In a bold move, Jane put the offer out to her fans that if they could find 30 people who were willing to pay $30 each, then she’d turn up and perform in their lounge room. At the time of writing, over 80 Salons have been scheduled.

The Salon tour is all part of her reassessing how music and money can co-exist, side-stepping the cookie-cutter machine that is the music industry to bring music and community back to the people.

When I heard of this concept, I knew I had to go. I love it when people create their own ways of being in the world and this kind of thinking and approach is much needed in the music industry – an industry that makes billions of dollars out of talent, while the majority of musicians are working multiple jobs to support their creative endeavours.

It has been a few years since I’d even heard a Jane Siberry track. However, I knew her album, When I Was A Boy, inside out when I was an angsty, love-lorn twenty-something. I was confident that no matter what direction she’d gone in the last 15 years, I was sure to appreciate her immense talent.

It was only as I began the two hour drive to Brisbane that I reacquainted myself with her music. Its impact on me was immediate. I WAS an angsty, love-lorn twenty-something again. The feelings came back instantly. I even remembered some of the words – which would come in handy later in the evening.

So you could say I was well and truly primed when I arrived at the Brisbane Salon. James Lees and Silver Sircus were the hosting Jane’s performance in the lounge of James’ inner Brisbane Queenslander. There was something very apt about this setting. Not only is a Queenslander the ubiquitous Brisbane house – wooden floorboards, windows open and verandah around to quell the summer heat – but being back in that environment was like coming home. Much of my Brisbane life was lived in these houses and their high-ceilinged lounge rooms and verandahs remind me of happy times with many friends.

I was pretty apprehensive about attending, as Caro was sick and I was going alone. I had no need to worry though, as James was the perfect host and because it was a small gathering, most people were happy to chat.

James and Lucinda Shaw, performing as Silver Sircus, opened the night with three songs. When Lucinda began singing, I was again transported back almost 20 years, watching her performing in a cafe in New Farm. I remembered what it meant to me in the early 1990s to hear her sing so lovingly and cheekily of a queer Brisbane life.

Tonight, she mentions that she is nervous to be singing in front of so many friends but the nerves do not detract from the performance. If anything, they enhance it. I get that this is important. Plus, Lucinda and James have become such wonderful multi-talented musicians that you don’t realise that it’s a drummer (James) and a vocalist (Lucinda) stepping out of their roles by providing piano and guitar accompaniment.

When Jane emerges from the Salon’s green room (ie the kitchen) we are ready for the journey she will take us on for the next two hours. She weaves stories of humanity through spoken word, song and music – accompanied by piano, guitar, and trusty ipod. She is captivating. Stories of pain, love and hope that transport you to the villages she’s already visited in her almost 30 year career – whether it be listening (really listening) to kids in a bus shelter in Britain or greeting the locals in her native Toronto. She speaks of energy and oneness and relationships getting to the heart of our human experience – to love, to connect, to see and bring out the beauty in us all. By the time the encore arrives and the whole room is singing (in harmony!) the chorus of Calling All Angels, I don’t just have shivers up my spine, I have shivers through my whole body.

Like a magician, Jane Siberry has transported us to this beautiful place (which is where we always were anyway – we just didn’t see it). I’ve been to many gigs where I’ve been moved, where I’ve felt one with the crowd and performers, but very few have challenged my thinking and cajoled my senses like this one.

It’s love and sustainability in action – through music and performance. It’s connecting with the people directly – not through profit hungry middlepeople. It made me think about all the ways I could be living love and connecting with the people who need what I do. If how we want to live doesn’t exist, or if the current system doesn’t work, then we have the power to change it, to create it anew. Or perhaps create it a-old?

The whole Jane Siberry Brisbane Salon has made think. And feel. And dream.

And from that place, I am alive.

Love IS everything.

Related posts:

1. Quantum love and the essence of life
2. Working toward higher goals. Sharing the love. Happy V day.
3. Valentine tune: You + Me = Love by Undisputed Truth

You have to make your own fun when you live in the country.

Fortunately we were aided in our fun-making this past weekend by one of our friends hosting an L Word Party. As a self-confessed tragic of the television show, I just had to attend. 

For those who may not orbit in the lesbian (or pop culture) universe, The L Word was a television series about a group of LA ladies of a Sapphic bent. Its sixth and final season was screened in the US earlier this year.

The L Word is significant because it portrayed “women who identify as not straight” (as one high profile woman put it) as everyday people with complex, inane, yet likable lives. For the first time in television history, these characters were played out in an ongoing series, rather than just bit parts in heterosexual dramas. Sure, anyone who has been in a dyke community knows that The L Word was not truly representative of the diversity of the culture, but the producers and writers of the show generally portrayed a group of women who, while flawed, were women you wanted on your team.

So an L Word Party is something I see as deeply embedded in “what it’s like to be a lesbian circa 2009″. I can’t imagine it happening in ten years as the show, like DTWOF comics, explored issues of its time: gay marriage, censorship, parenting. It was also styled in a very LA way, so I can see us exclaiming “Look at what they were wearing!” in ten years and wondering why they raided the costume department of 1979 Dallas for this noughties drama.

