Depreston

On Friday I heard Courtney Barnett's single 'Depreston' for the first time. I know what you're thinking. Am I living under some kind of rock? I'm last to hear anything and everything, my music know-how so low, since my car radio is tuned to Fox, PBS and Radio National depending on my companions and my own state of mind.

I'd been hearing good things about Barnett's album and its barnstorming ways up charts here and in the States so my response to hearing her now award-winning song surprised me. I liked it but I think I expected a bigger song, instrumentally and its canvas, though press articles about the "telling detail" in her writing should have alerted me to the fact that specificity – being attuned to the spaces, places and emotional texture of life at this point in time as a 30something north sider – is her thing. She sings about going to an open for inspection in the now gentrified former working class suburb of Preston with a light, comic touch, though the subtext of the song is economics.  I wondered whether 'Depreston' has struck a chord with people because of its truthfulness: on the subject of Preston we are in total agreement.

In life we are rarely given the opportunity to feel into another person's inner world, even our family and friends remain essentially mysterious. That inner world is the place where working life intersects with intimacy and love, the place where our bank balance and our aspirations face one another. This is the the land of self-talk, a patter that veers between hopefulness and resignation that circles around questions of self-worth and the material. Some days it veers off towards questions of security and safety, other days it strays towards worries over power and influence but it always begins and ends with the question: how much is enough?

Belgrave aka 'End of the line'

Owing to my hectic weekly schedule – nothing special, just work and ferrying the monkeys around – I try and spend my weekends local. Need to find me? Try the the back garden or pushing the pram around the 'hood. But in a break from routine I headed for the hills, the Yarra Ranges to be precise, to attend the End of the Line Music Festival at Belgrave. The event promised 70 bands, a makers market, workshops and art exhibits over one massive day.

Aside from an excursion to Puffing Billy in my youth and a few weekends in Upwey as a teenager riding my skateboard on the ageing basketball court at the local high school, I have not been a regular visitor to these parts. Driving into the town, I felt immediately charmed. It wasn't just the steep, bushy walkways though they were lovely, or the puffs of chimney smoke drifting lazily over the town. The Cameo Cinema sits on the main drag like a stately monolith, a dark cave of visceral excitements and solitary pleasures. Everyone has a touchstone for what constitutes civilisation. For some that's a public library, in my case, it's a cinema.

We didn't have a plan, other than to hear some music and head home when we tired. Sometimes being on foot with the pram is not too different to a mobile shanty town: drinks, snacks, warm clothes, toys. Heading into town with my pre-schooler and pre-teen in tow I was hoping we could make the day work. When they started asking if we could go home in the first half hour I began to have my doubts. But kids are not that different from grown-ups. Faced with a new environment their instincts is to get back to familiar turf. I was having none of it. Guys, I reminded them, we are here to hear music. Let's go find it.

What did we hear first? The pounding of drums. Turning the corner in the the Station we happened upon a dozen local kids channeling Africa. Is anyone doing Aussie bush ballads on that vast continent?

We got a kick out of seeing the garbage bins pasted over with artwork – what a good idea. And toodled along the train track stopping every now and again to watch the graffiti artists shake their cans between drags of cigarettes. At TBC stage, where a few turned over milk crates made for seats, Harmony Byrne sang a sweet set. She had the small crowd enthralled with her strong voice in perfect pitch. I felt moved in equal measure by the vulnerability and courage of her performance and the fortitude it takes to stand alone on a stage.

We pushed on through the excellent maker's market where we found ourselves in tie-dye heaven. In a stall that might have been made by elves, the kids picked up a necklace each: a sparkling unicorn's horn and multi-coloured mushroom. With these talismans around their necks the monkeys seemed re-energised.

At the very end we reached the Green. Here we settled on the lawn on soft cushions under a billowing silk canopy to watch the belly dancers, chow down some bliss balls and have our faces painted. I had the opportunity to do some people watching. It was a colourful parade. There were some good Alt Country outfits, a family of medievalists. But the day belonged to the Rakia Gypsy dancers. With their fingerless gloves, silver jewellery and felt hats, those ladies brought Frida Kahlo flair to the occasion.

On Sunday over brunch at my local cafe – wedged between chino and sports wear brigade – I thought: I have to get out more.

Fabrizio Biviano

Fabrizio Biviano
Summer Stack (postcards)

Oil on linen

I find myself in the swamplands of Collingwood a few times a week but its not often that I visit the galleries unless its a friend's show. When I'm not at work, I'm with the kids. They beg for the park not contemporary art. But I might make an exception for this one. I have had it up to pussies bow measuring out my time like a Queen Street lawyer. I want to cut loose. Which is maybe why these works by Biviano speak to me. Books and music: they have a whiff of leisure, selection and taxonomy that remind me that summer and lazy days are on their way.

