic of conversation by Montanans, and that was how Californians - who could no longer afford to live in their own over-hyped, over-priced State - were migrating in droves to Montana, putting condos on perfectly good grazing land, driving up property prices, and generally screwing up everything with their yoga studios and their organic decaffeinated coffee houses. Our driver explained - "You know what they call Missoula? Miss-angeles. And Bozeman? Boze-wood. But those Californians haven't got to Butte yet - its still our town and we hope it stays that way."

As we drove into Butte, the gigantic open faced copper mine that our driver informed us had been the town's source of boom and bust throughout its history spread for miles around like an artificial canyon. Old drilling towers came into view down long empty streets, their black frames silhouetted high like skeletons against the sun. As we headed downtown, some of the town's most important bars were pointed out to us. There were a lot of biker bars. Butte was Evel Knievel's birthplace, and every year the risk-obsessed showman's birthday attracted about 30,000 bikers who paraded down the mainstreet non-stop for over an hour and probably made enough money for the biker bars to keep going for another year. A former train station was now a watering hole; that former crumbling brick drygoods warehouse is now a snug bar. We asked about the Silver Dollar which we had been told was the most hopping bar in town - there it was, still with its '50s/'60s neon saloon sign, right next to the original Chop Suey restaurant with its blinking sign from the same era.

The further we drove downtown, the more excited we got. Abandoned buildings, warehouses, shops everywhere, most with their original faded advertising painted on their sides, promoting long gone products and services. Glorious heyday architecture starting from late 19th century right through to 30s, 40s, 50s, now razed across with broken windows, crumbling eaves, boarded up wooden doors, paint peeling in the breeze. The town looked like it had lost its wealth suddenly and pretty completely decades ago, leaving the town in a time capsule. I was reminded of pictures I had seen of Cuba, where the US embargo kept people poor and living in an immaculate simulacra of the '50s. But we could see that the locals were starting to reclaim some of these spaces, and transform them into bars, eateries, quirky shops, art spaces - so there must be money coming back in again, the town was starting to slowly be reborn.

The Cohen brothers and deja vu

We were let out uptown Butte, the oldest part of town high up on some hills, outside the Capri, a rundown '60s style motel, which our driver informed us would give us a room for $35 a night. That was our kind of budget. We stood on the pavement and looked around; the streets were silent except for the soft breeze, some kind of clinking tin sound in the distance (the drilling towers?) and the occasional dusty car cruising slowly past. We could see for hundreds of miles across the town, across the surrounding plain, our vision halted only by the cresting grey and white waves that were the Rockies in the distance. I felt the thrill of discovery and the eagerness of a child to run up and down the steep streets looking at everything, gulping in the atmosphere, which seemed full of secret messages about times past. For some reason, this was the kind of town I was hungry for.

First things first - we walked into the Capri's peeling foyer and were shortly greeted by a skeletal elderly woman, in carefully coiffed hair and an ironed-thin pastel outfit from the '70s. She looked genuinely startled to see us. She shook (not from shock but from Parkinsons). The thought flashed into my head "This is just like a scene from a Cohen brothers' movie - maybe some of their stock characters are real after all". She told us with a wary look that rooms were $55 a night; disappointed, we thanked her and left. T said outside: "She put the price up just for us". Later that night, one of the bartenders told us that was right - rooms were usually only $35 - but that was because the hotel was a hangout for crackheads!

T took off up the hill with her long Swiss legs shouting "I'm in photography heaven!". I wandered around with the video cam. Can a town have too many sagging gabled rooves, colorfully painted Victorian turrets, overgrown lilac bushes, porches lined with old bowling pins and other found kitsch, nooked and crannied laneways, rusting gold-tipped '50s Pontiacs, rainbow peace signs and mountain views from every corner? No, it cannot. Many porches were hung with wind chimes so that gentle tinkles wafted everywhere through the lazy Saturday afternoon sunlight. And most houses, no matter what their state of repair, sported 'Welcome!' signs on their front doors. People smiled greetings passing us on the street, or from heads lifted up from gardening. Despite the obvious hard times that had hit and stayed, it was clear that people were happy here.

T said: "The hills, the architecture, the feeling here reminds me so much of San Francisco in the early days, when it was still vibrant and still affordable to live there." T had spent the best times of her life, the times when she had felt "the most alive and most free" in San Fran in the early to mid '90s.

Our impressions of a largely happy, friendly town (except, presumably, for the biker meth and crack addicts) were confirmed when we came across an old bar high up on a hill called The Goodwill. I needed a wee badly. T peered in through the window to make sure it was ok to come in - it could well have been another biker bar. She saw all the locals in the little bar staring back at her, gesturing eagerly for her to come in.

When we walked in, people called us over to the bar and started talking to us immediately. After our first beer, a middle aged man and his son-in-law bought us a second round. The bar owner Annie (in her 70s at least, custodian of The Goodwill for 30 years) gave us a packet of chips and refused to take payment. After a while, one of the three older women sitting next to me - the one who smelt delightfully of old hairspray - offered to drive us up to another bar further up the hill where "there is a poker game going on this afternoon, its going to be really hopping, honey". We declined the kind offer, as we had our heart set on seeing some live music at the Silver Dollar - and we wanted to meet some younger people. I handed around one of our few copies of our album 'Larceny of Love' for the regulars to look at - and was gratified to see how they were genuinely impressed - by the look of it anyway. And once again we were congratulated heartily on choosing a great name. We've hit upon something for sure, I thought, something that resonates, but it did intrigue me: why do people like the concept of jilted brides so much?

After a couple of hours, we reluctantly left our new friends to continue on with our wandering and photography. As we started off down the hill, the father in law ran out and asked if he could buy one of our CDs. We had to explain that we sadly didn't have a pressing yet, but we gave him our MySpace site so he could hear some tunes. He hoped we would come back soon and play at the Silver Dollar; we really hoped we could too.

As we made our way down the hilly streets to look for food and more bars, T said: "I have never been made so welcome by strangers in a bar before - never". I couldn't recall a similar experience either. I looked around the town as the sun started to decline and another strong wave of nostalgia hit me. "Does all this seem very familiar to you?" I asked. "I mean very familiar"? "Yes!" she said. "It sure does".

Teenagers revisited

A couple of hours later, we were cruising downtown, sitting in the back of a Chevvy driven by a curly haired teenage girl called Sarah and her buddy Megan. They had spotted us walking down the street after we had had our cheap dinner at the Sports Bar. Once again I did not get through my alleged American meal -most of the 'pork chop sandwich', Butte's specialty dish - a squashed and deep fried bit of meat product in an aerated bun - sat in a styrofoam container in my backpack, infusing it with crumbed meat smell; I didn't leave my meal behind this time as I calculated that this combination of fat and protein would be precisely what I needed later to soak up a night of bar hopping.

Megan and Sarah were driving us to the local bottle shop so we could buy them a 24 pack of Pabst and a pint of Nikolai vodka. When they saw us on the street they said "You looked like teenagers" who might be able to buy them some booze, so they stopped and offered us a lift. Although we turned out not to be teenagers, we were still most happy to oblige. In the bottle shop, we were astonished that the pint of vodka they asked us to buy only cost $4. So we bought one for ourselves too.

Back in the car, the girls were full of gratitude. They had everything they needed now for an evening "with some boys". "Lucky you" I remarked. They laughed and dissed Butte: boring as hell, and most of the boys "are backward and goofy looking". I felt transported back in time: I remembered being a teenage schoolie so well, the emotions fresh like they were lived yesterday - the sexual drive straining against parental restraint, the hunger for excitement, the frustration of growing up in a dull town, slim pickings when it came to boys (actually, this is starting to sound like my recent life in Melbourne). Megan asked if we were married. "Do we look married?" I asked. They laughed again and said "No way. You sexy ladies look like you've just stepped out of Sex in the City". Thats great, I thought! My confidence was boosted, ably assisted by the Moose Drools we'd downed at the Sports Bar. I was looking forward to a good night out. Maybe even a wild one.

They dropped us off at the former railway station, The Depot Bar as it had now been reincarnated. But there was a wedding reception there (irony not lost on us), so we wandered back up the hill to find another bar. We found the warehouse bar that our driver had pointed out. Inside was indeed cosy, all exposed beams and golden pine chairs and tables. But it was full of mums and dads treating themselves to a Saturday night meal. It was dull. We downed our dangerously large and cheap bourbons quite quickly, and waited to be given the bill. We weren't. We started to make our way to the cash register, when I suddenly turned to Tanya and said. "Lets pull a runner". T said: "Thats exactly what I was thinking".

So we just kept walking, out the door. Once on the pavement, we picked up our pace and giggled hysterically as we ran towards Main St where the Silver Dollar awaited. Neither of us had pulled a runner for a very long time - probably not since we were teenagers.

The Silver Dollar reeked with old saloon atmosphere - long polished wood bar, blinking red Bud lights, old photos and assorted band paraphanelia - the kind of place I would live at if it was my local. But it was empty -at the bar, there was a plump, heavily made-up barely 21 year old girl, and further down, a geeky looking guy (who turned out to be a petroleum engineer). And that was it. The house band turned out to be a mediocre white blues band. Mediocre country is ok with me, but blues played by white guys- and ok, reggae too - white blues and reggae are genres I have always failed to 'get', striking me as genres that are presumably a lot of fun to play, particularly if you are stoned, but monotonous beyond belief to listen to. We hung around, downing more bourbon, but no more people showed. Our hopes for finding some friendly Buttites to party long into the night with faded.

The Silver Dollar bargirl was helpful, and recommended we go to the old Finlan Hotel for the night, and gave us directions to the historic hotel, and also to a good diner for breakfast the next day. At the end of the night, we staggered up the road, found the Finlan and pushed open the heavy glass doors into the foyer.

The Hotel Finlan foyer looked exactly as it must have in the '30s when it was the hotel of choice for rich and famous visitors who, according to the faded black and white photos on the walls, had, for some inexplicable reason, frequently found themselves in Butte. We slowly wobbled through an imposing row of gold and pale green gilt columns illuminated by art deco chandeliers throbbing out pale yellow light from high up in the ceiling. We eventually found ourselves at the front desk. The night porter guy, who was of around the same vintage as the columns, slowly looked up from his book and stared uninterestedly at us.

Sixty-six dollars for a room, he told us blankly, with a take it or (hopefully, for customers like us) leave it attitude. He elaborated: "Thats a good price. A third less than the flats. You've come down from the flats haven't you? Everyone is pleased when they find out the Finlan is a third less than the flats". It was 1.30 in the morning, we were sozzled, and could not figure out what he was talking about. Once again, I felt I'd stepped into a Cohen brothers film - not 'No Country for Old Men' as up at the Capri, but 'Barton Fink'.

We had no choice so we accepted, and grabbed the keys from his reluctant hands. To my disappointment, the actual accommodation was not an atmospheric piece of Americana, but a room in a standard low budget motel which had been annexed to the grand old original building; the old Finlan infrastructure had apparently been turned into apartments. But I didn't care too much. After we got into our room, I made myself eat my pork chop sandwich remains (which then tasted ok) while T excitedly got a much needed TV fix, surfing through late night movie channels. I must have then passed out for maybe 3 hours; only to be awoken by doors slamming and T swearing. In the room next to ours, there were teenagers - going back and forth to the balcony, drinking, smoking, laughing and talking loudly. T rang the front desk to complain- she hadn't been able to sleep at all. But the old Cohen Brothers porter didn't seem to intimidate the kids, so the noise continued. Finally, after T made a second call, the door slamming and loud talking stopped. Good, I thought, glancing at the clock and registering 5.00am, we can get some sleep at last.

Then the unmistakable thump, thump and cries of bad teenage sex. The walls were paper thin. This is one memory, I thought, I could do without. Although I admired the fact that these kids had the stamina and sheer good times determination to stay awake all night. Later, T wondered how they could rent a room while being so young. In a cash-strapped town like Butte, I suspected that the Finlan would rent out to toddlers if they could produce a credit card. More of a mystery to me was where their parents thought they had been for the evening. Crawling home at 7.00 in the morning, stinking of cigarette smoke and alcohol, ruffled hair and clothes, what possible story could they produce? Out cow-tipping all night?

