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.

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1. Quantum love and the essence of life
2. Working toward higher goals. Sharing the love. Happy V day.
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Quantum love and the essence of life

I’ve never been a big fan of Valentine’s Day. Like so many other days that are deemed significant in our culture, it’s one that rattles me as perpetuating so many heteronormative myths and being nothing more than a cheap consumer charade. (Tee-hee. I’ve been itching to use ‘heteronormative’ for ages!)

What that means is that, no, unlike the ever-popular Lisa Simpson, I never received the “choo-choo-choose me” Valentine’s cards from secret admirers as a child (or teenager, or adult, for that matter). Granted, I never gave anyone a card either, but hey, at age seven I was yet to discover feminism or The Secret.

Feeling unloved is probably one of the worst feelings in the world. And I don’t think I was alone in feeling exceptionally unloved on Valentine’s Day. So why participate in a cultural event that ends up just spreading the non-love?

But here I am, a pathetic, hypocrite of an adult, quite happy to be swept along in this folly of romantic love.  On Valentine’s eve, I went searching for a special ‘love’-themed positive tune to post on this site and my V day plans include a special dinner with my love. (No, not the cat. Nooo, not my sMacBook. The other one – with two legs.) Actually, my enthusiasm for tunes of love and celebrating the day is probably more to do with “will use any excuse to eat wonderful food, guzzle champagne and dance around the house to cheesy music”.

It is true, though, that I’m a big sucker for love. In fact, it is my one value or guiding principle that has not changed over the years. For me it’s like the ultimate truth, the only reason we’re here, the singular essence of life: To live with love. And to isolate that to one day of the year just seems ridiculous.

In fact, my love attraction is so strong that whenever I’m making a tough decision, it only takes a Marianne-Williamson-moment for me to work out what I need to do. You see, I just ask myself, “What would love do?”

Now as I drag myself out from under my rock of new-age shame, let me explain why this works for me. Like so many popular songs have suggested, the world needs a lot more love. The alternative is living with fear, and although I’m pretty skilled at that, after years of giving the fear-based-life gig a red-hot go, I’d have to rate it as a pretty ineffective strategy for achieving quality of life.

So what is it about living with love that makes life a whole lot more worthwhile?

A recent paper in the journal NeuroQuantology by Antonella Vannini and Ulisse Di Corpo attempts to explain the life-giving power of love in terms of quantum mechanics.

In their paper, Retrocausality and the Healing Power of Love, Vannini and Di Corpo draw on the work of early 20^th century mathematician, Luigi Fantappie, and suggest that there are two competing laws at play that regulate our material needs (such as food, water, shelter, etc) – the law of entropy (waves diverging) and the law of syntropy (waves converging).  Due to entropy we are always replacing lost energy through food and water, or minimising loss through shelter. Syntropy, on the other hand, is the law that sustains life. According to Fantappie, who gave syntropy its name,

“The law of life is not the law of hate, the law of force, or the law of mechanical causes; this is the law of non-life, the law of death, the law of entropy; the law which dominates life is the law of finalities, the law of cooperation towards goals which are always higher, and this is true also for the lowest forms of life. In humans this law takes the form of love.”

If we’re serious about sustaining life, then we have to “be like the atoms” and encourage convergence of energy. That is, work together toward higher goals and share the love. It also means that instead of always making rational, head-based decisions based on certainty (or our illusion thereof), we make heart-based decisions.  In true quantum physics style, they also contend that the future determines the past (retro-causality is the inverse of causality where past events causes future events).

So when we have feelings we just can’t rationalise, like when we feel anticipation, it is the future sending us a message. And so in acting on our feelings, living with our heart, our future is determining our past.

Yup. [Back away slowly from the crazy lady…]

There’s more to the theory than that, as it deals with identity and meaning and how we connect with the environment. But I thought the stuff about love being the essential law of life was pretty neat – and way better than a tacky card and a hastily-bought box of chocolates.

