borders, edges

In regards to transitional seasons and watching it all happen before your eyes: a few weeks ago Uncle Jed and drove Grand Ridge Road in Gippsland from Mirboo North to somewhere along the M1…the map is still in the car.  It’s hard to know whether to migrate it to the great map collection, a file drawer full of all variety of maps, or to start a car collection of possible adventures.  So we drove and covered all manner of territory - there are some abrupt and diverse changes of landscape along the way.

Gippsland is a stormy place and thus everything is emerald and grey and very visually pleasing.  We had a bonnet picnic somewhere up near the Mt Worth State Park, and as we ate sandwiches and talked to the bovines and rotated our orientation to the four unique views we had of that dot on the map, we could hear a thunderstorm rolling over the hills.  Thunderstorms are quick motherfuckers - we could tell that we’d be cutting it close for getting out of there before the storm hit.  We ended up running from it, but not before we stopped to watch it roll over a valley and take some pretty pictures.  It’s a strange concept to see the border of a storm or perhaps of weather in general - to be able to stand for a second with one foot in the rain and one out of it.  Because they’re always in motion that border is hard to comprehend - it’s not static, and we all know that repeated adjustment of borders tends to produce anxiety.  It’s hard to think of storm as having an edge - and I think often we tend to internally measure weather in terms of time - we know how long it was present in our lives and how long it affected the daily Runnings of Things.

So here’s a picture of the edge of a storm.  The weather in Melbourne is:

go back forward

Homesickness as I experience it is a dull sort of ache that is easy to forget when there’s a more immediate sensation, but which will always and eventually settle back in. It falls into the general category of melancholia, but is one of the least debilitating members of that emotional genus. It’s like the ache you get after being tattooed, which is quite a pleasurable and edgy sensation. You feel satisfied - you chose this, this was intentional, and it’s with you now forever and the ache is just part of it and you don’t judge it like some sort of negative externality. It’s a part of the whole thing and the whole thing is good, is motion, is construction.

I have noticed that homesickness does not specify a single home but an idea of home, of home as a concept. To me there is a looseness in the word ‘home’ and even more in the question ‘where are you from?’ At what point in the chain of geographical references invoked by the term ‘home’ is an actual origin identified? de Botton gives his analysis of Flaubert’s attitude toward origins and nationalities in The Art of Travel - he was ‘as much Chinese as French’ - and the question ‘where are you from?’ was one of affinity, not necessity. For those with mulitple affinities, or an affinity to motion, ‘home’ is a funny brown colour like the one you got when you mixed all of the finger paints together.

A flavour, a scent, a song, a book, a line from a television show, a peculiar turn in the weather, an image, the specific sound of a specific key in a specific lock - these things send me into this almost endless and entirely circuitous sequence of invocations that have composed my homedoing. ‘This weather tastes like London‘ seems like a rational thing to say. Each place is a gateway to another place, and I build this web of places in the world and my way of building it is entirely unique. This is what home looks like - it’s always weaving in and out of itself and stopping at places it has already been and attempting to reproduce itself. And thus the general blur; the muddy brown colour.

Homesickness is a reminder and it tows with it gratitude, self-reliance, and affirmation. Leaving can be a sort of masochism, but one that, if indulged with discretion, can sting in all the right places and serve as a refresher for what you’ve endured and what you’ve brought upon yourself. Homesickness, like the leaving thing itself, is for me a sign of forward motion. Turning over and over the past in order to make it functional for the present, going back to be here to go forward. I choose to be Homesick, because it’s the only way I know what’s home.

xo
bs

Please click the images to see them sized properly - I cannot figure out how to get it not to crop them or how to size them for the margins in the template. If anyone has help, I will give you food in exchange.

missing myron

It’s a sad day in the ‘Burgh.

Myron Cope is a fucken legend of broadcasting, sports writing, and general local colour in Pittsburgh, my hometizzy. His voice is a Pittsburgh trademark and something that I’ve often Googled when homesick. He speaks a dense, frantic Pittsburghese and his raspy voice represents all that is haggard and yellowing about the city - even though he’s had it since he was young. I know of no one who could get more validation for making up words for shit than Myron, and I can just imagine those words being uttered over col’beers and scrawled on posterboard hung in shop windows in the Steel City in the days following his death. I know it’s cheesy, but I wish I was there to be with the fellow mourners - this is one of those things you can’t possibly explain to a non-Pittsburgher.

Cope is best known in the ‘Burgh as the colour analyst on Steelers radio broadcasts, and generations of Pittsburghers have a hard time separating that from their experience of Stiller Sundays and weeknight radio analyses. My dad had a special method for watching Steeler games, which involved turning the volume right down on the teevee, tuning the radio to KDKA 1020, and blasting it through stereo speakers. I didn’t understand this at the time, but now it makes perfect sense - Cope made you feel like you were right there at the game, screaming with the rest of those crazy fucks wearing nothing but black and gold body paint in the middle of winter. I remember being in my living room in McKees Rocks, watching my dad watch the game. Snow on the ground outside, dad in moccasin slippers, plaid shorts, and a NASCAR t-shirt, going out to the back porch between plays to turn the wings on the grill or get some more crinkle cut potato chips. He used to drape a Terrible Towel over the top of the television and place a mock-up Steelers helmet on top of that, building a Sunday Shrine to Steel Curtain. Before I was old enough to stay up for a whole night game, I could hear him downstairs yowling along with Myron over every Stiller success. None of this would have had as much of an impression upon me if not for Cope and everything he brought to the experience of being a Steelers fan.