Back to Basin: lesbian capital of Montana

Sunday morning was, as I knew it would be, painful. After checking out, we eventually found one of the diner's that the bargirl had recommended. Cheerful mom and pop '60s decor, shiny red leather stools, the smell of pancakes and coffee. After a cup of weak coffee (weak to Australians, who are used to Italian style cardiac arrest concentrations of caffeine), my hangover felt temporarily cushioned. We both ordered the vegetarian omelete, which sounded promising as it listed broccoli and cauliflower as two of its ingredients; but no, when the gigantic egg mound arrived, all the vegetables had been thoroughly fried then strangled in two kinds of cheese, including the ubiquitous fluro cheddar kind. I ate my rye toast, picked out all the vegetables I could recognise, and once again left most of my meal on the plate.

Hitching back to Basin required trudging a long way down the highway as it led out of town, to the turn off to Interstate 15. The sun was now high in the sky, my head ached. Once again, I felt how conspicuous we were, two women with thumbs out trudging down the road. I asked the angels and guides to protect us, make sure we got home safely. Later, T told me she had done the same thing.

A red car turned around when it saw us, and pulled up. Two very dodgy looking guys with tattoos, wrap around sunglasses and faint smell of beer leaned out of the car and grinned. "Basin? Oh yeah, we uh, just were talking about going there. Its got a bar we could all go to." T and I looked at each other and shook our head: we'll just keep walking thanks.

That was rattling, but at least it proved we could just refuse to put ourselves in a dangerous situation. After picking up some groceries and much needed painkillers, we eventually made the on-ramp to 15. I noticed another figure further up the ramp, hitching. That made me feel better, less of a freak. Within minutes, an SUV pulled up - a sketchy, unshaved guy as a passenger, but a peaceful looking Indian with a welcoming smile behind the wheel. We checked each other's look to see if we should take it, but we both felt it would be ok.

The journey back was dominated by Mr Sketchy, who was clearly an ex-junkie or speedfreak, proclaiming loudly about nothing and everything. I wished he would shut up and let the Indian guy speak, who was calm and thoughtful - he was from the Blackfoot reservation, his son was training in Basin to be a volunteer firefighter for the season. T and I both wanted to know more about local native Indian culture. But Mr Sketchy wouldn't shut up: "Won't be any f**n fires this season" he cried maniacally at his friend, laughing loudly. " Too much f**n rain! Too much f**n rain!" and then, swivelling around to bore his eyes into mine, "Hey, you know Basin is the LESBIAN CAPITAL OF MONTANA?"

Tanya and I couldn't help but laugh nervously. "Really?"

"Oh yeah. Bunch of bush bumpers down there man! Oh boy, bunch of BUSH BUMPERS!"

It was a huge relief when we were dropped off outside the refuge and waved goodbye to our lift. I pitied the quiet Indian guy who was going to have to put up with his friend's ranting all the way to Helena. And although T and I got to have our much needed night on the town, and arrived back in one piece, nevertheless neither of us really wanted to have to hitchhike again. That was one teenage experience we were happy to leave now in the past!

The Extraordinary Alien

2008-11-29T07:54:00.000-08:00

by Nicole Skeltys

Man About the House
Where I have settled in Pittsburgh, the freight trains wait until dusk then come out like great mechanical cows and commence their lowing which continues long into the evening, increasing their frequency in the early hours. I am a poor sleeper, waking often in the witching hours after midnight. In Melbourne, I would lie awake for hours, with nothing but my thoughts to keep me company. But here in the railway-zippered suburb of Lawrenceville, I will never again be alone at night. I am kept company by the conversation of the freight train horns. Every half hour or so, a new blare of exquisite tonalities erupts, a unique plaid of harmonics that is flung into the universe. Its 5.00 am as I write this propped up in bed with my faithful laptop Larry, and Larry and I have been digging horn solos for hours.

There is no predicting the rhythm or timing of the blares. Sometimes they are short, insistent bursts suggesting urgency, danger, get out of my way. Other times, they are are long, languid squirls of sound, like the cries of a delighted lover. The cry of each train as it rattles through is so erratic, that I think it must surely reflect the different moods of the men pushing the horn. Before I got up to write, I lay awake and listened closely to what I imagined to be the morse code of yearning. Some railway guy was leaning against a metal cab interior, he finished a cigarette and flicked it out the window, he reached over and and pushed on the horn pedal (or pulled the lever, depending on how old the train is) according to how he felt about his life at that exact moment in time. And motionless under my mountain of borrowed blankets, miles away, I heard it and I got it. Like him, I could hear what the sound contains: the the off-key, stained satin, diaspora of emotion that sums up our lives.

The freight trains have been providing the romantic soundtrack to our new lives, as Tanya and I settle into our second floor apartment, right above our buddies Scotty and Dan. My nights of sleeping on the floor of Scott and Dan's basement were now over. No longer did I have to battle with my constantly deflating air mattress while Tanya rustled and flopped behind the makeshift curtain that Scott had pinned up to separate our sleeping areas. I had my own completely solid mattress - heaven! T and I each had our own room - heaven again! It was typical of the great good fortune that had swooped upon us as soon as we arrived in Pittsburgh: the cheap, groovy little oak paneled, bi-level apartment above our hosts just happened to have become vacant. It was all too easy - why don't we just move in?

We did, however, have one hurdle to cross before we could settle down after our exhilarating but exhausting 5 months of being on the road. And that was our potential landlord, Jim. We needed to persuade Jim to hand over the keys to us, that we would be good tenants. Jim, according to Scotty, was around quite a bit. And usually fairly tanked.

We first met Jim when one day he was bustling into the back yard, about to climb to the steps to the 2nd floor apartment. Scott saw him from the kitchen window and called him over to introduce us. He poked his head into the kitchen, saw us, and his eyes bugged. He knew that Scotty and Dan had a couple of Australian women, "aussie chicks" staying with him for a while: but our corporeality, the actual sudden presence of two female bodies in a house that had previously only contained two young male bodies clearly hit him with some force. He barked a slightly startled hello and after some awkward pleasantries, asked with great curiosity how long we intended to stay. When we replied maybe for the long term, and that we might be interested in the 2nd floor apartment, Jim looked even more startled and affected a skeptical stance: "Well. We'll see, we'll see. We can talk abart it, we can talk abart it." He backed away and retreated up the back stairs, carrying his 6 pack of Yuengling lager.

Over the next couple of weeks, Jim's presence became familiar, as every second day he bustled up and down the back stairs and rattled and banged away upstairs fixing whatever it was that needed fixing in the wake of the last tenant. Jim was probably in his late 40s, early 50s, and was a 'yinzer' - what the locals call native Pittsburghers. This meant he was never without a baseball cap, even (or especially) indoors and at night, talked in a crimped, guttural Pittsburgh accent, drank goodly amounts of lager, barracked for the Steelers and engaged in a blue collar profession - in Jim's case, he was a plumber. Tanya had further expanded on the classic yinzer definition by including what she regarded as the defining physical characteristics of native Pittsburgh men: they looked like moles. Cute, cuddly moles perhaps, but moles nevertheless.

When we had finally made the decision to stay, we lay in wait for Jim's next appearance. One afternoon we spied him out the kitchen window, coming through the gate with his tool box in one hand and his lager in the other, looking every inch an industrious mole. We stopped him and told him we were definitely interested in renting the apartment. Jim affected a skeptical stance again. "Well, nah, well nah, do yez have a job? How are yez gonna pay the rent if yez dont have a job?" Luckily Tanya had just been offered some teaching work at the Point Park University film faculty; I mumbled some outright lie about doing "contract work".

However, as it turned out, Jim didn't actually require much convincing. He tried to look hard nosed, and complained sternly that "every tenant sez thar gonna pay the rent but they don't" (his last tenant had split without warning, rent in arrears). But moles, as we know, do not have hard noses, they have soft noses, and after chatting to Jim for a while, he loosened up quickly. Soon, we were heading up the steps and he was showing us proudly around the newly painted apartment. He showed us how he was now fixing the shelves in the kitchen and even started asking us what other repairs we thought we might need. This was a first for Tanya and I: neither of us had ever had a landlord who was anxious to improve a property to the tenant's liking. Jim was turning out to be just like everyone else we had met in Pittsburgh: generous-hearted to a fault.

At one point, as Jim was showing us the downstairs bedroom he said: "Theres a bedroom for one of yez." then he glanced at us and added in an almost apologetic tone of voice "Or both of yez! What yez get up to is none of my business! You know yez can do what yez want, do what yez want. Doesn't worry me!" He paused and he looked at us. We smiled broadly and didn't respond. We moved out onto the verandah so Jim could show us the sealant he intended to apply to the railings. We mentioned we would be continuing to share some facilities and tasks (such as gardening) with the boys. Jim couldn't help himself again: "Well, nah, one big happy family is it?" he asked with another meaningful stare in his wide eyes. "I mean, I don't want to pry, what yez all get up to is your business, none of my business, yez can get up to whatever you want!" In Jim's mind, 227 45 St had clearly turned into a hothouse of sexual intrigue - just who was sleeping with who? The possibilities were endless! and exciting! anyway you cared to think about it.

T and I just smiled knowingly back at Jim after every leading statement and continued to ask questions about the apartment. We let his imagination continue to cook away.

The Boston Marriage
We started to move in our very few belongings the last week of October. As we set up our new home over the following weeks, we became aware that there was a term for our new co-habitation status. Scotty sent us a link to an MS article entitled "So are you two together?" The article was about women who decide to move in together to provide each other with emotional support, share financial responsibilities and work together on creative or other kinds of joint endeavors. Other people (such as our landlord, who reminded me strongly of the forever perplexed and titillated Mr Roper in the classic '70s British sit-com "Man About the House") would often assume a lesbian relationship where this was not the case. The term for this kind of living choice was a "boston marriage" - a term derived from Henry James' 1886 novel The Bostonians whose main female characters have chosen to move in together as each other's "helpmeets".

Our ability to actually set up the rudiments of a household was assisted greatly by the financial generosity of donations from family and friends, particularly those triggered by the now infamous "flying mattress incident". We were also highly dependent on the only two people in Pittsburgh we knew with cars - Charlie and Scotty - to help ferry us around to buy household goods and act as our surrogate husbands. One glorious day, we found three perfectly good (if somewhat faded) armchairs, plus a couple of sidetables just sitting outside a church around the corner from us on 46th St. Scotty was once again pressed into service with his Chevvy pick up, and by late afternoon our loungeroom started to look like a loungeroom.

Jim continued to drop around and fix things, and we started to enjoy his company. One night when we were hanging out with Scotty downstairs, he even went next door to the mysterious AmVets hall (he was a Vet as it turned out) and bought us all back a bunch of beer. This was no small favor as in Pittsburgh, for reasons that defy all logic, you can easily walk down the road and buy dangerously cheap wine and hard liquor from a liquor store, but the only place you can buy beer is from specially designated outlets. Why relatively low alcohol beverages are in restricted supply whereas serious liver and brain corroding beverages are everywhere is beyond me. But it made us especially grateful to Jim for saving us having to go on a quest to find a distant beer depot.

Our Boston marriage was certainly more functional than Jim's. Jim had divorced after only 4 years, but 2 years later the divorce proceedings carried on and were clearly causing him a great deal of pain and anxiety. We felt sorry for him, as he had a good heart, and clearly his general yinzer fondness for brews had developed into a stronger addiction to cope with post-marital stress. However, he had not lost his sense of humor and he too became another surrogate husband, cheerfully complaining about "typical women, always wantin' stuff done round the haus" as he trudged in with his tool box and beer to fix a blocked drain, or to bleed the heaters.

Jim was perhaps becoming a little too comfortable in his role as surrogate husband as one night last week he gave a perfunctory knock and walked in the kitchen door, starting to tell me how the boiler pressure was all wrong and needed adjusting when he stopped dead in his tracks. There I was sitting in the loungeroom in our borrowed pine hutch having a drink with another man. It was only Charlie, who had dropped in briefly after some new errand he had uncomplainingly done on our behalf. However, the sight of a strange man in our apartment was enough to make Jim visibly embarrassed, and clearly provided yet more fodder for an already inflamed imagination. He moved quickly upstairs to Tanya's attic room to adjust the bleeds, then hurried down back past us again moving quietly and sheepishly as if he had interrupted something momentous. I burst out laughing after he left.

The extraordinary alien
Something momentous did occur, though, a couple of days later, as I accompanied Charlie to see an immigration lawyer about my plight. My visa was due to run out the following week. To say this caused me some anxiety was an understatement: I had just put down a deposit and moved into an apartment in a town I was determined to live in with no legal means of staying or working there. This was a major cause of waking up in the middle of the night and spending hours focusing on train horn harmonics. Charlie had to see the lawyer on behalf of Dan Jemmett, a British playwright who also wanted to stay in Pittsburgh. He asked me to come along so we could get some advice on my situation too.

