Good Vibrations, old friends and new opportunities

Music is an intense gift to me, as the script from _Almost Famous_ would have it, “vast scenic rituals and angelic choirs in your brain”. There have been times in my life where I haven’t appre­ci­ated it as much as I ought or where I’ve used it to assuage anger but these days, it’s about the groove as much as it is about the polit­ics, and I love the way my feet move and my heart swells and it does­n’t matter where I am or whether I’m alone or with friends because the beat takes me and car­ries me for­ward. This is true even if I’m entirely sober, as I dis­covered in Prague.

Good Vibra­tions was great. We star­ted the morn­ing with break­fast in Surrey Hills: agwat, sluis, lost­wander­found, sluis’s brother Paul, an old friend of mine and his wife Jodi who I hadn’t met. We were joined by matt_fitz and we were all issued with Team Sluii orange hats. It sounds bad, but the photos are actu­ally quite cute.

We set up our base camp under lovely trees in Centen­nial Park and sorted out the program.

I was brave and wandered off on my own for the first set, safe in the know­ledge I could find those hats any­where, know­ing that I *had* to see Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and the Mad Pro­fessor. There are moments at dance parties and con­certs where I miss Jonathan intensely, like a phys­ical hole in my heart. This was one of them: Jonathan intro­duced me to Lee Perry and this time last year was when we had our big alter­ca­tion. Before that, I would have been tex­ting him through­out the day, updat­ing him on the music and how I was feel­ing and maybe even ringing him during key sets and play­ing him snip­pets of music. 

Perry is insane but amaz­ing. He told us none of us were white because there are no white shad­ows, only black shad­ows, and that he was our king. He got us all chant­ing “Jah bless pussy” at one point. Anyhow, he got me dan­cing and I just ima­gined that Jonathan was there with me some­how (and if you happen to be read­ing my journal even though we’re not talk­ing right now, thank you forever for intro­du­cing me to dub, Mister Jay. Love you).

Anyhow, then caught Free*land live, which was good, had a dance with the gang. Very dif­fer­ent crowd from the old Mardi Gras Posse: more relaxed, lovely people, although I found it rather amus­ing that the group was a mar­ried couple, a couple of queer singles and a bevy of sluis’s exes (okay, this is an exag­ger­a­tion, but there were *four* of them).

High­light of the day was def­in­itely Asian Dub Found­a­tion who went off in a major way. Hys­ter­ical mix of Paper­back Writer, fun samples of Tain­ted Love, Billie Jean in Indian (I think), and that awe­some mash-up of Bush’s speech so that he says “every Amer­ican child should be given three nuc­lear mis­siles” and other gems.

Let’s see: sluis had raved about diva Lisa Shaw, so that was next. Lovely and cruisy. Had a great catch-up with Paul, really won­der­ful to see him, I’d for­got­ten how much I enjoyed his com­pany. Last time we would have talked must have been a party at Mikey’s in 98 or some­thing before I moved to Melbourne.

Then Bugz in the Attic, then Moloko, then back to the House of Sluii for tea and red cor­dial and more tunes and mas­sages and lovely chats till 5 in the morning.

An amaz­ing, beau­ti­ful day with great weather and great com­pany. Thanks again, agwat.

The other major event of the week­end was one of my poten­tial donors saying “yes’ to the idea of being the bio­lo­gical father of my poten­tial child. I’m not going to name names until we’re a little more sorted with stuff, but this is Very Good News and I am very happy.

I was think­ing about this while dan­cing yes­ter­day and I want to keep a journal of the exper­i­ence, but I don’t want every­one to have to deal with baby stuff. I’m going to make a custom LJ group of people I think I’d like to know this stuff… if you have a par­tic­u­lar desire to be either included or excluded from this group, please let me know. 

Anyhow, it’s now late for this bunny who didn’t get enough sleep last night and I’m at Mum’s using the next door-neigh­bour’s free WiFi again… I’m sup­posed to get up at a reas­on­able hour tomor­row and start work on the reader for the course I’m coördinating this semester.