Fabrizio Biviano 
10 September – 5 October 2013

James Makin Gallery
67 Cambridge Street, Collingwood,
Victoria, 3066, Australia

Opening hours:
Tuesday - Saturday: 11am - 5pm

Polka dot: Brighter Later

For most of the year, penciled in my diary under Sunday 24 March has been 'Brighter Later album launch N'cote Social Club'. Being the nun that I am these days (early to bed, early to rise) I eyed it warily. There was no way I was going to miss it – I would go to the opening of an envelope if Brighter Later's front lady Jaye Kranz was somehow involved – but my stamina after the moon tracks its way across the sky is notoriously poor. Still. There is something to be said for going hard sometimes. It creates its own momentum. I put in a good effort on Saturday night at a fancy black tie affair. By Sunday night it was a way of life.

I spend most of my time either with my children or colleagues these days. And while these are peeps I love and respect I am generally my G-rated self in their company. Was it the pub environment? The Twin Peaks soundtrack between acts? The fact I spent most of the early nineties with half of the people in that room? At the Northcote Social Club on Sunday night in the company of old friends I felt like I opened a little storage unit in my head, a place where  my dirty twenties are stored. It was good to give those M 15 + memories an airing.

Then the stage curtains parted. In the centre Jaye sat bent over a keyboard with Brighter Later's Virginia Bott to her  right. The two of them were flanked by six musicians, all men, tightly packed around them. Shane O'Mara (legend?), Dan Marsh (Human Face), Patrick Dunn (Lower Spectrun) Sean Albers (regular Brighter Later drummer), Simon Baily (Pony Face frontman) and hairy Cameron Potts (best known for his drumming with Ninety Nine). On this occasion I saw him clap his hands and play a book with uncommon gusto. Though I couldn't tear my eyes away from him, they were all wonderful. For someone who sees little live music I was struck by a few things. The sight of eleven guitars, neatly stacked like bikes along a rack. The sheer number of cords and electrical equipment. The glances between musicians as they spoke to each other with instruments.

The band launched into 'All the World', track one from the The Wolves. Jaye's ethereal sweet voice filling the room, the thick, dense sound of the band creating a rich soundscape. Their music evoked a sublime and forbidding landscape. They followed it with the Woods and Satellite. At the end of that song Jaye looked up and said "That was nice. She said it like a perfectionist pleased with what she'd heard. I liked her solemn, though not humourless, stage presence. It was a powerful contrast to the cocksure swagger of supporting act Tommy Spender who had entertained the crowd with a guitar and a gutsy Bruce Springsteen cover an hour earlier. At the end of the night, between 'Another Day' and the encore, 'Zigi Song', dedicated to her grandfather, she flashed a big, bright smile. It was a smile of joy and maybe a little relief.

Oh, the top. The polkadot top? Gorman, naturally.

The Wolves by Brighter Later out now.

Just Kids

Back in the mid 1990s when I moved out of home and into a flat in the seaside suburb of St Kilda, I lived with a girl who I met at uni where we were studying cinema studies. She came with what at the time seemed like very exotic things: a rice cooker, floral sheets and a stack of feminist film studies literature. There was not a lot she didn't know about; those two or three years that she had on me could have been twenty, especially on the subject of twentieth century literature, music, style icons and pivotal figures. I'm pretty sure she was the first one who uttered the words 'Patti' and 'Smith' in the same sentence. I remember thinking, 'Who?'. Even then, confronted with a photo of the striking androgynous singer/writer, I think I registered a kind of fear in the face of Smith's challenging gaze. She looked a bit hardcore for me, at the time in the thrall of Nina Simone. After reading Smith's recent and much lauded book, Just Kids – an account of her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe – I'm not sure how I could have been so mistaken about her.

I'm still no wiser on the music front aside from that song she collaborated on with Bruce Springsteen but I can vouch for her writing. It is warm, sensitive and self aware. And if you ever asked yourself, 'Why would you keep a diary?' the answer is 'Just Kids'. Smith brings detail (not only to chronology and emotion but to setting and wardrobe). Anyone interested in the literature and music of American counterculture, New York and creative process will find something in it. It reduced me to tears on more than one occasion, and not out of sadness for Smith and Mapplethorpe but rapture at Smith's gift for unexpected way with language and her sure sense of conviction. I came away with a deep and abiding respect for Smith's courage in forging her own creative path and wonder at her capacity to accept and love Mapplethorpe with a generous heart no matter what. Now he was hardcore.