exile. a while

i've had a few different nicknames in my life, but the one that has is the most used, and has the greatest history attached to it is "hen". now, at least if you live in sweden, you too can be hen! this is the proposed new gender-neutral personal pronoun, instead of "han" for he and "hon" for she. call me biased, but i think hen is much nicer than han or hon!

i am in the picturesque czech town of cezky krumlov for an easter escape; it's very cold & has been raining quite a bit, which is a bit of a shock after india, but there are plenty of museums, galleries, shops and cafes in which to lose oneself away from the weather. the vlatava river (moldau) curls around the old town which is nestled beneath an impressive middle-ages castle. the streets are narrow and cobble-stoned, there is barely a straight wall or a square angle to be found - the whole place reeks of oldness. having grown up in a country where anything more than about 50 years old is considered old, i don't think i'll ever get over my fascination with being in places where i can actually touch things created by people many hundreds of years ago. i'll also never get over the feeling of being able to jump in the car, drive for four hours, and not only be in another country but be somewhere where a different language is spoken, a different currency is exchanged, different road rules apply ... and the complex history of thousands of years of human habitation, power struggles, agriculture, developing society ...

it is quite a touristic town, and i am also here purely as a tourist. it's still very cold - remnants of the heavy snow of europe's winter were all around us from the bavarian forest into the bohemian forest - and it's been raining quite a bit; but there are still enough tourists around to cause traffic jams in the castle's tower, & for people to be turned away from the very nice vegetarian restaurant we went to last night. i'm not sure that i would want to be here in the tourist season, as the town is tiny and must just become nothing but a tourist place. however, the baroque theatre at the castle - which i'm told is a must-see - is only open for tours from may ... so we will have to return, in the high season ...

but never mind that we can't see it now; today we've been in the castle museum, up the tower, and to the egon schieler gallery; still to come is the mirror labyrinth, marionette museum and the historic fotoatelier siedel. we might go to České Budějovice tomorrow (where the main square is named after otakar II - already i am thinking of tintin and king otakar's sceptre ... ) & to the nearby "tscheschien neuschwannstein", schloss hluboká. we might, but then again - we're on holiday; we don't have to be tourists every day ...

last night andy & i watched the final episode in the new zealand tv series outrageous fortune; we've been watching the boxed dvd set over the last year and a half or so - six series, each with about 18 45-minute episodes - so it's been a big part of our lives for a while. we've followed the trials & tribulations of the west family down to every sordid detail. as someone who has never been a big tv-watcher, & even less of a regular series follower, i have to say this one had me hooked. i'd seen the occasional episode when it was originally screened on tv in new zealand, but my nomadic lifestyle meant i didn't even try to keep up with it - but i have devoured the dvds eagerly. mostly it's been a very fine series - epic and shakespearian in every respect, and andy says it's given her a special insight into the unique kiwi character (i haven't broken it to her yet that not everyone in nz is like the wests ... )

however, the ending has disappointed me - specifically the storyline of pascalle and judd; this was completely unconvincing. compare judd and cheryl's sexy flirtations, even in their final meeting, with judd's sheepish attitude around pascalle and her pathetic agonising. the director must have instructed them to express the conflict between their hearts and their minds, but this has resulted in pascalle looking like she's suffering from severe indigestion & judd looking like he wishes he was somewhere else (with cheryl, probably). remember the way that he pursued cheryl in earlier episodes, and the things he gave up (such as his job, and for a while his freedom) to be with her - a strong, beautiful mature woman whom he clearly respected, admired and desired. pascalle, on the other hand, is an airhead; sweet, but slow and naive, demonstrating none of her mother's strength of character. if anything, she's looking for a father-figure; but this means she loses all her sexiness around judd. it would have made more sense if judd had got it on with loretta.

obviously it made good drama - the scandal of the daughter running off with her mother's lover while her mother is in jail; but it didn't satisfy me at the end of what has otherwise been a fairly consistently good series. there are other things i could criticise - such as the utterly irritating character of bailey the lawyer & some of the more stupid extraneous storylines like loretta's irish dancing episode - but mostly it's a pretty damn good series from our very small television production industry. anyway, now it's over ... a few people have recommended the american tv series madmen to me, so perhaps i'll check that out ...

i knew that returning to western civilisation after time in india would be a kind of a shock. when i returned to sydney after my three months in india in 1987, i was utterly repulsed by the obsene affluence, the brash materialist capitalism that pervaded every aspect of the city. i ranted about it to strangers at bars and nightclubs, louise and i raved at each other and probably drove our friends a bit crazy ... but the world felt crazy. it was crazy. nothing in the west made sense after india.

