For the next few ‘episodes, I am handing over my blog to interviews with people who embody inspirational aspects of Australian culture.

First up, an interview with Mike Puleston, long-standing organiser in the Victorian branch of the Australian Greens. When I told Mike I wanted to interview him because I found what he stood for inspirational, he replied with typical Australian laconic humor: “I’m not inspirational, I’m just a bloody old ratbag!”

Nicole: Mike, please introduce yourself – tell me a little about your personal history:

Mike: I grew up in the working-class western suburbs of Sydney. My Dad and Mum were English immigrants. Dad was a building worker, and Mum had been a factory machinist before becoming a full-time wife and mother. I managed to get a scholarship into Sydney Uni in 1965, a time of great intellectual, political and social ferment. Australia was supporting the US in Vietnam, and young Australian men were being drafted to fight this dirty war, so I got involved in the opposition. Along with this I developed a leftish, soft-socialist outlook which I’ve kept since then. Through doing all kinds of part-time jobs, I came to see the importance of unionism.

My career was spent in various areas of education, secondary and tertiary, specialising in English as a Second/Foreign Language. Thus I came into contact with people of many ethnicities, both in Australia and elsewhere. This helped me to see the world beyond the Anglo-Australian viewpoint. I remained a unionist, serving as local rep. in various workplaces. Even now that I have retired, I continue to pay union subs and proudly carry a union card.

I joined the Australian Labor Party in the 60s, and worked hard at the 1972 federal election, when Gough Whitlam ended 23 years of conservative rule, and instituted a set of reforms that at least brought Australia into the 1960s. But in 1975 conservative forces inside and outside politics conspired to overthrow Whitlam in what amounted to a bloodless coup, and the conservatives were back again.

I went on working for the ALP, but grew increasingly involved in the anti-uranium movement and other environmental causes, joining the Movement Against Uranium Mining, Friends of the Earth etc. During the 1980s I came to see that the ALP had been so terrified by its 1975 experience that, even when back in government, it would never again pose a serious opposition to conservative thinking. The party embraced neo-liberal economic philosophy, which really permeated all aspects of political and social life, so that the ALP increasingly merely presented a slightly more humane side to the same coin which had the conservatives on the other side.

Thus in 1984 I joined the campaign to get Midnight Oil singer Peter Garrett into the Senate, joining his Nuclear Disarmament Party, even establishing a local branch. Garrett was not successful, and I withdrew from political activity, as I spent six years working and travelling overseas. This experience, which included living in Borneo for three years, made me more aware of conservation issues, especially the destruction of rainforests and the plight of indigenous people such as the Penans.

Settling in Melbourne in 1994, I joined the fledgling Australian Greens, and have been active in the Party ever since.

N: The first formal ‘green party’ in the world was established in Tasmania in 1972, out of the campaign to save Lake Pedder. Other Australian state green parties emerged in the 1980s, which then formally consolidated into a national party over the course of the 1990s. Over the last decade, the party has steadily increased its electoral support, attracting over 9% of the primary vote in the last Federal election in 2007. In some Victorian electorates, such as HIggins, the primary vote is as high as 33%, and support in the seat of Melbourne could be strong enough to send a Green to the lower house in the next Federal election. Currently, the Greens have five federal Senators, 21 elected members of State parliament, and over 100 local councillors. The Greens are now recognized as Australia’s third major political party after the Australian Labor Party (currently holding power Federally) and The Liberal Party (Australia’s conservative party).

Mike, why do you think electoral support for the Greens has been growing so strongly in Australia. For the benefit of American readers, I think we’ll need to first explain first the difference between the Australian and American versions of democracy. Our voting systems are very different – our system of ‘proportional’ and ‘preferential voting’ enables the growth of third parties whereas this is all but precluded in the American ‘first past the post’ system. Did you want to have a stab at explaining the key features of our voting system?

M: OK. There are two main points of difference between the Australian and US systems, that enable small parties such as the Greens to make some impact in government. The first is that in the upper houses, at both federal and state levels (federal Senate and state Legislative Councils), as well as in many local government areas, there is a form of proportional representation. Thus if a party gets 20% of the vote it gets, more or less, 20% of the seats. It’s more like the European systems. The second difference is that we have a preferential system of voting. Thus in a local electorate, voters don’t just put a cross against candidate Judy Bloggs, but number all candidates in their order of preference. If no candidate gets 50+%, candidates are progressively eliminated and their votes redistributed, until one candidate gets 50+% and is elected.