Ahh costumes… which brings us to the L Word Party – country Australian edition. What does one wear to an L Word Party? A couple of dozen women turned up at the property, which had been decked out as two of the sets from the show: The Planet and the Arts Centre (albeit regionalised for the party). The Arts Centre came complete with po-mo installations such as a bowl of lemons entitled “Family” and yart from local creatives.  But the theatre of the night was certainly provided by those who came in character. We had a couple of Alices, a couple of Tashas, a glamour Tina and a pregnant Tina, a couple of Danas, a couple of pregnant Maxes, a Tom, some Shanes (who kept ducking out all night), a funky Kit, a Joyce and a Candace, and – how could we forget – a Jenny. Of course, the evening would not have been complete without its gracious host, the very glamorous Bette.

Highlights of the night included an L Word quiz (which exposed those who really had watched the series one too many times), re-enactments of key scenes (sometimes re-scripted for effect), and a local edition of The Chart.

The Chart, which was introduced into the show by the character Alice, was a wall-sized diagram that showed the interconnectedness of lesbian liaison. In the show, it illustrated how there is seldom more than two degrees of separation between women. Real-life versions of The Chart linking up local lesbians have been done on the internet and in coffee houses the world over. I remember thinking when The Chart was introduced on the show that it was so true, you could link up all the women by who’d slept with whom.

So it was surprising when The Chart from the party consisted of lots of little orbits of names but very little interconnectivity. I wondered if it was because we didn’t know each other and were from different places. Maybe it only works in localised communities? Whatever’s at work, it was fascinating, especially with a few “I didn’t know you slept with her” bringing whole new dimensions to relationships.

I write about this party because it illustrates what it’s like to live beyond the ghetto and how people can be brought together through common interests. Sure, I may not be bestest buds with everyone but I did feel a shared sense of experience, a common language and an acknowledgement of the values that I hold dear in my life around openness, diversity, acceptance, and joy. And I doubt I would experience that in the city, where it’s so easy to keep the same group of friends and also become very blasé about living free.

And it’s probably why, despite all my kvetching about how dreadful the last season of The L Word was, I am grateful that it was produced. It gave us stories that captured our hopes and fears, our joys and heartbreaks, and for us to gather around and say, “This is us. We exist.”

Related posts:

1. Squeal! The L Word returns for its final season
2. Joss Whedon’s new series, Dollhouse: Yeah or meh?
3. Farewell to lesbian feminism

One of the first ‘essentials’ for navigating the turbulent waters of personal change that I learned from coaching was Positive Mental Attitude. Now there’s a lot of woo woo bumpf around PMA. The version I learned was straight out of Napoleon Hill but the basics of it are starting to be borne out in the positive psychology research.

Today I watched a talk by Sonia Lyubomirsky who is one of the leading lights in happiness research. Her book, The How of Happiness, is regarded as one of the must-have texts of the positive intelliarti. I’ve yet to read it but I have read her 2005 research paper on which it draws, which looked at how happiness impacts on success. As she summarises in her talk, it seems that happier people just seem to have more of those things we find valuable in life – better relationships, better work, better health. They are resilient and thriving.

And the one distinctive thing about PMA that I recall from years ago is that, in those wobbly formative, early-days of going through a transition or change, when perhaps the vision and the way aren’t so clear, then it’s essential to surround yourself with positive people. I’d even add in now that it’s not so much positive people but people who support you in the changes you are making.

Last night I went to a community film and discussion and I came away thinking about this. I’ve been to many community gatherings before and usually come away with a spring in my step, thinking that life is just dang wonderful, and heck, aren’t those flowers just beautiful. But recently, I’ve come away from meetings feeling that I am alone. I am an alien here with nothing in common with anyone. Now, I know that’s not true, so what is it about these gatherings that throws me into the other PMA – pessimistic moping antagonist.

I call it the Chicken Little effect. This is when all people can focus on is the doom and gloom, the sky is forever falling, and even when the focus may turn to solutions, the solutions are so deeply embedded in the catastrophic problems that are befalling us that they are just reactive bandaids. Current favourites of the Chicken Little club are peak oil, global warming (or the kinder, friendlier version, climate change), overpopulation, global financial / credit crisis, global collapse, and so on. And when I’m around Chicken Little mental attitude, it makes me think “Well we’re all just fucked. We may as well kill ourselves now.” It’s not what I’d call empowering.

It’s not that I don’t think these things are important considerations in how we live our lives, but I think that they are just one small factor. Ultimately, I don’t want to continue on this sea of uncertainty, reacting to the latest catastrophe, and fritzing out my cortisol because I’m constantly anxious about the future.

Instead, I want to be able to respond to whatever life throws my way. I want to be resilient. And with this never-ending talk of the oil running out and no longer being able to power anything or go anywhere, well, it just does not contribute to that.

I suppose it doesn’t sit well with me as well because I actually believe that we’ll be alright in the end, that humans are incredibly resourceful and adaptable (I see evidence of it everyday) and that the worse case scenario is that Gaia will get her own back and wipe out all the pesky humans who just haven’t learned how to live in harmony with each other let alone the rest of the planet. And I wonder, is that all that bad?

But that’s not what I’d prefer to happen. I’d prefer that humans and other critters were part of the earth’s future. And that is my focus. A healthy, vibrant, flourishing planet for all life. We are but the stewards.

We learnt a long time ago that The Stick doesn’t work when you’re looking for motivation for change. It’s just not sustainable, and, it causes suffering in the process. No desirable means. No desirable end.

It’s time to start talking Carrots. This is what’s going to make the difference between us not just surviving, or having a sustainable life, but moving us into a realm where we, and all life on the planet, flourish.  

I’m getting the crudités ready now. You bring the hommous.

Related posts:

1. Bouncing back: Choose your response to adversity
2. How people change: Working with the stages and processes of change