today munich is peaceful, quiet, sunny; i can't understand that despite the clear blue sky, i'm not dripping with sweat and i need a coat to go outside. i miss the colourful kolams and the constant tooting traffic. munich's eternal baustelle (road works), with their elaborate obstacle-course-like detours, are more hilarious than irritating. i'm watching out for strolling cows and sleeping dogs on the road instead of cyclists.

i'm thinking a lot about "work" - something that in the west implies having to do something that you don't really want to do, something rather tedious but that you get paid for, so you do it - and the different attitude in, for example, auroville, where they don't talk about "work" at all but rather "giving service". or at the ashram school in pondicherry, where all the teachers are volunteers; yes, all of them. they teach because they want to, because they have something to share, to give back. in auroville people give service in areas where they can, where they have skills or can contribute usefully. they don't get paid, instead they receive "maintenance", credit which enables them to live. it's not a perfect system, but it's an alternative which - at least on the surface - seems to generate a lot less stress and a lot more satisfaction. during the festival i appreciated the large army of willing volunteers who enabled everything from cold drinks or coffee to transport to the playing of dvds during presentations. nobody suddenly expected me to operate their dvd at the appropriate time during their presentation (this has happened in many previous situations!). there was always someone else around to do this, or to be sent on an emergency dash for a forgotten prop or a missing piece of equipment, or to take someone somewhere. with more than a billion people in the indian subcontinent, the human resource is plentiful, and in this particular occasion it was a very willing and competent resource.

we work like slaves to pay mortgages, insurances, and for unnecessary over-packaged consumer goods; while in india people are quietly sorting through rubbish, sweeping the streets by hand, pedalling their cycle-rickshaws ... happily? it's hard to say, but there is definitely less stress and more contentment. there's a lot to be said for belief in reincarnation.

why do we do the work that we do, and how do we value it? is it only "work" if we are paid in monetary terms? so much of western society would collapse if all of those doing voluntary work stopped doing it, and yet the capitalist system pretends that this work does not exist or is not important. when we do things voluntarily we have a slight sense of being exploited or somehow not valued, and yet the reality in the arts is that nearly all of our "work" is voluntary. i could decide that this work that i do (for far more than 40 hours a week, and for far less than an "average" wage) is in fact an offering, the act of "giving service". i can value it in other ways than how much i am earning financially. but if i'm "giving service", who am i giving it to? the universe? the mother? the "audience"? does it matter?

the first country i travelled to outside of new zealand and australia was india; i was 20 years old, living in sydney and trying to save money to go to europe when louise said to me, "i'm going to india, do you want to come too?". i immediately said yes. we arrived in bombay on january 1st 1987, but my backpack stayed on the plane and went to london; all i had was a plastic bag containing my passport, travellers cheques, camera, diary, hairbrush and a duty-free bottle of whisky. it was a memorable beginning to three incredible life-changing months during which time we travelled from bombay to kovalam to kashmir and nepal, and many places in between (my backpack did turn up 4 days later, unscathed by its solo adventure ...). since then i've talked many times about coming back, but somehow i never have - until now.

this time i'm in pondicherry, where i've been participating in Tantidhatri - a festival of women's performance that is part of the magdalena project network. the festival has just finished - an intense 5 days of performances, from traditional indian performances to my own cyberformance make-shift and several of the magdalena "regulars" - and now i have treated myself to a week to rest, recover, and discover pondicherry. as part of the festival we have seen a little bit, including the sri aurobindo ashram and nearby auroville, an experimental international city. i need to go back there to get a bit more of an understanding of how it all works, but we festival artists had a special invitation to the matrimandir, and i was performing make-shift from a house in auroville, so that has given me some insight. some of us visited mahabalipurum on the way down from chennai, and after the festival those who were still here went south to the enormous chidambaram temple and on to a dawn festival as the beginning of an ecotourism development on an island that was ravaged in the 2004 tsunami.

i have so much to write about, hopefully there will be some time during this restful week to reflect on my second visit to india; but at the moment i'm just enjoying the colourful, noisy, chaotic, yet harmonious existence of this over-crowded larger-than-life country. and today i was blessed by lakshmi, a temple elephant who accepts donations of coins, notes and food with her trunk and carefully passes the money to her assistant before eating the food.

