Communal ridiculous celebrates cat AIDS, in her hand

I don't know who's idea it was to start singing but we were all doing it. Spencer was cranking out song after song on the guitar and somewhere along the way we all lost our shit and just sang as loud as we could. Waving around our arms and creating one hell of an unharmonious racket.

It might have been the cold, the hours we spent UFO spotting in the park in the middle of winter, Spencer's idea of an ace birthday party, or the sheer volume of drinking under our belts. After the park where Spencer spotted fifteen UFO's and nobody else any at all we congregated in Spencer's lounge room. There were already people there, drunk as fuck and making little sense to anyone but themselves. One small woman in the corner held up her hand in greeting, showing off a fresh looking graze on the heel of her palm. She said 'I've got cat AIDS' then went back to the bottom of her glass.

Someone explained on the small woman's behalf that she had slipped on some pavers and grazed her hand. She was convinced that there was cat urine somewhere in the mix and now she was telling everyone about her new dose of hopefully imaginary cat AIDS.

Songs turned into time and we sang our way through three more bottles of wine. There were highlights, old favourites, songs nobody at all knew the words for so we all just made noises that kind of sounded like the right words were somewhere underneath the almost melodic synchronised guttural utterances.

Spencer started playing 'Zombie' by The Cranberries. It seemed like we all knew the words, everyone jumping in with;


But you see, it's not me, it's not my family. 
In your head, in your head they are fighting,
With their tanks and their bombs,
And their bombs and their guns.
In your head, in your head, they are crying...

In your head, in your head, Zombie, zombie, zombie.

Then came a pause in the singing, no one remembering the next verse, some of us started just humming and harmonising the right sounds but from the corner a clear voice started ringing out singing.

'I've got cat aids, in my haannd, in my hand, in my hand

I'm still fighting'.

There was a communal shrug then everyone, and I mean everyone, all fifteen of us, fell into the song with enthusiasm so wild it was frightening. 

'She's got cat aiiiids in her haaaaand, in her haaaaaaaand, cat aids cat aids, but she's fighting'.

Spencer had his wits about him and started playing us in a loop. The small woman in the corner repeated her solo verse, holding her injured palm out and rising from her chair like she was on wires. Three drummers in the room started banging beer bottles on the table and someone picked up another guitar. The chorus swelled again and again 'She's got cat aiiiids, in her haaaaaand, cat aids cat aids, but she's fighting'.

Spencer played us in a loop for an age but the song only gained momentum. We were for those minutes joined together in the height of a communal ridiculous. Together as one voice of call and response, all of us screaming words through laughter. The night and the songs went until just about dawn with moments so strong you could pen a book about them but that one, the impromptu chorus of cat AIDS, well that was really something.

Nuns!

Illustration by Onnie Cleary

 Nuns! I've been banned from writing about my house so this week it’s nuns. I couldn't help but notice the large flock of nuns, in white habits and wimples, chanting on the corner outside my office. At first I thought they were chanting at Ding Dong Dang, the ancient and well-attended karaoke bar that has featured in car ads and one song by Sydney band Psychonanny and The Babyshakers. As I approached from downhill I imagined I heard the nuns singing said band’s Ding Dong Dang, the woeful tale of the disappearance of a girl named Ashley. It soon became clear they were chanting something along the lines of, "Hail Mary full of stuff, Hail Mary you're very tough", and the Ding Dong Dang was coming from my iPod. 

The nuns - and their posse of priests and worshippers - stayed on the corner outside my office for a very long time. They chanted about Mary, God and some other people without pause whilst holding cheap-looking candles. After eliminating the possibility of them being an en masse outdoor karaoke performance, I decided to investigate what it was they were really doing. Through a scientific investigation process involving three listens to the song Ding Dong Dang and a minor hair-on-fire incident, I reached a firm conclusion. The nuns were using the occasion of International Women's Day to protest the existence of a women's clinic. If this is the best idea they had for celebrating women then they suck. Nuns suck.

My friend Leif once told me, in astonishing detail, about a video he saw of nuns sucking - nuns sucking all kinds of things. I was not surprised to discover that he finds the idea of nuns erotic. It just so happens that Leif's housemate is one of the singers from Psychonanny and The Babyshakers, which leads me back to the song and the street corner. This might not be so much about nuns as it is about geography and sound.

Some corners have a smell, like the corner of Pitt and Redfern streets in Redfern, some corners have a revolving temporal relationship with colour, light or shade. The corner outside my office seems to be developing a sense of something else altogether. Let's start with Ding Dong Dang. It was voted Sydney's fourth best karaoke bar by Time Out Sydney. My friend P Street writes for Time Out so it’s not too much of a leap to imagine that it was he who rated the bar, which is important for the following imaginary scenario.

Picture this. P Street is inside Ding Dong Dang singing his heart out to his open notebook, in the very same room Ashley last sang in before disappearing forever. Outside, a large posse of nuns chants over their cheap candles in the direction of the women's clinic while the producers of a car advertisement arrange three models in front of the green and white checkerboard tiles of Ding Dong Dang. Inside the women's clinic the medical staff are hard at work doing medical things and have no idea they’re about to be overrun by nuns. Across the street, I'm working in my office wishing I was at a party at Hibernian House, visible in the near distance over the heads of the nuns. On the opposite corner, the staff of The Australia Council for The Arts are ignoring everything that goes on and taking turns to have bathroom breaks so they can adjust the artful draping of their red plastic bead necklaces. Back in Newtown, Leif farewells his housemate who is off to a soundcheck for a gig at The Excelsior Hotel. The first song on their set list is Ding Dong Dang. Leif finds himself satisfyingly alone, wanders around the flat for a while and then decides that seeing as he is alone, just this once, he might put on the video featuring sucking nuns.


