Soundtrack.

I’m sitting in a café in Fitzroy, and a beautiful song has just come onto the sound-system. I'm jealous I didn’t write it, but also happy someone else did (see previous post ‘I hate you, Regina Spector').  I don’t know who it is, but if there was a soundtrack to my life, I’d like for it to be in the mix.

I write music and play it. I also sing it, dance to it and generally enjoy it’s being around.  Like most people, I associate bands, songs and albums with the people and events that have populated my life. Like any good soundtrack, they have enhanced these experiences and relationships.

And they are mostly folk-pop (kidding… maybe).

Since I was very little, the soundtrack to my life has been quite nice.  I can remember watching my anonymous mother Susan dancing around our lounge-room to Paul Kelly’s ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’ (there were many large and repetitive arm movements involved). I knew dinner was ready when ‘Passionate Kisses’ by Mary Chapin Carpenter came on the stereo (a great dinner song, I swear).

To me, home sounds like Paul Kelly, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and The Indigo Girls. Family holidays sound like Crowded House and Things of Stone & Wood. Holidays with friends sound like Paul Simon, Flight of the Concords, and the Big M ad (“Amy was a girl on the side of the road, I picked her up and away we go, I 'm leaving home without you I know…”). Trips overseas sound like Bon Iver. Ex-boyfriends sounded like Ball Park Music, Laura Marling and Vince Jones.  High school sounded like Harvey Danger, Blink 182 and Something for Kate (maybe just a smidge of cheeky Hanson for good measure).

My liking of nice music (please ignore earlier Hanson reference) (…actually stuff it, they were awesome - you know it and I know it) was largely influenced by my anonymous father (my mother’s only record being the Beaches soundtrack). He regularly sang to my two sisters and I at bedtime, in a vocal style that I thought was purely ‘Dad’ until I released it was mostly ‘Neil Young’. Our favourite lullabies were James Taylor’s ‘Sweet Baby James’, Jefferson Starship’s ‘The Baby Tree’, Donavan’s ‘Circus of Sour’. And strangely enough, ‘Big Ted’s Dead’ by The Incredible String Band. It wasn’t until I got a little older that I realised that these were interesting choices of lullaby. My sister even had a Big Ted. Must’ve been tough to sleep after that…

He also played guitar (though mostly this was limited to The Beatles’ ‘Rocky Raccoon’), which I thought was pretty darned-freakin’ cool until the 'my-dad’s-a-rock-hero' illusion was recently damaged when, while “jamming” (and I use this term so so loosely), he shared with me his theory that all songs are made up of just two chords: G and C.

They are not.

But apparently Rocky Raccoon is.

I was surprised, in 2005, to find out that my father was a music-bully (MB). I was visiting his brothers and sisters in the US when they decided it was the perfect time to tell me about this  One story (told with not-just-trace amounts of real bitterness) involved him chasing his younger sibling with a chair, threatening her safety should she attempt touch any of his records, with particular emphasis on his Bob Dylan collection.

I can relate.

My relationship with music, particularly CDs (I know I know… ‘streaming’, ‘internet’, whatever)  is quite emotionally charged (though perhaps not ‘chair-wielding’ charged). Many of the bands and CDs that I have mentioned throughout this post are ones that I now own, simply because home doesn’t seem like home without them. And so I feel pretty lucky that home was filled with such great music. 

But then again, quality is in the eye of the be-listener.

…because no matter how hard I try not to, I freakin’ love Taylor Swift.  Freakin’ love her. 

She can be in my soundtrack for sure.

Today was a Fairytale, Taylor Swift

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUqnrjSFXtE

Passionate Kisses, Mary Chapin Carpenter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7l8lz4Urn4

Private Helicopter, Harvey Danger

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFaAxlNjCUA

Circus of Sour, Donavan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFfy2fNEFQM

Rocky Raccoon, The Beatles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNRH7_Kd5Yc

Signed, sealed, delivered.

Yesterday I received a little piece of cardboard in my mailbox, which told me that the postman had visited while I was out. It told me that I had a package waiting for me at the nearby Australia Post, and that at my convenience I could go and collect it. 

