I have a reading coming up soon. It’s part of the popular performance series Gendermash, which features wordy and music types of all gender flavours. I have been very fortunate that I’ve been regularly asked to perform at the Gendermash events over the years. Spoken word events/readings, like publications in literary journals, are mainstays for me. The Gendermash gigs, along with various other events (especially queer events like Gendermash), have really helped to expose my work over the years. I think the results of that were clear at my Melbourne book launch when over 200 people turned up. I don’t think I could ever have drawn such a crowd were it not for doing all those spoken word gigs over the years.

So I feel a bit sad about this but I’ve realised that I need to begin cutting down on some of my commitments so I can spend some time plotting, planning and experimenting with some new artistic directions. In terms of Gendermash, it means that this is my last Gendermash gig for a while. So consider this gig to be kind of like John Farnham’s ‘Last Time’ tour, except in my case it might be called ‘Last Time For A While’. In fact, that’s what John Farnham should have called his ‘Last Time’ tour. Instead, he declared the ‘Last Time’ tour to be his final tour but then he eventually ended up touring again. This caused displeasure to some who had bought tickets to that tour believing that it really was his last tour.

Anyhoo, the details for the Gendermash gig are below. I like the look and feel of the flyer so I’m reproducing it here. As always, there’s a good mix of performers on the bill.

P.S. Want to book tickets online? Click the image to be taken to the Gasworks website. Scroll all the way down to the event details and you’ll find the link for online bookings there.

A little while ago, I did a blog post about the Melbourne Zombie Shuffle, an event in which I dressed up as a zombie call centre operator. But let’s face it: one of the best zombie renditions of all time was in Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video. What a way to make zombies come to life.

I was too young to remember when Elvis Presley died (I was only three). But although Elvis Presley was the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, I grew loving Michael Jackson as that other King – the King of Pop. Those kinds of titles can be silly marketing inventions, along with ridiculous superlatives such as ‘greatest ever’, etc. But, then, Michael Jackson really was an artist of superlatives. He had the world’s biggest selling album of all time. He broke records for concert attendances. And he certainly had the credentials to be the King of Pop – at the very least, a background that included Motown and disco, and a great pop career in itself as the lead singer of The Jackson Five/The Jacksons. Add his own achievements as a solo artist and his innovations across music, music videos, dance, fashion, etc. and… well, I’m happy to see him as the King of Pop. There really was no other entertainer like him.

Later in his career, Michael Jackson became reclusive and, more than ever, he seemed to live out a persona of a wounded misfit that he also came to explore more explicitly in his music (and which drew other misfits to his work). But I will always remember the night I saw him accept a particular music award – a very big one, perhaps for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. He gave a beautiful speech – funny, touching, humble, ironic. One thing I especially remember is when he talked about how it was good to be considered a person and not a personality. I like to think of him as a person too – as much as I can, given that I never met him person-to-person but via sounds and images (some of them now iconic) which were also transmitted to millions of others. At any rate, he had a personal effect on me.

I loved the original Thriller album cover. A generation of teenagers grew up idolising John Travolta in his white suit. I do remember the Saturday Night Fever album (I saw the film much later, as an adult) but was a touch too young for it to really affect me. Michael Jackson in his white suit was who I grew up idolising. (And I always wanted a red ‘Beat It’ jacket too, but that – and my adventures in moon-walking and trying to start up my own break-dancing crew in 1984 – are another story.) But, as much as I love that original album cover, there’s something about the below image – which is the cover of the 25th anniversary re-release of Thriller – that I love too. In his life, Michael Jackson was surrounded by people who made sport of taunting him – people who were flesh-eating zombies in their own way. They saw Michael as a freak – as freaky as a zombie. But, via his work, Michael Jackson also spoke to other misfits who loved what he did, including fellow zombies such as myself.

At any rate, in the end, I like how Michael Jackson appears in this picture: it turns out that he wasn’t really a zombie but was quite the person.