Prior to the meeting, I did some research on visa categories, and for the first time I saw a glimmer of hope. The category of visa that Dan was applying for might - just might - apply to me. That visa category was an EB-1 or "extraordinary alien" visa. To qualify to be an "extraordinary alien" you had to have received an academy award (it was THAT easy); but more relevant to my situation, you could also be considered if you had an outstanding record of achievement in your field of endeavor. As I scrolled through the criteria, it dawned on me that my years of slogging it away punching out electronic and electronic influenced music, album after album, might make me an "extraordinary alien". After all, I had been nominated for an ARIA once, wasn't that kind of extraordinary? It certainly stunned me at the time.

Charlie oscillates with nervous energy pretty much all of the time. As we sat in the all white po-mo waiting area, I too was oscillating - if someone could have plugged us into a circuit board and hooked us up to an amplifier, we would have made a very high pitched sound. Larry, our lawyer, greeted us warmly and ushered us into the conference room, asking us to take a seat at an extremely long walnut table. The small talk consisted of Larry's plans for the sterile white foyer - he intended to use it to showcase local artists' work. Charlie quickly jumped at the chance to offer to broker curatorial services as part of a deal, and within minutes he was gone, ferried away by the marketing lady to talk artwork turkey. I sat alone with the lawyer, almost unable to keep my buttocks on the chair due to anxiety and looked at him as a penitent with heavy sins might look at a confessor.

Larry asked me what I wanted and I mumbled that I well, just wanted to stay here, and write and perform music. Larry nodded enthusiastically and, after asking after my visa status, noted that we were "looking at a rather tight timeframe" to sort all this out. Then he put on his glasses and started reading the material I had sent him - my CV/biography and the two pages worth of self-promoting bravado I had put together as my claims to be an "extraordinary alien". The funny thing was, though, that as I had sat down the previous night, gone through the acceptance criteria and jotted down my potential claims, I realised that I had, in fact, achieved stuff. I had always moved through my music career like a salmon spawning up-stream: I never looked behind me or thought about what I'd done, after an album or project had been completed and promoted, I just wanted to hurry up and get onto the next one. But as I forced myself to go back over the last decade, particularly over the tons of press clippings that I'd scanned before I left Australia, I thought maybe if you were looking at all this from a consciousness other than my own self-deprecating Australian consciousness, particularly if yours was an American can-do, boosterish consciousness, you might form the opinion I was a person of some note in my field. You might start slowly mouthing the words "extraordinary alien".

Larry scanned the documents silently then put them down and looked at my half-terrified, half-pleading face. "This is excellent. No problem, I'm almost certain you will qualify. The green card takes about a year, but in the meantime we can rustle up an application that should be able to get you a temporary work permit so you can stay here while we work on the EB-1 process." It was a Rocky moment. I leapt up from the chair and punched the air:"YEEEESSSSSS!!!!" I cried, then composed myself and sat down. It did indeed seem possible that I was not just any old alien; I could hear the theme from Close Encounters start to build, I could see the massive disk of light descend from the sky over the Devil's Tower formation, I could see rows upon rows of speechless people, faces upturned in awe: they were looking at me as I emerged triumphantly from the spacecraft and started to walk grandly towards them: watch out America here I come - I'm an extraordinary alien!

Pittsburgh (Part2) - Hope

2008-11-18T07:54:00.000-08:00

by Nicole Skeltys

Graeme and Eugenie: the ties that bind

Last night I Skyped Canberra to try and speak to Eugenie, my adopted Mum. I have been more than usually anxious about Graeme, my adopted Dad, for over a week now. When I was in Philadelphia I received an email from Eugenie about Graeme with news I never wanted to get. Graeme was in hospital, he had had a massive stroke which left him paralysed down the left side of his body. In shock, I read the email twice, once out loud to Tanya who gasped.

My heart wrenched. I felt a deep tangle of emotions which even now, I struggle to describe.

Graeme had been there for me through all my major life transitions and struggles over the last 10 years.

In 1997, I finally made a break out of the sterile, small town/ government-town atmosphere of Canberra, where I had been working in the public service since graduation, trying to save some money. I fled to the music haven of Melbourne, where I was initially giddy with the stimulation of being in a real town with real stuff happening all the time. Here were lots of great venues, cool bars, restaurants, large herds of people from other cultures and sub-cultures, people who knew how to dress snappy. I was at the time in a long-term relationship with Peter, who I had met at University, and he and I moved into an old warehouse on top of a shop in Smith St, in the hip inner city suburb of Fitzroy. Each morning I would walk down the crowded street like I was stoned, listening joyfully to all the different languages being spoken, smiling at all the junkies and freaks, delightedly sucking in the dank pot-pourri of Vietnamese cooking, musty second hand clothes shops, and pollution. Trams crashed past my windows late into the night, as soothing as the throb of the ocean. When I met new people, I would joke that I had just spent the last 7 years "in a sensory deprivation tank", which I still think is a pretty accurate description of Australia's capital city even today. Melbourne, in contrast, was an acid trip.

Graeme had been my last boss at the Department of Finance; but once our formal relationship ended, a richer connection developed. We stayed in email contact. Gradually we realised we were starting to rely upon each other to talk about our minor worries and celebrate our little life victories. We emailed each other regularly, not every day, but frequently enough to make it feel like our lives were becoming more and more connected. Over the years, Graeme would come down to visit, often as part of a work trip, or sometimes just to visit his ex-wife's sister, and to see me. When my relationship with Peter ended, and I found I could no longer afford to live in increasingly yuppie-crammed Fitzroy, I moved further out to a share house in Brunswick, a sprawling working class suburb full of Italians, Greek, Turks, Arabs and eco-activists. The house was '70s 'wog kitsch', and featured a little concrete porch facing the plane-tree lined street. Graeme and I would spend many hours on the porch, watching the Greek mommas vigorously sweep much hated leaves from their gardens out onto the street. We'd drink wine and discuss relationships, his kids' ups and downs, people we knew, spirituality, politics, all the while giggling a great deal as we shared the same irreverent sense of humor.

Graeme became more and more important to me as a shoulder I could lean on, an older, wiser man I could rely upon to give me unconditional love and inflinchingly honest advice. My relationship with my own father had been distant. As a child I knew he loved me very much as he was always giving me presents and was proud of both myself and my brother's academic achievements. But he was a reserved man, and hid much emotional turmoil behind his proud Lithuanian masculinity. He was a taxi driver and a workaholic, driving late into the night, 6-7 days a week. When he got home in the early hours of the morning, he would go down to the rumpus room which he had helped build, put on his headphones and play the Lowrey organ for hours - although he was a war refugee from a poor farming background, he had taught himself (amongst many other skills) to read and play music. Late one night, he did not come home. There was a knock on the door, and I got out of bed to answer it. There was a young policeman standing there who held his cap in his hand and looked down awkwardly as he told me my father had committed suicide by hanging. I was only 14, which meant that I then went through the formative years or adolescence and teenage-hood not knowing what it would be like to have fatherly support around.

Later in my life, Graeme filled that gap. His naturally warm and generous heart simply expanded to include myself. Three years ago, as I went through the durm und strang of yet another relationship breakdown, Graeme was there, patiently wading through my angst ridden emails, striking just the right balance between genuine concern for my broken heart and fatherly annoyance that I should be so bonkers over someone who Graeme regarded as "a twit". Graeme would often refer with pride to the success of his own relationship with Eugenie, his second wife. While they argued about many topics, he regarded this as a sign of relationship health, that the friction (within bounds) kept the spark alive and indicated genuine engagement. He adored Eugenie, who was temperamentally quite opposite to him in many ways - she was a highly gifted landscape painter, who could let fly with strong emotions at dinner parties, particularly when she felt in the presence of fools, a situation which, in Canberra, happens particularly often. Graeme told me over and over again he and E accepted and valued each other's differences, and that was a key to their relationship longevity.

In mid-August 2006, Graeme 'just happened' to be down for a visit when the Queensland police rang to tell me they had found my mother, she had died suddenly in her Brisbane flat. I could not have got through that night or the following few weeks without Graeme and Eugenie's tireless emotional and practical support. And when 6 months later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, Graeme flew down and stayed, sharing the journey with me, making sure I got through the surgery and the subsequent diagnosis ok. Before I left for my epic supertramp through the US, Graeme and Eugenie let me know that I always have a home with them if I need it, they are my family and will always be there for me.

The night I got the news about Graeme's stroke, I called Eugenie who turned out to be at the hospital in the stroke ward with Graeme. When she passed me onto Graeme, he could hardly speak, and his voice was almost unrecognisable, like that of a frightened child. When I finally put down the phone, after a long silence, I recognised a familiar emotion - grief. Grief that this formerly cheerful, energetic, charismatic man was lying scarcely able to move in a hospital bed, facing awful uncertainties about his future. I could feel his own grief, frustration and terror about the loss of bodily power. But I also grieved for myself, that my rock had crumbled, that the person who I loved and could rely upon in my hour of need now was in direst need himself. And here I was thousands of miles away, helpless.

For two nights I hardly slept, considering seriously whether or not to fly home immediately and join Eugenie. Tanya was disturbed too, as she and Graeme had hit if off when they met briefly before we left for America. Graeme had come down to Melbourne to visit before I left, as he knew he may not see me for a long time. After our first group lunch at Bimbo's pizzeria on Brunswick St, Graeme had pulled me aside at the bar while T had gone to the toilet (thats a 'restroom' in American), and said "Shes great, you'll make a great team". Although he could now scarcely form sentences, he had asked after Tanya when I called him.

But then I considered the situation more objectively, and realised that Graeme would be facing a long recovery and rehabilitation process, after the initial crisis rally-around, many friends and family would probably taper off, I could be of most help in a few months time when I had originally planned to use my return flight to Australia.

Last night I found myself talking to a woman with a rich Scottish accent, Graeme's niece who was staying with Eugenie and helping her out. She told me progress was slow but steady. Some mobility and balance was being gained. Graeme was finding it easier, although still tiring, to talk. I asked after his spirits. "He keeps saying how much he is determined to ride his motor bike again" she said, adding sadly "But the doctors say that won't be possible." I thought about my own journey through cancer, and the number of stories I read about sick and gravely injured people beating the statistics, people written off by the medical profession who pulled through, some testaments to the individual's sheer pig-dog determination to survive, others bordering on evidence of divine intervention, miracles. I said "The biggest healing power of all is hope. Graeme needs hope more than anything else. I'm glad he is thinking about his beloved bike. Its a symbol of hope."

Hope

Three weeks ago today I clicked on "post" for my first blog about Pittsburgh. I was in the bleakest of moods because of the dramatic loss of my brand new mattress. It had blown off the back of Scotty's Chevvy pick-up on the way back from the shop, and instead of providing me with badly needed nights of soft passage into the land of nod, it had turned into a terrifying zeppelin with a short lived flight down the highway, crashing to its premature smouldering end under the wheels of an SUV. More than that, both my money and my visa situation were looking hopeless. I loved PIttsburgh and I loved the people I had met here, but I couldn't see how I could keep the dream going much longer.

Things were continuing to look up for Tanya, as (thanks to Charlie yet again) she was offered the job of filming five promotional reels for Mount Washington's Grandview Scenic Byway Park, the newcomer in Pittsburgh's impressive cornucopia of parks. The park's authority wanted a series short promotional films shot over all 4 seasons. I could do sound design, music and narration...provided, of course, I could somehow stay in Pittsburgh.

The day after the blog post, Charlie emailed. He asked if T and I wanted to go for a ride to a local music shop. I agreed for the sake of an outing from our freezing flat, although musical ambitions were far from my mind. As we cruised down more leafy autumnal Pittsburgh streets, I was preoccupied with the problem of how we could get hold of another mattress for free. The concept "free mattress" was blooming and repeating in my mind like a Hindu chant. At the shop, I wandered around in a distracted sleep deprived haze, twiddling with a few synths. When Charlie asked which one would be best for The Jilted Brides, I pointed at the Korg X50 and said it was very good value and would do the trick, I would buy something like that one day. Suddenly, Charlie was at the counter clutching the Korg, handing over cash. When I realized what was happening, I tried to protest, but to no avail. Is there a word for "feeling shocked, humbled and made speechlessly happy with gratitude?". Well there should be, lets say its "shumbled". I was shumbled. I remained quiet in the back of the BMW, occasionally stroking my brand new Korg, all the way back to our Lawrenceville flat.