What fun! A Surprise Present (SP), to be received at my leisure! Maybe a love letter from a secret admirer!? Maybe I’d won a prize!? All that was certain was that it was bigger than would fit into my postbox.  A lengthy love letter, perhaps? Perfect!

Thanks to the wonders of modern email and online banking, the only reasons I would ever go to the post-office these days is to either collect something, or to send something else. Both activities, in my opinion, are exciting - and provoke similar feelings to Christmas.

Current financial challenges aside, I really like giving gifts. My anonymous mother tells me that when I was little, I used to wrap up little objects (gum-nuts, twigs, dried flowers) in paper, and leave them around the house (in my parents bed) for them to find and enjoy (to stick in their backs while they slept). The joy that I got out of this activity was very real, as was my anonymous father’s resulting hay-fever. Presumably this behaviour continued until I got me some cash (although maybe now is the right time for me to re-discover the art of twig-giving).

My family has a certain system of gifting at Christmas. It lasts a very, very long time, and generally ends with us all sitting around in a lethargic fashion as though we have participated in some kind of endurance-based sport. 

It starts with one person collecting a gift from under the tree (a real tree, mind you... don’t try and fool me with any fake tree b*llsh*t), who gives it to another family member/hanger-on-er-er, who opens it while others keenly observe. After an appropriate amount of admiring/holding/trying-out/on, the open-er goes and collects a gift for someone else. The whole process is peppered with comments from my anonymous mother, such as “Oh, did that say ‘Bridget’? Actually that one was for Meghan/Kathryn/Oscar (the dog).”

Let me tell you: parting with a gift that you’ve opened is emotionally difficult.

Anyway…  so I have just received a slip-de-joy and off I go, slip in hand as though I’d found it inside a chocolate bar. 

One of the major things I think I find so appealing about the Post Office Experience (POE) is that the whole idea so straightforward.  Something needs to get from Point A to Point B. How often are problems as simple as this? If it’s big, you put it in a big box. If it’s small, you put it into a small box, or perhaps an envelope. If it’s breakable, there are a plethora of cushy-options to choose from; from bubble wrap to shredded newspaper, to those little peanut shaped beans that seem like a good idea until you spill them everywhere by accident and then have to pick them up while they make a sound that you feel in your stomach. Either way, the problem can be solved, and generally is solved by way of stationary.

Just imagine if all issues could be solved through delightful and satisfying foldy bits of cardboard! As someone who’s head generally thinks about things all at once and not ‘through’, finding the right box/envelope for the right occasion makes me feel like I have really achieved something. A small success to tick of my lengthy life-list.

Anyway. 

I waited in line. I showed my ID. And in the end I did receive my package. Turns out it was something I’d bought for myself on eBay. 

And I couldn’t care less.

Maybe I’ll start posting myself love letters.

The Docklands Market. A nice (if not slightly obscenely warm) way to spend a Sunday. 

Yes, that’s a lot of dresses. No, I am not ashamed.

When I was quite little, my anonymous sister Bridget told me that I had no sense of style.

It hurt. Not only because it was delivered with the kind of purposeful flippancy that only an older sibling can bestow, but because, in my opinion, it was not entirely true.

I’ll elaborate.

When I was about six, my anonymous mother Susan bought me what can only be described as a purple clown suit. Onesy. It was a fiesta of spots and stripes, had smart black buttons down the front, and a comically large pointy collar.  I loved it. Not only was it stylish, but it also had the practical element of disenabling me to wear my usual tracksuit pants backwards; a scenario that, at that time, happened more often than not. Perfect!

I wore my purple clown suit (PCS) around the house and to school, and the love affair continued until one day my friend’s pet mouse ran up the sleeve and could not be extracted.

Throughout much of my early adolescence, my wardrobe choices revolved around a pair of overalls (a similar idea to the PCS, but with greater access for removing unwelcome rodents), a skivvy, and a pink and white striped hat that my anonymous Aunt Sara had bought for me at a local Geelong market. I thought I looked great. Hell, I did look great.  I was Alex Mac. 

I wore my ‘ovies’ most days, apart from school days when I was forced to turn into a blue school uniform.

My school uniform was a prison in clothing-form. It consisted of a blue boxy dress, blue jumper, blue socks, blue shirt, blue tie, blue kilt, blue socks and - the bane of my adolescence - a blue blazer. Sports days were for blue tracksuits (at this point generally worn the right way around). I still struggle with ‘blue’ as a general concept.

