Sweet Dreams A letter to Nutri-lame

 

Dear Nutri-lame,

One day my kid came home and chugged a litre of milk. Then he made an omelette. Six eggs. Then he went back to the milk. “What the hell are you doing?” I asked. “Bulking,” he said. “Trying to get SWOL.” “What the hell is SWOL?” “Ripped,” he said. Then he asked if we had any Nutri-grain. “Nutri-grain is rubbish.” I said. “Nutri-grain. More like Nutri-lame!” “You’re such a loser,” my kid said. “Takes one to know one,” I replied. He walked out of the room.

But that afternoon on the way to the shops my kid couldn’t stop talking about it. He told me about Kevin and how Kevin was all muscly now. Before he’d been all normal and skinny but now he was huge. “… and Kevin eats Nutri-grain EVERY DAY.”

So we got the cereal. We returned home. My kid sat at the kitchen table and began shovelling the cereal into his mouth. He shovelled one bowl. Then he shovelled another. told me he wanted to be big like Kevin was big. He wanted to be an Ironman like the ones he saw on the TV. “So do some push ups,” I said. He told me he had. He said he’d been doing them every night before bed. And sit ups too. And during the day, at lunch, he’d been running around the oval. “I fucking hate, Kevin,” he said. And then he told me it wasn’t fair. “Why can’t you just be cool like Kevin’s dad is cool?” Kevin’s dad sounds like a bozo, I told him, and then I opened the ashtray that I’d converted into a swear jar and told him to put another dollar into it.

We walked through the supermarket. “Okay let’s make a deal,” my kid said. “If Nutri-grain has a 4 star health rating, we get the cereal.” I laughed. “Nutri-lame is basically junk food. You got no chance.” “Do we have a deal?” “Wait,” I said. “What if I win?” “I don’t know. What do you want?”

I thought about it. Then I told him I wanted a son who thought independently and spent less time on the Internet. “Deal,” my kid said, grinning, immediately pulling out his smart phone and Googling: Nutri-grain health star rating. “Four stars, motherfucker” he said, showing me the screen. Then he started waving four fingers in my face. “Smell that?” Jesus, I thought. Was he going to – “Smells like victory.”

“Let me see that,” I said, snatching the phone from his hand. It seemed impossible, but, no, there it was. Four stars. He was right. We say, “Mother trucker,” I said, opening the swear tray again.

So we got the cereal. We returned home. My kid sat at the kitchen table and began shovelling the cereal into his mouth. He shovelled one bowl. Then he shovelled another. “I’m going to start calling you ‘The Shoveler’,” I said, but he wasn’t listening. Too busy shovelling. That’s how you do it, I thought. Just keep shovelling. Life: a constant shovel towards something, and then death. Just joking!

Except what happened next is no joke at all. My kid started complaining. He said his stomach hurt. “Harden up, legend,” I said. But he wouldn’t harden up at all. So there’s my kid groan-sleeping on the kitchen tiles when one of your Nutri-grain commercials came on. You probably know the one. It’s the one where the music sounds like robots are fucking, then murdering one another. Then an athletic male starts, for no reason, running and flipping and spinning on the side of a GIANT CEREAL BOWL, eventually scaling a GIANT NUTRI-GRAIN BOX. And then he summits the box and raises his hands above his head, screaming as if coming down from the sugar high induced by your cereal, or meth.

As you’ve probably gathered, I’m a chill guy. On a good day my kid would even tell you I’m a cool dad. Well, he’d say, “My dad’s a fuckwit”, and I’d say, “My kid was adopted” and he’d say, “Knew you didn’t have it in you” attempting to punch me in the testicles, and I’d say, “Losersaywhat?” and he’d say, “What?” and then I’d make a circle with my pointer and thumb and hold it beneath my waist, and when he looked he’d say, “fuck nugget” and then I’d sock him in the arm, reminding him afterwards that he owed two more dollars to the swear tray.