The day after that, I received an email from Tom Gates, a man I had met once in New York. Tom was a partner in an ultra-cool music management/publishing company called Nettwerk. He liked our music and was supportive of our crazy journey, which made us feel good as this guy had discovered then managed Cold Play and was as warm as he was smart. Tom wanted to know how much money I needed to keep going, 'just tell me straight how much you need', he'd help me out. When I got the email, I was shumbled all over again - someone I hardly knew was offering me hard cash to keep going.

And this was quickly followed by more offers of help: Nick Meyers, an old friend and ex-lover from Sydney, offered to cover the cost of the AWOL mattress: when we next looked at the bank balance, there was an extra $2000 sitting there, enough for 4 mattresses!! Gabrielle Dalton, an Australian film producer who is a friend of Tanyas but who I have only met once, also put money into both our accounts, to help us improve on our scanty can-o-beans biased grocery list and "buy yourselves some good food!". And my dearest oldest friend in Melbourne, Kazza, offered to go through all the expense and paperwork of organising to sell my little Hyundai for me, so i could get more cash that way too.

As a result of this extraordinary outpouring of generosity by strangers and friends, I felt my spirits start to climb again. It started to become clear to me that neither I nor T were entirely on our own. We wouldn't fail to start a new, more hopeful life, we wouldn't sink into penury and oblivion, because there was a safety net. A safety net made of the kindness, altruism and passionate imaginations of people we had had the great good fortune to become friends with over our lives. People who would help us out because they believed in us, they believed in ideals of freedom, kookiness and romance, and they believed in 'spreading the love'.

And I felt that what was happening on a personal scale for me, was happening for America. Over the last few weeks, the Obama campaign had boiled down to a simple image; Obama's handsome face stenciled with primary colors , tilted upwards, looking passionately but intelligently into the distance, stylistically hearkening back to a time of late '60s cultural revolution and optimism. This poster was all over America. I saw his youthful, black, iconic face in residential and shop windows - cafes, supermarkets, bars, record shops, book shops, clothes shops, libraries, everywhere, all over Montana, all over Colorado, all over New York, all over Pennyslvania, everywhere I went across the country. And underneath his face was one word: HOPE.

Yes, we can!

On Tuesday 4 November, Charlie lined up a meeting between myself and Councilman Bill Peduto, a progressive local Pittsburgh politician with wide ranging portfolio responsibilities and interests, including arts and cultural development. Bill had at one stage been recognised by the Democratic Leadership Council as one of the "100 to watch" New Democrats in the nation. Charlie described Bill as a man of impeccable integrity and vision and who should be the next Mayor of Pittsburgh. I was glad to be meeting a rising star Democrat on this historic day, the day when Americans had to decide if they wanted more of Bush's policies delivered in the Republican chicken-suit of McCain or if they wanted real change as represented by Obama. I was meeting Bill because there was a chance he could help me find employment in Pittsburgh, a sponsor to help me stay in America. It was, I thought, a slim chance, but one worth taking.

We shook hands outside a Butler St cafe, and started to shuffle towards the door. Before we got there, cars beeped and waved in recognition to Bill. We were then further delayed by another pedestrian recognising Bill and wanting to shake hands and chat. When we finally got into the cafe, the cafe owner lit up when she saw him, and more local political gossip was exchanged before we could order our sandwiches. I noted this was the life of a popular Pittsburgher politician, Bill had all the visibility of a sheriff in a one horse town. Still, Bill thrived on the interaction, he was clearly a people's representative born and bred.

We talked about Bill's history in the Democrat party, how he had opposed the Iraq war right from the start and initially paid the price by being marginalised by the party's power brokers. As time wore on, and popular opinion began to swing against the war, his status in the party rose too. Now he was now one of 8 local Pittsburgh Councilmen; his personal priorities were to tackle environmental sustainability initiatives, social equity programs, improved public transport, and enhanced support for the arts.

As we rose to leave from our lunch, Bill suddenly said: "Don't worry, I'll help you. I know everyone involved in the local not for profit arts and welfare sector. I can help you find a job. And I know a Congressman who can help with the visa process too. Together we got a friend's wife released from a Chinese prison where she had been held for her Fulan Gong beliefs. If we can do that, we can help an Australian stay in America". I felt shumbled again, as Bill had now beat the record of complete strangers wanting to help me out - we had known each other for less than an hour.

As we parted ways outside of the cafe, instead of shaking hands we now spontaneously gave each other a hug. I said "God help us, that we win tonight. What are you doing? Are you hanging out with some Democrat folk?". He responded with a supremely confident shake of the head "N'ah. I'm just going to play ice-hockey with some kids. Obama is going to win. Its in the bag".

As I trudged back up the hill to our 45th St apartment, I drank in Bill's confidence about the election results. He'd crunched the numbers, he knew the predictions, better than most. So it was really going to happen?! We would soon have a new, black, young, progressive president of the United States? and (just as life changing from my own micro-personal perspective) - I would have real help for me to remain in this country? For both those reasons, I felt more and more tension unravel out of my body. When I reached home, I made a quick dinner then fell asleep early.

The next morning, I woke up at dawn and rushed out to log-on to find out the election results. The first email headline that came through was from my dear old friend Aaron, that told me everything I needed to know, that told me that an historic change had happened in America, and there was now hope for a better global future:

"YES WE CAN!!!!!!!!!!"

Pittsburgh (Part 1): The End of the Road?

2008-10-27T15:52:00.000-07:00

by Nicole Skeltys

Pittsburgh: Je T'aime!

As I write this, we have been living in Lawrenceville, Pittsburgh, for almost 3 weeks. Lawrenceville is an inner working class Pittsburgh suburb which is in transition to becoming a funkier neighborhood. You can tell its 'up and coming' because there are little designer clothes shop down on Butler St (the main drag) and several quirky art galleries. You can tell it has not yet 'up and come' because the eateries are still dominated by low rent diners offering hoagies with 6 kinds of meat and plenty of cheese, and you can't buy soy milk or sourdough rye bread anywhere.

Lawrenceville, like other similar inner Pittsburgh areas, features steep, narrow streets, zig-zagged with rows and rows of semi-detached houses. These are wooden, thin, multi-storied turn of last century structures with peaked attics, many of them seemingly drawn crookedly by children, then painted in all colors of the rainbow. Most houses have cute little yards and gardens (including ours). Architecturally, sometimes you could be in Amsterdam, sometimes northern England. The air is fresh, the streets are clean. Now, as fall fades the days in earnest, there are psychedelic shocks of colour everywhere, as the maples and other desiduous trees burn themselves up in explosions of orange, scarlet and yellow. Combine this with sweeping views from every corner, and you've got one hell of a picturesque town.

In Lawrenceville and the nearby Strip district, the landscape near the river is dominated by shambling old warehouses from Pittsburgh's former days of steel mill prosperity. At night, freight trains pass by somewhere near here and are heralded by their long lonely piping. I'm hearing it now as I type. Truly one of the loveliest melancholy sounds you can ever hear.

Before we came here, when we announced we were going to spend fall in Pittsburgh, many people looked at us incredulously: "why on earth are you going to that stinking cesspool of a town?" they asked. The answer then was because we wanted to see our poet buddy Scott again, and because he and his roommate were generously offering us a free place to stay for 3 weeks (in their basement). Our fully funded residency with the Blue Ridge colony in Georgia had fallen through at the last minute, and we really needed somewhere to go after New York that cost little, or no money for accommodation.

Pittsburgh in the '60s was described by Frank Lloyd Wright as "hell with the lid off" : a polluted, grimy, rough steel town. Then in the '70s and '80s, the economic basis of the town steadily collapsed as the US became a net importer of steel, and several other iconic companies (such as Heinz) moved many of their jobs elsewhere including overseas. Pittsburgh lost about a quarter of a million jobs throughout the '80s, earning a reputation then as being being one of America's dying, crime riddled "rust belt" towns. But since then, the town has reinvented itself remarkably: its economic base is no longer resource based, but high tech (robotics, biotechnology, medical research and healthcare), academic (the town boasts 8 universities) and (most encouraging for T and I) the arts, supported by numerous foundations and private philanthropists. Boosterish Pittsburgh bank advertisements now quote Forbes.com: "Top 10 world's cleanest and greenest cities", and Places Rated Almanac: "No 1 most livable city in America".

The more we saw of Pittsburgh in the days following our arrival, the more we thought we might have found our new home at long last.

On our first Saturday here, there was an open day where punters could wander into the various local Lawrenceville studios and see artists standing proudly by their creations. T and I spent a glorious sun drenched afternoon wandering from site to site, pouring over paintings, photos, hand-made graphic novellas and encyclopedias, 'found objects', all the while chomping on corn chips and chugging down wines. Everyone we met was happy and relaxed. They told us how cheap it was to live, which meant it was possible to live as an artist and not starve. One woman, a photographer, had moved here from California and her business was now booming - so much so that she had recently purchased a beautiful old former 19th working man's singing school for $80'000 and was fitting it out into a photographic studio, artist rooms, performance space and multimedia complex.

Most people we met expressed amazement at meeting real live Australians - their first reaction also was "Why on earth are you in Pittsburgh?" It appeared Pittsburghers, like most Americans, think of Australia as an impossibly distant sun drenched utopia which no-one in their right minds would ever want to leave. But when we explained that we were artists looking for a new home, everyone quickly told us how great Pittsburgh was for artists, how happy they were living here, and they urged us to stay with great warmth - they really meant it. Local artists liked new artists to move to Pittsburgh, so the community gets bigger, and there is a richer social and creative life for everyone. Everyone gave us their emails, one artist even gave us a free copy of his book of full color prints. And without us having to wheedle at all, people plied us with the names of people in funding bodies that could help us out.

At the end of the day, we walked home, a bit sozzled and on a huge high. "That was one of the most magical days we've had on our trip" Tanya said. I agreed. I felt somewhat overwhelmed, like I'd just been to a love-in and licked everywhere. T said: "My dream has always been to set up my own photographic studio, specialize in portraits. Rents are so cheap, warehouses are so plentiful, you know I think I could actually do it here" I agreed again. Someone with T's extraordinary talent would shine here, and the infrastructure was affordable, it could be done. In Sydney, rents were the same level as New York. In Melbourne, all the old warehouse spaces had been snapped up by developers and turned into 'yuppie dog-box' apartments a decade ago. And when we boarded the plane for North America in May, 1500 people were moving into Melbourne every week, the rental vacancy rate was less than 1% and rents were skyrocketing.

But no matter how cheap it was to live here, would we be able to make a living? It seemed that one person might actually know the answer to that question. As we had wandered around around the Lawrenceville artist studios, the person most artists urged us to meet was a guy called Charlie Humphrey. He is the head of the Pittsburgh Filmmakers Society, the Pittsburgh Arts Center, and the Glassworks Center. He is "the man" they said, the guy who knows everyone in Pittsburgh, he is the philanthropic sluicegate that directs trickles of funding into the quivering outstretched hands of artists. We decided it would be a good idea to see if we could meet with Charlie - very soon.

Charlie: Patron Saint of The Jilted Brides

Sure enough, after we sent Charlie an email outlining our improbably large span of artistic projects (filmmaking, musical performance, video clip production, book writing, travel blogging, photography) he got back to us straight away, saying he was keen to meet us - that day. That was Monday.

However, Monday was the day I had planned to henna my increasingly rat-like hair (I had not had any hair grooming since leaving Australia, except for a $3 bangs trim by a Mexican barber in Austin, who left me with a marked diagonal slope up my forehead). We delayed the meeting until 4 pm so Tanya could slap the muddy slime all over my head at midday, and I could sit there for a few hours, my head incubated in a garbage bag while underneath my follicles changed color as quickly and remarkably as the autumn foliage. When I rinsed all the muck off, I blow-dried my locks and stood back and admired how new I looked. I was more confident now, I could meet the chief executive officer of a prestigious art institution, assured that my radiant mane would speak volumes about my creative skills.

Finally, it was time to set off for our important appointment. We slammed the door behind us at 3 pm, an hour ahead, because we didn't have a car, couldn't afford a taxi and the glory days of Pittsburgh public transport had long passed: we had to walk there. Up the cardiac conditioning hills of Lawrenceville, along the 'Little Italy' stretch of Bloomsfield (which T and I joked should be called 'micro-Italy' due to its barely noticeable Mediterranean character), then over onto Shadyside, along traffic choked Baum Avenue, left into Melwood Avenue, up to the headquarters of the Pittsburgh Filmmakers Institute. As the droll receptionist paged Charlie and said "There are two Aussies here to meet you", I realised that, although I had no expectations whatsoever, I was nervous.