So, with all this blue to deal with five days a week, high school clothing decisions were mostly restricted to ‘boxer shorts or bike shorts’ under my school-dress, whether my ‘royal blue’ scrunchie was close enough to the ‘sky blue’ outlined in the school’s dress policy, and what to wear on casual dress days (overalls, of course!). For one glorious month in 2001, (to my seemingly easily evoked delight) the school trialed a ‘no tie’ policy, which led to such an immediate flurry of wild behavior among the ‘ladies’ that ties were swiftly re-instated. And just in time, no doubt.

It was when I started university that I decided that I would become a dress wearer. In those days (the olden days of 2003), dresses had not yet come back into fashion (though my mother’s LL Bean catalogue would say that tracksuit dresses, and skorts, had never left!). So I decided that if I was going to wear dresses to uni, I would have to do it from day one, so that people who didn’t know me (and my overall inclined behaviour) would just assume I did that kind of thing all the time. “No big deal guys, that’s Kathryn Kelly - she wears dresses”. Totes.

Like they cared.

My first dress was a pink floral number. I wore it on my first day (and by that I mean second day… I forgot to turn up on the first day.), with my carefully practiced guise of confidence. I felt summery and pretty and special and I loved it. I wrote songs about it. I never looked back.

Luckily, the rest of the world was watching (as I had evidently assumed they would), and so dresses came back into fashion quite soon after.

So it comes to the point where I reveal I spent the next nine years accumulating enough dresses to be able to quite comfortably wear a different one every day for one month, and still have quite a few left over to keep my wardrobe satiated. 

Yes, that’s a lot of dresses. No, I am not ashamed. (Note that I am slightly ashamed.) I love them all. And if you go back through the ‘Coming Up Kathryn’ archives to October last year, you will find dorky and sentimental dedications to 31 of these dresses. 

If only there was some kind of month-long celebration of overalls.

www.frocktober.org

 My first dress. And some chickens.

Cool Change

I’ve never been very good at small talk.

…nope.

At parties, you are most likely to find me in the kitchen trying to spend a lot of time deciding between different kinds of sandwich. A well-placed fruit platter can add a couple of minutes to this process, and also opens opportunities to discuss seasonal fruits with fellow kitchen dwellers (KDs).

It’s lucky for me that I live in Victoria, Australia, where if all other topics of conversation fail, I can rely on one that is foolproof. I mean other than seasonal fruits.

My dad, who arrived here about thirty years ago from the USA, has always said he can’t believe how often Victorians discuss the weather. We talk about the weather so much that even questions that don’t specifically related to it, do. “What’s it going to be like on the weekend?” really means “what is the weather doing on the weekend?”. “It’s going to be nice tomorrow” isn’t a statement about one’s love of Wednesdays. Imagine where we’d all be if we had no rain, hail or shine to discuss. We’d be endlessly awkward and conversationless. We’d be clogging kitchens everywhere.

When I was little, I clearly remember most summer-weather small talk revolving around what seemed to me to be the unicorn of the summer season: the cool change.

For those who don’t know (and by this I mean dad’s sisters: the only people reading this who live outside of a 100km radius of me and my computer), a ‘cool change’ is the point in a summer day when a breeze lifts from the ocean and blows on over to your place, dropping the temperature by a few degrees. The climatic equivalent of comic relief. 

It’s the point in the day that you get to stop surviving and start living. Once the cool change comes through, you are free to do all the tasks that somehow seemed unmanageable and unrealistic before: watering plants, cooking dinner, strolling down the street or getting out of your chair. When I got old enough to drive it meant going to the beach for an evening swim. The specific time of it's arrival is endlessly discussed throughout the day, though it normally arrives about dinner-time (presumably for a free meal). 

Maybe talking about the weather is the conversational equivalent of a cool change. Something that brings comfort and ease. Something that makes really horrible, tedious exchanges manageable.

And if that fails... 

you can always go to find some more sandwiches. 

Are strawberries in season again?

Perfect boiled eggs.

Owning it.

Last Saturday night I sat at home like a kid in a candy store.