i don't like to proclaim firsts in anything unless i'm really sure something is a first; & today i had the unusual distinction of being the first person to fly with emirates airline from munich to india without a visa. the check-in woman consulted another check-in woman, who had worked with emirates since they'd been in munich (about 12 years) and had never encountered someone able to travel to india with a visa. new zealand is one of only 9 countries that india allows a "visa on arrival", & i had double-checked this with the indian high commission in wellington, but since i guess not many kiwis fly to india from munich, it was something totally new for the emirates staff in munich and they had to go and consult others, look up regulations, & then declared i was the first person they'd checked through to india without a visa. of course i do still need to get the visa when i arrive, with a hefty US$60 fee, but it has been good not to have had to organise that as well in the last few weeks, busy as it has been.

i "should" have had 2 relatively calm weeks at home in munich, working on make-shift & UpStage, & generally catching up with everything i couldn't keep up with over the last 3 months of travel. however, the day before i got back to munich, my web server company upgraded something on the server, which caused the make-shift site to somehow get copied into the directory for this blog; & other problems. my initial attempts to fix it myself naturally made it worse, so i have spent the last 2 weeks in intimate email communication with the support staff (who are pretty good). as one problem was resolved, another was caused or discovered, including odd file-paths and log-ins that ceased to work. fortunately through-out the whole saga, no data was lost; and this morning, as i zipped up my suitcase for india, the last little tweaks were smoothed out. it meant that my catch-up time was severly eaten into, but on the positive side the support people are very good, prompt and polite, and they are giving me a month's credit to make up for it.

but it did mean that i haven't managed to write here about the rest of my time in new zealand and australia, or my visit to nantes when i got back to europe. i did find the time to create this needle-felt flower as a gift for lena, who created a lovely book-cover for me as a christmas present & a very fine painting for andy. needle-felting is an interesting craft that my 10-year-old nephew rowan taught me while i was visiting them - he, rata (7) & doug (6) are all profient needle-felters, with doug boldly experimenting with materials, needle-felting some of his own hair. when i got to brisbane, i taught my cool-sons chad & mali (10) how to needle-felt, & they also quickly got the hang of it. in coffs harbour, i discovered that the needle-felting craze had got there before me; all of my cousins' children over the age of 4 were already stabbing away, making dolls and fish and all kinds of other abstract art, toys and ornaments.

an auspicious event to note is the cool mother ceremony that we held in brisbane; recently chad & mali, whose birth i attended ten years ago, did me the honour of asking me to be their cool-mother (kind of like a godmother but without the religious bit); naturally i accepted, & on sunday 5th february we held a ceremony to formally celebrate our cool relationship. we talked about what it meant to be a cool mother and cool sons, and what we expected from each other; mali sang a song he'd composed for the occasion, & louise presented us with our ceremonial cool pendants - small different coloured soap-stone turtles (turtles being the great cool-mothers of the ancient world).

from the sweaty heat of brisbane i plunged into snowy munich, rested for 3 days then flew to nantes, in the north-west of france, where the digital arts organisation APO33 is located. APO33 had hosted martin, one of the UpStage developers, for a month to work on the prototype of his new engine for UpStage, aptly known as DownStage. i was there for the final days of his residency, which included a meeting to brainstorm ideas about how to fund the development of DownStage. then a few days later we had a performance of make-shift. nantes seems like a very interesting city, with good support for the arts. APO33 have an office in one part of the town, and a black-box performance space on L'Ile de Nantes; this was formerly a major shipbuilding area, but the industry has been moved further out of the city and the island, which is in the centre of nantes, is being redeveloped into a thoughtful mix of arts, housing, and education. many of the old buildings have been refurbished in a post-industrial style, & in amongst are many new buildings and the school of architecture. there's also an area called "le nef" - the skeletal remains of what must have been a huge factory or warehouse - & it's here that the elephant lives - a fantastical machine that takes people for rides. i was really intrigued and wanted to ride on it, but as it was school holidays there were huge queues every day so no chance. next time!



this post comes to you from dubai airport, where my flight to chennai is now boarding ...

it was -6 degrees and snowing when i landed in munich on tuesday morning, having left a hot, humid brisbane 30-something hours before. the next day in munich a strong westerly wind blew the snow about, horizontally and upwards. the housemeister ploughed the footpath twice in the morning, but it was soon white again, and in the afternoon the "lawn" was decorated with children's footprints. i'm happy to experience a bit of winter, after 2 months of southern summer. i lay in the outdoor hot saltwater pool at westbad, snow falling on my head & warm bubbles massaging my body, & it was bliss

so, i was down south for 2 months & only managed to write one blog post. well, time away from the keyboard was the priority, & when i had to be at the keyboard, i just wanted to clear the email backlog & do the required work as quickly as possible then get back to the relaxing part. my holidays are always generously sprinkled with work, just as my work often contains holiday elements ... it's impossible to separate the two, really. now that i'm back in the bavarian winter wonderland, fighting the jetlag to get to stammtisch this evening & re-tune my ear back to the bavarian dialect, my antipodean adventures seem such a long time ago ... i'll trawl through the photos to find some for you and show you a bit of what i got up to.

