tigertail in new york

My Dear Friends in Australia,

I miss you. I miss having people who know you really well and are there for you in ways you don't even think about till after they're not. I miss calling people up on the phone for a good yarn (talk) and knowing it's only going to cost me around 30c no matter how long I talk. I miss hanging out on weekends in the summer in Sydney with no real plans - just going to the beach, an impromptu bbq, walking by the water, dinner parties - oh how I miss dinner parties!!

I miss girlfriends who listen to your stories and problems and remind you how you told them three years ago you weren't going to do stupid things like that again. I miss hanging out with my posse of gay boys. I miss lunches in the park or Chinatown halfway between my work and my friends' offices. I miss late afternoon chocolate runs to the convenience store and knowing who in the office wanted want if they weren't at their desk.

I miss house parties in the inner-west, in the eastern suburbs and in suburbs that used to be all industrial as you started to buy places. I miss hanging out in kitchens talking about food, and late night emergency dinners over bottles of red wine. I miss new friends and old friends and oldest friends in the world, and friends-of-friends who became friends, and friends of friends that I saw all the time. I miss women I grew close to in my last few years in Sydney as I started to rebuild my friendships and develop new ones after the end of a long relationship. I miss my girls, and my "girls" and my boys.

I miss having lots and lots of different groups of friends, and bringing them all together for parties and special events. I miss remembering parties "back in the day" and looking around to see who is still there. I miss seeing people I've known for years and years change and develop and grow into new people, new couples, new individuals while still maintaining their old values and old friendships. I miss buckets of sangria, and all-vegetarian dinner parties, and our standard order at Saigon Bay with all the foods exes and partners didn't eat. I miss going a few suburbs over to hang out with girlfriends, and driving back late at night to still find a parking space outside my house.

I miss dressing up to go out dancing, and never finding any places where we really, really liked the music. I miss complaining that all my friends live in a different area, but all the while preferring living near the beach.

I miss random connections and random meetings in the street and shop keepers who know you and work events where you really can have a good time. I miss wandering around my city and remembering events that took place there when I was a kid.

I miss roaming thru city parks and streets full of memories of friends who are no longer friends, friends who disappeared, friends who changed into people I didn't recognise. But I miss remembering them as they were - back when time didn't matter, back when life was stretched soooooo far out in front of me I couldn't imagine being more than a few years older than I was then. I miss seeing the ghost of myself cross the same street I did 10 years earlier, trying desperately to remember how I felt then, and realising how much I'd grown.

I miss re-visting places of significance - first kisses, first street-pashing, first break-up, first dates, first meetings, favourite restaurants, fave new spots, fave old spots that change names a thousand times, last meal together, last boyfriend's favourite bar, last place I saw someone cute and went and spoke to them.

I miss knowing my city, and being able to share it with new friends who'd just arrived...



A package arrived today from Australia. It's from a newer friend - someone I became friends with in the last 6 months I lived back home, but became very close to.

The last line of the accompanying letter reads:

I miss my friend. I think of her often

I'm crying as I write this... I miss her too - both my friend who wrote the letter and her friend. The one who encouraged her to stay in Sydney when she felt overwhelmed. The one who told her she'd love it there and would make lots of friends, the one who had no doubt that just as her friend could move to the other side of the world and have a good job and a nice place to live, and lots of new friends, that she herself could do the same thing, no worries.

I miss that fearless, determined, don't take any crap, stand up for what you believe in, party-for-your-right-to-fight, world citizen girl. In some ways I wonder if she ever existed, or if she was a projection of other people's opinions of her.

And yet - sometimes I find myself telling people about some of the things I've done in my life, and I see from their expression that they can't believe how fearless and brave I am. A lot of the time I don't feel fearless and brave. Sometimes I feel tired and scared, and overwhelmed. Sometimes I feel like someone somewhere has made a mistake, and soon someone somewhere is going to look at my file and realise I was meant to have a mundane ordinary existence, and that this moving to new country and actually getting work and moving very quickly through the ranks was all a dreadful mistake. That the fact I've made a lot of wonderful new friends was all a clerical error and they'll disappear with a little magic eraser. That my cheap rent will sky- rocket tomorrow with no offset in location, features or cleanliness, and I'll have to live out on the street or somewhere in Jersey.

I came home today at 11:30pm. I left my house at 5:30am and I've only been at work, so that's basically a 16 hour work day plus travel time.. I'm exhausted.. And I've come home to my room being messy, and it looks like my roommate's cats knocked over my dresser, and all my jewellery is on the floor, and all my clothes in the drawers are wet from my water glass that was on top. And I'm about to crash and then get up and do it all again tomorrow.