As an example, in the coming elections in the state of Victoria, in a few seats, it is likely that no candidate will get 50+% on the first account. The outcome could well be Greens 33%, Labor 42%, Liberals (= conservatives) 20%, other parties, independents etc 5%. The Liberals will probably, in order to spite Labor, advise their voters to put Greens at No. 2, as may some of the other parties and independents. Thus the Greens could get the magic 50+% through the flow-on of second preference votes.

N: In addition to the electoral enablers, what do you see as the key social and cultural reasons why more people are voting for the Greens?

M: We’re getting a better-educated, more-travelled, generally more aware and sophisticated society developing, and these people can see through the Tweedledum-Tweedledee relationship between the two major parties. There is really not much difference between them, more a matter of style than substance, with much focus on the contest between the two leaders. There is huge cynicism and lack of trust. The Greens are seen as honest, and focussing more on issues than personalities – social justice, the environment, peace and disarmament.

N: Why did you join The Greens? You started off life as an ALP man, which has historically positioned itself as Australia’s left leaning party and in this parallel to the American Democrats.

M: I have touched on this in my introduction above. But I’d like to go on and say that I think the Greens today are where the Australian Labor Party was in the late 19th century. In those days politics was very much about large landowners versus business interests. Few people thought that a political party dedicated to representing the interests of ordinary working people would ever form a national government. But it did, first in Australia and New Zealand, then in Britain, Scandinavia and other European countries. Social democracy was a new way of thinking. With time, in Australia and Britain especially, the social democrats parties came to resemble the parties they once opposed. The Greens are now bringing a different way of thinking.

N: How would you describe the political philosophy and principles of the Greens, and how well does the party put those principles into practice?

M:Whew! Big question. Go to the Australian Greens website…… But anyway, Greens principles are based on the four pillars of social justice, the environment, peace and disarmament. This is the template for policy development. Everything flows from that. The Greens have a very localised, grassroots system of organisation and policy development, based on consensus decision making. Compared with the ALP, there is great scope for individual members to have an input in what the Party does. I must say I find the decision making processes frustrating at times. They can be very time-consuming. The advantage is that once a decision is reached, it has broad-based support. But I do wonder if this system can be maintained in a pure form as the Party gets bigger and more involved in government. Within the Party I do argue for a modified version of CDM.

I am not so naive as to think that the Party will be without inner stresses and strains. One potential fault line is that of social justice/environment. The two might not be entirely compatible. For example, in northern Queensland, an issue has arisen with relation to the management of some wild rivers. Environmentalists want the rivers preserved in their original state. But some aboriginal groups want to practice agriculture along the rivers, which run through their lands. The Greens support aboriginal self-determination. So there’s a potential conflict here.

Another potential divide is that of idealism versus pragmatism. Does the Party stay pure and true to its principles, and risk being no more than a pressure group, or make some compromises in order to gain greater support and influence? That’s politics. No easy answer there, though I tend towards the pragmatic end.

So far, by sticking to our principles, the Greens are running at about 10-15% of the vote, more in some areas. But that’s still a long way from what we need. Still, we are represented at local, state and federal levels, and have favourably affected outcomes.

N: There is a huge amount of eco-innovation going on at the grassroots level in the USA, so much so I can’t keep track of all the ‘green’ initiatives and little eco-groups even in my adopted hometown of Pittsburgh. However, a recent international survey of national concerns about global warming, put the USA close to the bottom of the list when it came to people believing global warming is a “very serious issue” (44% of those polled). Australian’s weren’t asked their views apparently, but how would you rate our awareness? We are after all one of the nations currently suffering the most from climate change.

M: Awareness of environmental issues, including climate change, is growing here, particularly among the young. Overall, I would say this awareness is higher than in the USA, but then again it’s not absolute. Who would have thought that Arnie would be doing such good things in California, for instance? (Or have I got that wrong?) It’s a great pity that Copenhagen collapsed, as this caused a lot of Australians to put climate change in the “too hard” basket. Thus our conservative Federal Opposition has been able to push a “climate change is bunkum” barrow. The ALP Government is marginally better, but still are holding to 5-25% CO2 reductions, while the Greens are pushing for 40%.

But still, a lot is going on at the local level, with householders and local governments reducing their energy consumption, recycling, saving water etc.