What I’m saying is that we understand each other. But you know what I don’t understand? Why my kid was reeling on our kitchen tiles after consuming several bowls of your four-star cereal.

Now a normal family would say: Interesting… very interesting result from the cereal. Perhaps we should limit the food’s intake – and I use the term “food” loosely – thereby avoiding similar outcomes in the future, but as I mentioned before I am a cool dad. I let my kids make their own mistakes. Besides, I figured if my kid wanted to get ripped and become an Ironman then who was I to discourage him? After all, your cereal is, and I quote, “ONE OF THE HIGHEST PROTEIN CEREALS”.

But over the next month something strange started to happen. My kid got bigger. But it wasn’t the big he was after. Now, he was just fat. “I’m fat!” my kid cried out one morning, staring into the mirror. I heard him from the kitchen.

“What’s that, SWOL LORD?” But this made him cry out even louder. “I feel like a sack of shit,” he said. “And look at my face.” So I did. And it was true. His face looked terrible. Once it had been smooth, but now it was blotchy and rough, as if several fault lines had cracked deep within to produce volcanos, and those volcanos liked to party. Then my kid looked at me and said, “I hate this. I feel so bad” and he put his arms around me and began to cry. He cried and he cried and I patted his back and told him it was okay. I told him to let it out. Then I strung together a confused metaphor that turned out not to be a metaphor about how you couldn’t use sugar as a cleaning product, unless it was Coke and you were cleaning a stainless steel bar. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, between tears. “I just wanted to be strong.”

Now let me ask you this: where do you get off? Can you hear my beautiful boy crying? Can you hear him whisper-crying, “I just wanted to be strong”? My kid was in training. He wanted to be an Ironman. He wanted to be unstoppable like the extremely hot-athletic people found in your advertisements. But if he continues like this I fear he may become something else: a diabetic. Because your cereal is full of sugar! Sure, a big deal was made when you reduced the sugar content a few years ago, but it’s still plenty sweet. 26.7g per 100g to be exact. Four stars?! Yeah right. Food for barge-arses! For bozos!

For this, I place a curse on you, Nutri-Lame. You have now been cursed. May it bring rain. May it bring sheets of fat into your dreams and into the dreams of those you love.

Oh, but like all great literature, this tale has a twist, a silver lining if you will. Have you seen that movie Silver Linings Playbook? Don’t bother. It’s rubbish. Instead, view the drawing below as your very own silver lining playbook. For in these times of great suffering my son and I have banded together. We have become strong. We have grown. Instead of testicle punches, we hug. We talk. We have ‘feelings Tuesday’ and we talk about our dreams on that day. We jog. We go to art class. And then we draw. Please find, enclosed, an original collaboration we’ve titled Thank You. Hang it on your wall, Nutri-lamers, and your curse will be lifted. Hang it on your wall and set yourself free!

‘Dear Nutri-lame’. Artwork by Oliver Mol and family.

Bob Dylan and His Band Enmore Theatre, Sydney, Sunday 19.08.18

 

 

“Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men that come with the dust and are gone with the wind.”

– ‘Song to Woody’, Bob Dylan

 

By the time Bob Dylan rises from his piano to take a final bow with His Band, the night feels less like a rock ‘n’roll show and more like having entered a grand story of some kind. Dylan’s jangling walk across the stage meanwhile betrays a glimpse of his very real mortality at 77 years-of-age, giving credence to reports he can no longer sustain playing the guitar due to  severe arthritis (a rumour he denies). I wonder if the source of this dangled stride might date back to his break-neck motorcycle accident in Woodstock in 1966, not to mention a case of hard living and life on the road that would have killed most anyone by now? Reports, rumours, denials… for someone so famous Dylan has about as much substance as smoke in the wind. In many ways, his songs are more real than him. Yet here he is anyway.

