magic dirt

I’ve been spending a lot of time with ghosts lately. They’ve been surfacing from old photos – some, not that old – as I’ve been digitising my negatives. Loss, it’s like a sea creature, isn’t it; a kraken, rising up when you least expect it, wrapping its long, sticky tentacles of lost love and missed opportunity and abject failure, all those dark tendrils that curl around your heart, your mind, even your lungs. And squeeze. It’s hard enough to face in the privacy of your home, let alone taking it on the road and singing it to faceless masses. Masses who chat over the top of your hearteache, who pay lip service to your craft … no, I can’t imagine it.

Which is why I found Adalita’s solo show at Melbourne’s Toff of the Town so damn engaging. I’ve seen her rock out before at the helm of Magic Dirt – I think the last time, maybe the time before, her lead guitarist stabbed his guitar neck through the low ceiling insulation at Brisbane’s venerable sweat box, The Zoo. Great gig. Great emotion.

And last night at the Toff, it was all about emotion, and there’s no better way to explain it than by starting at the finish, the sole, perfunctory encore tune, anything but perfunctory here. Adalita and guitarist JP Shilo duetted while MD guitarist Raul Sanchez slowly wound up a buzzing guitar, its recurring rasp slowly drowning out the singers as they backed away from the mics, until it was only the guitar, discordant, chaotic, howling. The guitar was loss and the crowd applauded as silence fell, because they understood enough to know that when Adalita dedicated that song to Rowland S Howard and Dean Turner, it was a eulogy.

The ghosts… Howard, an Aussie music legend of Birthday Party fame who had a big hand in Shilo’s career, and MD bassist Turner both died in 2009. The latter co-produced Adalita’s self-titled solo album, which she’s touring now. As if stepping out from the shadow of a band isn’t enough pressure; isn’t enough vulnerability.

In the absence of her band, Adalita had PJ providing effects and support on guitar and violin. Sanchez stepped up for an atmospheric dual guitar instrumental, and support act Amaya Laucirica played drums for one and later a guitar duet for ‘Good Girl’.

It’s a line-up you’ll hear on Adalita’s album, which provided the set list for the evening. She has a great voice, Adalita, and it was grand to hear her playing with form, breaking up the rock song formula to turn songs into stories with changes of pace and volume. It was a short and sharp set, a little melancholy, a lot hungry, a solid chunk of Gibson-driven rockin’ with backing tracks and effects pedals filling out the sound where needed. But that encore: such a powerful ending for a gig on a tour that signifies a new start.

I should think the ghosts would be happy with that.

WE got to the Toff halfway through Spencer P Jones‘ support gig, and apparently halfway through an argument as well. The one-time Beast of Bourbon was hurling insults and guitar licks at a section of the crowd in a performance that straddled the line between performance poetry and song; there was a certain air of Johnny Cash-style maudlin in there, between the shots of tequila (was it?) and slurps of beer and fiery glances. For the record, Amaya Laucirica played first support.

I’ve been trying to keep up with the pile of ‘to read’ books, and struggling. The pile never seems to go down! But here’s some recent ones I’ve ticked off:

I finally got to Magic Dirt, a collection of shorts from over-achieving Australian Sean Williams. There are a bunch of lovely stories here, most with a preface from the author about how they came to be. Two of my favourites are ‘Passing the Bone’, a gorgeous take on the zombie story, and ‘White Christmas’, a very different approach to the apocalypse. There a goodly number of SF stories, some concerned with Williams’ ongoing fascination with the idea of just how humanity might cope with the distances of space, and other post-human conundrums, and one that isn’t spec fic at all.

Note: There is also a superb Aussie rock band called Magic Dirt.

And for something completely different, I rolled Rant, by Chuck Palahniuk. This was a delightfully quick read, the story of the eponymous Rant being told through the accounts of those around him, documentary style. It’s cleverly done and the characters are drawn with considerable relish and appeal, and I much enjoyed the dystopia that the alternative history provides with all its Ballard-lite car crashing and diurnal/nocturnal divide. I didn’t quite go for the final conceit of just what was happening here (it belongs to a certain plot device that I always have trouble getting my head around), but didn’t mind so much, the ride had been so enjoyable.

Check out Chuck’s writing tips

Over on the non-fiction shelf, there’s A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels and Other Subversive Spirits, by Carol and Dinah Mack. This survey of, well, the title says it all, really, was going pretty well as it discussed fey folk of water, mountain, forest and soforth. It sets out each entity by description, then a little story about them, and then a section on disarming and dispelling them: identify, case study, coping technique. But the guide loses traction with a few of its inclusions, the spirits being so specific (such as St Anthony’s demons) and so powerful (such as Kabhanda and several deities) that the guide’s ‘disarming and dispelling’ section is rendered irrelevant, there being neither disarming nor dispelling available (it might as well have been renamed ‘put your head between your legs and kiss your arse goodbye’). The inclusion of psychological entities such as Freud’s Id and Jung’s Shadow seemed a step too far. Still, as an introductory guide to mythology, not bad, and the introduction to the role of spirits within each domain gave cause for reflection.

On a similar theme, there’s Anthony Finlay’s Demons: The Devil, Possession and Exorcism, the author being a former Catholic priest who offers up a history of Christianity’s relationship with Satan and his minions and the Church’s changing attitude to possession and Satan. It’s a good starting point for an overview of how Satan came to his position within Christian dogma, Finlay showing a lovely balance between logic and faith as he charts the course in conversational, approachable prose. There’s some discussion of the role of evil in the world and Christianity’s loss of ground to materialism and atheism and other alternative viewpoints. Finlay cites historic cases of possession, introduces pop culture portrayals through the likes of The Exorcist, but doesn’t reveal too much detail about his own experiences. I suspect this book is aimed at readers from within the Church, but I found the basic history and information to be thought-provoking.<p
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