We were greeted enthusiastically by a tall slender man with a mop of greying hair, boyish face, curious kindly eyes and quick movements. As he spoke to us, he oscillated ever so slightly with nervous energy. Within minutes, I could tell this person was not cut in the senior arts bureaucrat mould that I was used to jousting with - he was not the kind of person that "had tickets on themselves" as my mother used to say (Australian slang for a self-important person). Far from that, Charlie was like everyone else we had met so far in Pittsburgh - down to earth, warm and friendly. As the conversation progressed, he too made it clear that he wanted us to stay. "You women have media coming out of your pores. I would consider it a moral victory if I could help you stay in Pittsburgh". He said he would send any work he could our way, and he would introduce us to "everyone we needed to know" in the film and post-production community.

Sure enough, the next day Charlie set the ball rolling for what turned into a week of frenzied networking and socialising. Within a few days, Tanya was being asked if she would like to apply for a job as video projection mistress with a cool multi-media troupe called Squonk Opera. A few days after that, Point Park University asked if she was interested in applying for a position in the film school there, teaching camera and lighting, something she knew lots about due to her training as a cinematographer. Off her own initiative, T got work as a camera operator to film a motivational 'wealth creation' seminar, and was following up a number of other leads on the ever bountiful Craigslist.

Charlie's most spectacular act of generosity, however, happened when I showed him my last two CDs - the Dust album 'Songs', and the as yet unreleased Jilted Brides album 'Larceny of Love'. I had hoped that a US label would want to release 'Larceny' (we certainly couldn't afford to manufacture any), but I had low expectations. In the face of world wide plummeting CD sales, these were very grim times for independent labels, most labels were cutting their roster, not looking for new bands. But it turned out Charlie's hands weren't full enough being the CEO of three major artist institutions, he also played in a band and ran a small music label (no wonder he oscillated!).

At the end of last week, Charlie asked us if we would we like him to manufacture 1000 'Larceny of Love' CDs for us courtesy of his label "Uh Oh Music"?. He loved the music and wanted to be part of the project. We were over the moon. At last, someone was taking a punt on our music, someone thought we were truly destined for a brighter future. And we would have something to sell at gigs, just like any other 'normal' band.

That's it, we agreed, we are staying here. We also agreed that Charlie should henceforth be known as "The Patron Saint of the Jilted Brides", and was clearly in cahoots with the rock and roll angels who had guided our journey thus far.

Jean Luc Godard and kidney beans

The apartment just above Scott and Dan's had become vacant just before we came to Pittsburgh. We decided to rent it out, from the first of November. It was only $600 a month, for a spacious bi-level two bedroom place, renovated kitchen, polished wood floors, garden, and a large balcony with (of course) spectacular views. Our neighbors would be a Veterans hall with fairly mysterious goings on on one side, and a gay couple, Timmy and Jimmy in a little bungalow on the other. When Timmy and Jimmy found out we were moving in, they were delighted. Scott and Dan were excited. Rosy pictures of neighborly pot lucks, swopping garden cuttings and sharing wireless internet access appeared in everyone's minds.

But the strangest thing about the course of events of the last 3 weeks was that is has been like a Godard film. On the one hand, the visuals are all pointing in one direction - happiness, Anna Karina smiling seductively to the camera, beautiful Paris streets, Hollywood musical poses, bonhomie! But underneath, the soundtrack is subtly telling a different story - dialogue out of place, inappropriate music coming in and suddenly stopping, strange sound effects hinting at another world behind what is displayed on the screen. Something is wrong.

That something hit Tanya first. As we started to talk about the costs of setting up the flat (bond, furniture, utilities) she became more agitated. "I'm really going to have to budget" she said, as she had often stated over the course of our journey. But then this became "Actually, I don't know how I can do this". T was about to slip into the shark infested waters of credit card debt. The sea of red was already lapping at her bank statements. I said, "Well, I've still got cash, we'll get by". I had been managing my cash stash like a life support drip, carefully restricting money flow to essential homeopathic droplets.

But over the last few weeks, the financial market Frankenstein had kicked its way into the US/Australian dollar exchange rate and strangled the value out of our pathetic currency. When we arrived in May, the OZ dollar was equivalent to the US dollar. Almost overnight, it lost 40% of its value. I was hemorraging cash, faster and faster.

The make matters worse, the sleeping arrangements in our basement camp were terrible. My blow up mattress regularly lost its air during the night, and as we had no pump in the house with which to blow it back up (we relied on a car pump), I lay for hours awake, twisted on the slowly but insistently deflating lumps of my alleged bed. I tried sleeping on a makeshift arrangement of cushions for a few nights, but this was scarcely any better than lying with my spine crimped into the floor. The floors were paper thin, and Dan's every animal-like movement, along with his sub-woofered I-Tunes playlist, echoed down hour upon hour into our airless, dark living quarters, further disrupting sleep. Each day, I was running on the adrenaline of being in a sensual new place with wonderful people who instantly called me "friend", a place that was seemingly the answer to both T and my longings for a new home. But as the days progressed, my sleep deprived mind started to feel more and more unhinged. I found it harder to concentrate. I felt physically weaker, frightening memories of radiotherapy fatigue started to come back. My emotional stability started to slip.

T and I ran out of food and went for a grocery shop at the local Shop and Save. We found ourselves trying to get enough food for both of us for a week on $40. This isn't actually possible, notwithstanding the appealing giant tins of kidney beans for $1.69 that we purchased. I sat on the bench outside the supermarket as T passed the supermarket chain's discount card back to Scott so he could use it for his own purchases too. I put my head in my hands and noticed all the spittle from previous bench occupiers next to my feet. When T came out, I said, "I can't take anymore of this. I feel completely bleak about my future."

When we got home, Scott went to work at his $5.00 an hour job at the local coffee shop, and I tried to get some daytime sleep on his free bed. Later in the afternoon, I heard a knock on the bedroom door. T came in, tears in her eyes. She had called her father, a man who had separated from her mother when the family was quite young, a man with whom she had a complex and often difficult relationship. She summoned up enough courage to ask for help, and she expected rejection. But he had come through. He even sounded proud at what she had managed to pull off in our crazy American adventures so far. He gave just enough ("no more!") to help her get on her feet and start the new life that was clearly just about to happen.

T was overjoyed: "We are going to be ok! We are not going to freeze and starve through the winter!!" she said. We hugged and I was overjoyed too. A great weight was lifted from my heart. I had never ceased to worry about T's financial situation, which had been more precarious than mine since the beginning of our journey. T's bravery was paying off, long deserved opportunities were opening up for her here. She deserved a break, she deserved the opportunity to establish herself as a formidable photographer, videographer and artistic force to be reckoned with in Pittsburgh and indeed the whole Goddamn US of A! And I was very moved that she was saying "we" would not starve, that we were indeed a team, we would sink or swim together.

Warhol, mattresses and rude awakenings

When T's money came through a couple of days later, at my insistence, we headed off to buy two new mattresses. I explained that I couldn't bear another night without a full sleep, I would literally start to crack up. I was already starting to lose it.

Scott kindly agreed to drive us out to the Northside to forage for mattresses, despite the fact that time would be tight - he had to be back at his coffee shop to work at 3 pm. To our enormous delight, we found two Queen mattresses worth over $1300 in the clearance section of the store for only $300 US (make that $515 in Australian pesos). Giddy with our purchasing good luck, and euphoric at the idea of a good nights sleep at last, we tied the mattresses awkwardly onto the Scott's Chevvy pick-up and took off home with our booty.

Half way there, Scott started to accelerate faster down the highway, anxious to get to work in time. What followed next happened extremely fast and was very shocking. I looked out the rear window to see one of the mattresses rear up with the windforce factor and fly off the truck, off into the face of 3 lanes of busy traffic.

I screamed at Scott to pull over. T and I stared horrified as cars started to veer around the huge obstacle that was half flying, half bouncing across the lanes. A pile up was surely imminent. We somehow got into the emergency lane and pulled up. As the car skidded to a halt, I wondered with terror if a serious accident had occurred yet, and if not, how on earth we were going to get the mattress off the highway before one did. But as I turned to look out the rear window again, what I saw was a surreal divine intervention worthy of a Spinal Tap tour tale- the mattress was being safely dragged towards us under the chasis of a 4 wheel drive under which it had become stuck.

The SUV stopped behind us. T, Scott and I piled out, shaking. I was sure the driver was going to go nuts at us. But instead, a friendly middle aged woman got out and was far more concerned about the (now completely ruined) state of our mattress than the fact that we had almost caused her to have a major accident. She explained apologetically that she had no choice but to try and drive over the mattress because there were cars on either side and behind her who would have collided with her had she attempted evasive action. She waited patiently with us while we struggled and heaved to try and remove the mattress from under the car body, into which it had become wedged. She was on her way to the airport, but was seemed completely unphased and joked that "it was lucky she set off early".

Finally, after much struggle, we got the smouldering, tattered remains of the mattress out and had no choice but to pitch it into a trench by the side of the road. As the woman turned to go back into her SUV and resume a (hopefully completely uneventful) trip to the airport, she dug into her wallet and stuffed something into Scott's hands. Scott, who was (like the rest of us) still in a state of shock, stared in disbelief at his hands - she had given him $25. He started to protest, but she just hopped airily back into her truck wishing us the best of luck and took off.

If you are going to have a highway accident with someone, that woman is the one to do it with.

On the way home, we hardly said a word. My dreams of a good nights sleep lay crumpled off a Pittsburgh highway (we got to see all its lovely layers that would have made it so comfy because they were all now shredded and exposed, like a filleted and smoked fish). We did note that we were very, very lucky that potential catastrophe was averted, that angels had most certainly been at work here to save lives. But the mood in the Chevvy was as dark as the looming thunder clouds.

That night, we tried to cheer ourselves up by attending two Pittsburgh arts events that sounded promising. At the Pittsburgh Fim Institute, there was the opening of an installation by Bill Daniel, an artist who claimed he led a hobo life in a vegetable oil powered truck and made films about his experiences. Sounded like our kind of guy. Then after that, at the Wexner Center, there was a screening of Andy Warhol's "Screen Tests" with live soundtrack performances by super-stylish mood-meisters Britta and Dean, formerly of lauded US indie band Luna.

We arrived at the Institute early. Our new landlord Jim, a lonely middle aged guy who was spending most of his afternoons lavishing attention on fixing up our apartment, kindly offered to drive us to the Institute (after T dropped a few heavy hints), thus saving us another hour's walk. When we got there, we made a beeline for the bar to try and calm our nerves and temporarily blot out the loss of money which we couldn't afford. Later, the artistic irony struck me; two of the biggest and most prestigous contemporary art museums in Pittsburgh are The Mattress Factory and The Andy Warhol Museum. The image of our mattress flying freakily down the highway would have made for perfect Warhol footage, slowed down infinitely and looped. If only I had had the presence of mind to whip out the handycam instead of hyperventilating in horror!

Half way gulping down a wine, I turned around to find to Charlie in the foyer with his beautiful wife and one of his college student daughters. Everyone seemed to be in good spirits and looking forward to the night's entertainment. I realised with growing alarm that I was ill-equiped to deal out conversational niceties, and slunk off to look at Daniel's installation. He had a lot of 'road memorablia' stuck here and there on the wall, plus a scrapbook of 'hobo' musings and doodlings that he was trying to sell. In his bio, Daniel lists a prestigious string of awards, including a Rockefeller nominee and current Guggenheim fellow. I should have felt excited at the idea that in America someone could call themselves an itinerant while still receiving lots of money. But instead I felt nothing.

We got a lift to the Warhol/ Britta and Dean concert with Charlie and his wife, in their BMW. Once there, I ordered a whisky for myself and T which turned out to be almost pint-sized. I watched the performance in an alcoholic daze. Some of the staring, tear streaked faces of Warhol's screen test victims mirrored my own bleak soul-state too well. After a while, I realised I couldn't take anymore and suddenly got up. I stumbled past the rows of Pittsburgh's glitterati, mumbled my apologies to a startled T, and fled. I found myself outside in the pouring rain. Next thing I know I was in a stretch limousine with a chubby guy who liked '80s music. Luckily, I could still remember where I lived, or rather subsisted, although everything else in my consciousness was fading from view. The limo driver and I finally got home, after singing together many '80s hits playing on the local hits and memories stations. I groped my way up the stairs to sleep on the remaining, surviving mattress in the freezing cold in our new apartment, which had yet to be connected to heating or electricity.