N: You are now trying to ease your way out of leadership positions at the local level in the party, and you and your wife have set off on amazing adventures traveling around Australia, seeing as many of our remaining wilderness areas as you can. Australia is roughly the same size as the United States, so this is no small task. What have been some of the highlights and downers of your trip so far?

M: Kairen and I did an eight month camping trip through the western two-thirds of our country last year. We got to some wonderful, beautiful places, some of them very remote. It was not enough time to see it all, and we’ll be back, as well as covering the rest of the country. Our national parks services are doing a fantastic job of protecting wilderness areas, often on inadequate budgets. It was also good to see what private philantrophic organisations were doing to buy up clapped-out farms and regenerate them. We were also grateful to meet indigenous groups and to learn more about their perspectives. As they see it, people belong to the land, not the other way round. I guess the trip strengthened my resolve to do more to protect the land we belong to.

Disappointments? There are a lot of dickheads out there, littering, driving dangerously and without regard to fragile environments, generally behaving disrespectfully to the land and other people. Probably no worse than in any other country though.

N: I don’t think any Americans realise that Australia’s current Federal environment minister, Peter Garret, was a former national rock mega – star, leader of the agit-prop Oz rock band Midnight Oil. However, Republican Schwarznegger appears to take environmental sustainability more seriously and tackling the hard issues better than lefty Peter – what went wrong? Should we be turning to Hollywood action heros rather than rock stars as environmental leaders?

M: Poor Peter was swallowed up by the ALP Party machine. They seduced him in order to pull the environmental vote, then neutered him. He isn’t a very effective minister, or isn’t allowed to be. A warning of the perils of trying to change the system from within. Arnie? I don’t know. I guess if public figures have the right ideals, and are strong enough, they can make a difference. But I wouldn’t be going out headhunting celebrities to the cause. They have to find their own way.

I’d like to add something. One of the biggest battles as you get older is to ward off cynicism. When you see what’s going on around you, it’s so easy to be cynical. But cynicism corrodes the spirit, and I think contributes to ageing, and maybe physical and mental illness. I find that working with the mostly younger people in the Greens helps me keep my equilibrium. There are many fine young people in this Party, and the world would be a better place if it were run by the likes of them.

Their time is coming, and one reason I am stepping back from taking a more prominent role is to give them space to do things their way. I will continue to support in whatever way I can. I hope I can go on giving the benefit of my experience – and benefitting from the freshness and idealism that our younger members have.

N: I’d personally vote for AC/DC – the entire band. They’d at least do a good job at representing the alcohol overindulgence vote in Australia, which would be pretty huge. And their campaign parties would be awesome! Thanks Mike!

M: Pleasure!

And finally here are some beautiful pictures from Mike’s recent travel’s around the Australian outback:

Upcoming topics: the Australian electronic underground, community radio sector, independent film

Your gravestone epitaph competition

As I remain in Melbourne recovering from surgery, I find that I miss Pittsburgh quite a lot – in a yearning sort of way. Which is a bit mysterious given I have only really just moved there. But I think I have figured out the major reason for the heart tug: Allegheny Cemetery, which backs onto the street behind where I live. I walked there almost every day last year, and it is surely one of the world’s great cemeteries, encompassing 300 rolling emerald acres and 15 miles of tree and monument drenched roads. Allegheny Cemetery feels more like a happy empire of the dead than an ordinary burial ground. Its beauty and spiritual energy is sublime and very hard to capture in words.

But there is one aspect of the cemetery that disappoints me: and that is the lack of imagination in the epitaphs engraved on the thousands of gravestones and dozens of mausoleums. As I wander around the grave-studded hills, I am always on the look-out for inspiring legacies, some profound words from the departed to the remaining bewildered who are still tromping around their remains. But I hardly ever find them.

There is one gravestone that stands out, fairly recent, and the man that left it seems to genuinely embody that truly American genius for valuing individuality. His epitaph says:

“It takes courage to grow up to be who you know you really are.”

But that is pretty much it for someone sharing their vision of life as they leave it.

Most of the thoughts people have left behind aren’t theirs at all, but those of priests and bibles – conventional Christian pieties like “In the arms of Jesus”, “Rest in peace”, “He did God’s work” etc And just as many drab scratchings by people apparently too poor to afford the cost of extra religious engraving – all they are able to say about themselves is their name, their date of birth and death, and sometimes a one word description of their most important role in life: Father, Mother, Brother, Sister.