Inherent in his performance is an intense feeling of time. Not ‘time’ as something nostalgic or revived, but a force flowing, glittering and unfixed. His songs and their influences nod to a history that is lived, a thing within rather than behind us.

The mood is enhanced by the appearance of his band, all dark suited and sparkling lapels like some gunslinger cabaret act, the stage lit mostly in yellows and shadows with giant klieg lights hanging precariously above as if on some Hollywood set. The ultimate atmosphere, the illusion in this old art deco theatre, is of a barn dance and sawdust on the floor around us.

Tonight, through Dylan, we keep company with Cole Porter, Hank Williams and Muddy Waters, with Jack Kerouac and Arthur Rimbaud, with Greenwich Village in the 1960s and an American West that belongs in dime novels, with cold North American mining towns and railway iron in the soul, with love and contempt and God-fearing and faithlessness, as well as gnarly doses of paradoxical humour and misogyny that remind us of Dylan’s darkness and unpleasantness as much as his genius. The Shakespeare of our age, he breathes it all in and he breathes it out right in front of us.

I can’t escape the feeling that even if eight of his lives have been spent, Bob Dylan has at least one more left to surprise us with. And that something wonderful is brewing within him: a sequel to his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, a bootleg spin-off of Blood on the Tracks and Desire, a longed-for album of fresh original material and a whole new creative era. That’s very exciting to contemplate. Dylan isn’t just ‘back’, he’s going somewhere.

The mystery of this evening is how he got to be this mythical – and yet so human again? It’s as if Dylan has fought his way back into being here and is saying a strange thank you to a dream that almost destroyed him, a dream that started way back in the 1950s when a young Robert Allen Zimmerman fell in love with literature and music and began reinventing himself as someone he’d eventually call ‘Bob Dylan’.

Bob Dylan, Tempest era, 2012.

The night begins with black-hatted guitarist Stuart Kimball playing disparate notes that seem to have been sheared from ‘Waltzing Matilda’ without ever fully evolving into that melancholy song. There’s no big overture, just the hum and clatter of the band picking up instruments and taking their places as we recognise fragments of Australia’s unofficial national anthem. Be it root or branch, this musical trace is in keeping with the entire evening as zeitgeist melodies surge forward and fall back again into the band’s beautiful noise. Post modernists might call this type of thing ‘quotation’; hip hop artists could compare it to the practice of ‘sampling’. In the blues, country and jazzy popular standards that flow into Dylan’s ‘50s tilted rock ‘n’ roll it feels like nothing less than the irruption of his youth, a calling he once heard and depends on again. Things aren’t over. They are just beginning. Maybe it has always been this way. The old man is just a boy dreaming he is an old man. And the old man is smiling.

The band is already getting into a groove when Dylan grabs his seat at the grand piano. He’s still easily identified by his trademark birds-nest of hair, though these days it’s a little less the electric halo that so enchanted Jimi Hendrix and more some half-crazy composer. Maybe Charlie Sexton was on to something decades ago when he first met Dylan and was reminded of “an old owl”: a creature one associates with wisdom, magic and predation.

For the rest of the evening Dylan will alternately sit and stand at the piano, playing in a way that suggests Little Richard’s rhythmic force and Fats Waller’s joyful feeling in composing the popular jazz standards of yore. In other words, you tend to hear the 1950s and 1920s in Dylan’s playing, and while he is no Mozart on the keys he totally drives the band and has a potent melodic touch that mutates – at will and almost carelessly – between those decades and every other era between. Texan swing, hard edged Chess Records blues, ragtime popular ballads, juvenile delinquent collar-up ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll… Dylan might just as easily be touching the dial of some cosmic radio as running his fingers over the ivories. At times, it feels as if the band is mashing all those sounds together in a single tune, trying to catch up with whatever world Dylan might be time-tunnelling himself into.