I also like the theory because there’s a bit of a Taoist dichotomous balance thing going on as well; love and hate paradoxically co-exist, and the redress of hate or force is love. It also gives me insight into one of other great paradoxes of love, which was the fabulous opening line (and theme) of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body:

Why is the measure of love loss?

Why do we not realise how much something, or someone, means to us until it has gone? That only through absence do we recognise what we truly have. By their very nature, love and loss co-exist.

If you want a brain-melt trip into the edges of research, you can read the full paper here.

And my Valentine’s wish?  I hope all your days are filled with love.

POST SCRIPT: I was so chuffed when I published this piece last year to receive the comment “Beautiful” from the authors of the quantum love paper. A simple acknowledgment can mean so much.

This piece was first published 14 February 2009.

Related posts:

1. Quantum love and the essence of life
2. Love is everything: Jane Siberry and the art of being human
3. How people change: Working with the stages and processes of change

Uplifting Tunes for your Weekend

I must have first heard this tune when I was having a really bad day, as I recall my initial thoughts of it being “bloody useless hippy crap”. 

However, my bad day passed and after hearing this 2008 dance anthem a few more times, I really really warmed to it. Warmed to the point where the harmonies of “What a wonderful world it would be” often get stuck in my head on a continual loop.

What I love about the song now, and I think what I reacted to on the first listening, is the spoken word bit where Ron Carroll lists what a wonderful world would look like – people are smiling, having a good time, loving one another, sharing, there is only peace, love, joy.

I know it’s over the top but if you’re familiar with the concept of redressing, then you’ll know that you often need to swing things all the way over to the polar opposite before they will balance in the middle again. So, in living a modern western life, we see and hear so much negative stuff in the world that we need a litany of wonderful to get some balance back. 

Interestingly, while I first heard of redressing through politics and philosophy, it seems to be being borne out in the research in the field of positive psychology. They have found that to flourish in a relationship, work or life, you need about three positive encounters for each negative encounter (Losada). Some even say you need at least five positive encounters for each negative (Gottman). 

So while many may scoff at the idealistic lyrics of this tune, they actually serve a purpose, and if we allowed ourselves more positive encounters then our lives would be richer for it.

But back to the music… I mainly love this tune because it is a love generation, trance anthem that can getting you tapping into the warm fuzzies without attending a weekend workshop or scoffing a handful of ecstasy. 

Am off to twirl with abandon now…

Related posts:

1. Joy Retro Disco presents H.A.P.P.Y. Radio by Edwin Starr
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I’ve never been a big fan of Valentine’s Day. Like so many other days that are deemed significant in our culture, it’s one that rattles me as perpetuating so many heteronormative myths and being nothing more than a cheap consumer charade. (Tee-hee. I’ve been itching to use ‘heteronormative’ for ages!)

What that means is that, no, unlike the ever-popular Lisa Simpson, I never received the “choo-choo-choose me” Valentine’s cards from secret admirers as a child (or teenager, or adult, for that matter). Granted, I never gave anyone a card either, but hey, at age seven I was yet to discover feminism or The Secret.

Feeling unloved is probably one of the worst feelings in the world. And I don’t think I was alone in feeling exceptionally unloved on Valentine’s Day. So why participate in a cultural event that ends up just spreading the non-love?

But here I am, a pathetic, hypocrite of an adult, quite happy to be swept along in this folly of romantic love.  On Valentine’s eve, I went searching for a special ‘love’-themed positive tune to post on this site and my V day plans include a special dinner with my love. (No, not the cat. Nooo, not my sMacBook. The other one – with two legs.) Actually, my enthusiasm for tunes of love and celebrating the day is probably more to do with “will use any excuse to eat wonderful food, guzzle champagne and dance around the house to cheesy music”.

It is true, though, that I’m a big sucker for love. In fact, it is my one value or guiding principle that has not changed over the years. For me it’s like the ultimate truth, the only reason we’re here, the singular essence of life: To live with love. And to isolate that to one day of the year just seems ridiculous.

In fact, my love attraction is so strong that whenever I’m making a tough decision, it only takes a Marianne-Williamson-moment for me to work out what I need to do. You see, I just ask myself, “What would love do?”