Thats not to say that many of these gravestones aren’t moving, they certainly can be. But how much more moving is it when words express grief and love and a vision of life in a most personal way. Here is another rarity, a monument to a recently departed child that makes you smile and cry at the same time, and admire the courage and hope of the parents of that left it there:

Naturally, I fantasize from time to time about what epitaph I’d like to leave behind, were I fortunate enough to find myself nestled for eternity in Allegheny Cemetery in a particularly nice spot with a view. Spike Milligan thought of the best one – he wanted to have the words “I told you I was ill” as his epitaph which would have continued his wonderful legacy of lightening the hearts of millions and showing no respect for authority. But of course his local church, the Chichester Diocese had the last say, they would not allow it.

My favorite monument to my own death at the moment would be this:

“Here lies a bumbling human.”

I can’t claim to have come up with the infectious term ‘bumbling human’, that honor goes to Natasha Dwyer, who in a single phrase has captured everything you need to know about human life in order to be compassionate, amused, annoyed and forgiving.

And in this vein, I have now decided to link two problems: what to do with some of my old vinyl releases – B(if)tek records that I no longer have a home for – and how to amuse myself while I get well. And I have come up with this happy solution to both:

I WILL GIVE AWAY A COPY OF B(IF)TEK’S DOUBLE VINYL ALBUM ‘2020′ PLUS A VINYL EP OF ‘WIRED FOR SOUND’ REMIXES TO THE PERSON WHO CAN COME UP WITH THE MOST APPEALING EPITAPH FOR THEMSELVES, POSTED AS A COMMENT ON MY BLOG.

I think I’ll give this competition about 10 days to play itself out. Then I’ll contact the winner, get their address, send off the goodies and announce the winning entry in a couple of weeks time.

Thanks everyone, I look forward to reading your brilliant graveyard legacies:-)

How not to improve on ‘Wicked Game’ (but make it sound more like the kind of track you’d actually desperately record in your bedroom late at night)

Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’ is one of those perfect songs which simply cannot be ‘improved’ upon.  There are many, many tracks that can be improved upon (ie better arrangements, production, vocals, emotional ideas)- maybe most.  But ‘Wicked Game’ is not one of them.  

I remember Julee Cruise describing ‘Floating into the Night’ as a ‘perfectly realized’ album, and she was absolutely right – the whole thing, in concept, feelings, vox, beauty, originality – it too is flawless.  The eponymous album from which ‘Wicked Game’ is drawn, is up there in the sonic stratosphere with ‘Floating into the Night’.  And they are both entwined with the deep sexual mysteria of Twin Peaks episodes.  

Around about ‘91/ ‘92, I was going into second hand audio gear warehouses in Canberra and Sydney and trying to find the first speakers for my first home studio.  I remember that very often, the audio guys would slip on ‘Wicked Game’ and stand back to show the great fidelity of the speakers they were trying to sell me.  But I knew even then, that the slinky production values on that track were so astounding, that they would make the crappiest walkman sound good.

So you have to admire the sacrilegious tendencies that goaded A.T Vish (otherwise known as Carol Blaze) and my good self to try and record our own version of ‘Wicked Game’, bouncing track to track recorded in our (respective) studios – which, while not our bedrooms, may as well be.  I’m on keys, A.T plays everything else.

What can I say about it? than the idea was not so much to do a cover version, than to provide a sonic canvas – pre-treated with nostalgia – upon which to paint our own versions of unhinged, unrequited longing.  Which turned into a kind of retro Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Spector smacked-out ‘wall of sound’ crashing down epic.  But gently crashing .

Here it is: 01 Wicked Game

Nerd-watch: The lead is my 1972 Wurlitzer electric piano through a Space Echo box.

Not only, but also:  Here is a picture of me and A.T posing at the Brillo Box:

Life update in dot points for the busy:

I’ve moved into my own flat now and I have established (after 18 months of no privacy, and no capacity to record new music) my own pad and rudimentary home studio in the basement downstairs;

I continue to work hard for the Squonk Opera empire, trying to get gigs in the US and abroad for Pittsburgh’s leading multi-media troupe;

With T and Scott, finishing off a promotional video for the amazing and unique Pittsburgh Glass Center;

Heading back to Australia from 22 December to 17 January. See people I love.  Run the gauntlet of about half a dozen medical tests and check-ups.