‘Things Have Changed’ and ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ open the set. The band runs into them like a misfiring hot-rod, with an echoing and harsh sound that sees them struggling to find any instrumental balance at all. It’s just too freaking loud and clashing. The line between racing machine and car-crash is worrisome after so many reviews that have told us how great Dylan is again. Are we to be denied? Then ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ kicks in and the band lock on to a sound that is so tough and mean the guitar ghost of Link Wray might be looking over their shoulder nodding at the rock ‘n’ roll rumble below.

The tempo drops back on ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, its opening phrased as if Dylan were crooning it in the early twentieth century. “They sat together in the park as the evening sky grew dark,” comes over as laughably corny, with Dylan’s quavering voice creating the impression that even he is having a joke with himself. But as the song unfolds there’s a sense it has become kinder and more forgiving rather than tragic, that it is now about the act of letting go and accepting an experience of love instead of being wounded by it. For a lot of people, it’s not till Dylan actually says the words “simple twist of fate” that any recognition and then applause arrives. ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ gets a similarly fresh treatment and an oh-so-that’s-what-it-is response – once he recites the title emphatically into the microphone like he is laying down a vital clue. To be honest, I much prefer the original arrangements, but these new treatments make me hear the songs afresh and rethink my listening of them. Like I might relearn them, or that maybe he has and this is the most important thing of all. ‘Maybe’. I seem to reach for that word a lot to understand tonight.

‘Early Roman Kings’ stomps like the Muddy Waters pumper that it is. ‘Love Sick’ sounds menacing, a knife in the heart, a matter of sexual addiction he can’t resolve. ‘Visions of Johanna’ is neither sweet nor sour, yet entirely redefined. At times now, writing about the night, I lose track of myself and feel unsure of what happened as I entered the landscape of the songs. ‘Visions of Johanna’ has a sound you could only call golden. ‘Trying to Get to Heaven’ has a similar beauty, an ache about wanting to have a soul and not making it, or not seeing it understood. But what kind of words are they… ‘soul’, ‘golden’, ‘lost’?

Bob Dylan live on stage. 1966. Image by D.A. Pennebaker.

It must be quite some feat to pull together a band that can grasp such a broad and deep musical vocabulary. As skilled as they are, the emphasis is on feel more than perfection. I had heard by the turn of this century that Dylan’s road band was required to know over 200 songs by heart. And be ready not only to play them, but also bring on any change of tempo and stylistic treatment as per Dylan’s mood. No surprise that this could also lead to some stress and strain. These days it’s common knowledge Dylan plays to a much more narrow and defined set list, something that must release his band into the pleasure of playing.

Even so, about a quarter of the songs seem to end on nothing more than Dylan’s nod or a glance from his eyes – when the band falls into line accordingly. The relationship between Dylan and bassist Tony Garnier seems particularly close, while Charlie Sexton appears to work as hard as he can to please the master, moving from Les Paul jazz notes to hard cowboy blues, shaking out a little stiffness in his hand now and again. Sexton and fellow guitarist Stuart Kimball work like two men sawing down a big tree, cross-cutting and overlapping their energies. Maybe there’s a shared Scotty Moore influence on their playing, tough but modest, serving the song every time, working as one. Donny Heron on pedal steel, mandolin and violin, brings in those Texan swing and timeless folk flavours. George Receli slips in a ‘Wipeout’ drum solo during ‘Thunder on the Mountain’ – much to Dylan’s pleasure – but for the most part he manages to be percussive and colourful without marring the rhythm with anything too busy.

Overall there is a curious individuality to all of the band; a cultivated edge of anarchy where they lose unity and begin to make a racket that elasticizes and comes back together into something fine. Most beautiful of all is Dylan’s harmonica playing, so rich and honeyed its almost enough to make you cry.