First published on RHUM...

Spencer lodges complaint number 42367262868275083270 but this time he might have a point

Spencer once said to me 'never trust a writer, they know how to make things sound just how you want to hear them'. I paused my milkshake drinking just long enough to stick my tongue out at him but then on Sunday he lodged a complaint and this time I think he might have a point.

Sunday afternoon, walking down Enmore Rd on the way to the Changing Lanes Festival, I told Spencer all about my Saturday night. Later that afternoon I relayed the same story to Abdullah and some of the Psychonannies over coffee. Spencer protested at the telling of the story, saying 'it's all in the telling, you wouldn't sound so good if you gave them the same version you gave me'.


Saturday night as told to Spencer:
DS: I had to go to my brother's girlfriend's birthday party at her parents' house. I didn't want to go because I was dead tired but I went, cause I like her.
S: How was it?
DS: Brother had some of that lemon stuff my crazy old relative makes then I got a lift home from a friend of the girlfriend's brother, which was nice.
S: Told you would end up having a good time.
DS: I hate Western Sydney but food was nice. I was starving. Free food is good but I hate trains. They are stupid. Do you think my hair looks stupid? [pauses to look at hair in reflection of shop window]
S: Not more stupid than normal. [rolls eyes] I had a $2.50 stick thing on a roll.
DS: Those are good. How was your gig last night?
S: All right I spose. What's this festival going to be like.
DS: Dunno. Don't want to go but the editor is kind of making me.


Saturday night as told to Abdullah and some of the Psychonannies:
DS: Last night I traveled West to a convict settlement and drank moonshine Limoncello at a party where most people were speaking French and sometimes Cajun.
PN's: You're always doing stuff like that.
DS: The food was amazing and I got a ride home from a 6'2'' racing car driver.
PN's:  Racing car driver!
DS: She was awesome and kind of beautiful. She's about six foot two and has long red hair that hangs to her waist. I got home in record time.
PN's: Is she single?
DS: Doubt it.
PN's: Are you going to Changing Lanes?
DS: Sure am, just picked up my media pass.

Whores, psychonannies, damn building and a new kind of floor

Club 77 is the kind of dive I dream about. Strobe lights in the men's toilets, fluorescent picture of a naked woman spray-painted onto the wall. There is illegal indoor smoking, a Death Star mural, a faux stuffed tiger head behind the bar and a door bitch that has been watching re-runs of original Degrassi Junior High. The women's toilets are decorated with pink spray-paintings of razor blades and naked women on motorcycles. The main problem is the absence of either sticky or bouncy floors. I guess they must hose the bloody joint with a fire hose. Even the vending machine is lit with a red light.

Whores (Chris Colla from Atrocities, some guy I only know as Big Al and Sarah) climbed onto the low stage. Sarah looked damn beautiful under those lights drumming loose and raw like a slow motion roller coaster. This small band was, at times, extraordinary. Chris and Sarah came offstage, came over to sit with Spencer and me, they seemed short and like their ordinary selves. For a moment or two their music had made them large. I'll go out of my way to see them again though it could be difficult to track the trio down. Sarah tells me they might play under a different name each gig. They'll alway be Whores to me.

Psychonanny and The Babyshakers swear they aren't a rockabilly band but they were doing a grand impression of one, they could use more than one kind of drumbeat. Sonia has the kind of voice worth listening to, she's the opposite of a bombshell or what happens after the bomb has gone off. If I could figure out a way to be like her then I'd do it in a flash. You should have seen her up there, cigarette hanging low in the corner of one lip, tambourine rising and falling when she felt like it with an enviable amount of indolence. The not-Simon guitarist has a habit of muddying up the sound, someone give that man a slide, some pedals and the instructions to not play the same thing as Simon at the same time. One song, a slow song was grand until suddenly it transformed into yet another rockabilly song, I'm not sure why they did that. But Jesus they can roll when they get going with that sound that shakes your shoes until you're on your feet and shaking with your shoulders dropped back and knees bent in a stiff-legged forgotten dance from before Elvis.

Earlier I stepped aside so Anthony from Damnbuilders could take his shot, he stalked round the table aiming at balls and smoking cigarettes. Half the girls in Sydney, my side of Sydney not the shiny and terrible side, are developing a thing for him. I've seen him around and idly wondered how he managed to wear that kind of hat with that kind of beard without looking like a serial killer. Spencer and I were talking about him on the way back to Newtown. Spencer kept saying "Is it the beard? Is that what they like?". Someone said he once punched a man for calling him Grizzly Adams, I'd call him Grizzly Adams if I ever got the chance but I'd hang on round his neck really tightly until his urge to punch subsides. Damnbuilders opened with Batman, not Prince but Adam West, followed by what happens when you play Deep Purple in slow motion. After that who the hell knows what that was, I didn't mind it but things definitely took a turn for the what in the hell when Anthony shifted from guitar to keyboard, a sort of dance thing, greatly appreciated by the wall of Indie Kids obscuring my view.

Two known associates of Freddie Mercury Guy played overly loud obsurely chosen tracks between bands, sitting in the dj booth looking like extras from the 1970's. I walked through a dense wall of marijuana smoke in the women's toilets, Sonia nearly got stuck in a cubicle and a Goth who calls himself a death rocker danced like it was 1952.