As I lay there, the reality of my financial situation hit me with complete clarity, a rude awakening. I was going to run out of money very soon. And, unlike T, I was not a dual citizen, I did not have an American passport. I only had a tourist visa, that, like my money, would run out in a few weeks. I couldn't work here. I couldn't stay here. What had I been thinking all this time? Why on earth did I think I could make a new life here? For the first time in many weeks, I was in a bedroom by myself. And for the first time since I had left Australia, I cried all night.

New York to Pittsburgh in October - Philly and the Soul Train

2008-10-18T19:41:00.000-07:00

by Nicole Skeltys

A week and a half ago, we caught a bus from NYC Chinatown to Philadelphia. What happens is you buy your ticket from hawkers off East Broadway, then a person waving a flag yells something incomprehensible at you and you run after them down the street, looking for the right bus. The Chinese bus company operators don't seem to follow any schedule in particular, and they don't bother with niceties like having the name of the destination in the bus window. With luck, you mount the right coach, then after the bus driver ejects the people who are on the wrong coach, you are on your way. After 2 hours of driving through drab New Jersey semi-industrial ruralscapes and stopping at several truck-stops with the occasional 'Haulin' for Jesus' stickered semi pulled into the corner, the Philadelphia skyline comes majestically into view. All this for only $10, the cheapest way to get to Philly by far.

Although New York was crammed, sweating, frantic, with all aspects of life being conducted at high speed and high volume, we never once felt threatened there. My sub-let was in the hispanic and black suburb of Bushwick, Brooklyn, which not so long ago had a reputation for "graffiti and burned cars". But I got on and off the subway alone at night and felt safe. Up at the local laundromat, where T and I were the only white people sitting around watching our undies flip, we felt conspicuous but not ill at ease. (T speculated that the chilled atmosphere could have something to do with the pervasive smell of weed, which sometimes blew like a furnace up from the apartments below my sub-let, often accompanied by bellowing booty rap).

For sure, there are still terrible ghettos in NY, no-go zones. And we were told about roaming Dominican machete gangs who engage in random, psycho displays of macho violence. That was in groovy, increasingly gentrified Williamsburg, where Tanya was staying illegally in the 6th floor of a warehouse, in her ex-fiance's writing studio. One of our fellow Byrdcliffe artist colonists told us how she had been mugged last year in Willamsburg, late at night.

But the most exotic displays of masculinity we saw in Williamsburg were the harmless Hassidic jews, who were everywhere walking at a smartish clip, dressed identically in their black overcoats, stiff white shirts and fuzzy top hats from under which flopped their cute religious ringlets. As we made our way down Diagonal Avenue, the sheer volume of these 19th century figures often made us feel like we had stumbled into a large movie set - a strange Dickension period drama, however, not a blood soaked reenactment of Mean Streets or Taxi Driver. We wandered all over Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens because Tanya got a sub-contracted job photographing suburbs for a guidebook designed for people who were considering moving to the Big Apple. We spent long days navigating subways, sometimes popping up in the middle of projects neighborhoods, then tramping up and down strange streets with all kinds of languages, smells and looks issuing from every open doorway. We often ended up feeling frazzled, slightly deafened, and plain exhausted. But we never felt scared.

But as soon as we stepped off the bus in Philly, we felt calculating eyes upon us. A guy rushed up, pulled our suitcases out from the bottom of the bus, then immediately hassled us for money. We staggered down the street with our suitcases, looking for the right subway entrance. Cars slowed, looked at us. When we asked a young woman for directions, she helped us out, but as she was walking away, she looked over her shoulder and said "Be careful. Particularly at night." We finally got to the right train platform, walking past homeless people slumped against the escalators.

Hours later, we were sitting at a train platform in in the central suburb of Wissahickon, waiting for our couchsurfing host to pick us up as we had arranged before we left NY. The early afternoon light fell over the pleasant, slightly shabby Philly neighborhood. It was very, very quiet. The stillness more noticeable, perhaps, after our ears had spent several weeks blasted by the relentless, amplified cacophany of NYC. Still, it was a little on the eerie side. On the way to Wissahickon, we noticed that there were slow, empty streets, vacant lots. Very, very skinny multistory houses which had once been part of terrace rows, but which for some reason now stood alone, the houses on either side torn down, banks of grass now writhed between dwellings. As the train rattled past, it was like looking at multiple gap-toothed smiles.

Every 20 minutes or so, Tanya made a call to our would-be host, each one ringing out.

Eventually, in a Dr Livingstone spirit, I boldly set off up and around the hill to the left of the station, not quite sure what I was doing. There I found a small bar crammed with drunk men all craning at the TV screen. I walked in and asked the bartender for directions to the street where we were supposed to be staying. After a pause, he twisted his neck away from the TV, glared at me, told me he had no idea where Bourke St was, then turned back to the TV. I looked up at the screen. The Philadelphia Eagles were playing the San Francisco '49ers.

Then it dawned on me. The whole of Philadelphia had stopped. Everyone, everywhere, was sitting around in bars, in their homes or in their buddy's homes, glued to the TV, gunning for the Eagles. Imbibing vast quantities of the local Yuengling ale. There was no way our host, who was a self-professed sports nut, would tear himself away from this momentous event to pick us up. I trudged back down the hill to tell T the bad news. We swore quite a bit, then waited for another 40 minutes for the next train going back to downtown Philly.

But bad news turned into good news again. That night we fell asleep just north of the University district, in the cheapest non-hostel accommodation we could find, a bed and breakfast which called itself The Castle, for the good reason that the old stone building looked exactly like a kitsch version of medieval England, complete with turrets, bay windows and a '70s Lowrey organ in the parlor. On the way there, we were conscious of being the only white people in the public trolley. This time, we felt on edge.

The next day, we wandered around downtown Philly, and the Northern Liberties 'artists reclaiming a slum' neighborhood. After a while, I said to T "This is a great town if you are black or gay, but we are neither". It felt bad saying that, given I knew I owed Philadelphia a lot - after all, it had produced and named the super-lush, super-fly '60s/ '70s funk soul movement, which had provided the soundtrack to my dreamy hours spent as a small child rollerskating around suburban rinks. TSOP's "The Sound of Philadelphia" had actually been the early sound of sub-tropical Brisbane for me. And later in life, I had, like thousands of other remixers, sampled string stabs and sweeps from disco hits like "The Hustle" which, although recorded by the Soul City Symphony in New York, was saturated in the satiny Philly sound. I used Philly-type samples to add retro, loungy, funky character to my electro doofs which would have been as pale and straight as I was without those stolen grooves.

Before I left Melbourne, I was told that Philly was now a hotspot for psychedelic folk, the subgenre that The Jilted Brides occupies. But we didn't have enough time to do research into venues that might host our kinds of bands, and, after spending the next afternoon resting in a park by the Schuylkill river and lazily watching a drug deal take place in the bushes behind us, we were ready to leave. Our last night ended up being a very positive black experience, hanging out in the local African bar, talking to the bemused locals and stuffing ourselves with delicious, cheap Ethiopian stew wrapped in pancakes. But we still felt that Philly was not our town, despite the enormous attractiveness of its proximity to New York. I was pretty sure Philly wouldn't miss us either.

The 5 hour train ride from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh through gentle Pennsylvania farm and woodlands was as pretty as we had been told to expect. Not long after we wobbled up from the passenger car into the bar/diner carriage for a round of beers, one of the Amtrak conductors plomped down firmly in the seat opposite ours and without any introductions whatsoever, started to tell us the history of Pennsylvania railways and the differences between the various contemporary trains that ran on the Philly/Pitt route. The latter points he illustrated by reaching into his uniform pocket and producing numerous scuffed photos of trains which he spread out over the table. T and I lent politely over the images and tried to follow what he was saying. In the opposite booth, an older black guy, spectacularly rigged out in linen kaftan and super-stylish rivulets of gold bling, grinned at our predicament. He later introduced himself as a Pittsburgh-based fashion designer. "Oh, you're gonna love Pittsburgh" he said. "Its a great place to live. Believe me."

We arrived In Pittsburgh late on a hazy Tuesday night. Scott picked us up in his parent's Chevvy pick-up. He and Tanya had really hit it off when we first met at the Montana Artists' Refuge in June. I filmed him striding towards T down the dimly lit platform, then the welcomes, the giggles and hugs. I kept filming as I crouched with the luggage in the back of the pick-up, on our way to Scott's flat, moving the camera from the silhouettes of excited chatter, out the window to Pittsburgh flashing past. Even at night, I could tell the city was one of the most picturesque I had ever seen. We drove through a quilt of rolling hills, historic housing, lonely industrial spaces, all stitched through with parks and wooded areas. My view was often framed by moonlight glinting off the three rivers (the Allegheny, the Ohio and the Monongahela) that triangulated the heart of the city. Scott and T talked non-stop.

We arrived at Scott's 2 bedroom apartment in the old inner working class suburb of Lawrenceville, and shook hands with Dan, his James Dean look-alike flatmate. We were bustled down the stairs. Our accommodation was a couple of camp beds in their basement. A week later, I was bordering on psychosis from lack of sleep, lack of light and cramped living conditions. But that first night felt like luxury, because the air was fresh, the neighborhood was quiet, and we didn't feel scared or out of place at all. I slept soundly because I had a feeling I was going to like Pittsburgh, a lot. In fact I had a feeling, completely irrational given it was based on only an hours' observation late a night, that I might just have found a new home.

New York gigs - September - Part 1: The Lit Lounge

2008-10-10T19:16:00.000-07:00

by Nicole Skeltys

When we introduced ourselves, the large black doorman broke into a big sly grin, showing a gold capped tooth. "The Jilted Brides, huh? Ha ha ha. Thats a great name". A couple of babes dressed in uptown fashions for their night out in the East Village, teetered past us on spiky heels into the club. The doorman nodded after them, still grinning "Hey, they ain't jilted brides. They ain't cooool enough to be jilted brides!".

We'd been booked to play at the Lit Lounge in East Village since April 2008, since before we had left Australia. I'd had an image in my head of New York band venues all looking like photos I'd seen of CBGBs in the late '70s. Dimly lit, low ceilings, dungeon-cool aesthetic, heroin-chic clientele sprawling on crumbling torn black vinyl lounges, decadence. I wasn't disappointed. As Tanya and I made our way down the steep narrow stairs into the band room, I saw with satisfaction that the Lit Lounge was, "a charming cellar hole" (as a delightful elderly lady who came to the show later described it). The venue fitted my NY stereotype perfectly.

Well, almost perfectly. The decor and feel was smouldering and edgy but the audience for the first band (a duo that looked and sounded just like The Dresden Dolls) were a handful of neatly dressed people in middle age. They were the proud parents, uncles and aunts of the band, who politely clapped after every tortured ballad.

Our brand new band arrived, one at a time. First, Stu - our doe-eyed, mild-mannered guitarist, who had been playing in bands ever since he'd been a kid in the late '60s. Then Brian our bassist, the youngest member of the band, who turned up sporting a fedora and spats, looking impossibly dashing. Finally, Garry, our black drummer arrived at the last minute and shook his head in good humored disgust at the tiny crack at the back of the cramped stage that was where he was supposed to set up his kit.

Before we left for the Byrdcliffe art colony in Woodstock in late August, we'd put ads up on Craigslist asking if any NY musicians wanted to join us for our two NY shows. We explained that there was no payment involved, they would be joining us just for the fun of it. I expected to get no response, due to the obvious lack of financial incentive. But I was wrong. A number of musicians responded straight away. One guy described himself as "your jilted guitarist", explaining he'd like to play with us because he "sure knew what it was like to be jilted". One bassist called Gio, a large hispanic guy covered in tattoos (he sent us photos) who seemed to specialize in metal and funk, boasted he could "do slap real well". A "romantic violinist" offered to join us: due to the lack of a Myspace page where we could hear his stuff, he suggested we call him so he could play some soulful strains to us down the phone.

Eventually, we settled on Stu, Brian and Garry because they seemed the most professional and suited temperamentally to our folky/psychedelic/ atmospheric sound. I was both grateful and amazed that musicians of their calibre wanted to help out an obscure Australian duo, purely because they loved our music. But I was very unconvinced that they could master a set list comprising a mixture of tracks from The Jilted Brides and Dust (my previous Melbourne band) in only a couple of rehearsals. For two reasons: most of the tracks were not simple, they had fairly complicated arrangements and chord structures. And it takes a long time for a band to get tight - Dust rehearsed for 9 months before we felt we were good enough to play our first gig.