Rest in Peace, Michael Jackson

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the role of the reviews of my book. My book is filled with evidence of my own reader responses (e.g. to texts like Dirty Dancing, Gulliver’s Travels, etc.). In turn, a reader of my book brings their own history of reading to their experience of interpreting my book. Reviews of my book further add to this body of texts and reader experiences that are connected to and, in some sense, comprise the book. So: the more responses, the richer the mix becomes – and the greater the possibilities to enhance how my book is read. And this is why I would much prefer bad reviews of my book than no reviews at all. (By the way, if it’s possible, this stance does not equate to ‘Any publicity is good publicity’ – that’s an adage I don’t tend to support.) [Note: Tip of the hat here to my PhD for introducing me to intertextuality, paratexts and other useful concepts.]

Having viewed things in this light, it makes further sense for me to post some of the less available reviews of my book here on my blog. So here are two further reviews that aren’t available online. The first one is from Australian Book Review (ABR) and the second is from The Sun Herald.

The ABR review is not very kind to the book. The reviewer is fixated upon the use of popular culture in the book and thus provides a pretty narrow reading of the text. In this sense, it is in the vein of the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) review of the book. What is it with these narrow reviews anyway? Or, as I joked to a friend, “Does it come down to an ability to multi-task?” The ABR review did not sting me though. The SMH review was definitely more bruising: that reviewer was determined to read the book as a narrative of Chinese-Australian identity to the exclusion of pretty much anything else. That was harder to take because it basically replicated something pretty familiar to me: my own personal experiences of being read as a narrative of Chinese-Australian identity to the exclusion of pretty much anything else. In contrast, the ABR reviewer, Adam Rivett, presents an interesting little spectacle all of his own in his attempt to comprehend the book’s use of popular culture. Ultimately, he succumbs not even so much to his own conservatism as his need to pick sides between ‘popular culture’ and ‘literary fiction’ (which brings us back to multi-tasking once again…).

The Sunday Herald review, by Eleanor Limprecht, is rather different – it provides a far more expansive reading of the book. Interestingly, it also happens to be one of the reviews that notes my own personal adventures in gender morphing. I like the fact that Limprecht’s review is not overly-weighted by this tidbit of information. That in itself demonstrates an ability to multi-task.

OK – here are the two reviews. (P.S.  I haven’t forgotten about my promise to provide a round-up of my other three launches here on my blog. It’s coming…) (Read more)

Soon, I’ll be performing at an event to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. This event is a fundraiser for the Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby.

As noted in articles like this one at GLBTQ.com, for all the mythologisation of the Stonewall riots, they occupy a contentious place in queer history. The Stonewall riots refers to a series of demonstrations that occurred one weekend in 1969 when the patrons at a queer venue in New York, the Stonewall Inn, retaliated against a police raid (police raids on queer venues were routine during this era). The spontaneous retaliation that occurred at the Stonewall Inn has been widely credited as being a catalyst for the modern ‘gay rights’ movement.

However, the ‘gay and lesbian community’ has always been deeply fractured along lines of race, class, gender and much more. This was the case before the Stonewall riots and it continues to be the case in the aftermath – including in how the Stonewall riots are read and remembered. For example, although over a million people participated in the 1995 march in New York that marked the 25th anniversary of the riots, transgender people were not (officially anyway) in attendance – they had been excluded by the organisers. This led Sylvia Rivera, one of the original Stonewall rioters, to stage an alternative march in protest.

So Stonewall continues to offer us many opportunities to learn about ourselves and this, among other reasons, was why I was up for performing at this event.

Stonewall 40 Years On: ‘69 was a riot!