Now as I drag myself out from under my rock of new-age shame, let me explain why this works for me. Like so many popular songs have suggested, the world needs a lot more love. The alternative is living with fear, and although I’m pretty skilled at that, after years of giving the fear-based-life gig a red-hot go, I’d have to rate it as a pretty ineffective strategy for achieving quality of life.

So what is it about living with love that makes life a whole lot more worthwhile?

A recent paper in the journal NeuroQuantology by Antonella Vannini and Ulisse Di Corpo attempts to explain the life-giving power of love in terms of quantum mechanics.  

In their paper, Retrocausality and the Healing Power of Love, Vannini and Di Corpo draw on the work of early 20^th century mathematician, Luigi Fantappie, and suggest that there are two competing laws at play that regulate our material needs (such as food, water, shelter, etc) – the law of entropy (waves diverging) and the law of syntropy (waves converging).  Due to entropy we are always replacing lost energy through food and water, or minimising loss through shelter. Syntropy, on the other hand, is the law that sustains life. According to Fantappie, who gave syntropy its name,

“The law of life is not the law of hate, the law of force, or the law of mechanical causes; this is the law of non-life, the law of death, the law of entropy; the law which dominates life is the law of finalities, the law of cooperation towards goals which are always higher, and this is true also for the lowest forms of life. In humans this law takes the form of love.”

If we’re serious about sustaining life, then we have to “be like the atoms” and encourage convergence of energy. That is, work together toward higher goals and share the love. It also means that instead of always making rational, head-based decisions based on certainty (or our illusion thereof), we make heart-based decisions.  In true quantum physics style, they also contend that the future determines the past (retro-causality is the inverse of causality where past events causes future events). 

So when we have feelings we just can’t rationalise, like when we feel anticipation, it is the future sending us a message. And so in acting on our feelings, living with our heart, our future is determining our past.

Yup. [Back away slowly from the crazy lady…]

There’s more to the theory than that, as it deals with identity and meaning and how we connect with the environment. But I thought the stuff about love being the essential law of life was pretty neat – and way better than a tacky card and a hastily-bought box of chocolates.

I also like the theory because there’s a bit of a Taoist dichotomous balance thing going on as well; love and hate paradoxically co-exist, and the redress of hate or force is love. It also gives me insight into one of other great paradoxes of love, which was the fabulous opening line (and theme) of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body:

            Why is the measure of love loss?

Why do we not realise how much something, or someone, means to us until it has gone? That only through absence do we recognise what we truly have. By their very nature, love and loss co-exist.

If you want a brain-melt trip into the edges of research, you can read the full paper here.

And my Valentine’s wish?  I hope all your days are filled with love.

Related posts:

1. Working toward higher goals. Sharing the love. Happy V day.
2. Valentine tune: You + Me = Love by Undisputed Truth
3. Love is everything: Jane Siberry and the art of being human

Uplifting tunes for your weekend!

Twas the night before Valentines and all through the house, not a creature was sleeping, not even a mouse. 

Oh, it’s been a frantic V Eve here at Club C’ran. With the day of the valentine tomorrow, we’ve been a-looking for a festive tune to bring in the new year of lurv. We had a long-list and then a short-list and have finally chosen the positive tune to see in the new cheer.

It is Undisputed Truth’s 1976 disco hit, You + Me = Love. There was strong competition on the love front. Donna Summer, Diana Ross and the C+C Music Factory were all contenders to the end, but it only took one spin of the Undisputed Truth’s tune through the big speakers to get the assembled (okay, Ms Ride) dancing in the halls. 

Sure, the lyrics may not be the odes that are traditionally favoured in this season, but this tune has a hands-in-the-air fervour that brings the joy back to love. And, well, it’s just a lot a fun. 

Oh, apparently it’s sung by Taka Boom, younger sister of Chaka Khan. 

Kick off your heels, close your eyes, put your hands in the air and enjoy the next 10 minutes of joyful love. 

Mucho love-o on this weekend de valentino!

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