I don’t know at what point in my life I got so excited about staying at home, but I sure am into it. I was happily doing all kind of home-ish activities; wearing loose pants, eating multiple ice-creams (I assume that is the reason they sell them in packets on six) and determinedly not leaving the house even to go to Video Dogs (No I still haven’t got the hang of downloading things – what of it?), when I decided to take a closer look at some TV.

Gosh, I love TV.  I just love it.

I know it’s not cool to love TV. In my defense I don’t watch a lot of it. Partially because I am pleasantly busy in my life, and partially because there is nothing on that’s any good. Mostly it’s just a choice between boring reality (shows), and different flavours of CSI. And let’s face it, the only CSI worth watching is Miami. That Heratio does an outstanding job.

So I was flicking through channels on my happily lonely Saturday night, when I stumbled upon a film called ‘Some Like It Hot’ on the ABC. 

At the point when I channel-stumbled in, there was slap-tastic scene going on, which involved multiple women (in their underwear!) having a party on a train. One of these women was in fact a man, which to me was quite obvious, but somehow not to any of the underwear clad women.

But maybe CSI has boosted my detective skills.

Now even though I pretend to have somewhat of a sense of culture (please disregard CSI Miami comments from earlier), I must admit that this is my first real experience of Marilyn Monroe. I mean, other than Marilyn played by Michelle Williams (it’s now more official than ever that Dawson was out of his league with both of his female co-stars). Culture.

Some quick maths and Googling tells me that when SLIH first hit the screens in 1959, my academically inclined mother would have been picking up her first crayon. Which to me is interesting, because for as long as I can remember, Susan Kelly has been well on top of drawing with crayons. So this tells me that SLIH came out a while ago.

And let me tell you. That Marilyn is amazing. Not ‘amazing for the time’. I mean actually AMAZING. In all senses of the word.  If I hadn’t been determinedly couch-bound, I myself would have been rioting in the streets. Those were not dresses. Those were sparkly bits stuck onto rude bits. In an amazing way.

What I also found interesting, was that her character (named Sugar!) wasn’t solving crimes with test tubes and an Alabama accent like women do these days (Wow, I am really digging myself a shallow CSI grave here aren’t I?). No no, she was far too busy playing with beach balls, wearing kickin’ outfits, and generally trying to catch herself a rich fella. The dumbest of blonds. (I mean that in ‘Don’t complain if you are blond because YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN’ kind of way).

The cool thing was - she was totally owning it.

She didn’t change who she was in order to appear smarter - no way. And you know what? She did get herself that man. She even sailed off into the sunset. And at the end of the film I felt nothing respect for the lovely Sugar. She got everything she wanted - and in sparkles to boot.

So I have decided to take a leaf out of her book and ‘own it’ too. 

I have decided to start by bravely declaring my love for TV. Maybe no sparkles just yet.

 What is this????

Orange Leaves & Cafes.

As I grow older and ‘wiser’ into my full-sized grown-up self, I appreciate winter-time more and more. Now it could just be my love of accessories talking, but doesn’t winter just seem more romantic (in that non-romancy sense of the word)?

Winter is a time of fire-places, rain on windows, and multiple-movies-in-a-sitting. It’s a time when drinks are mulled, and you can eat fish and chips in your car while you watch the surfers and secretly think ‘Suckers, better you than me’.

Summer does, of course, have its summery perks. Just a bit showy, maybe? Sunshine… exposed-skin… sitting outside… fish & chips on the sand (and the host of sand-related issues involved with that). Whatever, summer, I say – give me a car that smells like fish & chips for three weeks.

In the last year I have moved from a small seaside town, where summer meant one thing – tourists.  Personally, I enjoyed being able to complain about tourists. All Locals secretly do. (NB: I am only able to refer to myself as ‘Local’, but not ‘A Local’. Very different.) It brings us together in an annual bonding ritual known as Tourist Hate (TH). Truth be known, the only time I noticed it was in line at Ryan’s IGA… which was fine because my coveted ‘frequent customer tag’ implied my superiority at check-out.