(that was written several days ago; i didn't have time to look at photos before i left for nantes, i hardly had time to repack my suitcase ... & now here i am with the APO33 people in nantes, preparing for a presentation & performance ... )

 

nearly a year has passed since the earthquake that devastated central christchurch, but the city is still a mess and the frequent aftershocks continue (although i was there for about 36 hours at the weekend and didn't feel the earth move). everywhere there are deserted houses, ragged curtains flapping through broken windows, leaning letterboxes, fallen fences, overgrown gardens, braced walls and signs declaring "danger! keep out!". the house next to where we stayed is abandoned, its garage entrance taped with "danger" tape. there are empty sections, some recently cleared and other still with the bulldozed remains of buildings. at the arts centre - formerly the university, stone buildings about 150 years old - a salvaged turret sits oddly on the ground next to its damaged tower. a few blocks away a turret from what must have been a beautiful old wooden house sits beside the rubble.

we drove out to the hills above sumner, to check out the home of friends which was so badly damaged it will have to be demolished. ferry road, which leads to sumner, has been resurfaced, but not levelled - driving along it feels more like surfing on gentle but unpredictable swells. the road up the hill becomes worse, with large depressions and damage to the edges. when we arrive at the house, what hits me immediately is the silence. it's a warm sunday afternoon in january - normally people would be working in their gardens, doing a bit of home repairs, cleaning cars, children would be playing ... there's nothing but birds. nearly all of the houses in this street have been so badly damaged that no-one can live there. it's heartbreaking to walk around our friends' house - all the bricks have falled off, many windows broken, cracks all around the foundation, in places revealing broken joists under the floor. when we visited almost 2 years ago, they were finishing renovations and starting work on the garden. we water the garden, which is overgrown but thriving, with this year's brocolli & beans nearly finished, apricots & apples beginning to ripen. across the road, a curtain flaps sadly through a broken window.

today a strong wind has blown away the few leaves that were still clinging to the trees; everything is exposed again - the birds' nests, the railway line, lower floor apartments and rubbish caught in hedges. tomorrow's forecast is for snow here in münchen. but i won't have today's tomorrow at all - i'll be in the limbo-land of a long-haul flight, migrating to the southern summer. i'll miss the snow ...

this morning i got up early and went through 6 more tests - scoring 100% on every one! but i was still nervous on the way to the TÜV, as i knew there was a high chance i'd strike tricky questions or simply forget something. we arrived at the building 20 minutes early, having been told to be there 15 minutes early, and were sent up to the warteraum where already several other nervous candidates waited.

i don't know why they tell you to arrive 15 minutes early - probably just to make you more nervous by having to wait - as it was not until exactly 10.00 when a woman came and sharply called us into another room, set up with desks on which there were flat screen computers, like large iPads. the other candidates formed a queue to the woman who sat at a desk at the front, just like a teacher in a classroom, and everyone had a piece of paper to present. except me. after a frantic search through my many pieces of paper while i stood at the end of the queue, i handed her my passport and was relieved to find this was accepted. she asked for €20.83 which i obediently handed over, and instructed me to sit at platz 11, near the back of the class.

she then proceeded to race through lengthy instructions in deutsch, holding up large pictures of the computer screen which i couldn't really see from the back of the room. when she finished talking everyone put their head down and began the test. i clicked "start" and was relieved to find the instructions repeated in english - it would have been helpful if she had mentioned this at the beginning so that i could have read them while she explained, instead of worrying that i was missing out on a crucial piece of information, such as "if you put a tick instead of a cross you will be marked wrong". but this is probably another deliberate strategy to try to make us ausslanders as nervous as possible. (one of the other candidates a young american man who had arrived in the warteraum quite stressed because he'd been trying to enter the building at a door that was locked ...)

so i did the test; all of my visual memories from the paper practice tests was useless, as the layout of the screen was totally different. but the pictures were, helpfully, larger and clearer, and the questions were the same as the ones i'd been diligently studying. happily, i didn't strike any of the most difficult ones. after double-checking everything, i bravely clicked "submit" ... and almost immediately my results were there before my eyes: i got 2 questions partially wrong, but luckily this was not enough to fail. I PASSED!!!!

without further ado, andy took me directly to another branch of the extensive führerschein bureaucracy, where i took a number, waited patiently, then went into an office and surrendered my (expired) new zealand driver's licence in return for a shiny new deutsche führerschein. i walked out of the building legally entitled to drive anywhere in the european union.

WHEW!