As for Dylan’s voice, it’s so cracked and raspy it makes Tom Waits sound like a blue-eyed soprano. A shotgun blast into an ashtray would have more polish and consistency. But any idea that Dylan is a bad singer, or that in last decade he has been a far greater songwriter (at least in so far as a late masterpiece like Tempest might prove) than a vocalist (all those albums paying tribute to Sinatra et al and Dylan’s own abilities at the old soft-shoe shuffle) is just plain wrong. I’ve sometimes wondered about the camaraderie he documented in his memoir Chronicles between himself and Tiny Tim as mutually struggling artists in early 1960s New York. We place so much emphasis on Dylan as a songwriter it is all too easy to forget his innovative force as a vocal stylist, paving the way for singers like Neil Young and Tom Waits. Frank Sinatra was certainly a fan, recognising in Dylan a like-minded cinematic vocalist acting out the character of the song.

Working within his own peculiar limits, exalting in a life-long brilliance at phrasing and undeniable feeling for song narrative, Dylan naturally touches the words that he wants to touch and redefines their emphasis with ease and intimacy tonight. He’s not just a good singer, he’s a great singer – reawakening lost phrases, regenerating your formerly fixed sense of what a song was and how you heard it. I’m guessing in his crusty tributes to the Great American Song Book in this last decade and in his own song-writing repertoire he is smart enough to write his voice into the equation, making the most of his aging and the ages he has lived through. As for the musical arrangements now that are so radical certain songs appear to have developed entirely new melodies, it could be part of a vocal need as much as any desire to shake out a familiarity that may have made us forget what else the songs contained.

That’s not to say these new interpretations and musical shifts of gear are always an improvement. Or that Dylan was not always this way inclined, as any in-depth listening to the riches of his Bootleg series will reveal.

But after decades of sporadic performances that wrestled against what seemed to be a spiritual torpor and a passive-aggression towards his audiences and even his own songs, such changes are the sign of a Dylan who is most definitely back in the world. When he sings in ‘Pay in Blood’ and “I pay in blood but not my own” I don’t really believe him, powerful as it sounds. It’s tough guy acting, and the guy I see on stage – mean and nasty as he can be – is more of a giver than a taker. When I stumble out of the Enmore Theatre as surely as I might have finished a wild night at Al Swearengen’s saloon in Deadwood, everyone around me is energised, delighted and aflame with this gift. It was legendary.

 

Leaving the Enmore Theatre. 2018. Photography by Samantha Hutchison.

 

Ghost Dance Marrugeku’s Le Dernier Appel at Carriageworks

From the voice of Aretha Franklin to the torsions of Japanese butoh there is an intuition the body somehow inherits and carries history: be it the slavery and racism that ‘Aretha’ alchemized into songs of exaltation, liberty and solace; or the grotesque, eerie and primordial energy that analysts of butoh see as a form of post-Atomic distress.

A more familiar metaphor might be our sudden recognition in a child’s gesture that she or he takes after one of their grandparents and not their more immediate forebears. Consciously or unconsciously, we carry ghosts with us and those ghosts can go back a long way. We grow out of the dead.

Le Dernier Appel, which translates as The Last Cry, seems to draw from this physical well of memory to forge a conversation around colonialism and its aftermath today. It’s a bold and breathtaking new dance work by Marrugeku, a company which started life in Broome and now enjoys a bi-coastal relationship with Sydney as a resident group at the ever-expanding Carriageworks.

A press release announces Le Dernier Appel as “an inter-cultural and trans-Indigenous production, featuring Australian and New Caledonian dancers of First Nations, immigrant and settler descent.” But you will not need to have read the press release or a write-up like this to get that information or any associated messages. This is because the message of the performance is writ forcefully all over it, glowing from a giant iPhone screen that offers up news footage with a fast-scrolling text feed, as well as a steady array of colonial portraits and contemporary decolonization protest images that accelerate into a red-rushing, subliminal pile up.

Le Dernier Appel by Marrugeku. Photography by Prudence Upton.

Initially the breaking news ticker on the giant iPhone screen feels like a terrible distraction. You’re fighting to both read it and to simply stop reading it in order to focus on the actual dancing. It’s hard to know how much this is a creative misjudgement and how much it is a kind of Brechtian alienation technique, distancing us from mere aesthetic pleasure and hammering us with the polemical roots of the production.