In 2006, for my 22nd birthday, my dad sent me a copy of Cope’s autobiography Double Yoi, titled after one of his many catch-phrases used to describe football and life in general. In the inscription dad predicted a Super Bowl win for the Stillers. They won that year, just a year after Myron had retired from the booth. It’s honestly one of the best books I’ve ever read, and if you are from Pittsburgh or want to properly understand your Pittsburgher friends, you really need to read it. The only thing better than reading Double Yoi would be to listen to it as an audiobook read by the author, which unfortunately won’t come to pass, either because Myron died or because it would be a very difficult thing to propose to a publisher. There is a certain breed of person who can tolerate that voice for more than a few minutes, and nearly all members of this breed live in the Pittsburgh metro.

Well, Myron, I hope you and Mildred keep your afterlife radios tuned to 1020, Terrible Towels in hand. I know I will be, and I’m in Australia, which is heaps further away than the afterlife.

xo
bs

camp camp

Once upon a time, at a farm in Dunoon, NSW, a whole buncha kids gathered together at the loving, list-making request of a certain farmgrrl to celebrate the existence of life and one another. Or maybe they were just trying to stay away from the Lismore showgrounds. Either way, they were there, they were quare (past participle of ‘queer’, dontcha know), and I got to watch.

I am challenged by the task of saying ‘what Camp Camp was’ for those who haven’t already heard me prattle on about it. Seems to me that it was a sometimes loosely, sometimes intimately assembled group of folks who started hanging round Matiatia sometime after Christmas and stopped…well, they haven’t really stopped so far as I can tell. Seems like quite a few of them are practically living there in their heads (myself included), and that some may even make that materialise to living there for reals. But since this post is more personal and more for those who did hear me prattle or who experienced it for themselves, I won’t muck about with definitions.

Instead, as a way of debriefing myself from Camp Camp and also giving it the recognition it deserves in virtual print, I am going to use the words of Camp Camp Monstress Vee Bee as points of departure for my own thoughts about what it was and what it did and how I experienced it from my little corner of the room/farm/lens.

connect with the Difference that is living outside of the cultural centres, embrace the landscape, be here now and other platitudes which seem to fit

Over the last six or so months since I started going to the farm for various reasons, it has come to embody all that is vastness and expansion and seeing over the tops of things. It has started this big internal push for me towards geographical remoteness - it made me consider the possibility that there was life for me beyond urbanity. Many of the Camp Campers were urban folk, and I sensed this collective curiosity and relief at being out of that infrastructure. The farm is very much about what is happening right now. As a citydweller I am not terribly used to what is happening right now as I am constantly going somewhere else, planning how to strategically use each moment of rush rush rush, and so there is a challenge in that Difference. One that I gladly accept every time I get into that outdoor bath or eat something I have just picked out of the garden (I constructed many small salads of cherry tomatoes and rocket whilst standing next to the chook dome looking out over the tops of things).

I’m glad it rained.
I’m sure you all feel the same, even if you wished for sun.
I’m so pleased that you were all so intrepid, that the rain became something which created a lockdown, but such a nice one, for that period of time.

It rained. It blanketed rain for days and days and more days and we all had to be mermaids and mermen and this required a certain cooperation and collectivity. I live alone. My life is very individual. I have a Job in a Company and I do these Certain Things and someone else does their Certain Things. At Camp Camp, you do what needs doing, and everyone has a stake in that and in meeting needs and feeding the troupes and making cocktails in large quantities and mopping the grime off the floor. Of course this would have been required without the rain, but the rain made it more immediate and urgent and close. It also made me stay longer than I was planning to. I loved this. The closing of roads out, the lack of control I had over the situation, the fact that everyone else was in the same boat, all of these were presents from the rain and I was grateful.

Bee Ess, for behind camera duties above and beyond and the creation of such beauty through the eye

At Camp Camp I experienced myself as a voyeur and a documentarian. Being that the Monstress was my only pre-existing connection to this gathering, I was a bit of an outsider to the whole thing, and my main function became to sit back and watch (with a camera at the ready when it was needed). The camera has become an extension of my already well-developed voyeurism because it allows me to frame things as I observe them - with edges and borders in place where they are apparent to me as an outsider. It also lets me capture things I may not have noticed in the flurry of happening so that I can look more intensely later on. It’s become a processing tool and an apparatus of desire. Documenting things photographically feels like a piece of service to me as well - I like being the one with the camera and the wherewithal to use it. It’s a skill I have to share, and it felt good to have one of those in a situation where all of the bakers and dishwashers and table-scrapers had already been found.

I know that this is all a bit disjointed, and the more I write the less it’s for anyone but Camp Campers. Meh. There are a few more small pieces I’d like to add.

Camp Camp was Camp for a reason. Pink bodysuits and fake eyelashes, dogs in cages, bound dishponies, and Hot Apron Sluts abound. I don’t have much of a queer sphere in my current life configuration, so I was grateful for so much Big Gay Energy around me. It reminded me of this part of my life that needs more engagement and community. You know you’re in queer country when you hear the word ‘facilitation’ used to refer to the promotion of possible sexual liasons, and that makes me glow.

Also: while there was of course some intimate collectivity going on, I also felt like folks were able to use the space of Camp Camp individually as well. I think we all took something different home with us, and despite the close quarters there was room for individual experience and contemplation. I think this has much to do with the farm itself and the way things are configured and that aftorementioned Difference. Each of us inhabited that space in a different way and I think it would be an amazing project to have us all report back on that - you can bet that a thousand different thoughts were happening in these contemplative and creative minds over the course of Camp Camp and I think it meant something different but of great significance to everyone.

Thanks to the Great Facilitating Listmaking Monstress and to the Camp Camp organism as it existed then and exists now. I’m carrying it all around with me as a reminder of what is possible.

xo
bs