‘Schoolies’ are a particularly enjoyable breed of tourists to complain about. These are the ones who have just finished Year 12, and are looking for some frivolity before they start pretending to be grown-ups (as we all are I am pretty sure). They are young and do silly things that Locals love to hate – from the more traditional trampling of flower-beds, to stealing my recycling bin. Which, is a gift in itself really. Because: a) it gives Locals something to justify their TH, and b) it warrants a trip to the local Council Offices –a Mecca for small-town complainers. (Apparently they use the bins to stow illicit alcohol – the scallywags.)

Winter in a beach-side town is a whole different story. There is something pride-provoking about living in a town other people pass through only on holiday and special occasions. In winter, Locals get to rejoice in the privacy, quiet and beauty of their place. A different sort of beauty that other people miss because they are busy living and working somewhere just that little bit too far away.  The incidental loveliness that is there every day when you step out of your front door.

After almost 8 months of living in this big town of Melbourne I am beginning to see the loveliness that exists here as well. Beautiful old buildings and secret parks and orange leaves and warm cafes...

But WHERE are the good fish and chip shops?

Out my front window. How can this be bad?

I hate you Regina Spector (not really).

A while back I went into JB HiFi in Geelong, in the hopes of finding a particular song to play at my Grandma’s 80^th birthday party. After a quick and unsuccessful search through the shelves and computer-system for Glenn Miller’s ‘I Dream of Genie with the Light Brown Hair’, the kind store-person directed me to the Geelong Regional Library.

I liked that very much.           

It reminded me of a scene I saw in TV show, where one of the characters joked that technology was cyclical. And perhaps it’s true. And maybe the way we access music, like climate change, is cyclical (KIDDING). Maybe after iCloud comes (L)iBrary.

I love CDs. This fact, combined with an unfortunate lack of knowledge regarding ‘downloading’ and ‘streaming’, means that I have a modest but satisfying CD collection. I keep them in my lounge-room in a CD rack, which I found (after much searching through furniture/CD/music shops) at Ikea. Ikea is apparently the only modern establishment that still sells CD racks. Maybe I need to move to Sweden – I think we’d get along.

Just like my Grandma, I am slightly wary of computers. Now that I have this very small computer due to leaving my larger one on the roof of my car (see a previous blog-post for details) I am even more wary of storing precious things like music onto it.

But mainly I just don’t like the idea of ‘downloading’ or ‘streaming’ music. I don’t want to ‘stream’ music. I want to listen to it (yes, you may be picking up on my aforementioned lack of understanding about the whole ‘streaming’ thing). But still, I just want to listen, and hate the person who wrote those amazing songs for the simple fact that I didn’t write them. I hate you Regina Spector (not really).

I know it sounds like I am trying to demonstrate that I am ‘above’ downloading. It sounds like I am taking the musical higher ground. (Actually, it probably just sound like I hate lovely songwriters for no good reason). But that’s not what it is (the no-good-reason-hating part is true…). I am pretty what it is, is actually a deep-seeded selfishness that presents itself in the form of not wanting to share music.

And by ‘share music’, I mean share my music. I am quite happy to share yours.

As I have articulated and inferred to in many previous bloggy posts - I am an unacceptably and outrageously sentimental loser. Nobody is as sentimental as me. I can form the same degree of attachment to my grandma’s old necklace as to the egg-cup I bought at the op-shop yesterday. 

And I mean this in a good way Grandma (who am I kidding my Grandma does not read my blog).

Basically, I don’t even want you to borrow my CDs because you might try and burn them. Again, not because of copyright stuff. Copyright Shmopyright.

Basically… I don’t think you deserve it.

I just don’t think that you have the right kinds of happy-feelings when you hear those songs. I don’t think should get to ‘own’ it without also getting the cracked CD case that is cracked because you left it on the roof of my car outside JB HiFi. I don’t think you have the right kind of story to ensure that you love the CD like it your own puppy/baby/Macbook Air.

Yes, I know. It’s good to share music. Michael Franti is right – everyone deserves it. But still I can’t shake this selfish feeling.

I could console myself in knowing that if you take my music, then I become part of the story of ‘you and the music’. I.e. ‘That time Kathryn lent me this amazing CD and it changed my life and I am now a better and more sentimental loser because of it all”.

But I don’t. Sorry. 

The Elwood Market last weekend. Best honey-joys of my life. 50 cents each! Thank you Elwood.