The spark for the work is a referendum on independence from France due in New Caledonia in November 2018. This information is detailed in the news ticker that cross-cuts items with an overlapping news conversation on Australia’s tussle with the words for an Indigenous recognition in the Constitution. Just as you begin to tire of the information overload and wrestle your gaze more fully towards the dancers, accepting you can’t keep up with the speed and density of the written information anyway, this textual and polemical bombardment ceases.

By then the dancers are in full flight. Apart from the giant iPhone (which also offers a serene close-up of geometrically composed leaves that slowly turn blood red, and later use as a mirror and a solitary source of reflected light), the only other pieces of staging are a long, harsh metal bench that reminds one of an extended and cruelly uncomfortable chaise lounge, and a rock with what appears to be radial totemic markings. The six dancers are as advertised – a mix of Australian and New Caledonian presences, white, black, Asian, dressed casually yet distinctively in everyday clothes – moving with a looseness that suggests, at times, about as much choreography as the bustle of a busy street.

And yet this was a very, very powerful collective expression. And though each dancer was able to maximise their individual identity and style, the motion and interlocking weave and action held all the tension and danger of an MMA cage fight. Faint traces of hip hop moves, ballet training and indigenous dance rituals existed in a performance of stunning gymnastic force. You really felt these people were dancing for their lives. Or if not quite that, fighting to understand who they were – part liberation struggle, part exorcism. Inherent in their youth and physical vitality one might also have read some hint of a new democracy being born.

In one incredibly impressive sequence, a dancer wiped his hand across his face and thereby his identity away, falling backwards almost to the floor, rolling over and around without ever seeming to actually fall and touch the ground. He then arched himself back to standing height before wiping his face and repeating this shoulder-rolling, downward-falling, gravity-defying move again and again, spinning almost drunkenly in a circle of his own terrible making. Elsewhere dancers distinguished themselves with even the smallest of gestures as much as more dramatic feats, twitching and jittering, then exploding from themselves. This was an exceptional collective, with each dancer pulling us toward and even into them.

The dancers were fortunate to be working with a simply outstanding score that mixed electronic and percussive energies reminiscent at varying moments of composers like Steve Reich and Peter Sculthorpe and the dark, seductive syrup and propulsive density of acts like Massive Attack and Burial. The brief but transcendent use of ‘future soul’ singer Ngaiire meanwhile brought a genuine shaft of beauty to the intensity of the overall show.

Any relationship between dance and language is obviously problematic, especially when that language is so freighted in politics. Reviewing a production like this can be just as difficult; to rephrase an old joke, writing about dance is like singing about architecture. And yet dance and narrative do connect, perhaps as something nearer poetry than prose – a form of storytelling that can border on the shamanistic at its best. Dance, like song and poetry, talks to some other deep part of us.

Le Dernier Appel, The Last Cry, achieved that shamanistic point of flight amid its messaging. Despite its highly contemporary shape, (Dis)Information Age references and radical polemic, it warrants a much older reference: to the Ghost Dance of the Native Americans, a latter-day spiritual uprising of the nineteenth century that sought to unite the living with the dead in order to drive away the white colonists. At Le Dernier Appel’s end, the dancers moved forward, in step together at last, towards a ray of light, their arms outstretched – as if to either embrace or receive something, it’s not clear. Each person who sees this show will likely feel a final message of hope or pessimism in that moment. A fatal echo of the colonial past being met again; or a step towards a better world.

 

Le Dernier Appel is at Carriageworks, 8pm Wednesday to Saturday, 15-18 August 2018.

Le Dernier Appel by Marrugeku. Photography by Prudence Upton.

X

Sign up to our newsletter, Word on the Street, for your weekly dose of news, features, and culture direct from your neighbourhood.

* Mandatory Privacy Policy