T has been very busy with video projects and teaching, but I am still hoping she will have time to finish off the zombie mini-doco, before I go. In which case, you will be the first to get the link:-)

A New Country

My USA permanent residency card arrived totally unannounced in the mail today.  I  stared at it in happy shock and amazement.  I am now an American (albeit one with a funny accent).  Exactly one year after Tanya and I wandered into Pittsburgh, for the first time, almost by accident,  I  can now stay here, live and work for life if I want.  Just like that.

Once again, I could hardly believe my luck – how did I manage this transformation from Aussie to Yankee, in such a short space of time – a feat no more astounding than the emergence of the butterfly from the caterpillar, say, or the frog from the tadpole?  I could say good-bye to my ‘extraordinary alien’ status and say hello to being just an ordinary American.  

The first thing I did was write a letter to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette complaining about the American health-care system and the incomprehensible resistance to national health insurance by a lot of my fellow ordinary Americans.  I then signed up to turn up to a Sierra Club rally against mountain top removal coal mining projects next Thursday.

A brightly hued vista of public complaining about my new country now opened up for me:-)  

I could also start to think long-term about my life.  I wasn’t in a legal holding pen anymore, I had a new permanent home, if I wanted.  After years of instability, I could now start to make a serious plan about where, at least, I was going to live and work.

Refugee Nations

Over the last year I had found myself reflecting more and more on the plight of the millions of refugees worldwide – like Palestinians, refugees in their own country;  Burmese, for over 50 years fleeing militaristic oppression, huddled in camps on the Thai border; Sudanese, fleeing to Chad to escape war and famine.  The list goes on and on. And many of these and other refugees sometimes turn up as ‘boat people’ in Australian waters where, without ‘official papers’ from the countries they are fleeing, they are locked away indefinitely in our concentration camps which we call ‘detention centers’ (one reason why Australia did not object to Guantanamo Bay).  Many of these detention centers are situated in isolated parts of Australia, where the prisoners subsist ’stateless’, separated from their loved ones, without legal rights, for years. Many are then eventually sent back by the Australian government  to their ‘home countries’. Refugee action groups in Australia have documented many cases where boat people so forcibly returned have been subsequently imprisoned and/or killed by the oppressive governments from which they were trying to escape.  

So many refugees across the world have fled homelessness and persecution only to find themselves living in the eternal purgatory of the refugee camp or worse, sent back to the death sentence of their strife torn home countries.  My emotional distress in not being able to know where I could put down roots for the last eighteen months was real enough: but my choices have been vast compared to the millions of the world’s genuinely dispossessed.

My own father was a refugee – a Lithuanian boy from peasant family stock, he was drafted into the army during WW11 then found himself imprisoned in a concentration camp in Germany in the final two years of the war.

When Dad was released – as Europe was liberated by Americans – he thought his entire family had been killed during the war.  He was given the option of countries to immigrate to – worker hungry countries like the UK, Canada, Australia.  He chose Australia, almost randomly, just because he had a soldier buddy who was also going to immigrate there.  That was all my father’s emotional connections in the world seemed to consist of then, men he had met during the war.  

I try and imagine that isolation and statelessness, that complete lack of emotional connection or sense of belonging, no longer even able to converse in your own language to get by. From gathering firewood for the family farm in the gentle misty  forests of the Baltic coast to, a few traumatic years later, slashing sugar cane with strangers in the sweltering fields of tropical north Queensland.  I used to find it almost impossible to imagine, but the older I get, the more I seem to get some glimpses into what it could have been like.  And it struck me today, for the first time, that I am in at least once sense, a spiritual sense,  continuing my father’s journey,  an ‘unquiet spirit’ that continues to drift with no sense of home, and to search.

Podcasting Nation

I spent today at Pittsburgh’s Fourth annual Podcamp conference.  This is a wonderful annual grassroots, totally free, conference on digital social media, made possible by local social media enthusiasts with sponsorship by local entrepreneurs and some heavy weight Pittsburgh corporate and philanthropic organizations: Podcamp Pittsburgh.  It was packed out, beyond capacity in fact.

One of the many useful take-away messages I got from today, is this:  please decide what your blog is about, and where is it going?  And in the last few hours, I have taken this question to heart.  Like many bloggers, I started blogging  purely as an efficient way to keep friends and curious strangers up to date about what was happening in my travels around the USA (with my fellow Jilted Bride, Tanya Stadelmann). And to provide some ‘back story’ for the journey.  But over time, I can see it has clearly changed and morphed into a number of different genres – ranging from personal confessions for imagined and hoped for sympathetic ears, to declamatory and mystical poetry, to travelogue, to slapstick, to political polemic.