But the package and the accompanying note got me thinking...

To my friend who sent it - thank you.

I miss you too.

Posted by Ness at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments

This was a post I started a while back, and never got to publish - the actual krs-one show concert was back in June or July, but rock the bells was at the end of July - time is going by waaaaay too fast people


I'm really into Hip Hop. Really. A couple of years ago when I went on a Hip Hop Tour of NYC with Grandmaster Raheim from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, I was the only one who knew the answer to the question "Who was the grandfather of hip hop?" *

Mind you, a lot of commercial hip hop that's around today really isn't my thing, and I find it difficult to find a good radio station here that plays a diverse range of music and not just current commercial hip hop - I'm missing Koori Radio like crazy. (Big shout out to all the crew - Brad, Naian, Donita)

So I was very excited the other night to get to see an old school hero of mine, KRS-One. Ever since I first heard KRS-One back in the day, I've always loved his ability to tell stories and to literally teach people about what they need to know. And he's still got it - the show was great - and it was upfront and personal in a small club in Brooklyn. Stuff like that never happens in Sydney... If I get 5 minutes this weekend, I'll try and put my video footage on You-tube and then link it here..

The other big event I went to after this was the Rock The Bells festival on Randalls Island. I had a great time, despite misplacing all my friends, and having to stand in a line for terrible food for 45 minutes while Cypress Hill were on.

I saw Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Public Enemy, The Roots, Cypress Hill, Wu Tang Clan and Rage Against the Machine. PE started off great. I was thinking to myself wow! They've really tightened up their game since I saw them back in Sydney in the mid-90's and Flav was so far gone on coke that they didn't finish a single song

And then it happened. Flava Flav has become a reality tv star and so clearly the idea was to cash in on some of that and have him talk a little bit and then do 911 is a joke. Except Flav doesn't know when to stop. He started off ok, then brought his kids out and made them individually say hey to New York. Then he started rambling, and Chuck D tried to move into the song, but Flav shut it down and kept talking and promoting his TV appearances.

What had started off as smiles and nods and appreciation from the crowd was starting to turn into embarrassed laughs and silences. Finally Flav did his song (which by the way was never one of their greatest anyway, IMHO). And finally when it was done, Flav insisted on showing off his drumming skills, which used up any more time that was available for more PE songs. Chuck D had walked off the stage, and didn't come back.

The Roots did one of the best sets I've ever seen them do - complete with a New Orleans Style brass band. It was fun and funky, and they were great! Unfortunately the rest of the crowd wasn't feeling it as much as I was...

Wu Tang had 50 guys on stage and only 3 of them seemed to do anything, but that's what they do. The whole time I couldn't help but think of the Skit from the Dave Chappelle Show.



* It's DJ Kool Herc for thos of you who don't know...

Posted by Ness at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments

If there's one thing that really bugs me, it's conspiracy theories. You know what I'm talking about - any recent disaster / tragedy was really some evil plot perpetrated by [insert name of alternative ethnic or religious group here] in order to make someone else look bad; aliens are real and the US Government has had specialists working with their undercover agents for decades; the CIA did it [can be used in reference to pretty much anything].

This isn't to say that (a) no-one was responsible for bombings, massacres and disasters (b) there aren't some pretty unexplainable things out there in the world (c) that the CIA hasn't done some pretty messed up things in different countries all around the world.

However the idea that a well organised governmental machine put every little piece in place, and had amazing control of every single detail, and managed to cover it all up, and no-one has found out about it seems ridiculous to me.

On two recent jobs I've had to deliberately extract myself from people who wanted me to know THE TRUTH about something. First one was some 9/11 conspiracy theory. I was in the middle of working, I had been having a reasonable day up until that point, and I did not want to engage in any kind of debate about how some third force was really responsible and had their agents secretly infiltrate the US Government to use them to help bring down someone else and blah blah blah blah blah. I told him I didn't want to talk about it, and when he pushed it, I stared at him and said, "some things I just don't want to talk about, ok?" Maybe he thought I was personally affected by the tragedy, but I just couldn't listen to another word.

The second one was alien talk. I'm sorry, but there may be life on other planets, sure, but to think that they all live here amongst us undetected and that they are called greys and blues and the US Govt has some sort of deal with their leaders... well I just walked away from the lunch table..

More effort should be put into saving our planet from environmental disasters, getting rid of third world debt and helping provide food and shelter to those on our planet who have nothing to eat and nowhere to live. Some of the food wastage I see here is unbelievable, and the lack of consciousness about rudimentary recycling depresses me.

Posted by Ness at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments