Pussy Riot (Auckland)

Pussy Riot founding member Maria Alyokhina, imprisoned for her anti-Putin and patriarchal church-state protest

So I took my daughter to Pussy Riot in Auckland last night and it was an experience and a riot alright but we had to work for our riot (and our 'pussy'; there were a couple of blokes added to the line-up of five, in my view two too many).

First of all our tickets bought online were invalid, thanks to a scam run by someone called 'Dada King' and the booking agent Viagogo, though we thought we were booking through Auckland Fringe. And second, the female punk rock band from Wellington (forgot their name) who were on before Pussy were SO loud and ranting I had to rush out and buy ear plugs, well in fact the guy at the bar took pity on me and gave me a set for free. But still.

There is a common thread here I know, I am too old for this shit! The Dada King's of this world see people like me coming and people ranting at insanely high volume, girl, boy or other, is not anymore my idea of a fun night out, though the wild vibe was some fun with the bright orange, I don't look square at all, plugs in. And Dada won't see me twice! No sir. With our bank's help we are working to get our money back from Dada and Viagogo, who facilitated his (apparently he is a he, no surprises there) shameless thievery. I'm embarrassed to say how much he took us for, but hopefully we can get it back and he can go to hell with all the other false (and real life thieving) kings. We were not the only Riot fans he scammed either. There was a whole queue of us, and not all of them 'old' either.

But the show, despite these slight obstacles, was still worth going to (with freshly minted legitimate tickets) on a wet humid Friday night, standing room only, especially to see the principal Pussy and founding member, Maria Alyokhina, who was sentenced to almost two years in a Siberian prison for her efforts to challenge the corrupt patriarchal administrations of church and state under Putin. She makes for a compelling front-woman providing the main narration of the story they told with surtitles and video taken of their church-based protest and political aftermath that is drawn from her memoir.

I think they might have had their day though, Pussy Riot, and been co-opted a bit by the wider cause of fighting against church and state and political imprisonment -- they showed footage of a whole bunch of blokes, old and young, apparently former political prisoners now released; there's obviously a lot of that still going on in Russia -- at the expense of the feminist fight against the actual man that Pussy Riot was, or at least seemed to be, originally focused on, even if that apparently wider protest against corruption in high places is no doubt worth rioting about too.

It's just that we've had so many riots about that, indeed Russia practically specialises in them. And the extent to which what has happened to Pussy Riot is yet another case of feminist activists being sacrificed and partly silenced for the so called 'greater' good and purpose of serving one or other fight for power and justice between men, then I can't help thinking it is a bit of a sad sign and day for women of the world.

But let's hope this is not the essence of the situation and that Pussy Riot can still symbolise for women around the world the power and importance of our voice to stand up against corrupt men and the women who continue to put up with and defend this gender hierarchy and ignore the inevitable corruption that results from having too many men at the top.

Pussy Riot reclaimed the p-word from a term of female sexual objectification and demeaning used by men to a term of empowerment and solidarity for politically woke women. That is a great thing. Let's remember that and make sure that the riot doesn't become louder than the PUSSY. Riot on!

 

Loving Levy

Deborah Levy's second memoir The Cost of Living saved my sanity in Sydney over Christmas last year when our sons... well, let's just say there was a midnight visit from a man and woman in blue. It is too close to the blood bone to say any more than that now. Even this probably says too much. With my boys (now young men) I feel increasingly it is better I say nothing at all. I am trying.

It was a very emotionally expensive time, a time when the cost of family and motherhood especially rose steeply in my eyes and I felt I might fail to rally the emotional funds necessary to pay for it all. I had brought Levy's slim book (a pre-Christmas gift from my husband) with me to read -- if I had time, between all the festive family fun I had planned and organised from a great distance of time and place before this watershed moment. Badminton was going to be involved in these festivities, the best value family sport because nobody cares if they don't win and any number can play, even an odd number -- as we are. And a shuttlecock has no sharp edges and moves in such a playful way too, sometimes getting stuck in the strings before you realise it and give the thing that isn't there a great hopeful thwack with your racket. Ha, ha! What a great, easy laugh that never failed, or never did fail. There would be no badminton this festive season; there would be no boys in fact after the first night (22nd). And it was going to take more than a stuck shuttlecock to save us.

So after drawing breath the next morning with my husband, who was not spared but blamed for taking my side, I picked up Levy's slim book and it, she, spoke to me of motherhood and womanhood in my time, and time of life, and I felt immediately I could face what I was living, the cost of living my life in and through those terrible moments to find a way back, or forward, to... I don't yet know what or where. But Levy made me believe there would be a what and where.

And yesterday I finished her even slimmer, fantastically titled, first volume of memoir, Things I Don't Want to Know and felt again my breathing ease as the hope of recovery and redemption from the challenges ongoing with my boys (men) returned. This is what a good book, a good author, can do. It is better than badminton indeed.

And it did not matter that I had read her memoirs in the 'wrong' order, the second first, for this one is in part a long essay response to Orwell's 'Why I Write', and a stand-alone piece in that respect, plus one that plays with chronological time anyway.

She writes, she says, to 'speak in my own voice', which she knows is much harder to do than it sounds, harder for a woman, that is. She challenges Orwell's claim that 'sheer egoism' is a necessary quality for a writer, countering that 'even the most arrogant female writer has to work overtime to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December.' I know exactly what she means.

Right now, January just done, I am not sure how I will make it all the way forward, and back, to December. Indeed I can't imagine how we will ever achieve another family festive season. But knowing that Levy is writing a third volume makes that imagining a little easier, and gives me the courage to figure out how I might find the words to write and fight my way out of the mire and back into the magic of motherhood. Perhaps it's time to turn down the volume a bit. Take a leaf out of Levy's book.     

Sisters to Saturn, brothers to brioche

It's a brave new world indeed and Netflix's new series 7 Days Out showing the final week of preparations leading up to some of the world's biggest live events (albeit almost all in America) provides an insight into some of this brave newness...

Saturn, image courtesy of NASA's Cassini mission 1998-2018

Or at least the first three episodes do, we baulked at the fourth episode on the Kentucky Derby. But the first three, and especially the second and third episodes, were brilliantly done and offered inspiring insights into our changing world.

The first episode on the top dog show (Westminster, NYC), shows us just how BIG dogs are in our world and that the people who become the biggest dog people are some of the most colourful (crazy and charismatic) people in that world. There is something about dogs indeed, and even though I don't quite get what that something is (my sister is the dog person in our family), I found it fairly compulsive viewing from a social science point of view.

But the second episode on the final week of the 20-year NASA mission to scope out Saturn for new information about the sexiest planet in our solar system, including taking this image and thousands more, was next level inspirational and has deservedly been nominated for an Emmy.

It also provides another revelation (Hidden Figures take two) into the influence of women in space exploration, with a woman being responsible for engineering and building the Cassini probe that would travel a billion or so miles from Earth and through the eye of a space needle to find its desired target and gather the information needed. We always have been good at sewing (She is pictured here hugging the project manager upon the completion of the mission). Oh and the lead scientist on the project (pictured applauding) was a woman too, so it was a regular sewing circle situation, you could say, except it was in space, the final sewing frontier, it seems.

The third episode provided a nice point of contrast with the second on almost every front, being about the re-opening of a grand New York restaurant, voted best restaurant in the world in 2017, after a total restaurant makeover, from the food to the forecourt. It all had to go. It doesn't sound quite as impressive as the Saturn probe, but it almost was, the tension in the final week before re-opening with a full guest list of people prepared to pay not hundreds but thousands for their dinner, almost makes earthly cooking look harder than space sewing.

And more interesting to me indeed was that blokes (cis gender) were at the helm of this event, a team of two men, one in charge of the kitchen, the other the front of house. And so it struck me watching this episode that although the Saturn probe was a little like sewing, it was really more about space exploration, a challenge that has tended to be thought classic men's work, whereas work in the kitchen and dining room has tended to be thought classic women's work, celebrity chefs notwithstanding.

So for me these two events are big indeed in so far as they challenge gender stereotypes and show how well we can do when we think outside of imposed and, for women especially, narrow cultural confines and expectations to allow all people to discover what we are good at and have a passion for.

These funky space-age chef hats, with cunning air vents for head cooling, are enough to show us how far we can go when we stop caring about expectations to look cool and focus on being cool and useful instead, even if the greater purpose of wearing any kind of large white hat in a kitchen remains something of a mystery to me. The universe works in mysterious ways indeed.