As I typed these words, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘County Fair’ has started to play, and what better metaphor for my life, or anyone’s life?

So I’ve decided from now on I will blog at least once every week, hopefully more, a more immediate, continuous discourse, like a ‘real’ blogger.  I hope someone holds me to that! xx

by Nicole Skeltys

Week two on the set of the Warrior movie

Last week, I brought down to the set of the Warrior movie a nice fat book called “Pennsylvania Spirituals” by Don Yoder (1961). I was working on Warrior as a full-time extra, my main duties consisting of cheering wildly as part of a large pretend audience to an MMA tournament set in Atlantic City.

My full-time status could have been more accurately described as a “total life elimination” status – an average of 15 hour days, 6 days a week on set – barely enough time left over to get home and get some sleep before the pre-dawn alarm shrieked my brain into consciousness again. This was followed minutes later by a run down Butler St to catch the extras’ shuttle which hurtled from the Strip district to the Petersen Events Center, a half hour wait in line to be issued with my payroll slip, then collapsing in the corner of the ‘dressing room’ (a bit of floor draped with curtains) waiting to be called down to the ring-side for the day’s screaming duties. Most of an extra’s time consists of just sitting/lying around, waiting for shots to be re-set, so I had ample opportunity to read five books last week, which I counted as a perk of an otherwise totally perkless job.

In between the “spritzing” of fighters (spraying them with water to simulate sweat), fake tattoo touch-ups and lots of rehearsals (to get, for example, the exact right velocity of a mouth guard being spat from the mouth in response to a fist being smashed into said orifice), myself and many other extras quietly read our books.

I started week two with Yoder’s book, which began by suggesting Pennsylvania has a much more interesting influence on Americana music history than I suspect even most Americans would realise. Yoder explores his idea that “the Negro Spiritual and the Pennsylvania Spiritual..are twin sisters, developing side by side at first and then only later maturing into distinctive types”. Yoder is eager to build on on earlier ethnomusicological research which shows the transfer of the 18th century British evangelical song from New England to the “Southern Uplands” – Kentucky, Tennessee, Western Virginia and then to the “Negro, who made the spiritual, once borrowed, into something expressive of his own soul”. He wants to stake out Pennsylvania as having a central place in the early development of this uniquely American and vastly influential musical form.

Yoder digs with relish through early 1800s accounts of Pennsylvania “camp- meeting” evangelical Methodist services which were attended by dirt poor white rural folk and “Negroes” – who were “free” unlike their Southern cousins. Being free didn’t mean you weren’t segregated from the whites by partitions or required to sit in designated areas behind the preacher man. But it did mean that you could drown the whites out with ecstatic shouts and chorusing over the service, and keep up the “tide of enthusiasm” after the service had ended, long into the night after the whites had crawled back into their tents and were trying to sleep.

The early American spiritual completely shocked British and European visitors, with its gushing emotionalism, crude folk-song repetitions, spontaneous made-up bits of verse, shouting, convulsions and general “hysteria”. A British visitor to the Ebenezer Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1817 noted that both the “African” and white parishioners suffered from the same “extreme degree of fanatical violence in their religious exercises”. Despite the rich musical tradition generated by their black and white (Pennsylvania Dutch) “religious folk-song” singing ancestors, official historians from the United Brethren, Evangelical and Church of God had (at least up to the 1960s) completely ignored its legacy. Largely because all those violations of established hymn structures, and ignorance of nicely arranged middle-class organ music (largely the preserve of urban churches), meant the spiritual was identified as the religious outpouring of the poorest of the poor, the illiterate, the barely shod. And it was damned by association.

Its no wonder then that America was the birthplace of that dirty irreverent shaking to music and spirit called rock and roll, and soul.

And how American that the rock and roll spirit (and the entertainment industry that latched onto it) would eventually reverse church history. The spiritual legacy in America has secured the quivering, fire-breathing, shouting and singing teleevangelist his mass appeal, and handed to his corporate religious empire the keys to the New Jerusalem. His rival churches, following more conservative forms of worship, watch as their parishioners (and economic base) slowly die off and are not replaced.