For the weeks we were in Woodstock, I got a knot in my stomache everytime I thought about our gigs in the Big Apple and our as yet unseen band. Every day, Tanya and I would tramp down the upper Byrdcliffe Road to the Icehouse (a small barn which was our rehearsal space) and we'd sing to the backing tracks which I'd loaded up into I-Tunes on my laptop. As I stared out the window at the light falling through the woods, serenading the unseen bears that everyone told us were out there, I thought: "How are we going to master all these tunes live with only a few hours rehearsal? We are going to sound like a sloppy teenage garage band. We are going to make goofballs of ourselves".

But at our first rehearsal in Brooklyn, on the Monday before our Saturday night gig, I felt the rock and roll angels had once again been pulling cosmic strings on our behalf. Our Craigslist band had not only flawlessly worked out their parts, but they had memorized them already. They knew the songs like they'd been playing them for years. And they were charming, funny, easy to get along with, on our wavelength. They were very enthusiastic about the songs which they told us they loved playing. They were, in fact, a dream band.

On the L-train home to our sub-let in Bushwick that night, I repeated the phrase "dream band" to Tanya many times, who agreed with me. I alternated that phrase with shaking my head and stating. "We are going to pull it off. We are actually going to pull it off!". Tanya confirmed that we had indeed just witnessed another miracle and yes, we were going to pull it off. I scarcely noticed the grimy Brooklyn subway stations as they flashed past. I was not just feeling less terrified about the gig, I was now positively champing at the bit to perform- I knew we were going to sound great.

Sure enough, right from the first few bars of Set Apart, our alt.country opening number, the band kicked in with a vigor, confidence and panache that impressed the audience and resulted in wild cheering after every song. Tanya also looked jaw-droppingly good in her Brigid Bardot look-alike hotpants, fishnets and booties rig-out. Even the harmonium was a hit, with at least one member of the audience pleading for "more harmonium!" when our exotic, much traveled instrument was apparently not loud enough.

After the show, the boys had to split for various reasons, and Tanya and I had to wait around until the other bands on the bill finished playing so we could get paid our cut from the door takings. We didn't mind at all, as it gave us the opportunity to be repeatedly congratulated on our performance and to take liberal advantage of our bar tab. We wandered into the upstairs bar and then down again, pushing past many people dressed in new New Wave couture, drinking and jiggling and (sometimes) shouting compliments at us. The soundtrack to the evening - the house music between bands - could have been the house music at CBGBs in the late '70s/ early '80s: Iggy Pop, Blondie, Bowie, Lou Reed, My Bloody Valentine, Echo and the Bunnymen, Ramones. As we eventually degenerated into a slumped giggling clump in the backstage bandroom, I had (not for the first time on this trip) a sense of having returned to my adolescent years.

Finally Max, the venue manager, appeared Dr Who-like from (literally) a tiny hole in the wall. And, just like an episode from the iconic BBC sci-fi series, members of each of the bands that had played that night moved slowly, awkwardly towards him, the tentative way you would if you were an alien and you saw Dr Who land on your planet. Max clutched a fistful of dollars, and doled out measley sums to each band, followed by what looked like pep talks of some kind. When our turn came, Max at first looked a bit startled to see that we were filming the whole procedure, but then cheerfully informed us that we had pulled more customers than any other band and gave us the remainder of the takings - $80 (after the venue had taken its cut).

Tanya said "Look at this, musicians get treated like shit, its a dogs life!". I whole-heartedly agreed. We fell back into the sticky couch again and laughed and laughed. A silver skull graffitied on the black wall opposite grinned back at us through the gloom. One of my favorite shoegazing anthems of all time, one I had not heard for a very long time - Jesus and Mary Chain's "Just Like Honey" kicked in at full volume. We finally rallied ourselves and with the help of some fellow Byrdcliffe colony artists who had come to see us, we grabbed the harmonium and keyboard, and staggered out into the early morning ruckus playing out on 2nd Avenue. Our first gig on the Eastern seaboard had turned into the quintessential New York underground rock experience and as we hailed down a cab, we felt invincible.

Woodstock Part 2: art colonies and recording studios

2008-10-01T16:01:00.000-07:00

By Nicole Skeltys

Back to the garden

"We are stardust, we are golden,
We are caught in the devils bargain,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden".
“Woodstock”, Joni Mitchell, 1969.

Whitehead's autocratic personality jarred with his espoused libertarian views and alienated many of the artists that initially gathered to live and work in Byrdcliffe’s 30 dark stained hemlock chalets. Several key figures left early on, including poet and author Hervey White who established his own Maverick artists’ colony off Maverick road in Woodstock in 1904. By the '20s, wild Maverick balls were being held which attracted artists, outsiders and hedonists from the Hudson valley and New York. They featured long days and nights of masquerades, cross-dressing, nudity, illegal alcohol, illegal sex, and jazz. In the decades that followed, Woodstock continued to attract and provide a refuge to artists, activists, free spirits and the sexually adventurous. Outdoor musical celebrations continued to be held, and in this sense the iconic Woodstock festival of 1969 was more the culmination of a long bacchanalian tradition associated with the area, rather than the new explosion of hippy consciousness that the media has subsequently portrayed.

On our first day wandering around the village on a bright September morning, it was the legacy of the 1960s and early 70s counterculture, rather than the preceding decades, that was most evident. Shops left you in no doubt that ’69 was a momentous year for Woodstock, and the major source of all tourist commerce ever since. Tie-dyed T-shirts emblazoned with ‘3 Days of Peace and Music’ flapped in windows. Signs in cafes said “Hippies welcome!”. The rainbow colored peace sign served as Woodstock’s local flag, and was stuck, hammered, or hung on most doors and windows. One cramped, dusty boutique specialized in rock legend memorabilia and stocked an impressive array of psych-rock T-shirts (including many alluring Grateful Dead designs which I hovered over for some time), dozens of portraits of Bob Dylan, caches of records with faded covers showing a lot of young men with beards, country frock coats and hats posing in rustic settings. In the town square (more properly described as a small rectangle of grass which served as a local meeting point and hanging out space), a couple of men with long grey hair sat cross-legged on the grass and smoked a joint. The square was surrounded by spiritual shops: a Tibetan arts and crafts shop, a New Age shop offering ‘Spiritual gifts of Light and Love’, a Sufi mystics centre. Incense and wind chimes flowed out.

But there was nothing ‘fringe’ about this place anymore. All the whitewashed New England clapboard houses and shop fronts were immaculately maintained, numerous art galleries discretely offered glossy bland photographic ‘art’ for very high prices. All the comfortable parked cars and SUVs gleamed with newness. Despite the occasional obvious aged acid-casualty mumbling to themselves and shuffling down the street in badly soiled fisherman’s wraparound pants, Woodstock it seemed had, since 1969, been gradually handed over from those who had been expelled from the garden of Eden, but still searched for it, to those who had always lived in paradise, but were quite prepared to buy more of it. Woodstock was now the preferred location for the second or even third home of wealthy, arty New Yorkers who needed a place to unwind for weekends; it was, after all, less than 2 hours commute from the Big Apple, and it offered trees, cafes, watering holes and the still lingering aura of bohemian stylishness. Many celebrities and wealthy rock musicians owned homes in the area.

Still, there was definitely a magic and energy in the air that we had not felt in any of the towns or cities we had visited so far on our US trip. Everyone seemed to be smiling, like they all shared a very cool secret. It was the kind of place where you felt you could just walk up to a stranger’s house and expect to be let in and just given stuff.

Which is exactly what happened, several times.

The first time was when I spotted a sign which said “Jefferson Starship” hanging over the entrance to double story house with a glass frontage in a recess off Mill Hill Road. I wandered over, half-hoping that a member of one of my favorite ‘60s psychedelic bands was actually in there. Tanya joined me and we pressed our noses against the windows. An older, thin man with long bedraggled hair was leaning over a guitar. When he saw us, he jumped up and opened the door: “Come in, come in!” he said, with a giggle.

We entered a ‘70s pine wood studio, CDs piled up, old keyboards racked one top of the other, audio leads and recording gear scattered around. The walls were covered in faded old progressive rock and psychedelic album posters: Yes, King Crimson, Pink Floyd and (very prominently) Jefferson Starship. Rick (our host’s) role on the Starship turned out to be the webmaster: he hosted and maintained the band’s website. In addition to that, he ran a small, low budget recording operation, laying down tracks mostly for visiting musicians – the town attracted quite a number of musical pilgrims every summer, some of whom walked into his studio on impulse, wanting to take a Woodstock recording session away with them as a souvenir. Within a few minutes, Rick was offering to lend me one of his old synthesizers to rehearse on and even to jam with us. By the time we left, he was even offering to record us for free.

A few days later, the temperature soared. Our little nunnery-like rooms in the creaking old Villetta Inn (the main structure in which all the artists in residence stayed at Byrdcliffe) were cooking us like hibachis. It was impossible to work. Tanya grabbed her swimsuit and towel and took off down Lower Byrdcliffe road, which was dotted with large, tasteful expensive houses in the woods, on landscaped acreage. Having selected one with an appropriately large swimming pool, she knocked on the door. When it was apparent no one was home, T changed and dived in the pool, did a few laps then sunbathed.

Ok. Maybe that counts more as hospitality seized rather than freely given. But when Tanya was sprung by the landscape gardener, all that ensued was a flirty conversation and exchange of numbers.

The most spectacular generosity, however, was extended to me by Levon Helm. Prior to Woodstock, I was traveling through Colorado and Texas, meeting other musicians, commune members, former Deadheads, vision questers. When people found out I was going to Woodstock, many urged me to check out the Midnight Rambles shows. The performances weren’t held in a venue, they were held in Levon’s house and studio, a converted old barn in the woods. Helm started the Rambles in a low key way in 2004; now people from all round the world were coming to be a part of these intimate shows, featuring the best roots musicians from around America.

But when I checked the website, I saw to my dismay that all the Rambles that were happening when I was at Byrdcliffe (and all those listed later in the year as well) had sold out. And the Ramble that was happening the next night, Saturday night, looked like it was going to be a corker. Levon’s guest band was Kinky Friedman and The Texan Jewboys. The country crooning showman, humorist and former gubernatorial candidate for Texas was famous for putting on a great show. I emailed Levon’s manager expressing my disappointment at missing out on the show, but asking if it was possible to visit the studio and perhaps meet Helm later in the week. To my astonishment and delight, I was offered a guest pass to the show.

The night far exceeded even my high expectations and proved to be one of the musical highlights of my life. Because the venue was not a venue but a large studio in a custom designed warm wooden room overlooked by an inner balcony, the live sound was flawless – like listening to your favorite record on a top end stereo. It was not crowded, there would only have been about 150 people there, it felt like being in Levon’s lounge – which it virtually was. Both bands played their hearts out and I swear everyone in the room was beaming from ear to ear.

Including me. Particularly when I found myself in Levon’s kitchen later which served as the location for the after party. A very happy accident, all thanks to my highly decorated Spanish leather cowgirl boots. One of the Texan Jewboys, Ratso, noticed me (or rather my boots) when I first arrived and walked into the merchandise room. We got talking, and later during interval, he kindly said I could hang out with him and the rest of the crew after the show. As the night pushed into the wee hours, and more Coors and spleefs were consumed, the conversation roller coasted around the forthcoming election as Kinky (perversely, or perhaps seriously) yelled out McCains virtues while Helm and just about everyone else in the room argued passionately, if fairly incoherently, for Obama. As the band members and hangers on eventually started to wander off into the night, I thanked Levon profusely for his hospitality and wonderful evening (“Youre welcome, honey!” he said, twinkling with gracious good humor, and giving me a hug) and I made my way back to Byrdcliffe on a high that lasted for days.

Helm’s opening up of his studio as an exclusive performance space has enabled him to remain in the Woodstock musical garden of Eden – ie keep his world class country studio and stay financially solvent. This has not been the fate of the other high end Woodstock studios, most of which have shut down over the last few years. The most famous of these was Bearsville, owned by Albert Grossman, a rock mogul who aggressively managed the careers of many of the greatest artists of the ‘60s: Dylan, Janis Joplin, John Lee Hooker, Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez to name but a few. He established his studio in 1969, and throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, the studio attracted roots and rock superstars: The Rolling Stones, Jeff Buckley, Phish, Bonnie Rait, REM, Foreigner, to name but a few. Grossman died in 1986. His widow Sally kept the studio running throughout the ‘90s, promoting Bearsville as “one of the few purely analog recording studios left”.