Friday 26 June, 8.30 pm to late
Glasshouse Hotel, 51 Gipps St, Collingwood

Tickets: $20/15 at the door

Performers:
Elvira Andreoli
Lian Low
Lou Bennett
Luke Gallagher
Merlot
Rabbit Hutch
Rocco D’Amore
Tom Cho
Janette Hoe & Tony Yap
Kaye Sera
Lia & Raina (Ladies of Colour Agency)

DJs: Queen’s Corgi & DJ Phat Daddy

Here’s the flyer for the event, too, with its retro activist photo:

Soon, I’ll be heading to Western Australia for the Perth launch of my book. But even before the Perth launch, I’ll be in Fremantle to sign copies of the book at New Edition bookstore (where my book is currently listed as one of the staff recommendations – yay for supportive bookstores). Then, two days after the launch, I’ll be a featured reader at Cottonmouth, a monthly spoken word night in Perth.

I’ll be popping into New Edition on my very first day in WA, so if you’re in the neighbourhood, why not come along and say hi? Here are the details:

Visiting New Edition to sign copies of my book

Saturday 6 June, 4pm

New Edition bookstore
82 High Street, Fremantle

I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of signing the book. I hope I can do it many more times in the future.

Now to the performance at Cottonmouth, which I’m really looking forward to. At my recent reading at the Art Gallery of NSW, I gave a performance that was more like a good ol’ fashioned performance poetry feature. Lately, I’ve found myself harking back to that style of performance (which also recalls a time much earlier in my career when I was hanging out at spoken nights in pubs back in the late 90s, performing my own poetry). Maybe it’s a sign that I am slowly preparing myself for a bigger shift into performance some day (an ambition that my PhD forced me to postpone). Anyway, here are the details for the Cottonmouth gig:

Cottonmouth

Spoken word by Tom Cho (feature), Patrick Pittman, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, Simon Cox,Tristan Fidler, Gabrielle Everall, Lily Chan, Anna Dunnill, Byron Bard and MC Able

Music by Rabbit Island, Li’l Leonie Lionheart and Carbuncle 

Thursday 11 June
Doors open at 7pm, performances begin at 8pm

$5 entry

Bar 459 at the Rosemount Hotel
459 Fitzgerald St (corner of Angove St), North Perth

P.S. While I’m west of the west, I’ll also be taking a short holiday. I never really had a holiday after submitting my thesis and instead headed straight into book release mode. Oh, I really need this holiday. I’ll be taking my copy of Twilight with me so that I can laze on a beach somewhere and read about Edward Cullen’s incandescent chest.

I’m going to start posting a few more reviews of my book to my blog. This is for two reasons. Firstly, the Reviews section of this website is getting quite long (a good problem to have). As a result, the Reviews section will still list all of the reviews I know of for the book – but some reviews will be excerpted, with links to full-text versions on my blog (or, where feasible, the original source). Secondly, I hope that reprinting some of these reviews will stimulate further reflection and discussion not only on my book (and other books) but the very practice of reviewing.

To start with, here are two reviews that are limited in their availability. The first is not available online. It’s from The Big Issue (Australia). The second is from the arts industry website ArtsHub.

Interestingly, both of these reviews came out at a similar time and both were the first reviews to explicitly provide autobiographical readings of the book (e.g. The Big Issue reviewer appears to read the book as a fictionalised memoir). I’m well aware of the impulse to read the book autobiographically (and in fact it’s an impulse that I discussed in the theoretical component of my PhD thesis). My views about this matter have morphed a lot but, for now at least, the following photo from boingboing concisely expresses a view I adopted in my thesis:

Having declared that, it’s time to unveil those reviews. (Read more)

Yesterday, I saw this piece of graffiti on a roller door at the baths in Newcastle. I spied it only an hour or so before I was due to read my work at the Hunter Writers’ Centre.

As it turned out, it wasn’t dangerous for me to read my work aloud. It was good, actually. I hope that the people who subsequently bought my book have been enjoying it and haven’t perished from any reading-related ills.

Still, let that be a warning to you. Words are trouble.

P.S.  Blog round-up of Sydney trip and other matters coming soon-ish…