I was really warming to Yoder’s history last Wednesday morning and flicking away the yellowed Carnegie library book pages with some enthusiasm when The Devil (in the form of one of the senior production assistants) marched around the ringside and shouted at everyone that all our books were now confiscated – we had to take all our reading material and put it away from set, in our ‘dressing rooms’ or wherever. Why? Someone said they thought that when viewing one of the rushes yesterday, the director noticed that one of the extras – instead of jumping up and down wildly and passionately imploring Tommy to beat the *** out of his opponent- was still sitting, head buried in a tome.

Whatever the reason, little did they know how this removal of our only perk would encourage many of us to openly rebel, only days later.

The Black Friday Showdown

Books I would have read by now and could write about had they not been confiscated:

. Sheila Rowbothom’s “A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States”
.”Coal Dust on the Fiddle: Songs and Stories of the Bituminous Industry in Pennsylvania” by George Korson
.”The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality” by Brian Greene

But instead, for the rest of Wednesday and all Thursday, myself and all the other extras sat through 14-15 hours worth of boxing takes with nothing to distract us except our cell phones (on silent) and each other. There was even a rumor going around that none of us were allowed to stretch out on the stadium seats anymore for the occasional back-pain relief, as this potentially delayed getting people in position for new audience hysteria scenes. A lot of us, deeply fatigued already although it was only week two of a four week shoot, slumped submissively in our seats and blinked blankly up into the bright stadium lights for hours on end, like cows in a holding pen.

My new buddy Dan, a 50 year old long-haired heavy metal fan, who dropped me home of an evening in his crimson Chevy touring van (complete with stuffed devil doll passengers and a silver skull-head gear stick), showed a spectacular deterioration in motivation over this two week period, ending in the Black Friday Showdown.

On the first day of shooting, Dan was sitting a few seats from me and was taking every opportunity to jump up and run to the ringside and punch his arms in the air, for hours on end. In between takes, he would chat to me and any other woman who would talk to him. He told me repeatedly how much fun he was having.

By day three, he was not jumping up to the front quite as much. But he was still “having fun”. By day six, he was not jumping up at all.

The following week, Dan was given a couple of days off by one of the PAs. But by Thursday, he was no longer even concerned about sitting in his usual seat, or wearing the Tap-Out sweatshirt handed out by the costume department. With nothing to do now for hours on end, he took to just finding corners of the stadium and just sitting there, no sign of air punching anymore.

On Friday, part-time extras poured in excitedly to make up extra bulk for wide-shot crowd scenes. Our numbers swelled to 700-800. Glamor-struck part-timers fussed with make-up, giggled with girlfriends and gingerly stepped in stilettos all over the half-sleeping full-timers who were, as usual, passed out all over the floor of the ‘dressing room’.

Black Friday commenced at 6.30 am.

By 6.30 pm there was still no sign of a wrap. Agitated murmurings began, particularly from the part-timers who had expected their workingday to end after 12 hours. Not a chance.

By 9.30pm, the groaning and complaining in the room was widespread and audible. All the extras had had enough. Some of us craving dinner and a decent sleep tried to escape up the stadium stairs to the exit signs, but we were trapped. Most of us relied on the shuttle to take us back to the Strip district car-park – the PAs glared at us and told us to “get back in there”, the shoot was “nowhere near done”, the shuttles weren’t going anywhere. We retreated back in. A lot of the part-timers were in a state of shock – some of them just ran away, others staggered back in incredulously.

It was almost 11.00pm, and everyone was still in their seats, exhorted to cheer for Tommy, as usual. This was the final straw for Dan. He slouched deeper into his seat, with no intention to punch the air, clap or show any fake excitement whatsoever. One of the PAs noticed him and the following exchange ensued:

PA: Hey, you have to move over here with the rest of the crowd.
Dan: I’m not going anywhere.
PA: You have to do what I say.
Dan: I don’t take any f** orders from anyone
PA: Man, you are SACKED.
Dan: You can’t sack me COS I ALREADY QUIT!!!

Dan then stormed out of the stadium; but kindly waited for me on the steps of the Petersen Center, to give me a final lift home after the shuttle dropped us off in the Strip district somewhere close to midnight. We cruised home to the overwrought metal strains of Ronnie James Dio reminding men that women always let them down. As I staggered up the back steps to the apartment, my body implored me not to go in the next day (please oh please) or indeed any of the days after that.

Mid-morning Saturday found me horizontal in my bed and not on the floor of the ‘dressing room’. Although I knew I was letting Nick down, I just couldn’t be a full-time extra on his film anymore, I just didn’t have the true grit needed to make the grade. I too could not be sacked because I had quit.