Ask most musicians who are serious about the sound quality of their recorded music and they will tell you analog recording techniques (tape, valve mixing/compression’ effects, reproduction onto vinyl), in the hands of an expert producer, provide an infinitely better sound quality than digital processes and media. ‘Better’ meaning warmth, nuance, emotional resonance, ‘creaminess’. The ‘90s saw the final mass market triumph of the CD over the vinyl platter, and the increasing power, user friendliness and affordability of computer based digital recording equipment. What was gained in terms of the much-vaunted democratization of the means of album production was lost in the actual sonic beauty of the thing produced. Apparently not enough of today’s commercially successful recording artists or their record companies wanted to pay the premium to recapture that old fashioned loveliness, free of the harsh digital imprisonment of zeros and ones. Or to feel the history in the exposed wooden beams, and see the recording desk that still bore the peeling masking tape with Joplin’s sub-mixes marked out in fading felt pen. Bearsville Studios in its old configuration closed down in 2004.

Road movie endings

As we came to the end of our stay at Byrdsville, we finished off the promo for our documentary. When we were in Portland in July, I had purchased another $300 handycam, which meant we had no less than doubled our film crew. As we reviewed the footage we had taken thus far on our tour we were relieved (and a bit surprised) to see we had a great deal of useable material (interviews, concert footage, travel shots, ‘incidents’). We were hoping to use our promo/teaser to entice a producer on board, particularly as Tanya had completely run out of cash and we were going to have to stay in New York for a while and get some kind of menial work to stay afloat. A producer, we hoped (wildly) might be able to get us some money, help us keep going on our journey.

My final task, craning over my beloved MacBook late into the cicada chorused Catskill evenings, was to organize rehearsals leading up to our NYC gigs at the Lit Lounge and the Trash Bar in the last weekend of September. Thanks to the miracle that is Craigslist, we had found musicians who had agreed to play with us for no other reason that it sounded like fun. A drummer, bassist and guitarist who we had never met in person were even now sitting in their NY apartments listening to the MP3s of our songs and trying to memorize the chord charts I had sent them. What were the odds of a makeshift band who had only played together for a few hours, pulling off an impressive show in front of one of the most sophisticated music audiences in the world? Pretty remote, I thought.

But I also knew that there was a lot riding on our being able to ‘make it’ somehow in New York: impress people, get some kind of fan base. After all we had been through, I didn’t want to have to live through the compulsory tragic endings of American ‘free spirit’ road movies: I didn’t want to have to accelerate off a cliff holding Tanya’s hand; I didn’t want to have to stare grimly into the fire in my Captain America jacket and repeat “We blew it”. I wanted a happy ending.

Woodstock Part 1: The story so far....

2008-09-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

By Nicole Skeltys

Taking the load off

Its January 2008. I am curled up on the couch, its very late. Down the other end, Mark is drooped in a corner, a guinness parked close by. We've just spent a few hours in Mark's home studio, laying down guitar parts for The Jilted Brides’ album. Now we were fading out into the wee hours watching a classic rock movie DVD, our reward for a job well done.

This DVD is 'Festival Express', a documentary I've been wanting to see for a while. In the summer of 1970, a rock festival traveled across Canada by luxury train, stopping to play at festivals in Toronto, Calgary, and Winnipeg. Enticed by the promise of a mobile party, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, The Band, Buddy Guy, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and Ian & Sylvia signed on to the tour for far less than their usual fees. The documentary shows all these artists at the height of their powers jamming and partying with each other non-stop on the long train journey. At the festivals, they let loose with intense performances, on no sleep, many intoxicants and facing riots by disaffected youth who wanted access to the concerts for free.

In the lounge room darkness, the TV provides the only flickering light. The images fade in and out of my consciousness. I'm tired and beery. So is Mark. But there are segments where our eyes widen, we shift, gather ourselves up. Janis sings a version of ‘Cry Baby’ that is stratospheric in its emotional reach, in its unearthing of every conceivable bit of heartbroken yearning. Mark's eyes brim with tears; his divorce is still not far enough away. The Band launch into ‘The Weight’. I find my eyes not moving from the drummer- he seems so 'real', so passionate. His whole youthful body is driving the song along, his voice strains so earnestly over the threadbare lo-fi '60s PA "Take the load off Annie...put the load right on me". I think he means it.

Now, its August 2008, and its very late again. I'm sitting in a large, rustic pine log kitchen and everyone is drinking the free band refreshments, Coors light. A thin, white haired old man with shining eyes and a youthful face, leans across the table and starts to roll a joint. I finally lean across and try and make myself heard above the chatter. "Levon, do you might if I take a picture?" He looks up at me kindly. "Not right now, honey" he says and winks. Then continues to roll the papers. I smile and lean back again. No, I guess I wouldn't want my picture taken right now either.

The old man is Levon Helm, the drummer from The Band. He is 68. There was a time when it wasn't clear if he would ever be able to sing again. He was diagnosed with throat cancer in the late '90s, was apparently advised to undergo a laryngectomy, which he refused and underwent a long period of radiotherapy treatment instead. Earlier that night, he and his house band had brought the house down - his own house in Woodstock, where he hosts what are now world famous 'traveling medicine shows' - The Midnight Rambles. His band numbered anywhere from 8 to 10, horn section, percussion, two gorgeous lady singers (including his daughter). And he could still sing, a testament to his courage in the face of terminal illness - he carried his last song, ‘The Weight’ with as much conviction and energy as he did as a young man in 1970.

I had had cancer last year, breast cancer. And if, when I started the treatment, one of my nurses had leant across the radiotherapy machine in room C2 at the Peter MacCallum Institute, winked at me huddled under my green hospital gown and told me 'not to worry, honey', within a year I would be in America, sitting in the kitchen of one of the most inspiring musicians in the history of rock music, I don't think I would have believed her.

How I got to Woodstock

I was in Woodstock because I was an artist in residence at one of the oldest artist colonies in the US - Byrdcliffe. The Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts colony was established on seven farms in 1903, the utopian vision of a wealthy Englishman named Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead. Whitehead was heavily influenced by Ruskin with whom he had studied, and he left England to search the US for the perfect site for a utopian community. He and his followers eventually decided the pastoral beauty of the Catskills was the perfect place to establish their early commune.

But I knew nothing about the history of Woodstock when, in December 2007, I first started to collaborate with a Sydney based photographer and film-maker friend, Tanya Andrea Stadelmann. Thanks to the digital panopticon that is Facebook, where everyone's emotional states and situations are under voluntary 24 hour group surveillance, Tanya and I could see by each other's daily status updates that we had a lot in common, including disillusionment with the Australian arts establishment, a love of '60s/ '70s psychedelic music and films, and the desire to make major changes in our lives.

On the day after Christmas 2007,Tanya flew down from Sydney, and over mint juleps in the sweltering post-Christmas Melbourne heat, we sat on the coffee stained couch in my Melbourne group household, and tossed around ideas about how we could escape our dead-end situation in Australia. Within days, we had hatched a wildly ambitious plan: we'd start a musical act, tour North America and make a film.

For sure, we faced a few hurdles: we didn't have an album, Tanya hadn't sung for 15 years, we had no contacts in America, owned no video equipment and had hardly any money. But what we had going for us was a kind of Withnail and I fantastic desperation, a vivid imagination fueled by joblessness, despondency and intoxicants.

For some reason, I fixated on the idea we should start our quest by trying to get accepted to play at the New Music West festival in Vancouver, Canada, in May, one of the biggest showcases of its kind. To be in the running for this, we had to submit tracks to the organizers by the 31st January. I look back now on what followed and our frenzied activity to achieve this deadline seems comically surreal, like a Loony Toons cartoon on fast forward.

First, our duo needed a name. ‘The Jilted Brides’ suddenly presented itself to my consciousness late one night as somehow capturing the exact essence of whatever it was we were and whatever it was we were going to sound like. I knew heartache was going to be a major theme, given I had also broken up with my partner, then lost my mother, in the 12 months prior to my cancer diagnosis.

Beaver-like, I finished off a swag of already half-completed songs then laid down most of the instrument parts in my backyard studio. Tanya and I worked around the clock recording vocal takes, sweating profusely, dizzy with the suffocating January 100 degree heat and our mint julep hangovers.

Tanya whipped up the now compulsory MySpace site, claiming primogeniture from another rival UK Jilted Brides who appeared just days later but didn't even have any tunes yet. I organized for a photoshoot, persuading a photographer friend and a make-up artist to take press shots in my lounge in exchange for beer and mint juleps. Their instructions were: "Make me look like Bobby Gentry and Tanya like Brigid Bardot". Easy for Tanya who is, in the words of one journalist, 'a Swiss blonde bombshell', a lot more hair teasing and false eyelash activity was required for me to approximate '60s girl glamour.

Then, on the 31st of January, we had a debut album, 'Larceny of Love', a website, and a press kit. I pressed 'submit' on the Sonicbids promoter drop box button for the New Music West festival. For good measure, I also sent off our EPK (electronic press kit) to venues in New York, and to the organizers of Terrastock, the world's biggest psychedelic music festival, to be held in Kentucky in June.

Sometime during all this, Tanya showed me faded photocopied pages from an old directory of American artist colonies that someone had lent her ages ago. I could scarcely believe what was I was reading - apparently there existed places an artist could go for weeks, months at a time and you could work on your art and pay no, or almost no, rent, and sometimes you would even get fed! I'd never heard of such utopias in Australia. My gut feeling that America could be the magical solution to my life problems started to feel slightly more rational. A quick Google showed that there were dozens of colonies in picturesque locations scattered around the US. The problem was, the deadline for summer residencies had already passed for a number of them, and for the remaining ones, submissions had to made within the next few weeks.

This set off another Loony Toons episode as Tanya and I scrambled to oil and polish our long neglected biographies and portfolios, paid a local visionary artist $500 to whip up dazzling psychedelic artwork for our album and website, and struggled to write convincing sounding submissions outlining our intention to use our time as artists in residence to make no less than a full length film of our (as yet non-existent) North American tour. We fired off 8 submissions to colonies all over the US.

Then we waited. Meanwhile, Tanya started to apply for jobs ushering people on and off the ferries that take people from mainland Australia to Tasmania, our island state. I started to investigate cleaning jobs, and eventually an agency offered me work cleaning bathrooms and picking up rubbish at Melbourne airport. Every second Monday, I took Tanya to the local welfare office to put in her dole form, her only form of income since her melt-down last year. I would sometimes spot other musicians standing in the long queues.

But on the morning of 5 April, the cosmos decided to pull us back from the brink of a winter spent shivering in low paid jobs on wharves and airport terminals. I sat groggily at the dining room table, and logged into my email, my usual morning ritual. I gave a yelp. I ran outside to the studio (in which Tanya was now living, next to piles of my recording equipment and old analog synthesizers). "They want us in Woodstock!!" I half-screamed. Tanya's eyes bulged. "I don't believe it, I don't believe it" she kept half-shouting back. But it was true. Byrdcliffe offered us our first artist residency, for the month of September. This was followed within days by more acceptances from other colonies: the Montana Artists' Refuge, in Basin, Montana; the Espy Foundation in Oysterville, Washington; Soaring Gardens near Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the Sustainable Arts Society in Blue Ridge, Georgia.

Then, perhaps even more incredibly, the New Music West festival in Vancouver told us they wanted us to play. We were offered dates at venues in New York. The prestigious, the 'extremely hard to get into because it is so cool' Terrastock festival offered us a place on one of their stages. Somehow, without us having played a single gig, a North American tour had actually materialized.

The final Loony Tunes sequence played out as T and I frantically sold off piles of our possessions on E-Bay in order to raise the airfare money. Tanya bought a Sony 1 chip handycam for $300, the means by which our road movie documentary was to be produced. By 13 May, we were flying to Canada, the last of our cash tied up in the digital handkerchief of a joint account, our bulging suitcases and an Indian harmonium, The Jilted Brides’ signature instrument, nestled in the cargo hold. On the long flight over, we accepted every complimentary drink, felt the immense weight of the last few months’ efforts start to leave our muscles, and occasionally burst into incredulous giggles in anticipation of all the adventures that now surely awaited us…..