Slow dancing with kangaroo and donkey

You’ve heard of course of the slow food movement. Well, I’ve launched the slow blogging movement. There were some very funny people at Byron Bay Writers Festival, some of whom are known as comedians such as the brilliant John Doyle (doesn’t everyone love him?), Lily Bragge, and then there are the people who tell very funny stories, often against themselves. A.J Mackinnon is one of them. He told of how he swam across a Chinese river to enter China and was arrested for not having a visa. How can this be funny? Well, because he is Australian he was asked by the guards if he had a pet kangaroo, and when he said he didn’t, the guard roared at him, “Why you not have a pet kangaroo?” It’s a difficult question to answer, said Mackinnon.
If there was a sartorial prize being awarded at the festival Jack Marx would win hands down. Marx said he gets really annoyed that if he has a reputation at all it’s as someone who has no ethics when it comes to writing about people. It really “pisses me off as people don’t know what I withhold. They only know what i publish … I am the keeper of so many secrets, and those people know the secrets I’ve kept for them.” “Those people are not going to come up in my defence, and say yes I told Jack I had an affair.” Marx see ethics with regard to journalism just the same as courtesy. “All I’ve got to do is ask myself what is the right thing to do and you always get the right answer.” He thinks the journalist code of ethics is nonsense as written by Canberra. He sees the current rules for ‘off the record’ as a joke and only there to protect the journalist. Marx prefers to look at every story on its merit and described this process in a somewhat surprising way: “If someone has irrigated the desert and saved millions of people yet they they’ve sodomised a donkey – yes that’s an interesting opening – but it’s not necessary for the story.”
Marx conduct himself by making the rules as he goes and by a personal code. “If someone waves the code of ethics in front of me I tell them to wipe their arse with it.”

Someone else who makes people smile and was a hit with the festival crowds again was Sam Cutler. He lives in a bus and parked it just by the green room, and hung out there with a few musos and writers, and just like I fancy he would have parked and hung out a thousand times before while tour managing with the Rolling Stones, and Grateful Dead…

Slow blogging continues in the next installment….

Marian Edmunds

An Unimagined and word-of-mouth hit

When Imran Ahmad was a child he imagined himself as a writer. So he went to university and studied chemistry. And then he went on to lead a managerial life with groups such as Unilever and one of the big consulting firms. I chatted with Imran at the festival and heard him speak at the Writers Cabaret about his word-of-mouth and never-say-die journey to publication. He appeared (breaks in transmission to talk about writers cabaret) amid recitals by Tom Keneally, folk songs with really meaningful lyrics by Professor Ian Lowe, author and film-maker Oren Siedler as part of a classical string quartet, Sam Cutler, ex-Rolling Stones tour manager, the uplifting Carl Cleves, singer and broadcaster James Griffin, and historian, film-maker, musicianMichael Caulfield on his guitar, the hilarious stand-up and now author Tom Gleeson, Judith Lanigan’s incredible Dying Swan by Hula, (next day i spotted Lanigan teaching Mark Dapin how to swing a hula hoop). Then there was Linda Jaivin’s simmering (that should be in scarlet red) rendition of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, and with Dominic Knight making a rare front of stage appearance – he is a Chaser team member you didn’t see much on screen, and now a novelist. He appeared not as Disco Boy but with a guitar and a line of hirsute self-deprecation. Sandi Gandhi was host. She’s the comedienne who would have won Australia’s Got Talent, had her friends and neighbours all not phoned Crimestoppers to vote by mistake.

Meanwhile, a full account of Imran’s path to publication can be read here.
I was curious about the recommendation from the British politician Ann Widdecombe. Normally an endorsement from her would put me off. She was not my favourite politician in the UK, although I give her some credit for always speaking her mind. Imran took the unusual step of self-promotion in mailing a copy of his book to all of Britain’s 646 politicians, although he almost skipped Widdecombe, and found out later that she had listed his book as her favourite read of 2007.
The events and aftermath of 9/11 set Imran off as a writer. He had to respond to the vitriolic backlash against Muslims. He wanted to set the record straight to let people know, “We’re not terrorists – we are really boring people who pray all the time and don’t drink!”
Imran is not one of those writers who pops into a festival for his appearance. He was spotted at the Launchpad on Saturday watching aspiring writers pitch their books to publishers and agents.
His popularity at the festival was Unimagined with all copies of his book being sold before I and many others could buy one for Imran to sign.

Marian Edmunds

I’m With The Band: Musos On the Move

There’s sunshine but a chill breeze this Saturday festival day. At the IGA there’s a man in black with a shock of silver hair ahead of me at the counter. It’s Sam Cutler.
This post introduces Ryan Butler, from Murwillumbah who is studying journalism and creative writing at Griffith University. Ryan has just read Sam Cutler’s book and watched the festival session, I’m With the Band: Musos on the Move.
Sam Cutler worked as a personal tour manager for two of the greatest rock bands ever, The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead. In his candid new book, You Can’t Always Get What You Want , Sam shares his experiences in his chosen profession, ‘rock physicist’.

What inspired, or possessed a young Englishman to embrace such a lifestyle. “It’s the disease of being on the move.”
“I love meeting new people. It was a life plan, to have a crazy life and then write about it after 60 years,”. He saw it as a way out of “dreary, grey, starving England”. No doubt music, and more specifically, rock and roll, had infected him like many others of that generation and he was seemingly swept upon a wave which never really broke. Musicianship itself was never appealing because that was what everyone else wanted to do. “I was more concerned with who made the decisions about how stuff works…where it went…how high the stage needed to be”. The position itself is described by Sam as like ‘a disinterested friend…who makes helpful suggestions”. Someone that in a band with Keith Richards was invaluable. The life Cutler describes is exciting, pleasurable, and unpredictable, but the presentation is so incredibly modest and realistic, there is never a doubt about its authenticity.

Sam’s life of free love, and drugs, decadence and debauchery on the road with The Rolling Stones culminated in the free concert at Altamont, a disastrous end to the group’s 1969 US tour. Meredith Hunter, a young Afro-American man was stabbed to death in front of the stage by a member of the infamous Hell’s Angel’s bikey gang. So began his work for The Grateful Dead, which after 5 years too ran its course.

Carl Cleves left Belgium, applied to study musicology in Africa, and was never heard from again. No that’s not true. But he never did return to Belgium, opting instead for the pursuit of moments of Tarab – a state of bliss invoked by beautiful music or poetry – amidst new and exciting environments. His career on the road, which spanned nine years straight, began in a small fishing village in Brazil, with a seven-piece band. That path landed him in a Sudanese prison, where he stayed for six weeks performing Beatles and Dylan covers for Jack the General, while the two drank sherry.

Don Walker was keyboardist and piano player for legendary Australian rock band, Cold Chisel. In his recent memoir Shots he recalls early life, the years spent on the road, and the high-times during the 1970s. Much like Cutler’s memoir, Shots also explores the occupational hazard of dealing with people with other agendas. He also reveals the inner workings and relationships within the band, and the events that led to it’s ultimate disband in the 1980s. Interestingly Walker said that writing songs and writing literature were very different processes, music being an ‘incremental process’ which leads to short periods increased intensity and vigour. Shots it turns out was written under “no conscious choice of craft” but instead as “a stream of consciousness”. The book has been heralded for its unique approach.

By Ryan Butler